Page 233 of Every Almost

She was soaked to the knee already, and she wasn’t in uniform. Dark tights, a tank, the soft off-duty clothes of someone who’d been in for the night. Charlie had never seen her in anything that wasn’t the captain, and for half a second the sight of her stalled Charlie out completely. Then Reyna’s eyes movedover the bay, fast, taking the whole disaster in at a glance, and Charlie watched the captain slide into place.

“Charlie needs a second,” Tavi said. “Someone needs to man the console in the shaft while Charlie handles the manifold.”

“Tell me where to stand,” Reyna said, not even a pause in consideration.

Charlie did not waste a breath being surprised. When Reyna Solas offered, Charlie’s whole body just said yes. There was no hesitation, no deference.

"Just as Tavi said. You run the console in the shaft while I run the manifold. When I call the sequence, you execute at the exact second I call it. If it's even a second too late, we flood a deck for nothing." She was already moving. "You good with that?"

"Yes."

"Then come on, Captain." Reyna nodded, following Charlie as she turned to the team.

"Tav, you good?"

"On it, Spark Plug," Tavi said as he moved out of the bay.

"Maren?"

"Ready and set, Charlie."

Charlie waded toward the shaft, turning to Reyna. "Stay with me."

The shaft was worseup close.

The overhead component had completely split along a seam, the coolant coming down through the void in a steady column. So the moment Charlie started up the ladder, she was climbing straight into it. Cold and glowing, it plastered her hair flat as her tank went dark and stuck to her. Her cargo pants soaked through and hung off her, heavy, dragging.

None of it reached her. Up here there was the manifold, the rhythm, and the next coupling. Her hands already knew what they doing.

And under all of it, steady, thirty inches down, was Reyna's voice. Calling the console back to her; keeping the rhythm. There, the whole time, and Charlie never once had to check that she would be.

"Console's live," Reyna said. "I have the tertiary array. Walk me through it."

And then they were working, fast, the two of them together. Charlie had worked with good people before. Even on the Emberkind, she'd worked with Maren, who was brilliant, and Tavi, who knew systems better than anyone, and a dozen sharp techs across a dozen jobs. Yet she had never in her life worked with anyone like this.

She called for the number-four line and Reyna had it open before Charlie finished the sentence. She reached down without looking for the spanner, and suddenly it was in her hand, Reyna's fingers already withdrawing. Charlie called pressure readings from the manifold, and Reyna fed them back adjusted for the console's half-second lag, correcting for the gap between them without being asked. They were not two people doing a job in the same room. They were one process running on two bodies, and somewhere under the fear and the alarms, Charlie felt how terrifyingly right it was, a hum in the water between them impossible to ignore.

"Tertiary four through nine," Charlie called, seating the last coupling by feel while the coolant continued to rush over her. "All of them at once. On my mark."

"Ready," Reyna called from below.

"Mark!"

Charlie watched as Reyna's hands moved across the panel and every remaining line in the system opened at the sameinstant. The sound was enormous, a roar of fluid finding every channel. The lower deck flooded exactly the way Maren had promised: ankle-deep, becoming knee-deep, becoming waist-deep.

Tavi arrived at the height of it and threw himself onto a tertiary console from a tool crate, calling readings while standing on the crate to keep his head above the rising line.

Charlie watched the pressure on Reyna's console spike, but then it plateaued.

And then, evenly, beautifully, all pressure readings began to drop.

"It's falling," Reyna said, and her voice wasn't quite steady, rough at the edges with a relief Charlie had never heard before.

The team counted ninety-two seconds before the manifold equalized. The cascade stopped and the alarms cut out, one by one, until the only sound in the bay was the drip of coolant off the overhead lines.

"Holding," Maren said with a steadying breath. "Secondary systems stabilizing."

"Confirmed," Tavi called from his crate, drenched to the chest and grinning like a man who'd never been happier to be standing on top of a box. "Pressure nominal across all junctions."