Page 1 of Every Almost

PROLOGUE: DAY ONE

EARTH YEAR 1990 / COALITION CYCLE 500

? PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES ?

Charlie Wickett hada theory about holidays, that they were designed by people who had someone to spend them with and had never stopped to consider what they'd built for everyone else.

New Year's Day, for instance.

Pasadena, California was home to the annual Rose Parade hosted every New Year's Day. The city shut down as the streets around town filled with people in lawn chairs and blankets, some having staked out their spots along Colorado Boulevard, some having even camped out along the route the night before. The city was alive and celebratory and loud.

But this was the first year Charlie wanted nothing to do with it.

An entire city shut down to watch flowers on trucks drive by in the sunshine, while Charlie sat alone in a lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a dead man's coat, talking tofragments of space metal that wasn't in any database NASA had ever compiled.

She liked the fragments better than the parade. The fragments didn't expect her to be happy.

Pushing through her lab door when she arrived on campus, she was welcomed by the frigid cold that was permanent in her workspace. Hence why she was wearing her father's aquamarine coat over her Fleetwood MacRumourstee, using the coat as her preferred choice of warmth during her workdays since his passing.

She dropped her bag beside her chair and pulled her lab coat off its hook, shrugging it on over her coat and buttoning it from the bottom up. She tied her hair back into a low knot and slid her safety goggles down over her eyes, snapping a fresh pair of nitrile gloves over her hands before flexing her fingers once, twice.Good and tight and secure.

She sat down at her workstation and looked at the project in front of her. Strange debris that had been recovered months ago from a storage room, made up of fragments of something that didn't match any known material in NASA's database. She'd found out that it had been passed around, assigned to engineer after engineer to catalog it, but it none followed through. Her boss had finally brought it to her only a few days ago, apparently desperate for someone with enough curiosity and enough time to figure out what it was before the big wigs of JPL gave him any more issue over how it had been months since it was placed in the work queue.

Charlie had both. Especially today.

She pulled the tray toward her and studied the fragments under the lamp. Before setting to work, she opened her bag, pulled out her Walkman, pressed play, and then placed her bag in her lap. As she continued to speak in low murmurs to thefragments, the way she'd always talked to broken things, she started working.

"Alright, little buddy," she murmured at the largest piece, tilting it under the lamp. "Let's see why the managers are making such a fuss over you."

She said this in complete sincerity, with warmth, direction, and with more patience than she'd ever managed to give a human being. Machines made sense to Charlie. They broke in ways you could understand and were fixed in ways you could trust.

People did neither.

Outside, the city was drowning in confetti and roses. Inside Lab 7, Charlie was the only person on the floor, possibly the only person in the building, and she preferred it that way.

She preferred a lot of things that way lately.

She took it slow. She photographed each piece from multiple angles before she handled them. She measured and logged, she used tweezers and a non-conductive probe to turn the smaller fragments over, examining the seams where one piece met another. She ran the infrared sensor across the tray and noted that one of the larger fragments was running two degrees warmer than the others. Small and easy to dismiss, but Charlie knew it was worth noting, as she had been trained. So into the log it went.

After three hours, she put down her tools, pushed back from her station, took off her gloves and pushed up her goggles, and rubbed her eyes. She reached down and stopped the Walkman, cutting off "Call Me" by Blondie about halfway through. Charlie remembered the first time she and Katie heard it on the radio back in her Plymouth the first summer she was back visiting her hometown on break from Caltech and, for some reason, they both fell in love with it.

That gave her an idea.

Charlie swiveled around, picked up her desk phone, and called Katie.

Katie answered on the second ring. "Happy New Year, Charlie."

"Happy New Year, Kit-Kat. How'd you know it was me?"

"It's only going to be you calling me at Mom's house at this time of day on a Tuesday," Katie said. Charlie could hear the smirk on her face coming through the phone.

"I guess that's fair," Charlie replied. "How's things?"

"Things are fine. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before."

"Did the lawyer call back about the property assessment?"

"Yes, Charlie. The lawyer called back."