Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
Holly wished she hadn’t looked at her wrist comm.
The message from Beenan glowed on the tiny screen and ignoring it was not going to make it disappear. Her earpiece felt heavy as lead as she hooked it on her ear.
Her old boss, well, technically he was still her current boss, did not have a demand. That was the first surprise.
It was, if Holly was hearing it correctly, a peace offering.
She went inside her residential unit, sat on the couch, and listened to it again, slowly, from the beginning.
Holly. Beenan, here.
Ugh. The sound of his voice made her teeth grind.
The Kelloran client is satisfied with the retrofit improvements to their project.
They were…displeased by the reason why you were put on leave and complained to my level eight superior.
They have requested your reinstatement to their account.
After internal review by the level ten management team, Sol-Arc Industries would like to offer you the following terms for your return: immediate promotion to level four engineer, effective upon your first day back, with the commensurate pay increase.
There was a pause.
The Enhanced Aesthetics for Professional Development requirement has been waived.
Beenan’s tone of voice made clear his disapproval, but Holly’s mouth fell open in shock.
Leadership acknowledges that the program was applied too broadly, and your participation is no longer a condition of employment.
You may resume your previous appearance and personal activities without it negatively impacting future reviews.
Please confirm your intent to return no later than four weeks from today, which is the end of your reflection period. We would prefer not to lose you, Holly.
Holly dragged the transmitter off her ear with heavy fingers and looked at the ceiling.
Level four.
She had wanted level four for ten years.
Had watched colleagues leapfrog past her, some of them people she had trained, while she stayed stuck at level three.
Level four meant better projects. Bigger clients.
A voice in design meetings where her ideas wouldn’t be filtered through with someone else’s name.
It meant being seen, finally, as what she was: one of the best engineers Sol-Arc had.
And the enhanced aesthetics program, waived.
No more workshops on acceptable dining venues.
No more style guides dictating the cut of her suits.
No more pointed suggestions about surgical enhancements to make her look more like a species from the Sang-Lok system.
She could go back as herself. Hair, shoes, eyebrows, and all.
It was everything she had asked for. Everything she had fought for and been denied, handed to her now in a tidy message, four weeks before her deadline.
Bean jumped up on the couch and curled into a ball, pressed to her thigh. All he ever seemed to want these days was to be in physical contact with her. He had become her dog, through and through.
She tapped the comm and listened to the message a third time.
We would prefer not to lose you, Holly.
That was the part that bugged her. It was calculated.
Beenan didn’t say things he didn’t mean, and he didn’t offer things without expecting a return.
If Sol-Arc was waiving the aesthetics program and offering her level four, it was because losing her was more expensive than keeping her.
The Kelloran client had made that clear by going over Beenan’s head.
Which meant this wasn’t really a peace offering. It was a business decision dressed up as one, served with a dash of desperation.
Holly got up and crossed to the window. The working rain system had brought the plants in the square back to vibrant life.
The lampposts stood quiet in the still air, and the broken fountain still sat in the center like a patient, waiting thing.
Beyond the square, she could see the tree line and the faint path that led to the gardens, and beyond that, the gentle rise of land toward the field where she hoped to hold a larger festival one day, if the first one wasn’t a total disaster.
She pressed her forehead against the glass.
What do you want, Holly?
The question popped in her head in her mother’s voice, which was annoying. She hadn’t called her mother yet and already knew how the conversation would go.
She turned from the window and paced.
If she went back to Sol-Arc, she would have a salary.
A good one. Level four pay would cover her living unit on Nova with plenty left over.
She would have more prestigious accounts and the reputation that came with them.
She would have stability and structure and a clear path forward, and she would never have to worry about whether the station’s water system would blow out, or if the spaceport’s energy grid would fail, or if someone sabotaged her oven.
She would also have Beenan, or some other soulless upper-level manager.
A cold office in Nova. Colleagues who passed her in hallways but wouldn’t remember her name.
She would have sterile hallways and the knowledge that her promotion had come not because Sol-Arc valued her, but because a client had forced their hand.
She would not find out if what was happening between Rasker and her was real, and she would not have Moone’s Landing.
Holly looked around the living unit that she’d made into her own.
Her plants on the windowsills, green and thriving under the dome’s light and her doting care.
The clothes she’d found that matched her style and made her happy.
The dog lying on the couch, looking up at her as if she were the center of his world.
She would not have the lounge, where she had learned to bake and where Harry left his tea on the counter like a standing invitation.
Words could not describe how much she’d miss the garden, where Mish knelt in the dirt and talked about her children with the resigned affection of someone who loved fourteen children who were fully capable of murdering anyone they considered a threat.
And then there was Alyce’s steady presence, and Sam’s shoulder clap, and the way Orba and Sula always seemed to know what she needed before she did.
All of those things had begun to feel essential.
Holly sat back down. Bean shifted close again and rested his small jaw on her thigh.
She ran her fingers over his velvet ears.
No matter what happened, or where she went, she was keeping him.
But thinking about leaving him alone all day while she worked in Sol-Arc’s offices made her heart ache.
No one had pets on Nova. There wasn’t even a place where people could take care of him while she worked.
The truth was, level four didn’t feel like what it used to feel like. Two months ago, she would have wept at this message. She would have gratefully accepted, walked back into that office and swallowed every other compromise because the alternative was nothing.
But the alternative was not nothing anymore. The alternative was this. A failing outpost on a small moon in deep space, held together by wonderful, stubborn people and the sheer force of Holly’s refusal to let it collapse.
The alternative was terrifying in a completely different way.
If she stayed, there was no predictable income.
No safety net. No guarantee that Moone’s Landing would survive in the long run, let alone become the success it once was.
She would be betting everything on a place that was one bad inspection away from being condemned, and on her own ability to prevent that, which was far from proven.
She would be walking away from twelve years of career for a crumbling space station and an elderly dog who slept twenty hours a day.
Bean let out a long, rumbling sigh.
“Easy for you to say,” Holly muttered.
She spent the rest of the afternoon doing exactly nothing about the message. She took Bean for his walk. She checked on the lounge, where Harry had left a fresh pot of tea and a note that read: New blend. Calming properties. Does it need more reishi?
While in there, she baked a batch of scones from Rasker’s recipe files, but forgot to add the raisins. She quit halfway through reviewing the latest supply order, as nothing was sticking in her brain. Her thoughts kept drifting back to the unexpected choice that had just dropped in her lap.
By evening, the apartment was quiet and the light from the dome had shifted to its softer nighttime cycle. Holly sat on the couch with her d-pad, pretending to read the station accounts, then picked up her wrist comm instead.
Her mother answered on the second chime.
“Holly.” Mirth’s voice was warm. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.” Holly leaned her head back against the cushion. “How are you and Dad?”
“Oh, we’re good. I’m finishing a piece with a colleague on the cognitive effect of low gravity and your father is on a ceramics streak, so he’s in his studio.
The kitchen table is covered in bowls that he swears are functional, but they look like they should hang on a wall. ” A pause. “You don’t sound fine, Hol.”
Holly closed her eyes. She told her mother about Beenan’s message. The promotion. The waived program. The deadline. She told her all of it, plainly and without editorializing.
Her mother listened. Mirth Moone was, by training and by temperament, a listener who made silence feel like a held hand.
She did not interrupt. She did not make small noises of agreement or sympathy.
She just listened, and the quality of her listening was so complete that Holly could feel it through the comm, across all those light years of frigid space.
When Holly finished, there was a long pause. Her mother chose her words with the precision of a jeweler setting a stone.
“That’s a significant offer,” Mirth said. “They’re acknowledging they were wrong. That doesn’t happen often at a company like Sol-Arc.”
“I know.” Holly opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. “It’s everything I wanted. A few months ago, I would have said yes before he finished the sentence.”
“And now?”
Holly was quiet.
“Let me ask you something,” her mother said. “And I want you to answer honestly, even if the answer scares you.”
“Okay.”
“If Beenan had called to tell you that your position had been eliminated, what would you have felt?”
“Relief.” It was true. There would be no more choice. Nothing to weigh.
“Okay, here’s another one.” Her mother cleared her throat. “Do you know in your gut what you’re going to do?” The question sat there, plain and unadorned, the way her mother’s best questions always were.
She thought about what her father had said, back in their living room in Canada, when she’d still been wearing the beige suit: The longer you work there, the dimmer your light gets.
Her light was not dim here. Beneath all the fear and the overwhelm, she’d felt the quiet pull of purpose.
“I know what I want to do,” Holly said. “But I can’t dismiss this offer, yet.
Moone’s Landing is hanging on by a thread.
We are out of nits and I honestly don’t know if it’s too late to turn the station’s reputation around before a vital system malfunctions and we can’t afford to fix it.
I want to stay, though. I love this place, and the people here. ”
Her mother was quiet for a moment. “All right,” she said gently. “Then take your time. You have four more weeks.”
They talked for a while longer, about smaller things. Her father’s bowls. A fox that had decided to have pups in Mirth’s potting shed. The weather. Holly let the familiar chatting wash over her and felt the tightness in her chest ease.
After they said goodnight, Holly sat in the quiet apartment and looked at Bean, who had woken up and was watching her with one ear cocked.
“I haven’t decided,” she told him. “And I wish I didn’t have to.”
Bean regarded her with the steady, unblinking gaze of a creature who could smell a lie from across a room.
Holly picked up her wrist comm, listened to Beenan’s message one more time, then set it face down on the cushion.
She had not said yes to her mother. But they both knew. They had always known the same things, she and Mirth. It was one of the quieter gifts of being raised by a woman who asked questions instead of giving answers: you learned, eventually, to hear your own.