Page 45

“She can feel it out there, yeah. It’s still active, it’s still pumping out signal, so that we know where to go, if we ever make it out there.”

Twig gave this some serious thought, flexing the chip bag back and forth between her hands. “So the people from the Second Lander could be there.”

“I mean . . . sure? There’s nothing to say they aren’t, but there’s nothing to say they are, either.” Cora pinched the bridge of her nose. The headache was back, but it was probably just thanks to this conversation. “Listen. I get that it’s a cool idea and all, but that guy”—careful, careful, light touch—“it sounds like he had some stuff right. But the conclusions he drew . . . I dunno. If there was somebody out there, they’d have gotten in touch, right? They’d let us know they’re okay. So either there’s nobody out there, or there are a few people out there and they want fuck all to do with us. And as for the other thing—if somebody actually did manage to launch something from Sucker’s Luck, their lives would be short and miserable. Nothing they can hack together from whatever’s been corroding out in the wastes is going to give them any sort of shelter that is even remotely habitable. And anybody who made it up there is still gonna be dead from radiation exposure before they reach the Mothership. The people who do this, they’re not organized, they’re not trained, they just wander out there and grab what they can and go for it. So, you tell me—how does that change things for the better?”

Twig looked bothered, and out of her depth. “I just . . .” She fidgeted, and slumped. “I just want someone to have gotten out of here, y’know? I want to know someone is at least trying.”

Now, that Cora had sympathy for. “Y’know, if you’re sick of being planetside, the corps is always taking applications for stables crew.” She scrambled to think of a job Twig might reliably do. “Cargo work’s not bad. It’s got good pay. Or you could be a . . . a flight tech, maybe, if you wanted to try school again—”

“Nah,” Twig said, shaking her head. “This is your thing, not mine.”

Cora hesitated. “There’s always the Quarries,” she said, not loving that suggestion at all. “Six-week shifts aren’t so bad, and their housing block on raft fourteen is really nice, I’ve heard. There’s lots of perks.”

Twig crunched a chip loudly. “You once said you wouldn’t be caught dead sawing ice underground in a space suit.”

“I did not say that,” Cora said, even though she probably had.

“You did so.”

“When?”

“I dunno, I just remember you saying it.” Twig sighed. “I don’t want an orbit job. I want to get the fuck out of here, and there’s nowhere to go.”

“I do get that, you know,” Cora said. She didn’t want to encourage Twig’s curiosity about Sucker’s Luck, but she did understand where it was coming from. She was angry about all of it, too. She’d just learned to shoulder it, because what other choice was there? If Twig was ever gonna settle within herself, she needed to accept the shitty hand everyone on Fortune had been dealt. “I never want to come back down, when I’m in the saddle,” she said. “I would love to fly forever. It’s beautiful out there. But this is where we are. It sucks. It really sucks, but it is what it is. And maybe one day we’ll get out, but . . . probably not. So we have to make the best of it, yeah?” She tried to catch Twig’s eye, tried to coax her down to the ground. “It’s not like we have to do it alone.”

Twig discarded the chip bag, picked up her orange, and rotated it between her hands. “What does it feel like, when Colibri feels the Mothership?”

Cora got to her feet and went to open her soda. “Uh, well . . . hmm. It feels just like whenever she picks up any sort of infrared, but—” But as to how to put the feeling into words for someone who’d never been in the saddle, that was always the trick. “It’s a color we don’t have words for. It’s . . . it’s bright. Sharp.” She wrestled with both memory and vocabulary. “Like if you could take the feeling of a cold shower and turn it into something you can see. Or like—”

Without warning, the headache blossomed. It ran in twin stripes from her eye sockets, shooting across her scalp and down the sides of her spine. She knew the color she was trying to find. She knew the color but she couldn’t see it, she couldn’t see it, and that was wrong, that wasn’t how the world was supposed to look, she was supposed to see everything, everything, because Colibri could see everything, except Colibri didn’t see at all, so that was wrong, too, and—

Cora froze, her drink untouched in her hand.

Oh, no.

“Cora?” Twig said. “Hey.”

Oh god, oh, no, oh fuck. Oh, fuck, not right now, Cora thought with the part of her brain that was still her own. Please, not now. This shouldn’t have been happening. She’d taken so much ginger that day. This had never happened before after taking that much. Oh, fuck, please—

“Cora, what’s wrong?”

Cora turned to her sister. Her sister who was the wrong color. Too few colors, too few waves, reality distorted, heavy and strange. “Sorry,” she forced herself to say, like she was trying to talk normal while being drunk. She set the soda back down, even though up and down had stopped making sense. “I’ve got a . . . a gnarly stomachache. All of a sudden. Uh—dinner, maybe.”

“Oh,” Twig said with a blink. “Are you gonna puke?”

“I, um—” Shit, shit, shit. Whenever this happened, Cora locked herself in her room until it was over. But Twig was here, and Twig couldn’t see this, Twig didn’t know, Twig couldn’t know, Twig couldn’t worry, Twig needed Cora and Cora had to be steady, steady, steady—fuck.

The pain sliced through her scalp, her jaw, her eyelids. It was sunrise, somewhere, and all the shutters in her mind were thrown open to the light at once.

Bathroom, some distant part of her ordered. Say you’re going to the bathroom.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Cora said, hopping over the mattress and hurrying for the door. “I’m really sorry, I’ll be back.”

“Do you want me to come—”

“No, no, I’ll be fine,” Cora said as she dashed out. “Everything’s fine. It’s fine.”

Later, she was sure, she’d feel grateful that she’d managed to shut the door, run down the hall, lock herself in a bathroom, shove the trash can under the door handle, and huddle in the far corner before the storm hit for real. But for the time being, all she could do was wad the collar of her shirt into her mouth, close her eyes, and bite down.