Page 189 of Every Almost

"I doubt that, Cap," Tavi said. Maren's shimmer flickered from laughing.

"Well?" Charlie asked, already laughing because the whole night had been about laughter. "What did the Captain say on his private comm channel? You can't just say it happened and not spill the goods, Tav."

"Poetry," Tavi said, with absolute sincerity.

"Poetry?" Maren asked.

"Oh, it gets better. He was reading poetry to his cat."

"He had a cat on a starship?" Reyna asked, clearly surprised and slightly intrigued.

"He hadtwocats on a starship. Coalition regulations are very clear on companion animals. He had filed the paperwork."

"For both cats?" Orion asked.

"For both cats. Individual forms completed and everything. In fact, he'd named them after former Admirals."

Reyna, from the floor, said: "Admiral Vondra would have been honored."

Everybody turned to look at her. She was holding her mead, expression neutral, and the timing was so perfect that the laugh hit Charlie before she could prepare for it.

"Look at that, the Captaindoeshave a sense of humor," Tavi said.

Reyna's mouth twitched, but not a smile. It was the suggestion of one, held at the edges, offered to the room as proof that the Captain did, in fact, have a sense of humor she only let out for special occasions.

Charlie had an overwhelming desire to make her do that again. She didn't bother pretending otherwise.

The night drifted the way the best ones do with the conversation moving without anyone steering it, from Tavi'sstories to Maren's gentle corrections that no one ever argued with to Orion's quiet questions that always landed deeper than they sounded. At some point, Charlie was explaining thunderstorms.

"You mentioned that once before," Reyna said. "The rain and how it smelled different before it arrived. 'Petrichor,' you called it."

Charlie blinked. She had mentioned that, just once, during one of their late nights in the Observation Room. Charlie recalled it as barely a sentence, an overlooked stray thought about Indiana weather while they watched a nebula drift past the viewport. She hadn't thought it was worth remembering, but Reyna had.

"You remembered that?" Charlie said.

"I looked it up," Reyna said, as though this were a perfectly normal thing to do with a word a human had mentioned once in passing. "Petrichor. Greek roots, which I understand is a race but also a language on Earth?Petra, it said, which means stone. AndIchor, which is the fluid that flows through the veins of the gods." She took a sip of her mead. "I thought it was beautiful. That your species named the smell of rain after the blood of gods."

Charlie stared at her. Reyna had gone back to her quarters after that night, pulled up the word, researched its etymology, and kept it with her. She'd been thinking about Charlie's words between conversations.

Charlie noticed. And something about it, the care, the quiet effort of someone going and looking up a word just because Charlie had said it once, made her go still for a moment as she realized someone had been paying attention to her when they didn't have to be.

She kept talking about thunderstorms.

"The air changes taste?" Reyna asked with genuine interest.

"I mean, maybe not taste, exactly. It's more like... the air around the storm gets thick. Really thick. Charged, even, because you can feel the electricity of the lightning around you. You can completely feel the storm before you see it."

"We have something similar," Reyna said. "Before a solar flare reaches a planet's magnetosphere, the ambient field shifts. Most species can't detect it, but Kaelari can feel it through their markings." She paused. "It's the feeling of something there before it arrives."

Their eyes met, but Charlie was the one to look away first.

"Is it difficult?" Reyna asked. "Being here? On a ship where I imagine nothing is familiar."

"Difficult," Charlie repeated, testing it. Then, with a soft smile, because it was the truest answer she had: "Two kinds of difficult. There's the kind that breaks you and the kind that changes you."

Reyna was quiet for a moment. "Which kind is this?"

"I'll let you know when I figure it out." Charlie smiled. "Give me about three and a half months."