Page 42 of Cloverleaf Station

Kieron bit his lip, holding back words he didn’t want to say but which nevertheless wanted to come out.

“If your mother is who I think she is, and she really did get you onto a ship, it wasn’t because she loved you. It was because she didn’t think you were worthy of dying for the cause like the rest of them. She was the general’s daughter—she probably did her best to represent her father and his cause. Maybe you weren’t the son she’d wanted. Maybe you were too different, too—”

“Stop.” Hearing someone else say the words that Kieron couldn’t wasn’t any nicer than saying them himself. “Please. I can’t …”

“All right,” Elenus said, leaning in and kissing his cheek. “It’s all right. That was a long time ago. You’re here now, with Catalina and me. Nothing will hurt you.”

Staring up into the darkness, Kieron wished with all his aching heart that that was true.

Chapter eighteen

There was a part of Kieron that had been hoping that Catalina wouldn’t get the defensive laser array done as quickly as she had promised. Now that the event he’d been working toward for so long was almost here, he felt … strange about it. Anticipatory but nervous, almost sick with it.

He couldn’t remember the last time his nerves had gotten the better of him so comprehensively that he actually had to sit in the dark and meditate about it for a while. It was embarrassing, and only something he would share with Catalina if her own nerves started to get the better of her again.

You could take your own advice. You’re trying, you’re making progress. It’s all right to feel conflicted. It’s all right to need to take time to be okay with the world around you. And for once, Kieron was actually ready to listen to himself.

That was growth, to be pondered later. Right now he needed to put his best foot forward for Catalina—and Elenus, who was glancing at him every few seconds, like he was worried that Kieron was going to break into pieces. He was worried, and Kieron didn’t like that. He decided to confront it head-on.

“Focus on the asteroid field,” he said briskly, grasping Elenus by the chin and pointing his face forward toward the viewscreen.

“Catalina is taking care of everything!” Elenus protested, actually moving into the grip. Freak. Kieron loved the unexpectedness of Elenus’s physical desires. “The defensive laser array is working perfectly, she’s pushing everything out of our path before it becomes an issue, and have you noticed how many steps out she’s able to calculate the physics of these little bumps and tumbles she’s giving our surroundings? Have you? Because even before we sent the probes out there to help her, she didn’t send a single ricochet directly toward us, and only two third- and fourth-level collisions have slightly impacted our return route. I want you to take note of the absolute brilliance of this programming because I designed her, and—”

“And she’s got a brain of her own that is far more capable of making calculations like this on the fly than your rudimentary program ever could have,” Kieron said, extra snarky just so he could hear Elenus squawk about it.

He wasn’t disappointed. “Are you kidding me? Is it any sort of logic to completely discount the building blocks I provided to this tender young soul that put her on the path to—”

“Daddee! Keeron! Shush! I’m trying to conceeentraaaaaate!”

“Oh, sorry,” Elenus said and put an exaggeratedly dramatic finger over his mouth as he turned to Kieron. “Shh, she’s got to concentrate,” he whispered—somehow more loudly than he usually spoke.

“Daddee!”

“Don’t make fun of her,” Kieron chided him, refocusing himself on the work they needed to prepare for. Elenus’s lightheartedness in the face of almost everything was part of his charm, but Kieron also needed to concentrate. He needed to control himself, no matter what they found—whether it was a ship with a body, an empty shell, or nothing at all. He wasn’t going to let his emotions get the better of him out here, when it could be actively dangerous. He had to keep it together for everybody’s sake.

“The first probes have reached the target location,” Kieron said, avariciously reading the data that flowed across Catalina’s screen. “We’ve got a space approximately five kilometers in diameter to cover, no pings yet … Catie, can you make any sense of their visual data?”

“These probes experience a rate of decaaaay that does not allow for accurate imagiiiing after ten minutes of exposure to the quasar,” Catalina said in an apologetic tone. “It has already been thirteeeeen minutes.”

“That’s all right.” It was too much to ask.

“I can send mooore!”

“By the time they get there, we’ll be there ourselves,” Elenus cut in. “Let’s keep all your processors focused on getting us there safely rather than racing probes through an asteroid field just to get Kieron information faster.”

The screen, and Kieron’s indicator for Catalina in his implant, blushed around the edges. “Daddeeee!”

“It’s fine,” Kieron soothed her. “It’s all fine. We’ll be there soon.” He was getting some interesting data here and there—higher concentrations of rare metals than he’d expect to see in a random cross section of asteroids in this part of the field, a minor source of radiation that was almost buried by the quasar’s killing intensity but not quite … “I’m pretty sure there’s something there. What or how much it amounts to, I have no idea, but we’ll find out soon enough.”

Elenus leaned in so close that his lips brushed the outside of Kieron’s ear. Kieron flinched instinctively, unused to such close contact even though it wasn’t objectively violent or aggressive. Elenus took the unintentional rebuffing in stride and repositioned himself before whispering, “Are you ready for this? Sure you don’t want me to take first crack at the analysis of the scene?”

“No.” That would be unthinkable, handing over a vital responsibility to someone who hadn’t even known Zakari. “No, I have to be the one to do it.”

To his credit, Elenus knew when not to push. “All right, then. Catalina, estimate to arrival time?”

“One minute and seventeen point eight seconds, Daddee,” she said.

One minute, or a little over, before Kieron faced up to his greatest failure. One minute to come to grips with the outcome of his and Zakari’s actions three years ago—actions that had led to Zak’s death and had a scarce-and-falling chance of not leading to his soul’s exile from his home planet.