Page 196 of Every Almost

The log accepted it without complaint. But it would, wouldn't it? That was the worst part about data collection. It had no value, no tolerance range, no diagnostic category unless the individualbehind the information provided it. The datapad itself didn't care. It formatted the sentence anyway.

Charlie selected the whole file and, for a moment, all of it turned blue. PERS radiation. Cellular turnover. Katie's age. Return status.

The sentence at the end.

She deleted the whole thing, and the page went blank.

And for exactly three seconds, she felt better.

But then her mind crashed with all the same information again. Katie at fifty, seventy, ninety. Charlie at thirty-eight, forty-five, fifty-one. Non-contact. Evidence. No return.

There is no both.

She closed the datapad, pushed it further away from her on the desk, got up from her chair, and crossed the room. She made it to her bed and lay down. The Emberkind hummed through the wall. That hum had meant safety for three months. The engines, the distance, the purpose she would serve on the Emberkind for six months, and then home. Tonight it was only sound.

Charlie turned over and faced the wall. The first tear slid toward the bridge of her nose and disappeared into the pillow. The bracelet pressed against her palm where she'd curled her hand around it, the knots Helen had tied still holding.

Charlie attempted to count backward from a hundred. She made it to ninety, where it suddenly stopped being part of the countdown and became Katie at ninety, her hair gone white, and her hands thin. Charlie imagined standing in front of her with a face that still belonged to fifty-one.

Hours later, sleep found her.

She was back at JPL.She knew it immediately by the dull polish of the floor, the scuffed surfaces near the lab doors, and the fluorescent hum that lived in the building's bones. Her workstation was at the far end, but the lamp was angled wrong, and the tray of fragments remained under that odd-angled light. Then she saw the phone receiver, swinging from its cord.

But the room was too long, and the distance between the door and the workbench stretched farther than it should, until the lab suddenly turned into a corridor, then a hallway, and then something that seemed like the Emberkind trying to imitate Pasadena, badly.

But the phone kept swinging, just at the end of her station. Charlie walked toward it, but every step she took seemed to take it further from her reach. She started running toward it, her boots landing just a second late each time before it moved further away. The lights began to flicker in the room, turning the scene into a collection of still photographs.

"Charlie?"

Katie's voice, from somewhere far ahead.

"Kit!?" Charlie called out, running toward the sound.

And then Charlie saw her.

Katie stood near the workbench with the phone in her hand, the one that had been swinging at Charlie's station. For one small second, she was twenty-three, just as Charlie had last seen her, her brown hair curling around her face while wearing the sweater Charlie had teased her about at Christmas years ago. Then Katie blinked, and suddenly she was thirty. The sweater was gone, and she could see fine lines at the corners of Katie's eyes.

"Kit, wait," Charlie whispered into the air in front of her.

Katie turned toward the sound but not toward Charlie. At least, not exactly. The room wouldn't stop stretching.

Katie blinked again. Forty.

Then suddenly, Katie was fifty, the phone in her hand held now like an object she'd found, but couldn't quite remember needing.

"Kit!" Charlie screamed.

Katie looked up, and relief slammed through Charlie so hard she nearly stumbled. Until she watched Katie's eyes move over her face with polite confusion. As though Charlie were a stranger who'd called Katie by name in public.

Charlie abruptly stopped running, but the scene shifted again, the floor moving. The workbench suddenly became the kitchen table in Shelbyville, then Borran's counter, then the hallway outside the Beckman house. Katie stood at the center of all of it, and every time the scene changed, she blinked a decade older.

Sixty.

Seventy.

Katie's hands were thin now, holding the same phone with both her hands clasped around it, her hair nearly white.

Charlie looked down at herself. Her hands were the same. Everything about her was exactly how it was today, and everything about her - from the scar from Frank's toolbox, to the soldering burn, to the bracelet with its blues and greens and golds and reds - it was still the same body, the same impossible face of a woman in her eighties that looked like she was forty.