Page 88 of Every Almost

"Okay."

"Okay, then," Helen replied. "Get Katie back on the phone. Let's tell her the good news."

Charlie smiled and beckoned Katie back to the phone, where she and Helen told her the plan. At first, Katie reacted the same way Charlie had, but when Helen told her the same reasons for the decision, Katie nodded with understanding, then broke into tears as she couldn't contain her excitement and gratitude.

The moment passed, and their phone call ended. Charlie debated telling Katie about the tests Helen was set to complete the next day, but decided to keep it to herself, at least for now. So, instead, she let the thought settle behind the things that needed her attention right now. She got up and stood by the window for a while, watching the California sky shift from blue to something darker, and she pressed her hand against the glass as though she could feel the distance between Pasadena and Shelbyville underneath her fingertips.

Helen's testscame back normal, and the Cub sold within a month. A pilot from Greencastle bought it, a man who came to the hangar and looked at the plane the way Frank used to look at it.

Charlie had flown back for the sale and was there when the man inspected the aircraft. She watched him run his hand along the fuselage, along that brilliant Lock Haven Yellow, asking all the questions she knew Frank would deem acceptable. Frank would have approved.

The money would cover all four years. Tuition, books, and enough left for Katie to eventually get a small car in good working condition halfway into her first year, especially with a fantastic resident mechanic as her roommate, to get her to and from school. Katie started at UCLA in the spring and walked into her first anthropology lecture with the same look on her face that Charlie had worn walking into Caltech, that look of a person who had finally arrived at the place they were meant to be.

Charlie stood in the parking lot after dropping Katie off on her first day. She leaned against the Plymouth and watched her sister disappear through the doors. Katie didn't look back because Charlie had reminded her when she left the car that she was taking her first step forward into her new life, and she should always look where she's headed. So Katie walked forward, and that was the direction the Cub had pointed her.

Charlie reached into her pocket and touched Frank's pin. The metal was warm from her body, the way it had been warm since the night he pressed it into her palm in the garage.

Lock Haven Yellow. The color of possibility to Charlie when she first saw it at twelve years old. It was the color of the sky opening, of Frank's hands on the cowling, of Katie on an overturned crate, and of the Continental A-65 that taught Charlie she already knew the language of flight.

And now, it was the color of what Frank Beckman left behind. Not a plane in a hangar, but a girl in a lecture hall, studying how people hold together when everything falls apart, funded by a man who never stopped believing that his girls could fly.

EIGHT

ASCENSION

EARTH YEAR 1980 / COALITION CYCLE 490

? EMBERKIND CV-0417, SECTOR CASSIA?

Jere left three months ago.Elena disappeared over a year ago. Vessi had been in her new post for some time now. And Reyna was doing everything to not let the fact that she'd lost the three people she loved most in the span of a season caused the Emberkind to suffer under her captaincy. But one thing she needed to fix immediately, was pulling the ship out from operating at reduced capacity.

Or, in other words, on a skeleton crew.

The ship's corridors had become quieter than they had been since Elena first took command, and the Habitat Wing had gone from Jere's personal symphony of birdsong and chatter to the low hum of automated feeders and environmental regulators doing a competent, but soulless, impression of care.

Reyna ran the ship and did it well. Despite the reduced staff, it operated, fulfilled its mission, and took care of its crew, allwith Reyna behind the helm. If she were honest, she'd admit that the requirements of captaincy helped steer her mind away from her thoughts and emotions. Right now, that was what she needed. Desperately.

Tavi Breck was still here.

Elena's last hire, the Tessarae software engineer who had been aboard for barely a year before everything fell apart, had stayed on board the Emberkind. When asked his choice, he'd made it clear there was only one option.

"I'm here, Cap," he'd said to Reyna the day she was taking stock of crew members that wanted to request transfers. "I'm not going anywhere." Then he'd smiled warmly at her, given her a salute, and made his way back to Engineering before Reyna could even respond.

Reyna figured he was too new to have known Elena well and too junior to have met Jere during his time on the ship. Those must have been the reasons for him to elect to stay, because Reyna was in the midst of dealing with so many requests from newer crew members that she was utterly surprised when he made no motion to leave.

Many years later, Tavi would tell her that he stayed because the ship's systems still required maintenance, and he wasn't modest to admit that he could maintain them with a competence that almost surpassed even his own personality. But, mostly, he stayed because the Emberkind was his reef now, and Tessarae did not abandon their reefs.

Reyna didn't know him well enough yet to trust him completely. But she noted that the Engineering Bay felt different when he was in it. Warmer and livelier, and a bit different with his presence around. If anything, Reyna could recognize what he was bringing to the department during the ship's time of grief.

Certain senior members of the Emberkind crew took notice of their new captain's change in emotion. Orion Calev, theVeladris who managed, collected, and organized data and knowledge as the Emberkind's librarian, was the first person to pull the captain aside, sit with her, and try to help.

The Veladris were quiet by nature and deliberate by culture. They were a people who believed that the highest calling wasn't leadership or combat or discovery, but tending. Not to anything specific. To anything. People, creatures, plants, machines, technology, or libraries They called the role aTender, someone who listened, observed, and carried the stories of the people around them. Veladris biology didn't compel him to. He wanted to, and the Veladris had decided, as a civilization, that the someone should be trained for it in a formal capacity.

Orion had trained for it his entire life. As Elena's last hire before her disappearance, he was brought aboard to manage the ship's growing library and data archive. But he was also an observer by nature as a Veladris, an unsanctioned function he would bring to the Emberkind. But he handled everything with grace, small and meticulous with how he carried out his tasks, and catalogued not just the data contained within the Emberkind and its research on the animals it rescued, but also its people. His memory of Elena and Jere stayed because he refused to let them go. Every story he wrote down and every voice recorded in his notes was every detail preserved through a deliberate act of choosing to contain their memory, even in the records of a Coalition spaceship.

As Captain, Reyna immediately admired him for the positive work he completed while the ship had gone through some radical changes during the beginning of his tenure, especially as he never mentioned the dynamic shift the Emberkind underwent since his arrival. And when it came to Reyna herself, Orion didn't offer comfort or solutions or even an entirely well-meaning, but overwhelming, instinct to make her feel better (something that usually made Reyna want to leave rooms whenother people attempted just this). But one night, when Reyna was researching the species they were collecting the next day in their forthcoming mission, he did appear in the library and settle himself at his desk with his cataloguing work, and stayed. He didn't converse with her, or even approach her. He was nearby and smiled at her when she looked up at him. The sound of his stylus on his datapad was the only noise filling the room with a certain kind of quiet, but one that still felt comfortably occupied.

This made it so Reyna wasn't alone in those moments. His quiet presence, without expectation or confrontation, made Reyna feel at ease. Acknowledged in the quietest way possible, just to show she didn't have tostayalone.