Page 180 of Every Almost

Charlie studied her before continuing. "Bad dreams?"

Reyna didn't answer immediately, nor did she look at Charlie. Instead, she watched the Aetherfin, and Charlie saw something flicker behind her eyes, as though an opportunity had opened up but then been stolen away. It was so quick that if Charlie had blinked, she would have missed it.

"Sometimes," Reyna answered. She took a deep breath before continuing. "The ship gets very quiet at 0300. Somenights the quiet is good." She paused and her voice went quiet. "But some nights it's too much."

Charlie understood that. She understood it on a level perhaps Reyna underestimated about her. How the quiet of some nights carried things the daylight kept at bay.

"Well," Charlie said, "If the quiet ever gets too much, and you're ever standing at this railing at an unreasonably horrific hour, and a barefoot Earth human in her pajamas just happens to wander by?—"

"You'll step right in and slip on a banana peel?"

Charlie grinned. "Promise."

Reyna turned to look at her, and the Aetherfin's light caught her face in a wash of blue and purple while she smiled. This smile was one of the real ones, and Charlie's vision, all over again, begin to narrow in, erasing the world around her fixated gaze on Reyna. Only this time, a weight in her chest started to feel warm, and all of a sudden Charlie had something brand new to add to the list of things she kept choosing not to examine when it came to Reyna.

"I'll hold you to that," Reyna said, determined and solid.

They stayed at the railing for another hour. They talked about more about the Aetherfin's color choices and how to read them, about how far the ship was from the nearest star system, about whether Borran's attempt at a human breakfast had been a success or a war crime. They talked about nothing important and then everything that mattered in the same breath, and when Charlie finally said goodnight and walked back to her quarters, she realized her mind was clear.

The second night,Charlie went back to the atrium. But this time, Reyna wasn't there.

The Aetherfin drifted through its slow patterns, blues and silvers shifting through the sphere, but the railing was empty. Charlie stood there for a few minutes, watching the creature pulse in the dark. She realized she was disappointed. Disappointed because the whole reason worth visiting the atrium was because of who was in it. And she wasn't here.

She almost went back to her quarters, back to bed and perhaps a night of broken sleep.

But instead, something compelled her to walk the ship.

It was quiet at this hour, a vessel of this magnitude where the corridors dimmed to their night cycle, the hum of systems the only company. Charlie drifted through passageways she knew in the back of her mind, but looked different in the dark. She let her feet choose her direction, leading her through corridors and hallways, until she turned a corner and saw light.

It wasn't the dimmed light programmed into the Emberkind's cycle system. It was pure starlight, pouring through a viewport that stretched nearly floor to ceiling and east to west, filling a small room with the slow-moving onyx of deep space. Benches of varying size sat facing the viewport, angled directly toward the glass. But it was the sight on the bench near the end of the room, by the corner of the viewport, that stopped Charlie.

Reyna.

She was sitting with her legs drawn up and her arms around her. Her face was lying against the top of her knees, turned toward the stars. Charlie observed as the Captain of the Emberkind simply sat in a silence that seemed to be a part of her skeletal structure, as though it had been practiced for a very long time.

Charlie stopped in the doorway. She recognized how Reyna was sitting. The posture and the stillness. This was the embodiment of what they'd discussed just last night, how the quiet was either a comfort or a punishment, and how some nights it was hard to tell the difference.

"Is this seat taken?" Charlie asked softly.

Reyna looked up, the starlight catching her markings, that strong gold against the soft sage-green. For a moment, Charlie almost forgot she'd asked a question.

"It hasn't been," Reyna said quietly. "In a very long time."

Charlie sat down next to Reyna, a distance she hoped Reyna would recognize as simplyI'm here.The viewport filled her vision with stars she didn't recognize that moved slowly past as the Emberkind traveled. The room was quiet in a way that the atrium hadn't been. The atrium hummed with the life support for the Aetherfin, it echoed with the sounds throughout the ship as it connected in the very center, and it spoke through stories of events that occurred every day within its confines.

This room was just silence, and stars.

"How long have you been coming here?" Charlie asked.

"A while," Reyna said. "Long enough."

The answer was careful, measured. Something about the response made Charlie wonder if Reyna wasn't ready to tell this story to someone she'd known for only two months. She could understand that.

"It's beautiful," Charlie said, changing the dialogue.

She heard Reyna's contented sigh. "It is, actually." And then she smiled at Charlie, which Charlie took as a sign that she was welcome to stay.

So she did.