Page 216 of Every Almost

Reyna took a staggering breath. And then another.

Care for Charlie.Reyna sat with that, the fear rising in her throat.

What if she’s ripped away from me like everyone else?

So, she held the gold. She wouldn't admit that holding it took everything she had, nor would she ask herself why she was holding, alone in her quarters, with no one around.

She turned her head to the side, noting that it was 0300. She closed her eyes as she knew, somewhere above her, three decks up, there was a bench and a viewport and a room she had gone to for thirteen years.

But tonight it was dark and empty because she had made certain of it. She had told Charlie earlier not to expect her and watched her take it easily. Privately, she had been fiercely and quietly glad that she had spared Charlie the sight of an empty bench with no explanation.

But she hadn’t spared herself anything. Instead, she lay in the dark three decks below the room she wanted to be in, holding gold for no one. And though she would never say it aloud, she suspected she was not the only one lying awake tonight.

And then the song started again.

TWENTY-SEVEN

THE ONE VARIABLE

Charlie stayedin the library after Reyna left. She wound the cord back around her hand and fit the mixtapes into the bag one at a time. By the time the bag was closed, she still hadn't worked out what had happened to her.

She ran it backward, looking for where she had slipped up, trying to locate the cause. Except there wasn't a slip up this time. She just couldn't find it, no matter how hard she tried. Every single piece of tonight was something she had done a hundred times before with a hundred other people. Yet not one of them had ever ended with her standing alone in a dark library with her heart beating so fast it felt as though she'd run there.

Back in her quarters, she found her datapad was already in her hand. Her thumb was on the music library before she even looked at it.

She scrolled, looking for one that would match, just as she always did.

Too many variables. That was the problem. The wire, the ear, the wall, the whole evening.

Too many fucking variables.

"Fine," Charlie said to herself, deciding to hold onto just one.

To be honest, I was surprised when it was over.

Charlie had put "Heroes" in front of people her whole life and knew every version of the look they could give. There was a look people got, a patient one that was them really just waiting for the song to end. She knew every version of that look.

But not Reyna.

Reyna had come up out of it like somebody surfacing, like it had stopped early.

And then Reyna looked at her the same way she had when Charlie told her about the wall, when Charlie heard her own voice go somewhere she hadn't planned. She had stopped talking, hadn't finished the thought. And Reyna had gone on looking at her anyway, waiting, as though the rest of Charlie's words were already sitting there in the room between them.

And Charlie hadn't minded.

When she woke the datapad, it didn't take long. She knew what she was looking for, where the song was before she even started.

"In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel. She'd loved it since she was twenty-five.

She added it to her library with all the others and set the datapad face-down.

It fit the evening. That was all.

Her fingers curled against her pillow, still holding the warmth of somebody's skin, hours after there was no good reason for it to still be there.

She flexed them. Nothing changed.

An anomalous reading you couldn't reproduce wasn't data. You simply logged it and moved on. So Charlie did just that.