Page 255 of Every Almost

THE LAST ALMOST

Reyna ran.

She came out of the library and sheran, boots hammering the deck plating, one hand catching the corner at the junction to keep herself from overshooting it, and the message sat behind her eyes the whole way.

Wherever you are right now, please leave and initiate a vid call with me. We need to talk. Immediately. About the human woman.

Vondra had never once saidpleaseto her.

"Captain?" Reyna went past a startled ensign at the junction but didn't slow down.

Eight days that appointment had been sitting on a Coalition desk, and Reyna had spent those eight days checking the file three times a shift, waiting for it to change.

The human woman.

Reyna pulled on her office door, and she was through it before it finished closing.

She dropped into her chair. Her hair had come loose somewhere in the corridor, but she shoved it back off her face with both hands. She couldn't care less what she looked like right now.

She was shaking.

Ten minutes ago, Charlie Wickett had stood in the middle of a library and sung to her. Reyna had not come down from it yet. In fact, she could still hear the last three lines, the ones Charlie had sung right at her, in a room full of everyone they knew.

Later,Reyna told herself.I can have all of it later. In no time at all, I am going to walk back into that room and I am going to?—

She didn't finish the sentence. She couldn't let herself. Not yet.

Instead, Reyna smoothed her collar and straightened her rank pin. She put her hands flat on the desk where they wouldn't betray her. She opened the channel to Admiral Vondra's office and waited for it to connect.

It's going to be fine.

The wall display came up,and the room got darker.

It always did with Vondra's calls because the Admiral's chamber drank light. Reyna looked at dark water, faint and green at the edges where the station systems glowed. And there, in the center of the frame, sat the Admiral, stone-still. The great slabbed shape, barely distinguishable from the pressure around her, her geode eyes catching what little light there was.

"Captain Solas."

The vibration came through the deck before it came through the speakers. It always did.

"Admiral." Reyna said, addressing her superior. "I got your message. Is this about the appointment? Because if the committee needs anything else from me, I can have the full field record to you within the?—"

"Reyna."

She stopped.

The resonance of Vondra's voice came through slowly. There was a drag, a place where the vibration thinned out before it finished. It was as though the Voxlink stripped that out and handed Reyna her own name, hollowed out.

But Reyna could hear the water surrounding her Admiral. She had heard it this way only once before, in this same office, in this same chair, when the Admiral told her that the search for Elena Voss was over and the Emberkind had a new captain.

"I need you to listen to me," Vondra said.

Reyna's hands started to shake even more, for a completely different reason than Charlie's song.

"The Coalition has reviewed the engineering appointment request for your provisional crew member." The water moved, barely. "The appointment has been denied."

Reyna didn't move.

"Denied," she said.