Chapter 9
Nine
Apleasant surprise awaited Holly when she got up the next morning.
She emerged from her room to find the clothes she had purchased from The Emporium sitting in a bundle on the table.
The amber and copper tunic. The knit pants.
The crystal necklace that caught the light.
At some point, they’d been delivered as promised and Luv had brought them inside for her.
She smiled as she dressed. It was a small thing, in the enormous picture she was in, but she really did love these clothes.
They were so different from what she wore on Nova.
They felt like her, and what unsettled her about that was this: she wasn’t sure anymore who she was.
In the frantic pace of Nova’s fast culture, and the enormous workload at Sol-Arc Industries, Holly had become someone she’d forgotten to get to know, like a work acquaintance she’d never gotten around to getting lunch with.
The top felt like water, the fabric cool against her skin.
The pants fit perfectly, soft and comfortable.
She fastened the necklace around her throat and looked at herself in the small mirror on the wall.
The woman looking back at her didn’t resemble the Sol-Arc version of Holly Greene-Moone.
Or the lunar city version. She was new. Holly took in the still-youthful face.
Rounded cheeks that were quick to flush and full lips that always looked a little pursed.
Hazel eyes that could not hide her feelings and brows that curved over her eyes in soft arcs.
There was nothing fierce or strong or sharp about her features, and maybe that’s why Sol-Arc found them deficient.
They wanted hard angles and power. Holly was not that.
She gathered her brown hair up and twisted it into a loose pile on top of her head, then secured it with one of her mother’s colorful clips. She had brought several with her, tucked into her carry-on bag. A small piece of home.
The Homeboti was nowhere in sight, but Holly heard the squeak of her rollerball approaching from down the hall. Luv rolled into the room and stopped when she saw Holly standing there.
“You’re awake,” Luv said flatly. “About time.” The robot tilted her domed head. “Do you want cold porridge, hot porridge, or protein bars?”
This would be a question that plagued Holly’s waking hours. She sighed. “Just a protein bar, please.” She’d either need to splurge on a better NuProd or learn to cook. With the gardens out there, cooking looked like a more interesting, and cheaper, option. But that, too, would have to wait.
Over the next several days, Holly got to work figuring out how this hodgepodge station operated.
She started with the hotel, taking a look in the unoccupied rooms. All of the twenty-two rooms were similarly furnished.
That is to say, they were as shabby as her living unit.
Although Luv kept them clean, no one would ever call them inviting.
She estimated the cost to refurbish them and winced.
Maybe they could do one or two at a time, after the more pressing repairs were complete.
She went to the lounge multiple times to meet Cody and get his thoughts on the station.
Also, since he was her cousin, she was curious about him.
But he never seemed to be at work. A few times she’d rushed into the lounge because she’d smelled something burning, only to find a smoky, but empty, lounge with a charred pan in the sink.
Her opinion of him was already poor, and she hadn’t even met the guy.
Sam sent her his report of issues that needed to be addressed.
He wasn’t kidding. The list was long. Beyond the obvious, which was the air circulation system, he wanted to see the outer crystal-plex surface refinished to repair the small cracks and fissures that had formed over the years, the water system needed an overhaul, the control tower’s communication frequencies were limited, followed by dozens of lower priority problems that could wait.
She linked her d-pad to the station’s main system and spent hours poring over this, and matching them with the records Mr. Binn had sent her.
She was trying to get a sense from the maintenance logs of how long it had been since these things had been serviced.
She paged through visitor tallies, revenue reports, inspection records.
The picture that emerged was grim but not surprising: a slow, steady decline that mirrored Charles’ own withdrawal from the world.
Systems were serviced less and less frequently.
Guest numbers that dropped year after year.
Expenses that were cut until there was nothing left to cut.
More days passed. She made notes. She categorized.
She built spreadsheets of what needed fixing now, what could wait, and what had to wait because it was too expensive to address now.
Then, she went out and tried to talk to residents.
Some would talk to her, but some wouldn’t.
She spent way too much time in the mushroom shop with Harry, the outgoing shopkeeper.
Orba and Sula, for all their wisdom, were terrible at giving clear and direct answers to any of her questions, and Alyce was rarely in one place long enough to get into details about anything.
All the while, Bean tolerated her. That was the most generous way she could describe their relationship.
He acknowledged her existence at mealtimes, when he sat beside his bowl and stared at her until she filled it.
He accepted the leash at walk times, but walked ahead of her without looking back at her.
It was obvious he considered himself to be escorted by a stranger.
He did not sit near her on the couch. He did not come when she called his name, unless she had a treat.
He did not wag his tail when she entered the room.
“He’ll come around,” Luv said, without much conviction, after a week.
“Will he?”
“Of course. It takes time.” The robot paused. “Or it doesn’t. Beagles are stubborn.”
The walks, at least, forced Holly outside more.
Twice a day, morning and evening, she and Bean made the same loop around the square and along the path that bordered the forest. She kept her head down and her pace brisk, speaking to the rare person she passed, but mostly she received skeptical looks and a wide berth.
They weren’t ready for her. Or maybe, they sensed that she wasn’t ready for them.
After a little more than a week, Holly knew every line item in the station’s accounts, every deferred repair.
She knew the names of the residents from the records, even if she hadn’t met most of them.
She knew how much power the dome consumed and how much water the rain system used and how many nits the spaceport brought in per month, which was not nearly enough.
All that data told the story of Moone’s Landing and it boiled down to this: The vast station was failing. Every time she looked up at the dome or out toward the distant tree line, the weight of what she’d taken on pressed down on her chest like a hand.
What she did not know was whether any of it could be saved.
To distract her from all this, and to maybe get a little more insight into her grandfather, she took the evening to open the two small crates that held Charles’ personal effects. Maybe she’d find some explanation to the station’s decay. Maybe she’d find a hidden currency chip.
When she sat down with her grandfather’s things, she wished she had something stronger than the weird, coffee-like, but definitely not coffee, beverage Luv had made for her from some powder she’d found in the lounge.
The containers were stacked in the back of the bedroom closet.
Alyce and Luv had disposed of his clothing, but packed up everything they thought might be of interest to his family.
Holly sat on the bedroom floor and went through them one by one, looking for anything that might help her understand the man, or the station, or why he’d put such odd conditions in his will.
She found…well, nothing. Some hideous kitchenware.
An old cookbook and an even older pocket watch.
Some even older books, which were interesting and something she’d look at more later.
A handful of data chips that she plugged into her d-pad with hope, only to find they contained nothing beyond old correspondence and maintenance logs she already had access to.
No personal letters. No images. No evidence of hobbies or interests or a life lived with any warmth at all.
She could not kick the sense that something was missing from this collection of belongings.
That an item should have been here, but was not.
Holly sat there and tried to feel something for the man who had lived here before her. Pity, perhaps. Or understanding. But all she felt was the absence of anything to feel. Charles Moone had lived here for decades and left behind two crates of nothing.
She repacked the crates, moved them into the empty room, and closed the door.