Page 120 of Every Almost

The room was quiet. Charlie could hear the hum of the ship through the walls, that same engine frequency she'd felt in the floor when she first woke up.

Vondra spoke. "The debris. Describe it."

Charlie did. The fragments, an unknown alloy, the shape and the feeling of its surface that felt unlike anything she'd ever encountered before. The light that had no color and every color at the same time. As she finished her explanation, something caught her eye.

Reyna's jaw tightened.

It was a small movement. Anyone across the room would have missed it. But with Charlie sitting right beside her, close enough to see the muscles along her jawline shift and hold, Charlie noticed. It happened just before Vondra spoke next.

"What you are describing," Vondra said, each word deliberate, "is consistent with a malfunctioning PERS device."

"PERS?" Charlie asked.

"Personal Emergency Retrieval System," Reyna said, her voice steady but her jaw still tight. The way it had tightenedat the word PERS, and the way it hadn't fully loosened since, Charlie didn't know what that meant. But she noticed it. "It's standard Coalition technology. Every crew member on any Coalition ship carries one. It allows for emergency transport back to a registered vessel."

"When functioning correctly," Vondra added. "A malfunctioning device can send its user, or in this case, an unregistered individual who made physical contact with its pieces, to an unintended destination. The displacement can cover vast distances."

Charlie processed this. "So the debris on my workbench at JPL was a broken alien teleporter."

"In essence," Vondra said. "Yes."

"And it sent me here. To this ship."

"A malfunctioning PERS device will transport to a registered location, but not necessarily the correct one. You could have arrived on an abandoned station, a hostile outpost, or a vessel with no knowledge of Earth's coordinates. That you arrived here, on a ship with both the knowledge and the ability to help, is considerable fortune."

"And we want to help, Charlie. Make no mistake about that," Reyna added, looking into Charlie's eyes.

Charlie sat with that. It was possible she could have arrivedsomewhere elsein space? Somewhere that possibly wouldn't even know where Earth was, or possibly wouldn't care. She could have landed somewhere completely without any semblance of help and never had a chance to find her way home.

She looked at Reyna then, meeting the eyes that were studying Charlie. More and more reasons kept falling into Charlie's lap to be grateful for the kind, gentle, and safe way everything was handled with her arrival because of this woman.

Charlie sat with that thought, too.

"The device would not have originated from the Emberkind's inventory," Vondra continued as everyone returned their attention to the display. "Malfunctioning units can scatter across extraordinary distances before activation. Its presence on Earth is anomalous but not unprecedented."

"Which brings us to the discussion about Earth itself," Reyna said. She turned to Charlie, and there was something careful in her expression. "Charlie, since Earth is classified as a non-contact planet, we don't interact with your home often. The Coalition itself has not conducted missions there in over ten years."

"You've said this before. About a non-contact planet. What does that mean exactly?"

"It means that the Coalition has determined that Earth's population has not yet reached a stage of development where open contact would be safe or productive," Vondra said. "For either party."

Charlie opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. Shewassitting on an alien ship covered in alien dessert. Maybe the Coalition had a point.

"The last mission to Earth was over a decade ago," Reyna said. Her voice shifted, just slightly on the word 'mission.' Something was underneath Reyna's voice that Charlie couldn't identify. "A crew member named Jere from the Emberkind, actually. He went to Earth on a routine mission. He never returned."

Charlie watched Reyna's face. That same tightness from before, but different now. Deeper. Whatever PERS meant to this woman, whatever Jere meant to her, it was heavy.

"What this means for your situation," Vondra said, pulling the conversation back. "Is that we have no active communication channel with Earth. No relay, no signal path, no intermediary."

The words hit Charlie like a wall.

"I can't contact... anyone... on Earth?"

"That is correct," Vondra said.

"I can't tell my sister I'm okay..."

"No."