Day Four
(age twenty-four)
A strategist like Zhaleh would have known what to do with the information Kelli had gathered.
She would have given a good answer to the prompt: You are a shy script supervisor, and you have been forced onto a heist with a beautiful strategist, an anguished con man, and a cheerful thief. How will you thwart them?
But Kelli, try as she might, was not a strategist.
They’d gone over the mission plan a couple of times at lunch now.
Rowan’s, Ting’s, and Zhaleh’s parts were technical.
Kelli could think of ways to tamper with some of them, but she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t be obvious to them.
Her own contribution was mostly just the ability to log in to Inspiration’s systems biometrically.
She wasn’t sure how to sabotage that, apart from slicing up her own thumb—which everyone would know she’d done on purpose.
Her best option was to do small things to keep them distracted and at odds with each other, and to keep feeding information to Baz. She couldn’t stop them, but she could slow them down enough for community standards enforcement to arrive.
Ting had sticky fingers; that was a start.
Kelli listened carefully for times when no one was around—when Zhaleh was sealed up in the storage closet, and Rowan was in his sleeping nook, and Ting was taking a post-exercise sponge bath in the bathroom.
She floated into the hall and grabbed the first valuable personal item she saw—a packet of Rowan’s favorite potato chips, which he’d left out in the galley saying something about a stress relief reward.
Trying as hard as she could not to make any noise, she floated down to Ting’s sleeping bag and tucked the chips inside.
“Ting!” Rowan called out, an hour later, while Ting was doing the laundry. “Dammit, where did you put my chips? I had them out here special.”
“What?” said Ting. “I didn’t do anything with them.”
“You know, I put up with a lot from you,” said Rowan, “but you don’t usually lie—”
At that point Zhaleh, who’d come out from the storage closet, reminded them not to yell, and they went on like that in hushed, irritated voices for a lot longer. Zhaleh watched them with an expression Kelli couldn’t read.
Meanwhile, every other useful thing Kelli learned got typed out, in the privacy of her sleeping bag, on her pink crescent.
Baz, they’ve changed out the ship’s transponder. It’ll register as the Blue Bolt now, not the Wildfire.
Baz, they’re going to jam your security cameras and make it look like an ion storm.
Baz, look out for the air vents, Ting has some way of getting up there.
They were in deep space now, so he wasn’t actually getting the messages.
They wouldn’t send until the Wildfire landed on Ganymede, and even then, only if Kelli managed to plug them into the network really fast without getting caught.
But she’d had time to do that with her earlier messages, from Io, before they took off. Baz ought to have those ones by now.
Had he read them yet? Surely he must have.
He’d never replied. Maybe he hadn’t taken her seriously when she’d given him the crescent.
Maybe he’d stuffed it in a drawer and forgotten about it, which was not very nice of him, because even if Kelli really was just on a date, safe calls were important.
Kelli was supposed to have been back at work by now, so even if Baz had forgotten their talk completely, he’d have noticed when she didn’t arrive in the morning.
Maybe he’d try to call her home phone; maybe he’d send someone to check her apartment.
Eventually, inevitably, he would remember the pink crescent, and he’d plug it in and actually read what she’d written. He had to.
But Kelli hadn’t ever been good at predicting what neurotypicals would do.
In any case she could not spend an entire three days plotting.
When she got tired or stuck, she found herself diving, once again, into Rowan’s media collection.
She put on a pair of headphones, and she searched through the metadata for videos she’d enjoy.
Just the nice stories and the nice videos, the ones where no one was having weird sex or murdering people with an axe.
Dismount, which was about lesbians at a low-grav gymnastics competition, flipping and soaring as they sublimated their obvious attraction into rivalry.
Get Along Now, the adventures of a flamboyant cowboy, who seduced other men constantly but who did the actual sex part offscreen.
We’re Okay Now, that one in particular, over and over and over.
She studied each video’s styles. She memorized their lines.
She wondered what it would be like to be those characters.
There were sadder videos, too. Their summaries intrigued her—imagine real queer people, like her, getting to write about the troubles they’d been through!
—but she skipped them for now. Kelli was just trying to get through the next few days.
She didn’t need to make herself more depressed than she already was.
The nice, safe, fluffy queer stories were intense enough already.
Kelli watched them for hours at a stretch, mesmerized, choking back tears of frustration.
If only queer people in the Jovian system were really like that.
If only they weren’t all blackmailers and kidnappers, or alone like Kelli, or dead.
Was there a story that could hold people like her and Rowan in it, that could tell the whole truth of them and even the truth of the fire, and still deliver them at the end to a kind of happiness?
If there was, Kelli didn’t know what it would look like.
She had never seen a story like that in her life.