9. CHAPTER NINE #3
“About us eating alien fungus on a moon?” I asked. “Specifically this? No. This was not in any of my fantasies.”
“About us,” she said. “About me. You said you watched my streams for years. What did you think it would be like if we ever met?”
I looked down at my bowl. The broth had settled into the grain by then, turning it a deeper gold.
“I imagined the concert,” I said. “Always the concert. Me in the pit, screaming. Maybe a meet-and-greet if I really let myself dream big. You’d smile and sign something, and I’d go back to my life while you kept being you. That would have been it.”
I looked up at her.
“I didn’t imagine this. Never in a million years did I dream of this.”
“This being a moon-stew date?” she asked.
“No, this being any of it,” I said. “I didn’t imagine you tired. Or eating with your fingers. Or arguing with your AI about sarcasm. Or saying things that make me forget how to talk.”
I smiled.
“I imagined the poster version of you. This is better.”
She was quiet for a second. Then she bumped her shoulder into mine.
“You are better too,” she said. “Than what I imagined.”
“You imagined me?”
“Not you specifically,” she said. “But someone. Someone who would look at my world and not want to take pieces of it. Someone who would just sit with me and eat terrible food and not need it to be anything more than what it is.”
“This food is not terrible,” I said. “This food is life-changing. Lyn was right.”
“Do not tell her that,” Zhari said. “She will go on forever about food and how we all need to listen to her more.”
I laughed and finished slurping up my stew before digging into the mini sponge cakes we’d gotten too.
After we finished dessert, we wandered deeper into the market. The stalls got stranger and more interesting as we went.
One vendor sold small spheres of compressed light that flickered different colors when you held them up to your face.
Another had racks of handwritten music on sheets of something that wasn’t paper—stiff and slightly warm to the touch, with notes I couldn’t read but could almost hear when I ran my fingers over them.
At a stall near the end, Zhari stopped.
The vendor had trays of tiny charms laid out on dark fabric, each one floating a few millimeters above the surface and bobbing gently.
The vendor spoke in their species language, which my translator said was, “Gravity charms, decorative micro-field generators.”
Zhari picked one up. It was shaped like a small heart, no bigger than my thumbnail. It hovered between her fingers, tugging gently upward as if it wanted to float away but couldn’t quite commit.
“Hold out your wrist,” she said.
“Why?” I asked, even though I was already holding out my wrist because apparently my body had stopped consulting my brain.
She tied the thin thread to my wristband with careful fingers. The charm bobbed above my skin, tugging faintly—a tiny, constant pull in the wrong direction that I could feel but couldn’t see.
“So you don’t float away,” she said.
“I thought the whole point of all this was floating away.”
“With me,” she said. “Not alone.”
I looked at the charm bouncing gently above my wrist, then looked at her.
For a few moments, the rest of the market just… blurred. The noise dropped to a soft hum, vendors calling out from very far away, steam curling in slow motion around the lights.
Zhari was arguing with the vendor over some tiny extra charm, switching between three languages without thinking. Her hands moved as much as her mouth. She laughed at something the vendor said, her head tipped back and her glow bright and careless.
There was no stage in her at all. No cameras. No posture.
Just this dork in a hoodie with broth on her sleeve, stealing my food and tying small pieces of gravity to me as if it were nothing.
My chest did this quiet, decisive thing. Not the panic flip I felt when she talked about destiny. Not the dizzy lurch of the concert.
Something steadier.
Like a gear finally sliding into the right place.
I could suddenly see it—more markets like this on planets I didn’t even know the names of yet. More cheap little charms stacked around my wrist. More mornings with her hair a complete mess and her laugh muffled into my pillow.
Not like some impossible fantasy or a perfect movie montage.
Like something real.
A life I could actually have.
Oh, I thought, a little breathless. Oh.
I didn’t just want her.
I wanted it all with her.
The word mate flickered across my brain like a subtitle I wasn’t ready to say out loud yet, but it was there.
Undeniable.
“You are somewhere else,” she said softly, catching my stare. “What are you thinking?”
I swallowed, the truth crowding my throat. I wasn’t ready to hand her all of it—not there, with steam in my face and a vendor watching—but I could give her a piece.
“Just…” I said, my fingers brushing the little floating heart. “Today has been such a good day. I don’t want it to be over.”
A smirk tugged at her lips.
“Good.”
And that was the moment I knew the choice was already made, whether or not I’d said the words yet.
We walked until my feet ached and the market lights shifted toward something warmer and dimmer, which I guessed was their version of evening. Eventually, the path curved back toward the dock, and the bus sat there waiting, its hull catching the last of the light.
The crew started to bunch together as we approached—Lyn and Yuki already arguing about whose food stall was superior, techs comparing trinkets and cheap jewelry, everyone pink-cheeked and relaxed from a few hours of not being on the clock.
At the base of the ramp, Sira was waiting.
She stood at the top with one hip against the rail, a bulky chrome flip phone open in her hand, a small holo projected above it. Even from down there, I could see my own face on the paused image—blurry, caught mid-laugh in the edge of some crowd shot from the night before.
Underneath, in Velan and English, the caption looped Who is Zhari's Human?
Despite seeing it many times, my stomach dropped.
As our little group reached the ramp, Sira snapped the phone shut. The holo vanished.
“Welcome back,” she said. Her gaze flicked over the others, then landed on me. “I need a word with our cultural guest.”
Zhari’s hand tightened around mine.
“Now?” she asked. “We’ve been walking all afternoon, Sira. She’s tired. We were going to lie down.”
“It’ll only take a minute,” Sira said. Her tone was calm, almost mild, but there was no give in it. “I won’t keep her long.”
For a heartbeat, it felt like the air shifted. Zhari’s jaw worked as if she were biting back something sharp.
“She can barely feel her feet,” she said. “Can it not wait until tomorrow?”
Sira’s mouth softened ever so slightly.
“No. But I promise it will be brief.”
Zhari looked at me then, the annoyance fading from her face.
“I’ll go up and run the water,” she said quietly, mostly for me. Her thumb swept once across the back of my knuckles before she let go. “Our room is open. Come straight there when you’re done, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, even though my stomach had sunk somewhere around my boots.
She squeezed my hand one more time and headed up the ramp alone, her hood still up and her lavender track pants slouching softly around her ankles.
I watched her until the bus door slid shut behind her.
Then I turned back to Sira.
She tipped her head toward the side of the ramp, away from the flow of crew members coming and going.
“Walk with me, Vada,” she said.
The gravity charm bounced lightly above my wrist as I followed, feeling very much like a student being called into the principal’s office.
The bus hummed behind us. The suns hung low and stubborn over Orin’s hills. Somewhere inside, the woman whose name I wore on my shirt was running our shower and trusting that whatever this was, I’d come back.
I swallowed, squared my shoulders, and kept walking.