Page 228 of Every Almost

Then there was the rescue, an event that had riled her up. She had been on the channel Torvax opened, listening when Cael called Charlie a human. He had said it with such disdain, reaching past her name and her rank and everything she had done for the Emberkind for the one word that would put her back in her place.

Reyna had heard it land, taking a moment to sit in her chair on the bridge with her hands clasped on the console. It was in that moment that she first ever understood, with a clarity that had nothing tactical in it whatsoever, what it felt like to want to cross the length of a shuttle, take Cael Rask by the throat, and hold him against the bulkhead until he'd learned to keep her engineer's name out of his mouth.

The want of that exact action had frightened her. She'd spent years not feeling anything at that volume, and this one had arrived before she'd had time to decide whether to allow it. That wasn't how she operated.

Reyna thought about how it was just a crew member had been poignantly insulted and, as a captain, she would never let something so heinous survive. She had felt it because it was beneath her ship and her command. She would have felt the need to protect any of her crew.

She sighed heavily as she almost got the thought to hold. But then it came apart in her hands anyway because, the real truth was, she had been insulted-on-behalf-of every member of this crew at one time or another, and none of those had ever once made her want to take a man apart with her hands. Especially a high-ranking officer on her own ship.

Reyna made herself stop there.

But it was Tavi who had said it first. Three feet ten inches of him, pushing in front of Charlie, telling the Chief Engineer to his face that he was done pretending the bit was even remotely funny. Tavi could do that because it was clean. He named something wrong, out loud, about his colleague. No matter who said it, he stood up for someone that mattered to him.

Reyna had kept her mouth shut and let him.

She waited until she trusted her own voice before opening the comms channel and saying her own bit, before calling him out during his apology.That is very evident, Rask.She'd used his surname, not his title, and delivered at the temperature of deep space. It was the coldest thing she'd ever said to a leading officer on her ship, but it ran nowhere near as hot as what was truly underneath.

And then, when Reyna had excused Cael and given Charlie the go-ahead, the net let go, and the gliders came up out of the canopy alive. It was then that Reyna opened the channel again for no operational reason at all.

She had opened it to tell Charlie she was glad she hadn't put herself in front of a net full of flying squirrels, and she had said it on an open channel, in front of the whole ground team. She heard herself do it; she couldn't deny it. Ten seconds after she had throttled every degree of heat out of her voice for Cael, it had walked straight back into her voice, but this time for Charlie. And this time it was warm, teasing, and true. It happened before she had a say. She had not caught it in time. That was what she couldn't stop thinking about. For Cael, she had spent everything she had to contain her anger, any warmth in her voice stolen by her rage. But for Charlie, it had appeared and gotten past her before she'd even known it was present.

Then there was the debrief. The one she hadn't been told of, that Cael commandeered himself, and probably would have gotten away with had it not been for Torvax retrieving Reyna.

She had come into her own office to find Cael handing the work of the rescue to a Fleet Admiral as though it had been born in his own department. The rage returned as she watched the whole setup play out in front of her, all in the time it took to cross the room. She understood that the best course of action was to let Cael continue doing what would eventually cost him. She should let him finish digging and then quietly remove the shovel.

But in a single instant, underneath the tactics, Reyna understood that she had not stopped to count the cost of dismantling Cael in front of Vondra and how it was going to reflect on her command. That was not like her. That was a variable she would ordinarily have run through before she even made a decision.

But she didn't.

There had been exactly only one priority in that office, and it was that she was not going to let Charlie stand there and watch a man carry off the one thing that was indisputably hers. Not while Reyna was in the room, not while Reyna still had air in her lungs and a rank to use with a Fleet Admiral already on the wall.

But then there was the gold.

Reyna had been trained and instructed her whole life on how to maintain her Kaelari markings, just like every other Kaelari in the universe. It was standard and was second nature to most Kaelari by the time they were in their teens. And Reyna herself had held gold through far worse than any event today. She held it through funerals and inquests, through the long year the bridge went quiet. In fact, she had held it especially then, practically in the way she breathed and without noticing she was doing it. In those years, there had been nothing underneath it that needed holding down.

But during that call, she had held it and felt the holding. She could feel the actual muscles working to keep her own color steady, the way they worked to lift something too heavy.

Reyna Solas had not had to put effort into this in longer than she cared to admit. And now that she could feel it, she couldn't tell how much of it was still holding on its own.

And then the office had emptied, and it was just she and Charlie when she made a mistake.

In hindsight, it wasn't a big mistake. She had just looked over at Charlie for perhaps a half-second longer than she should have, and she knew an expression appeared on her face that she had spent months keeping hidden. She had felt it happen and could not draw it back before it showed.

But time seemed to slow as she watched Charlie's face while it happened. Charlie went still, and Reyna had known, with a flat certainty, that Charlie had caught it.

And yet, Charlie catching it was not even the worst part.

The worst was the slip told Reyna that her... predicament... had gotten far enough out of her hands to be appearing in front of the very person it concerned.

Reyna had built an entire life on the principle that nothing showed without her first granting it leave. And it was crumbling at her feet.

She intended to go straight to her quarters after that.

Instead, she had ended up outside the library, without permission. She'd gravitated there. It had been her every intention tonotattend Earth Night this time around. There was too much that needing recalibration in Reyna's mind.

But she didn't move. Instead, she stood there, listening to the music through the door. Charlie's voice was under it, giving what sounded like instructions, and laughing. Reyna put her hand on the panel, listening to Charlie laugh, but did not open the door.

She turned and left.