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“And that’s . . . good?”

Cora laughed more. “I pitched it bad, but seriously, it’s good. The machine that makes it, it can do all sorts of flavors, and it can layer them, so like—I like to get a half-shot of chocolate at the bottom, so you get this one really sweet sip right at the end. It’s not as good as a real brew, but like . . . it’s not a real café, y’know? It’s good for what it is.”

In the span of a reflexive second, Signy imagined Cora buying her a chicory not in an unadorned space station, but in a warm, colorful café, at a table in the corner. With equal speed, she mentally smacked herself out of that uninvited distraction. This was ridiculous. Signy barely knew this woman, and Signy was not sixteen. Yes, Cora was attractive, and yes, Signy would’ve been interested under other circumstances, but there were circumstances here. The silly little whim that had traipsed across her brain was not appropriate. This was business, not a date.

“No, thank you,” Signy said, in regard to the chicory tube with a half-shot of chocolate at the bottom. “I’m eager to meet Colibri, too.” She was out of her element here, and so it only made sense to follow Cora’s lead. “However you think is best.”

Interstitial

Every so often, as Signy followed Cora through the stables, they passed by small windows. Signy was aware, intellectually, of the existence of stars and the dark canvas they hung in, but stars weren’t something you could see in Fortune’s sky. Her fifth-grade teacher had made a big fuss about being able to see stars from orbit, but Signy had been too queasy to care then. Now, though, she would’ve liked to stop and look.

Cora, however, did not stop for the windows, and it made sense as to why. Cora lived out here, Signy was beginning to understand. This view was a pilot’s everyday. Yes, Cora spent her time off-shift in the Berth, but even if those days outnumbered her orbital days in aggregate, space was where Cora lived. Signy thought of when she’d acquired a batch of weeping figs for her newly opened shop, before she started growing everything herself. Those specimens had seemed healthy. They weren’t limp; they hadn’t yellowed. They grew leaves and stretched toward light in the way plants are famous for. But once Signy got around to looking up care instructions in the Primer, she learned that ficuses did best with indirect light and regular misting. As soon as she made the switch, she witnessed the difference between growing and thriving. What she had thought to be a healthy plant rapidly became one.

So it was with Cora, in this place. She took to microgravity as though she were dancing, and every time Signy clumsily bumped into something or tripped over her own momentum, Cora encouraged her with kindness, keen to share this realm of hers with the uninitiated. Much as Signy wanted to take in the view her younger self hadn’t been able to appreciate, her purpose in coming to the stables was not to understand the cosmos; it was to understand Cora. Every new customer was a risk, and Signy needed to gauge why this one was worth it.

The stars could wait. For now, she had a pilot to chase after.

They came to a closed hatch, big enough for multiple people to pass through. A card reader and a small sign were bolted to the wall. The latter was printed with codes and abbreviations that meant nothing to Signy, but the words at the top were plain as day. Colibri, the sign read. Pilot: Cora Marten. Vet crew: Team B. Enclosure crew: Team 5.

Cora stopped heading forward. “Hey, so . . .” She grabbed a handhold with her left and tapped Signy’s shoulder with her right. “Before we go in, we should chat for a sec.”

“All right,” Signy said, though she didn’t know what said chat was for.

Cora’s short locks of hair drifted around her head like a small halo, bobbing and swaying as she gathered her thoughts. “You’re around my age, right?”

“Yes,” Signy confirmed.

“You went on a field trip to the farms, in school? You remember the fish tanks?”

Signy hadn’t thought of the fish tanks at the farms in years. “Yes,” she said, recalling. A distant synapse fired—cloudy windows filled with unblinking eyes that stared through the algal haze. The memory was a relic of another time. Aquaponic livestock was no longer raised on Fortune, and fish was an old-fashioned food—something Otto missed eating, something Signy’s mother had prepared dispassionately only once or twice. The greywater the fish lived in had been needed for projects of higher priority, and so the trout, the catfish, and the perch had undergone a contained extinction. Fish were no longer part of life on Fortune. Signy hadn’t had cause to think of them much.

Cora continued. “You went up to the glass, yeah? And you saw the bumblebees, at the greenhouses?”

Signy squinted. “What are you getting at?”

“Uh, well,” Cora said, “if you’re like most people, you’ve only seen two species of animals before. Human beings aside, obviously.”

Signy considered that. She’d never really thought about it, not in those terms. “I mean, I’ve been to the Settlement Museum.”

“Ugh,” Cora said. She didn’t need to explain. The gallery of the second generation’s failed attempts at livestock, immortalized in ceramic-eyed taxidermy, was the Berth’s collective childhood nightmare. “So, nothing else alive, then, right?”

“No,” Signy said. “What else is there?”

Cora threw her eyes toward the hatch. “There’s her. And there is nothing I can say that will prepare you. She is not bumblebees, and she is not fish.”

Signy bristled a touch. This was starting to feel condescending. “I’ve seen videos of them. I know they’re . . . big.”

Cora’s smile was respectful, but in a way that made Signy nervous. It was the smile of someone who knew something you didn’t, trying to put you at ease. “They are big,” Cora agreed, slowly. She paused. “They are bigger than you think. And your first time seeing one can be . . . a lot. It’s one thing to see an animal in a video. It’s another to see one face-to-face. I mean, she doesn’t have a face, but . . . you get it.”

Signy turned over her memory of the fish tanks: silvery shapes twisting and darting in the murky water, appearing in a flash, vanishing into shadow. The fish had startled her, unsettled her. She’d been afraid of them and didn’t know why. “Okay,” she said.

Cora angled her head, looking at Signy directly. Her eyes were a rich shade of brown, Signy noticed. Warm brown with flecks of amber. “However you feel in there is okay,” Cora said. “Some people freak out a little bit. Some people get emotional. However you feel, it’s all good. If we go in and you want to head right back out, that’s fine. I promise, I won’t care, and neither will anybody else here.”

Part of Signy scoffed at the suggestion that she’d freak out. She was not the sort of person who freaked out. She’d grown up in a medical clinic; there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen. But she wasn’t infallible, either. There were things she hadn’t seen.

This was one of them.

Signy once again bowed to Cora’s expertise. “What about Colibri?” Signy asked. “If I wanted to leave, would that—does she get offended? Would I insult her?”