Page 77 of Eat My Moon Dust
Hunar took me by the shoulders, jaw ticking with gruff uncertainty. “The molecular bay finally arrived.”
“Cool! And the engineer?”
“In a minute.” He wrapped his tendrils around the straps of my tank top and brushed back my short curls. “I, uh, did something. Without asking.”
“Okay…”
Bajora snorted, leaning back on his workbench and crossing his boots at the ankles. Hunar hissed at him, spinning me until my back was to his coworker.
“Molecular bays are used to print basic compounds, minerals, lipids… You name it. Stuff like potassium bitartrate, galactose, and…Fuck.Bajora?” He glanced over my shoulder.
“Anthocyanins.”
“Thanks.”
“Wait, I’m not following,” I said, flummoxed. “Galactose is in a lot of dairy products. It’s a type of sugar. I don’t know what anthocyanins are though. Potassium bitartrate… that’s tartaric acid, right?”
“Stop trying to pad it out,syali.Just show her,” Bajora pushed, his mane rumbling.
Hunar scraped his forehead and tendrils with an upper palm and exhaled in a whoosh. “Yeah, alright.” He stepped aside, revealing a hjarna with powdery blue skin, tattooed from crest to toe in gold and black. I recognized him with a smile. He was one of the refugees that had arrived with Siatesh.
He turned to face me with his holotab open and the machine behind him still whirring through some sort of start-up procedure. His giant black eyes met mine and he bowed his crest.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” he said. “Yulang. You must be Ms Adams.”
“Tinsley. Nice to meet you.”
“Yulang is certified to use the molecular bay,” Hunar explained. “And he’s agreed to tutor you until you can pass your certs.”
My brow creased, blinking up at my coil. “Huh?”
“It’ll be a bit more likecheatingon your certs, yeah?” Yulang said with a criminal grin. “But you’ll get the gist.”
Bajora pushed off his workbench and set a crate on the steel tabletop. He withdrew a stack of matching bowls, a set of packaged ladles, some silicone cups… That crate had been there for several days, hiding on a low shelf. What did the others hold?
My heart skipped.
“You’re the new engineer, Tin,” Hunar murmured, squeezing my bicep. “Food bays are regulated not to print uncooked foods or ingredients, but molecular bays can. Your workbench can incubate cultures too. Likeyoaghurt.Yulang dredged the human archives and made a recipe book to get you started. You just ask him for the compounds you need, and he’ll teach you how to produce them.”
“Oh my god,” I choked up in shock, pressing a hand to my mouth to keep them from seeing it quiver as I stared at all the things Bajora was unpacking. Most of them were novel shapes but their functions were familiar to me. Knives, sifts, baking molds, rolling pins, graters… I had to lean my weight on Hunar’s grip. With a shaking hand, I reached out and brushed my fingers against a silicone brush I’d have used for egg washes back on Earth.
But the tears really flowed free when I noticed that amazing, blobby Octopus bag hanging from the window between our work areas. I’d thought it had been packed away with everything else before I could claim it for our unit’s kitchen.
“Whatever you make,” Hunar continued, brushing his thumbs over my cheeks and swallowing the salty taste of my tears, “Bajora would like to use it to improve the food bays. It’s how we justified the addition. It’ll make things taste a lot bet–”
“Yes!” I breathed. Had I even blinked? My hands were shaking. “Yes, I’ll do anything.”
Hunar chuckled, gently pulling me towards his workbench. He sat, and I slid right onto his knee as his mane lapped up the tears itching my cheekbones and chin. His smile was warm, and the echoes in his chest soothed me while he rubbed my arm and held my waist.
“Think about it for a while,priya.You don’t need to give him anything if you don’t want to.”
“I want to. The food bays are an abomination,” I sniffed. “No offense, Bajora.”
“None taken.”
Hunar smirked, then presented me with a bouquet of purple wooden spoons tied with a red velvet bow. “Late MerryKrismis.”
I hugged them to my chest with a wobblytsk.“Hunar, you literally gave me the biggest gift of my lifetime.”
