Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
The room went briefly, noticeably quieter. Mish’s children had that effect on people.
“They were very well-behaved,” Luv announced, almost grudgingly. She had clearly expected otherwise and was maybe a bit disappointed to be wrong. “I did not need to restrain or punish any of them.”
“That’s…good, Luv,” Holly said. “Thank you.”
“I think they were considering taking apart my manifold with a dining utensil, but I talked them out of it.”
Mish sighed. “I should have warned you about that.”
Luv’s optical sensors blinked. “Yes. You should have. I had to remove the utensils from your home and store them in my frame.”
“I’m sorry, Luv.” Mish regarded her children with narrowed eyes. “We did talk about this,” she chided in a stern voice.
“I’ll return your property tomorrow,” Luv said, unruffled by her near-possible dismantlement. “I’m going home to my charging station.” She rolled off to the exit.
Mish watched her go, then stared intensely at her fourteen identical children, talking to them in their private telepathic language.
Whatever she communicated spread through the group like a ripple.
They moved to the open space at the far end of the lounge, the area that had been designed for performances, and arranged themselves in a formation.
Then they began to move.
It started as a simple pattern: synchronized steps, arms raised and lowered in unison.
But it evolved. The children moved through a series of formations that shifted and re-formed with a precision that was not quite dance and not quite anything else Holly had seen.
Their movements were fluid and connected, each child responding to the others through their shared consciousness, creating shapes and patterns that emerged from their single mind.
The lounge went quiet. Visitors stopped eating. Conversations trailed off.
It was equal parts unsettling and mesmerizing.
The children’s faces were blank, focused inward, and their movements had a quality that was too perfect, too synchronized, to be entirely comfortable.
But there was something beautiful about it, too.
They shared a connection and unity that most couldn’t understand, and that was on display.
When they finished, there was a pause. Then someone started clapping, and the rest of the room followed. Holly felt her eyes sting and wasn’t entirely sure why.
Mish looked at her children with an expression Holly recognized. It was the look of a mother who knew her children were strange and loved them ferociously for it.
Holly scanned the room. The lounge was full, warm, and noisy with conversation and music.
Harry had set up his sound system to play Ytolian ceremonial music, which sounded to Holly like medieval tavern music but with instruments called bulnars instead of fiddles.
It was lively and festive and exactly right for the mood.
Harry himself sat at the far end of the bar, and he was not alone.
Beside him was a male Holly had not seen before: tall, narrow-shouldered, with long hands and stripes that fanned over his face and hands.
He wore simple, practical clothing, and his eyes crinkled deeply when he laughed, which he was doing now, at something Harry had just said.
Vittor. The culinary mushroom buyer from Centura-Vox.
Harry was leaning toward him with the incandescent glow of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be. His white hair was wild, his hands were moving as he talked, and his eyes sparkled with a light Holly had never seen in them before. This was different, private, and entirely new.
Holly smiled and looked away. Even if getting to meet Vittor was a big reason why Harry was so intent on making the festival happen, she didn’t care. Everyone deserved some happiness.
She was refilling the cupcake tray when Sam pushed through the lounge door. He was still in his work jumpsuit, hands freshly wiped but not fully clean. He surveyed the room, took in the crowd, and made his way to the counter.
“Pie?” Holly asked, cutting him a slice before he answered.
He accepted it with a nod and ate standing up, watching the room with quiet vigilance. He was a man who always considered himself partly on duty. “Good turnout,” he said between bites.
“Twenty-eight visitors. Plus, hotel guests.”
“I heard.” He finished the pie and set the plate on the counter. “Not bad for a station nobody went to until a few weeks ago.”
“Coming from you, that’s a stellar review.”
His lips twitched. Then his wrist comm buzzed. He glanced at it and the skin tightened around his eyes.
“Everything okay?” Holly asked.
Sam studied the display for a moment, then dismissed whatever had come in. “Pressure reading in the water system. Slightly off. Probably nothing. I’ll check it in the morning.”
“You sure?”
“It’s within tolerance. Just logged it.” He stepped back from the bar. “I should get back to the terminal. Two ships departing tonight. One incoming.”
He left with a nod, and Holly watched him go with a faint tug of concern that she pushed aside. Sam had said it was within tolerance. Sam didn’t miss things.
She turned back to the room and saw the most unexpected thing: Alyce was dancing.
The de facto coordinator of the outpost had accepted a single glass of wine at some point during the evening, and had taken the space that Mish’s children had vacated.
She moved to the Ytolian music with a grace that stopped Holly mid-frost. She was good.
More than good. Her movements were fluid and precise.
Her long, thin braids swayed as she turned, and the expression on her face was one of concentrated pleasure, entirely at odds with the no-nonsense facade she wore the rest of the time.
Several visitors had gathered to watch. Harry noticed and nudged Vittor, who turned and smiled. Even Mish paused behind the bar, a bottle suspended in mid-pour.
Alyce danced as if no one was watching, which was clearly how she preferred it, and which made it impossible not to.
Holly leaned against the counter and let the moment wash over her.
The music and the warmth and the smell of baked goods and the sound of people enjoying themselves in a place that had been empty and silent for too long.
She thought about Bean, who would have liked the attention of all these guests, but would have also been overwhelmed.
He was probably getting on fine with Tyer, who also would have likely been overwhelmed by all the people.
She knew Tyer just well enough to interpret his detachment not as disinterest, but as introversion.
His story, the how and why of him being here, was still a story she hoped to hear one day.
She looked for the one person who was unaccounted for and did not find him.
Cody had not returned since being asked to stop playing music.
Mish had told her he’d sulked off toward the forest after being asked to stop playing.
Holly winced at a twinge that was not quite guilt and not quite sympathy. She would deal with it tomorrow.
She looked around the room again, slowly this time, and let herself feel what she was feeling.
She had built this, but not without help.
True, she’d been the one to say, yes, let’s try, and the people around her had said, yes, back, and together they had turned a struggling outpost into a place where strangers paid for cupcakes and danced to alien tavern music and sat on a bench looking out at a gas giant.
It was small and imperfect. But it was hers, and for the first time since she’d arrived at Moone’s Landing, Holly fully felt like its owner.
It boiled down to the simple, earned fact of having poured herself into it and watching it come back to life.
She didn’t know the exact figures, but she knew the station had made good nits today. Better than good, maybe. She would count them tomorrow, when the warmth of this night had settled and the real world replaced this magical one.
The lounge emptied slowly. Visitors drifted to their rooms or back to their ships, full and tired and carrying bags from The Emporium and containers of Harry’s tea and fungal products.
Mish wiped down the bar and gathered her children, who filed out in their usual two rows.
Harry left last, walking side by side with Vittor, their shoulders nearly touching, talking in low voices about something.
Harry laughed in a way Holly had never heard before. Soft. Almost shy.
The door closed behind them, and the lounge was quiet.
Holly stood at the counter, surveying the aftermath. Empty trays. Crumbs. Stacked plates and cups. A smear of frosting on the counter that she wiped with a cloth.
Rasker emerged from the back of the lounge, where he had been packing up his NuProd. He carried the last of the serving trays to the counter and set them down.
“You should leave the rest for tomorrow,” he said.
“I will.” But she kept wiping the counter, because stopping meant the day was over, and she wasn’t ready for it to be over.
He leaned against the counter across from her, arms folded, and watched her with that unhurried gaze she had come to know so well. The lounge was dim, lit only by the counter lights and the soft glow from the square outside. The Ytolian music had ended, and the silence was the comfortable kind.
“This is amazing,” he said.
Holly looked up from the counter. His gaze held hers, and the expression on his face was edged with longing. It made her belly tighten and her hands shake, just a little.
“It is,” she said with a loose smile. “Who knew, when I first arrived, that I’d find my family.”
He dropped his gaze. “Is there room in that family for a real estate consultant who’s secretly happy to be proven wrong?”
Her skin prickled with awareness as her chest expanded with feelings she wasn’t used to. Love. Connection. Need. “Yes.” Just the one word. It said everything.
He pushed off the counter and crossed to her side. She set down the cloth. He was close, and the lounge was empty. The day had been long and full of the magic that happens when stubborn people refuse to quit.
He kissed her.
This kiss was not brief. This kiss was not a question or a tentative gesture or a thing to be interrupted by a wet-nosed dog.
His hands found her waist and pulled her close, and she let herself be pulled.
The counter at her back was the only solid thing as he leaned in, letting her get used to his nearness.
She placed her hands on his chest, then let them slide up to encircle his neck.
Her senses flooded with him, and she kissed him back with all the joy and reckless courage the day had given her.
A tremble raked through her as she buried her fingers in his hair.
His gills flared, releasing air she felt on her wrists.
She could not get close enough to him. Even pressed up against him was too much distance.
When they broke apart, she was breathing hard and so was he, and his forehead rested against hers.
“Come back to my room,” he said. “Please.” His voice was low and rough and he pulled back just enough to look at her. To make sure. “Only if you want to, Holly.”
She looked at him. At the man who had come to her hotel to buy her outpost and ended up building shelves for her tea station.
Who had swum through underground pools with pure bliss on his face and kissed her in the rain and told her he wanted her to succeed even though it meant he would fail.
Who was looking at her now with an expression that was open and wanting and patient, and who would walk away if she said no, and she knew that, and it was one of the reasons she wasn’t going to.
“I want to,” she said.
She pulled out her wrist comm and sent a quick message to Tyer: Would you mind looking after Bean until the morning?
The response came back almost instantly: Sure. Give Vipp my regards.
Holly pressed her lips together to keep from chuckling and tucked the comm away. They had not been as subtle and she’d thought.
Rasker took her hand. They walked through the dim lounge together, past the counter and the empty trays and the ghost of a day that had changed everything, and out into the quiet hallway.
He stopped at his door and turned to her, and the look on his face made her breath catch.
He kissed her again, slow at first, then deeper, and she felt it everywhere.
His hand came up to cradle the back of her neck and she pressed into him and the hallway was too bright and too public and entirely beside the point.
He pulled back just enough to find her eyes. Then he lifted her, one arm beneath her knees and the other at her back, and she let out a startled laugh and wrapped her arms around his neck.
“This is dramatic,” she said.
“Let’s go with romantic,” he said. “You deserve romance. You deserve a lot of things.”
“So do you,” she whispered, and kissed him as he carried her through the door and kicked it shut behind them.