Chapter 8

TEN YEARS? HELL, THE STATIONS WILL GO AS FAR AS FIFTEEN GIVEN THE RIGHT MAINTENANCE. WE MIGHT BE DOWN BUT WE'RE NEVER GOING TO BE OUT. HOMELESS, BUT NEVER HOPELESS. THEY MIGHT HAVE BURNED THE SKY, BUT THEY'LL NEVER BURN AWAY OUR HOPE.

-SEN. NABE NGUYEN, COMMEMORATION OF MACI STATION.

.•° ✿ °•.

It didn't take me all that long once we boarded her ship for me to realize that Lilt Jackson was a completely and utterly remarkable woman. And at the same time, Lilt Jackson was a wholly unremarkable girl. Paradoxically, there was no arguing against the congruence of those thoughts, not the moment she chose to be a part of my life. In the span of one day, she'd played the role of Excited Naïf, Disgusted Objector, Coy Informant, and Would-Be Handler. Each of those masks seemed equally comfortable to her, each of them seemed like her natural skin and smile. And while none of the masks she'd worn had brought me any closer to knowing who she really was, each provided a critical piece of her puzzle, those important central pieces that show detail. If only she’d throw me an edge, or a corner.

“The air feels wrong,” I lamented, licking the inner slice of my lips while doing my absolute best to ignore everything else that was different here: the plush carpeted floors that sent sensations through my feet I couldn’t even begin to process, the absence of vibration that I’d come to accustomed to anytime I wasn’t on a Run, or the bony-hipped and cherry-headed punky waif who watched my every move.

“Wrong?” Lilt asked, pouring burgundy liquid from a decanter on her desk into a glass, “or different?”

“When you grow up on a station in the middle of the furthest reaches, Lilt, the two share a lot of the same usage cases.”

“Grow up?” She paused, tilted her head thoughtfully, and nodded, “that’s a curious term to use for a girl who died when she was ten, isn’t it, Cadence?” There was something to her words, something not... smugness, no, that wasn’t right, it was something else. Melancholy? That was closer, but still not the golden ticket. Lilt sipped the wine and pulled herself up onto the edge of her desk, sitting there like a rebellious student, while I had little choice but to park my padded butt up on one of the chairs - the feelings of the carpet were too much.

“I didn’t die.” The words were as small as I was, and almost as hollow, my diction all soft and mumbled. With everything Lilt Jackson knew, it left me with more concessions than counters. “Lilt, what is this?”

“My quarters?” She smiled first with her words, and then with her lips. Both were beautiful.

“You know what I mean, Lilt,” Where she offered beautiful, all I had was frustration to give in return, “these are your quarters? Carpet, and art, background music and... and wine? Mankind fights over moldy proteins and swims in reactor water, birthrates are low, and Skippers are dying, and you have a mahogany desk and the luxury of...of...” I waved my hand at her in frustration.

“The luxury of being me?” Her words could have sounded hurt, but they didn’t, her intonation was more like a parent explaining a complex topic to a precocious child. Was that the light she saw me in?

“I didn’t mean it like that, Lilt.” I didn’t mean to sound so sour, either, but I couldn’t re-wrap that candy, “I just don’t understand any of this, like, do you even know what we go through?”

“You say we, but you’re not a part of any we, Cadence. Not even among other Skippers are you a we.

You’re unique, you know why you are, you know why you’re here, and I’m sure if you pause, breathe, if you close your eyes and stop thinking for a moment, so you can let yourself feel, you’ll realize what I'm talking about.”

What I realized was how much I hated listening to her just in that very moment. And I hated even more that she was probably right, too.

I closed my eyes with about as much annoyance as a ten-year-old being drafted into a round of hide and seek that she didn’t want to play, I took a deep breath, and I let myself feel through things. I chased the Dots.

“You were surprised that I lived in standard quarters. Dot. You told me that I should have been living in luxury. Dot.” It wasn’t a confirmation, or a recollection, it was a feeling I needed to follow to find the truth I already knew. “You weren’t playing hero worship, you honestly felt it was true. Dot. We conserve everything we do, we save energy, we save matter, we don’t waste resources. Dot. Why do you believe a Skipper should be afforded special treatment, then? Where’s that Dot?” I wondered out loud, and if Lilt Jackson knew as much as she claimed to know, then she knew the answer to this already.

My eyes snapped open, and I looked up at her with an expression of betrayal that tore the innocence right off my doll-like face. “What gives you the right?!” Carpet be darned, I stood up and looked up at her in accusation. “Are you hiding resources from everyone? Is that what this is, the masses toil away scraping by in decrepit stations so the powerful can fly around in dark mysterious vessels and... and own real wood somehow and... and drink wine that’s made from real grapes? You should be ashamed!”

“Is that what your feelings are telling you right now, Skipper Cadence?” Ugh, she didn’t even care how awful she was!

“My feelings are...”

“Are what?” She prompted, slipping down off the desk, “your feelings have to be trusted, even when they raise questions. You’re a Skipper.”

“And you’re a betrayer.” I pouted.

“Am I?” She wondered, curiously but encouragingly.

“You’re a secret-keeper,” I accused.

“And what secret am I keeping?” Her tone was almost musical, as though I was getting closer to finding whatever hidden treasure she was guarding.

Real wood, real wine, carpet, a project with the development budget to afford secrecy among the station arbitrators, and all of this above the knowledge of even Skipper Command?

Oh, there’s the final Dot.

“You found something.” I couldn’t dare to sound so optimistic, and I chewed on the tip of my thumb as I felt the padding between my legs grow warmer, like in the end it had been the only place for my hope to flow. That, or I just wet myself like I did sixteen times a day. One or the other. “Resources? A meteor, something mineable, something usable, something we can turn into energy?”

“Think bigger, Cadence. Feel bigger.” And I would have, too, I had a thousand million different feelings and feelings came with images and imagined possibilities, each one of them cut short by her Comm chirping. Even that sounded different.

I would never be able to forgive that voice on the other side, no matter how exciting what came next should have been for me.

“Dr. Jackson? We’re ready for the field test. Do you have the Skipper?”

“We’ll be down in a moment, Genna.” Lilt terminated the Comm with a click of her fingers as precise and perfect as the wings on her eyeliner, and she looked from the source of the voice on the wall, to my head and my feet and back to my face. “It’s time for you to show me how right I was to pick you. Come on, Skipper Cadence.”

.•° ✿ °•.

“What’s your ship’s name?” My voice rang with curiosity, even if the curiosity was only a mask for my pensiveness to wear. “I searched Centra, but came up with nothing, and there’s not enough of us left for the idea of an unregistered ship, so I must just not be looking in the right place.” Down. Down was where I was looking. I was watching the way the floor of her corridor was inlaid, counting the patterns from wall to wall and calculating size and distance. Skippers were supposed to focus on feeling but thinking helped to settle my unease. Patterns made sense to me.

When Lilt didn’t answer me immediately, I opened my mouth to repeat the question, but her voice beat me to the halfway point.

“The Truth and Consequence,” she answered, dryly; uncertainty was a tone I didn’t think I’d heard Lilt wear before and it made me curious enough to stop counting tiles, although by the time I looked up she was continuing. “It’s not listed on Centra, Cadence. There’s a good reason for that.”

“A good reason for them to hide things from the people?” I spat back, ironically, counting sixteen stairs on the flight down.

“They hid what they did to you, too, and I think you and I can both agree that was the right move, can’t we?” Lilt countered, and I had nothing else to say.

I was wet, I was fussy, and the air was wrong; but Lilt Jackson wasn’t.

What did she know about me, anyway? She’d claimed she knew nothing, and now all she was talking about was everything she did know, and all the things that I didn’t. I liked Lilt the Naïve a lot more in that moment, because Lilt the Mysterious was frustrating and made me doubt myself, and doubt was a feeling no Skipper had a place to put.

I counted another twelve stairs as the floor went from patterned tile to open grating, and through the gaps of the checkered catwalk I could see a cavernous space beneath that comprised the ship's laboratory and hanger bay. And unlike the rest of the ship, this felt comforting in its dirtiness. Familiar in the gritty, oily, experimental nature of the science and mechanics at work and play here.

It felt enough like home for me to let my guard down and lean over the railing, to take an interest in what was being done here.

This was where Lilt had created a new Faering, one that she claimed didn’t require any use of Oversight. If she’d been anybody else and had told me that, I would have laughed her all the way across the Umbilical and back onto her stupid sexy ship, because that statement on its own was a clear lack of understanding on the nature of the whole Faering system. A Skipper couldn’t conduct a Run and be their own Oversight; it simply wasn’t possible and no amount of wishful thinking could change reality. If it could, we wouldn’t have been a homeless species.

“Is that...?” My voice trailed off in awe and curiosity, in hope and wonder; like what I saw beneath us was enough to steal the rest of my words.

“I know it’s not too much to look at now,” Lilt began, apologetically.

“It’s beautiful,” I dismissed her concern with a wave of my little socketed finger joints.

Mankind as a whole and single entity were bound and conditioned to see Faerings as beautiful, because they represented in whole and full the last hope of an entire race, and it was hard not to fall in love with your own salvation.

What sat beneath us, though, represented far more than respectful beauty. Sixty feet across, three concentric rings of glistening metallic substance, each with nine wedge shaped segments that focused in on a single point in the center - a dark-pinkish-gold facsimile of what a person might resemble, more-or- less, a little bigger than I was but not overly so. Where our Faerings were well-crafted and maintained, this one looked as though it had been summoned from the very aether of the universe itself. This Faering looked like it had been willed into existence, equally elegant and functional, catching light in ways light didn’t like to be caught.

“You shouldn’t waste so many resources on building something beautiful, Lilt.” I remarked, critical but impressed.

“Building?” Lilt asked, amused but prideful, “oh we didn’t build this Faering, Cadence. We grew it.”