Dove’s hand stills on my hair. I hear her swallow.
“Pickles,” she says, very quietly. “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said.”
“I said no such thing. I provided a statistical summary. Any emotional interpretation is the responsibility of the listener.” A beat. “However. For the record. I would not choose a different crew.”
The cockpit is quiet. The Arch burns gold through the viewport. Dove’s fingers start moving through my hair again — slow, steady, untangling.
I close my eyes. My markings settle into the family rhythm, the slow warm pulse that matches the glow of Dove’s claiming mark and the memory of Papa’s steady light through the comm screen and the quiet hum of a ship that sounds like the AI who loves us.
Three instead of two. That’s what I asked for, in the hydroponics bay, that first week when I was scared and brave and desperate. I said,I miss having three instead of two.
Now we’re four. Papa. Dove. Me. And a sarcastic military-grade AI who expresses love through biometric surveillance and filing comprehensive reports.
“Mission success,” I whisper.
“Mission success,” Pickles confirms. “Now go to sleep, small person. You have a disciplinary hearing at 0800 and your cortisol levels are elevated.”
“Worth it.”
“I neither confirm nor deny that assessment.”
But his voice is soft. The way it only gets for me.
I fall asleep in the copilot seat with the Veridian Arch burning gold through the viewport, Dove’s hand in my hair, wrapped in a blanket she tucked around me without being asked — because that’s what family does, the nesting and the guarding and the staying — and my markings glow warm all the way home.
Epilogue: Clear Horizons
Dove
Sixmonths,andIstill wake up reaching for the edge of the bed.
Not to flee. The running reflex burned out somewhere around month two, replaced by something quieter and more terrifying— the reflex to check he’s still there. My hand finds warm teal skin, the steady rise of his ribs, the hum of markings that pulse gold in sleep. His arm tightens around my waist without him waking. Reflex. Claiming instinct encoded so deep it operates below consciousness.
I used to think home was a place you left. Turns out it’s a heartbeat you come back to.
The station sounds different now. When I crashed here six months ago, the silence was oppressive — one man and one child rattling around in an industrial facility built for fifty. Now there’s noise. Real noise. Footsteps in corridors, voices in the mess hall, the high-pitched shriek of kids racing through sections that used to be empty storage. Fifty-three colonists and counting. Kepler Station isn’t a lonely outpost anymore. It’s becoming a town.
Cetus stirs against my back. His temperature runs hotter than mine by fifteen degrees, and in six months I’ve become completely dependent on sleeping beside a furnace. My last OOPS run, I spent three nights shivering in the Rolling Pin’s bunk, wrapped in two blankets that smelled nothing like ozone and warm mineral earth.
“You’re awake.” His voice, sleep-rough, harmonics barely online.
“I’m admiring my property.”
One eye opens. Gold and amused. “Possessive language. You’ve been reading my cultural database again.”
“Chapter fourteen had some very interesting diagrams.”
“Chapter fourteen is a reproductive biology textbook.”
“Exactly.”
His mouth curves. He pulls me closer — one hand splayed across my stomach, his chin hooked over my shoulder, and the claiming mark on my collarbone flushes warm where his jaw brushes it. Six months and the bite has settled into permanent pigmentation: purple-gold, the exact shape of his teeth, glowingfaintly in the dim morning light. I catch the scent of it sometimes — that warm ozone signature that broadcastsclaimed, taken, his— and my body responds before my brain gets a vote.
“Tavia has a study group at oh-eight-hundred,” he murmurs against my neck.
“And?”
“And she packed her bag last night. Unprompted.”
