Chapter 12
Day One
(age twenty-four)
In her apartment, Kelli rushed around, barely able to think.
She’d gone to sleepovers as a kid—just the short walk from her Basic Housing apartment to Rowan’s—but she’d never gone off-moon for a weekend and she had only a hazy idea what she would need.
She didn’t even own a suitcase. She ended up grabbing a backpack and stuffing things in: two changes of clothes, her toothbrush and hairbrush and hair dryer.
Some fidget tools. A package of caffeinated sugar beans.
She was pretty sure Rowan had food already, probably even food her picky palate could handle, but she’d picked up the sugar bean habit just in the last few years, so he wasn’t going to know about that one.
When she’d stuffed the sugar beans into the bag, she paused to breathe, and to uneasily consider what she was doing.
It was increasingly clear, in the calm of Kelli’s white and gold apartment, that she was not really doing what Orlando would do.
Orlando was a pirate. He sailed the high seas.
He didn’t have paroxysms of self-doubt like this.
He didn’t fall apart when he saw a movie about lesbians.
Orlando was an AdventureVerse character; he didn’t know or care what lesbians were.
Another breath. This was silly.
“You can still change your mind,” Kelli said out loud to the empty air.
Points of no return had always seemed important to her, the queasy hinges where suddenly an act could not be undone.
Kelli wasn’t at that hinge yet. She could go back and tell Rowan she wasn’t doing it after all.
For that matter, she could stay right here and ghost him.
Rowan knew her number, but she bet he didn’t know where she lived.
But if she did want to go, she had already packed everything she could think of.
She took a long, long look at the backpack. Then she fished in her pockets and picked out the pink crescent.
There were three options here, after all, and two were unworkable.
Staying here, leaving Rowan to his fate, and never seeing a thing like We’re Okay Now again: unworkable.
Blasting into space with a man she hadn’t seen in a decade, to meet criminals, without any protection or backup: also unworkable.
That left the middle option, the one she’d already planned and pictured Orlando doing. Go, but with safety measures in place.
It took an awkward moment to unfold the instruction sheet and figure out how to attach the crescent to her workstation.
But finally, heart in her throat, she watched its interface pop up as a window on the workstation screen.
There was no voice or video recorder, just old-fashioned text messaging, with no “Send to:” list—the only place the message could go was to the other crescent, whenever Baz happened to plug it in and check for new messages.
Baz, Kelli wrote, I’m going off-moon. Don’t be mad.
I’m investigating something important—at least, important to me.
Criminal copyright infringers may or may not be involved.
I don’t have enough info about that to point you to them yet.
Please don’t worry, I think I can handle myself, but if I can’t, I will message you otherwise, all the interference made it difficult to get a coherent signal very far.
Once she got out into space, she’d be unreachable.
Even when she reached their destination—which was obviously some other moon; the weekend wasn’t long enough to go any farther—she’d have to connect to Rowan’s ship at some time when it was connected to that moon’s wired networks, and it would take a while for that message to get relayed all the way back to Callisto.
But that was okay, probably; the important part was that it would get there eventually.
She’d already sent that first one. She couldn’t take that back.
Kelli picked up her backpack and headed out.