“When did you learn the difference?”
She looks at me. The soft look. The one that makes my eyes sting.
“About three weeks into getting stuck on a terraforming station with a grumpy scientist and his terrifyingly perceptive daughter.”
My eyes get hot and blurry. I blink hard.
“Small person,” Pickles says. “Your lacrimal production has increased. I calculate this is an emotional response. For the record, the cabin humidity is within normal parameters.”
“Thanks, Pickles. Very helpful.”
“I am always helpful.”
Dove reaches over and squeezes my hand. Her fingers are warm and calloused from tools and cargo straps, and she holds on for three seconds longer than a normal squeeze. I count.
She shows me everything after that. How the Rolling Pin’s cargo management system tracks weight distribution across the hold. How to calculate fuel reserves against delivery schedules. How to read atmospheric entry data for different planet types so you know what your ship is going to do before you hit the mesosphere.
“Every planet tries to kill you differently,” she says, pulling up approach data. “Gas giants crush you. Ice planets freeze your fuel lines. Desert worlds cook your hull plating. And terraforming planets —” She grins. “Terraforming planets throw electromagnetic storms at you and then make you fall in love with the station commander.”
“That’s not a standard atmospheric hazard.”
“It should be. Someone should update the manuals.”
She lets me key in a course correction — a real one, three degrees starboard to compensate for a gravity wobble she spotted — and when the nav computer accepts it, she holds up her hand for a high five.
I smack her palm so hard my claws almost extend.
“Careful!” She shakes her hand out, laughing. “I need those fingers for flying.”
“Sorry! Sorry, I got excited —”
“Sweetheart.” She grabs my hand. Folds my claw tips gently against my palm, the way Papa does when he’s teaching me control. “Never apologize for getting excited about things. Your dad does the same thing when his data comes back good — his claws come out and he has to retract them. It’s a Storm family trait.”
She called it aStorm family trait. Like she’s part of it. Because she is.
“One more thing,” she says, and kills the cockpit lights.
The viewport fills with the Arch. Gold and white and burning, close enough now that individual stars separate from the ribbon, each one trailing wisps of gas like hair in wind. The cockpit goes dark except for the console glow and my markings, which pulse in time with my heartbeat — gold against gold, my light matching the nursery’s light.
“Listen,” Dove whispers.
I close my eyes. The Rolling Pin hums around us. And underneath the hum — faint, rhythmic, like breathing — the sound of solar wind against the hull. A soft percussion. The universe tapping its fingers on our ship.
“Every ship sounds different in the Arch,” Dove says. “The Rolling Pin sings. Some ships rattle. Some go quiet. But they all respond. Like the stars are saying hello.”
I open my eyes. The Arch blazes through the viewport, and my reflection glows in the glass — small and teal and bright, surrounded by baby stars.
We comm Papa from the heart of the Arch. Dove angles the camera so the stellar nursery fills the background behind us, and when his face appears, his markings go still — the wonder-pattern, the one he saves for data that changes what he thought he knew.
“Is that the Arch from interior transit?”
“Live from the copilot seat,” Dove says. “Your daughter has atmospheric readings she’d like to present.”
I hold up my sensor and walk him through the data I’ve collected at three points along the corridor. He asks precise questions — about my calibration methodology, the variancebetween systems, whether I accounted for the Rolling Pin’s own atmospheric output in my measurements.
I accounted for it. His markings blaze.
“This is genuinely publishable data,” he says. “For a junior xenoatmospheric journal, at minimum.”
