Page 9 of Adrift!
“It doesn’t even matter, so why do you care?” Her voice—once strong enough to carry all her dreams—was little more than a whisper.
“I came all this way too, if not on the exact same path.” His gaze angled to the viewport. “Do you realize how many points and trajectories there are in the universe? Far, far too many to count. The chance of any given moment is impossibly slight—and yet it happens.”
When he glanced back at her, the shimmer in his eyes was brighter, as if he’d absorbed light from those stars she couldn’t see.
She dredged up a chuckle. “Dammit, I was a musician, not a mathematician.”
“You said you weren’t, not anymore.”
Even the semblance of amusement faded in her. “It’s a mangled quote from an old science fiction television show about… Actually, never mind.”
“But you do mind.” He topped off her coffee. “Minding is what got you this far. But I’m not sure how much farther it will take you.”
A cold flush that even fuzzy socks couldn’t protect against radiated through her. “I suppose you’re going to say that taking a chance on love is the next step.”
“Ididn’t say it,” he protested. Then he grinned at her, a dimple flashing in his cheek. “But it is in the cruise brochure.”
Aliens had dimples? Was that some sort of transplanetary evolutionary adaptation to enhance charm? She’d received all the required inoculations after she’d submitted her IDA profile, but apparently she wasn’t immune to temptation.
“If this is rude, please ignore me, but…” But at least they could stop talking about their feelings. “Can I ask about your people? You mentioned the tonic you made was from your homeworld. Do you get home often? I haven’t been anywhere except Earth, ofcourse, then the IDA transport that took us to the space station where we boarded. And now here.”
His dimple faded. “My planet is also called Earth in my language. And like your Earth, it is a closed world. Just not in the same way. It was the originating planet of two divergent sapient species. From the times of rock and bones until antimatter rocketry, we fought. Not until we finally made it into space and colonized other planets and moons in our system did our people mostly reconcile.”
“So maybe there’s hope for my Earth too.”
“Always. But my homeworld was badly damaged over the millennia before that. Although I was born there, when I was young, the planet was declared a disaster site. Everyone was relocated elsewhere in the system. It was too late for parts of me.” He splayed out his hands, the one cybernetic hardware, the other tattooed with symbols. “Just a few generations earlier, I would’ve died from the toxins built up in my world and in my body. But I made it out. Most of me, anyway.”
So much for idle chitchat minus emotional entanglement. Unable to stop herself, Remi reached over again to touch his hand, and her fingertips brushed the arguments in his tense forearm. “I’m sorry to bring up such hard memories,” she said. “That’s a lot of scars, and you’ve given them a special kind of beauty.”
“Whenever I see myself, or whenever I look at something else and my vision shifts across the spectrum, I remember.” He spun his hand upright so that her fingers slipped naturally into a soft grasp. “Maybe I can’t go back, but even if I’d stayed, even if I’d rejected the relocation and the reconstruction, the mutations in my cells would’ve changed me anyway. At least this way, I have some say over the changes.” His grasp tightened on her, just for a heartbeat. “I suppose we’re similar like that.”
She’d seized this chance to pursue something totally different, not the same. But he wasn’t wrong that she’d left pieces of herself behind, not cancerous toxins maybe, but never finding her audience had been killing her soul.
She angled her gaze to the salon viewport, which as far as her human eyes were concerned was an unrelieved field of nothingness. But she stared into that abyss without blinking so that the stinging prickle in her eyes didn’t overflow.
If she started crying now, she’d flood the whole damn ship with tears.
Chapter 4
Ikaryo looked away from her. His augments tracking the naked emotions on her face felt more invasive than the feelings button. But even giving her that courtesy, he was achingly aware of her tiny movements, her every breath, the delicate tremble of her fingertips.
It wasn’t his place to get so personal with a guest. He wasn’t the cruise director like Felicity or captain to decide on their fate or even in an IDA counselor with access to therapeutic training, species-specific psychological evaluations, and personalized profiles. As he’d already told her, he was just the bartender.
And yet, he found himself tangling his fingers with hers to tug her upright behind him. “Maybe you can’t see the stars with your naked eyes, but do you want to see something else?”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Come with me.”
Abandoning his post—they were out of coffee anyway—he led her out of the Starlit Salon. The corridors were empty, as if they were the only two on the ship. She held on to him tightly, as if she feared being left behind, lost in these quiet halls where the lights were turned down low to conserve power.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Our chief engineer designed a capacitorus—a containment unit—to capture the energy anomaly.”
“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” she muttered.
He wanted to urge her to explain, but even with his translator, he couldn’t frame a question that didn’t sound meddling. And then they were standing in front of a reinforced portal twice their height.
Remy tilted her head back. “Are you going to toss me out into space for a closer look at those stars I can’t see? Not that I’d blame you, considering.”
