Page 5

All things considered, though? Piloting was a great gig. She couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

“Hey,” she said, addressing a fellow pilot one row up and over. “You okay?”

Smokey gave her a miserable glance, barely turning their head from their careful aim over a sick bag. “I swear to god, this is my last run,” they said.

Cora nodded as Smokey heaved. This, too, was part of the rhythm. Smokey always got sick, and Smokey always came back. “Hang in there, Smokes,” Cora said, popping a chip into her mouth. “Won’t be long now.”

In Smokey’s defense, the descent that day was especially mean. The shuttle had left the placid float of low orbit for a real bitch of a storm—not the worst Cora had been in, but still, no fun. Noxious clouds warred with airborne ash underneath, spitting acid rain and cussing the shuttle out. Cora was unconcerned. The chunky hull and brick-thick windows were made for exactly this, as were the safety straps pulled snug across her torso. She looked out the window again as everything within the shuttle—bones, brains, and teeth included—shook like a pantry in a quake. Cora rolled her chip bag shut with a sigh. Snacking was soothing, but she didn’t want to bite her tongue.

“Hey.” There was a tap on her shoulder; Adam had craned around the back of her seat. “Happy hour at the Brick?”

“Ah, I gotta go to Midtown,” she said. “But if you’re all still there when I’m done, I’ll meet you.”

“Midtown?” Adam asked. “Why?”

Cora continued to watch the ground rise toward them. The clouds pulled back to reveal the murderous ocean shore for only an instant before the shuttle charged inland. She saw smoldering crags wreathed in smoke, rock blistered in corpse colors, a weak peppering of seismic arrays and weather dishes doing what little they could to give warning whenever things, inevitably, got worse.

Cora closed her eyes, and behind them, she saw a delicate star cluster she’d spotted from the saddle that run. She’d done Big Quarry thirty-six times and counting, but that cluster had been a new detail, to her. It hadn’t been very big and it hadn’t been very bright, but it drew her attention anyway. Colibri had been curious as to why. Colibri didn’t have eyes, exactly. She didn’t see like Cora did. But still, Colibri wanted to know. She was like that. She liked knowing things.

It’s a little bit blue, Cora had communicated. She’d shared the idea of glowing clouds cradling baby stars, barely there but oh so pretty.

Colibri understood wisps and clouds, for she ate such things. What she didn’t understand was blue. Cora shared comparative memories of paint and rock candy and some humans’ irises, but these were intangible concepts to Colibri. She understood, though, that those things could also be blue, and that blue was a nice category to fall into. A rorqual didn’t communicate in words, but the reply Colibri sent through Cora’s synapses was clear as glass.

If Cora thought blue stars were beautiful, Colibri reasoned, then it must be true.

“Hey. Cora.”

Cora shook herself back to Adam tapping her shoulder again. “Sorry, what?” she said.

Adam’s frown was sympathetic. “You still coming down?”

Cora rubbed the inner corners of her eyes with her fingertips. “Yeah, a little.”

The other pilot nodded. “All the more reason to go get drunk.”

The smile Cora put on was casually apologetic. “I gotta get my radio fixed,” she lied.

“You said you gotta go to Midtown,” Adam said.

“Yeah,” Cora said. “I gotta go to Midtown to get my radio fixed.”

Adam looked at her like she was drunk already. “You do know there’s a repair shop in the service hall.”

“Ah, they fucked it up last time,” she said. That much, at least, was true. “Twig says there’s a shop in Midtown that’s way better, so I’m gonna try it.”

Adam shrugged. “Do it tomorrow.”

“Such a pest,” Cora said, pushing him back toward his seat. “I said I’ll come. But if I’m gonna be hungover tomorrow, I want to be in my bunk with my shows.”

Adam relented. Smokey retched. Cora reopened her bag of chips.

Fortune’s surface grew closer, but that wasn’t the shuttle’s destination. Touching the actual ground was suicide. A perpetual fog of sulfur dioxide and cyanide gas and all kinds of other miserable shit lay coiled down there, condensing like silt in shallows. The shadow of the spacecraft flashed across the miasma’s surface until it reached another shoreline, of sorts—the towering sides of Chalice Crater, a monument to what happens when rock smashes rock. The engines whined through the steep, sharp ascent—poor Smokey—then hushed their way down the inside slope.

A murky sea lay cupped within the crater, sequestered from the worst of the poison. At its center stood the Berth, right where Cora had left it. A clunky, teetering, hodgepodge city built on massive tethered rafts. A quarter-million neighbors stacked like cargo atop the dirty water. A cushion against earthquakes, an escape from unworkable air, and the only option anybody on this planet really had. The shuttle flew over the power plants, the reclamation factories, the outermost residential blocks, the tiny wake lines of ferries chugging between. Cora could’ve drawn this parade of landmarks in her sleep. She held no real affection for the only settlement that had survived Fortune thus far, but she didn’t hate it, either. The Berth kept her and everybody she knew alive (for the most part). But as Twig had put it once: Just because something takes care of you doesn’t mean you have to love it. Love was a symbiosis, and the Berth didn’t leave people with much to give back.

An echo from the saddle danced through her. A shiver down her spine, a warmth lapping at her nerves. How good it had been to be away from the world. How good it had been to explain blue without words. If only she could stay out there for more than mere days. If only she could stay forever.

I want to go far, and I want to fly fast.