23. The Discovery #3
"I know." Her words cut this time, she heard it. She'd tried to pull it back because she knew, in the back of her mind, this wasn't Kess's fault, or Reyna's, for that matter. "I know. Thank you." This time, she said it a bit more evenly. But it was too little too late.
She stood up and began walking to the door. For one terrible second, she thought Reyna might step into her path to make herself visible enough that Charlie would have to decide whether to walk around her or stand directly in front of her to stop her, talk to her. Something.
But instead, Reyna just stayed by the door, still and silent.
Charlie walked past her without making eye contact.
If she so much as looked at Reyna right now, really looked, she would see the entire Emberkind reflected at her.
The engines, the galley, the bench, Tavi's laugh, Reyna saying 'hi' the day Charlie landed in an alien kitchen and realized she was in space.
She would see the life she had started to want.
But now, that life had teeth.
So Charlie walked out, and she did not look back.
She made it to her quarters, seeing no one. Or maybe she did. She remembered only the hum in the walls, the turn she made into the quarters ward, and then finally arriving at her door. She did not remember anyone's faces.
Her room was exactly as she'd left it. Frank's jacket slung over the chair by her personal workstation with the half-disassembled stabilizer component, the one Cael had called nonessential maintenance and Charlie had taken that personally.
Katie's 1979 mixtape was next to her Walkman on the station table, rewound to the start and ready to be played the next time she'd want to listen.
She looked at everything in her small space on this massive spaceship in the middle of the universe so far away from Earth that it was still going to take two months for her to even get there. Would she even get there now? Would she ever see Earth again?
She stood inside the door and waited. Nothing changed. Answers did not appear from the stabilizer on the table or through a phantom hiss of the engine within the wires. In fact, the universe continued demonstrating a spectacular lack of manners.
"Okay," she said, trying to center herself. But her voice sounded so wrong in this room right here, right now.
Frank and Helen's letters were in the inner pocket, where they'd been since she stored them there the night she spent alone, bound with a rubber band that had gone soft at the edges.
She touched the top envelope but stopped.
The idea of paper and ink paired with the terrible human habit of trusting things to survive only because they mattered.
Charlie squeezed her fist, the one not holding the envelope.
She didn't open them.
Charlie realized she didn't need to read them to know they were still true. She just needed to remember they were still there.
When she set them back, her fingers brushed the cassette case holding the most recent mixtape Katie had made for her, shipped to California while Katie handled Helen's estate. That's when she noticed the photo tucked behind it.
She pulled on it gently, unfolding it to expose Katie's UCLA graduation, taken on a disposable camera that mimicked all the confidence of a drunk man aiming a dart.
Katie in her cap and gown, grinning so hard the smile pushed her cheeks up under her eyes.
Charlie beside her in sunglasses on an overcast day, one arm slung around Katie's shoulders.
This picture was taken just last Spring.
Katie's graduation cohort was secured, and Charlie had started at JPL.
There were no obstacles yet. No losing Helen, no separation for the holidays, no PERS accident.
Charlie turned it over and noted, as usual, nothing was written on the back. Helen had always meant to label photographs and never did, insisting she'd remember everything important.
Charlie set the photo beside the datapad, face up. It made Katie look as though she was smiling at the ceiling.
She pulled the datapad back over, tapped the Notes field one more time, and typed a single, additional line before she could talk herself out of it.
There is no both.
The log accepted it without complaint. But it would, wouldn't it? That was the worst part about data collection. It had no value, no tolerance range, no diagnostic category unless the individual behind the information provided it. The datapad itself didn't care. It formatted the sentence anyway.
Charlie selected the whole file and, for a moment, all of it turned blue. PERS radiation. Cellular turnover. Katie's age. Return status.
The sentence at the end.
She deleted the whole thing, and the page went blank.
And for exactly three seconds, she felt better.
But then her mind crashed with all the same information again. Katie at fifty, seventy, ninety. Charlie at thirty-eight, forty-five, fifty-one. Non-contact. Evidence. No return.
There is no both.
She closed the datapad, pushed it further away from her on the desk, got up from her chair, and crossed the room.
She made it to her bed and lay down. The Emberkind hummed through the wall.
That hum had meant safety for three months.
The engines, the distance, the purpose she would serve on the Emberkind for six months, and then home. Tonight it was only sound.
Charlie turned over and faced the wall. The first tear slid toward the bridge of her nose and disappeared into the pillow. The bracelet pressed against her palm where she'd curled her hand around it, the knots Helen had tied still holding.
Charlie attempted to count backward from a hundred. She made it to ninety, where it suddenly stopped being part of the countdown and became Katie at ninety, her hair gone white, and her hands thin. Charlie imagined standing in front of her with a face that still belonged to fifty-one.
Hours later, sleep found her.
She was back at JPL. She knew it immediately by the dull polish of the floor, the scuffed surfaces near the lab doors, and the fluorescent hum that lived in the building's bones.
Her workstation was at the far end, but the lamp was angled wrong, and the tray of fragments remained under that odd-angled light.
Then she saw the phone receiver, swinging from its cord.
But the room was too long, and the distance between the door and the workbench stretched farther than it should, until the lab suddenly turned into a corridor, then a hallway, and then something that seemed like the Emberkind trying to imitate Pasadena, badly.
But the phone kept swinging, just at the end of her station.
Charlie walked toward it, but every step she took seemed to take it further from her reach.
She started running toward it, her boots landing just a second late each time before it moved further away.
The lights began to flicker in the room, turning the scene into a collection of still photographs.
"Charlie?"
Katie's voice, from somewhere far ahead.
"Kit!?" Charlie called out, running toward the sound.
And then Charlie saw her.
Katie stood near the workbench with the phone in her hand, the one that had been swinging at Charlie's station.
For one small second, she was twenty-three, just as Charlie had last seen her, her brown hair curling around her face while wearing the sweater Charlie had teased her about at Christmas years ago.
Then Katie blinked, and suddenly she was thirty.
The sweater was gone, and she could see fine lines at the corners of Katie's eyes.
"Kit, wait," Charlie whispered into the air in front of her.
Katie turned toward the sound but not toward Charlie. At least, not exactly. The room wouldn't stop stretching.
Katie blinked again. Forty.
Then suddenly, Katie was fifty, the phone in her hand held now like an object she'd found, but couldn't quite remember needing.
"Kit!" Charlie screamed.
Katie looked up, and relief slammed through Charlie so hard she nearly stumbled. Until she watched Katie's eyes move over her face with polite confusion. As though Charlie were a stranger who'd called Katie by name in public.
Charlie abruptly stopped running, but the scene shifted again, the floor moving.
The workbench suddenly became the kitchen table in Shelbyville, then Borran's counter, then the hallway outside the Beckman house.
Katie stood at the center of all of it, and every time the scene changed, she blinked a decade older.
Sixty.
Seventy.
Katie's hands were thin now, holding the same phone with both her hands clasped around it, her hair nearly white.
Charlie looked down at herself. Her hands were the same.
Everything about her was exactly how it was today, and everything about her - from the scar from Frank's toolbox, to the soldering burn, to the bracelet with its blues and greens and golds and reds - it was still the same body, the same impossible face of a woman in her eighties that looked like she was forty.
"No," Charlie whimpered.
Katie looked at Charlie as soon as she spoke and took a step back. Charlie felt her face tighten in a grimace.
"Kit," her voice broke around the name. "It's me."
Then Katie's expression softened, and for one bright, stupid second, Charlie thought it meant recognition.
Katie smiled at her with terrible kindness. "I'm sorry. Do I know you?"
The room went silent.
No engine hum, no fluorescent buzz, no ship, no lab, no stars. Charlie reached for the one name that belonged to the deepest connection between them.
"Kit-Kat," she whispered.
Katie's face changed, but it still wasn't recognition. Charlie saw pity on her sister's face, as if she'd mistaken Charlie for someone she'd lost.
Then Charlie noticed the phone receiver in Katie's hands had become the PERS fragment, glowing with all the wrong light.
Charlie pleaded, but she didn't know what her request entailed. "I came back."
Katie looked down at the fragment, then at Charlie's face. "You shouldn't have," she said gently.