Page 65 of Every Almost

Vessi noticed Reyna's color shift, but she never commented. Reyna imagined that was because she, herself, noticed a shift in Vessi's color markings as well as they spent more time together.

Right now, they stood together in Enclosure Seven, watching a pair of reef crawlers navigate the artificial tidal pool Jere had designed and perfected over the years. The plants cast light that shifted across the walls, highlighting Vessi's amber geometric markings, holding each pattern like stained glass in a window. Reyna looked over at her in the dancing light, surrounded by the mission and vision that was brought to life and made possible by her, Elena, and Jere. And the thought that ran through her mind then and there was one she'd never allowed herself until this very moment.

This is what it feels like when nothing is missing.

She let herself have it. The feeling of nothing missing, the way it fit her life like a glove, and the presence alongside the woman beside her who changed the color of her markings.

For a while, she let herself have all of it.

Elena calledReyna to her office on a completely normal day. Not unusual, as Elena called Reyna to her office often,because Elena Voss preferred to run the Emberkind through conversation, and Reyna just happened to be the person she conversed with most, and for good reason. They could argue about supply routes or crew rotations, or even whether Jere's latest habitat expansion proposal was ambitious or insane, which, most of the time, it was both. These arguments had become just a routine part of Reyna's professional life, steady and reliable and, occasionally, loud.

But today, Elena was standing behind her desk instead of sitting in her chair.

That was different.

"Close the door behind you please, Officer Solas," Elena said.

Okay, now she was getting a little freaked out.Officer Solas? What had she done wrong? Was she getting fired?!

Instead of voicing any of these concerns, Reyna held gold and closed Elena's door behind her.

Elena reached into the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a small object, holding it in the palm of her hand. She looked at it, as if studying it while her violet markings pulsed slower than her usual steady beat.

Reyna angled herself to see that it was a pen. But it wasn’t standard issue. It was slender, dark-cased, and bore a faint iridescent sheen that caught the office's lighting, throwing tiny prismatic fragments across Elena's fingers.

Reyna immediately recognized it. She'd seen Elena use it dozens of times, probably more than that actually. She had watched Elena trace routes across star charts with it and sketch the original habitat layouts during the refit with its tip pressed against datapads and napkins and once, memorably, the back of Jere's hand.

It was a star map pen.Elena'sstar map pen. A rare item to begin with that could store data pertaining to travels made, places visited, destinations planned, and trips cherished. Thiswas the very one Elena had used to chart every rescue route the Emberkind had ever flown. At least, until now.

"Officer Reyna Solas, this is your formal notification that I am promoting you to First Mate on the CMS Emberkind starship vessel," Elena said. "It is effective immediately. And yes, all Coalition paperwork has already been filed."

Reyna stared at her. The words hit her ears but her brain was having trouble processing. It was as if her brain went into slo-mo, and she wasn't able to get it back up to speed.

Finally, her voice reactivated. "You... you filed paperwork before even telling me?"

"Correction. I filed the paperwork before you couldarguewith me over it."

"I wasn't going to argue."

"You're already arguing about not arguing," Elena stated, raising one eyebrow. Reyna rolled her eyes, making Elena chuckle softly before continuing. "As much as you may not like hearing it, you argue with me about everything, even something as simple as supply requisitions. Hell, you argued with me last week about the temperature in the corridor outside the galley! You once even argued with me about whether a particular shade of alert lighting was amber or gold for over ten minutes." Elena stared right at her. "You were absolutely going to argue."

"It was gold. And I would not have argued about a promotion."

"You would have said you weren't ready."

Reyna closed her mouth, because she had, in fact, been about to say exactly that. But that wasn't an argument, it was just a statement of fact. Or, at worse, opinion.

Elena stepped around the desk, coming to stand in front of Reyna, and held out the pen.

"Every crew member on a PERS-equipped vessel carries a trinket," Elena said. "A personal object, registered to yourindividual retrieval signature, so that if and when a PERS has to activate, whether by choice or by emergency, the system will lock onto your trinket's signature and use it as the anchor point for transport. Without a trinket, the PERS can't find you. It's what brings you home. Sometimes, it's the only way to get you home."

Reyna looked into Elena's eyes, nodding her head in understanding.

"I know you know this, but it's important to remember how significant the trinket is to the whole system. How you must carry it with you. How it keeps you between safety and danger. And how it has to be deeply personal to connect to you."

Reyna did know the system. She calibrated every PERS beacon on the ship during the refit and conducted all the checks when new members came aboard. She understood how each crew member's molecular signature was encoded into the ship's retrieval array, meaning that losing the trinket means losing the tether. The PERS couldn't pull you back to a ship you weren't connected to.

Most crew members chose something practical but still personal. A ring, a badge, a small tool they carried that may have belonged to a parent or been their first piece of equipment at the academy.