I glared at her.“That’s what I thought. Get to work Ransom, or get back to bed.” She sipped her coffee. “And eat something, we don’t need you to be pissy.”
“Why is everyone on this station obsessed with feeding me?”
“Because you look like shit.”
Ring two smelled faintly of burnt coffee, which meant Elias was already here.
I stepped into the lab to find half the central console dismantled and pieces of SOL’s auxiliary processors spread across the workbench in the corner. Elias glanced up from beneath the hood of his sweatshirt.
“You’re late.”
“And you’re not in uniform.”
Elias shrugged. “SOL, power down in your charging bay.”
I dropped into my chair behind my desk. “What are you doing?”
“Just a systems update. I woke up with a crazy idea this morning so I made some coffee and came in early. I want to test a few things.”
Only then did I notice the old radio setup sitting neatly arranged beside my terminal, half taken apart and rewired into my computer. I stared at it. “...What’s this?”
Elias scratched the back of his neck. “I had some extra time this morning so I patched a direct line through secondary comms.” He spun a screwdriver between his fingers. “Thought maybe you’d like to stop sprinting to Command.”
All I could do was look at him for a long second. He was… it was—
“That might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
“I know. Don’t make it weird.”
SOL’s voice filtered softly through the speakers overhead. “Powering down, Lieutenant.”
He pushed himself toward SOL on his rolling chair, gliding across the floor. “By the way, your dad stopped by.”
My shoulders tightened instantly. “What’d he want?”
“To check on you, apparently.”
“All the way from Station Eight?”
“He heard about the—uh, well, you know.”
“That my girlfriend is stuck on a nuclear-torn Earth while I’m up here in space?”
Elias went quiet, and the word sat wrong the second it left my mouth. Girlfriend. Solace was my—my what? Friend? Partner? The love of my life? None of those words felt big enough. None of them came close toexplaining what she had been to me before the Scourge, or what she still was now after seven years of silence and grief and trying to survive the shape of her absence.
I’d spent seven years believing she was dead.
Elias cleared his throat softly. “He seemed worried.”
“Sure he was.”
“Well, he stood outside the lab for like ten minutes pretending to look at the maintenance hatch, so whatever version of worry that is.”
I rubbed both hands over my face. “Did he say anything else?”
“No. I told him you wouldn’t be in for a few hours and he finally left.” Elias rolled back toward the central console and nudged a crate of processor parts aside with his foot. “Anyway. Good news is you should be able to talk to Solace here from now on.”
The day eased forward after that. Most of it blurred into routine research logs and diagnostics. Elias stayed helping recalibrate one of SOL’s damaged processor clusters while I met with Commander Zhang and Admiral Pike to go over SOL’s ARS-7 readings over what used to be Asia. It was miraculous, actually.
