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"Oh. I guess you're right." For some reason, my answer doesn't make her happy. If anything, she seems sadder than ever before. "He's valuable to anyone, I suppose."
Her sadness tears at me. I feel responsible, as if I'm the reason her smile has dimmed. I don't like it, just like I don't like it when Sophie's scared. She should be smiling and happy all the time, full of bright laughter. Sophie's laughter is such a joyous thing.
The need to fix this tears at me. I need a distraction. Any kind of distraction. "Did you want to learn to fly the shuttle?"
Sophie gasps with delight, her expression pure pleasure, and I feel that gasp straight in my groin. "Oh, Jerrok," she breathes. "You'd teach me? Really?"
"As long as you promise to warn me when you're cleaning the floors." It comes out awkward and stilted instead of confident and teasing as I'd hoped.
She chuckles. "I just get so bored. My mom was a housekeeper back on Earth. When she got restless, she'd clean things. I guess I picked up the habit."
"If you're that bored, you can help me scrap some of the bigger wrecks," I find myself saying. "You can pull out all the parts I can't quite get to." It's an excuse to spend time with her, but I might as well go all in at this point. Get myself enough fodder for my fantasies so that even after Sophie leaves with Adiron and his brothers, I'll have enough memories to keep my mind occupied for years to come. I know that tonight, when I lie down in bed, I'm going to be thinking about last night, and how she curled up against me as I stroked her soft, soft hair…
…until my aggravating cousin Bethiah ruined it all by showing up.
Sophie gives me the widest, happiest smile I've seen yet. "I'd love to help you."
My entire body twitches at the sight of that smile. It's like her happiness makes everything in my body react, even the circuits.
How can I refuse? How can I refuse her…anything?28SOPHIEA week passes. Then two. And things are…nice.
There's no word from the va Sithai brothers, and I'm starting to realize that they dumped me on the station because they were planning on being gone for a while. After all, if it was just a few days, they'd have put up with Sleipnir's chewing, right? So it makes sense to think that they're going to be gone for at least a few months, maybe even more. With that realization in my head, I'm not worried at the radio silence coming from the Little Sister. They'll swing around to get me eventually.
For now, I can just enjoy Jerrok's station.
Now that I have things to do, it actually is really enjoyable. I wake up in the morning and put on my oldest, rattiest jumper, and then I have breakfast with Jerrok. We pull wreckage out of one of the storage rooms and get to work on dismantling it, tearing apart all the bits and looking for scrap. A lot of ships and sensitive equipment are made with rare elements—diamonds for heat conductors, iridium and dark matter for the drives. Expensive wiring. All of it can be stripped out of a broken machine and re-sold, and that's how Jerrok makes a living. His hands don't fit in the smaller spots, so I get to wriggle my way in and pull out the choicest bits, and when he gives me a grunt of satisfaction at what I've retrieved, I feel like a scrapping dynamo.
It's fun to tear things apart. Sometimes Jerrok keeps a particular bit of circuitry to repurpose, but for the most part, it's all about destruction…and conversation. I thought we'd be working in silence, but Jerrok talks to me all day long, and I like hearing it. He tells me stories of him growing up on a station, running wild with other “junk rats” and selling whatever bits they collected through the day for their dinners. He tells me about the station he grew up on, Haal Ui Station, and how expansive it was. How his mother had been born there and never left. How he and his cousin Bethiah were left to fend for themselves most days, because no one had time to coddle their children. How there were entire wings full of slums for the workers, how asteroid miners used to show up, filthy and loud, for drinks at the cantina and he and his friends would rob them when they got drunk enough. It sounds miserable, and like Jerrok grew up poorer than poor. No wonder he never had a chance to get better limbs. No wonder his people didn't give a shit if they left him behind in the war.
He never talks about the war. I never ask. There are some parts of the past that it's better to acknowledge and skim past. I know exactly how that is. I want to forget, too.
