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•Leaf and Stem (pick-your-own-salad hydro cafe—maybe too much like work?)

Signy looked into a set of big brown eyes paired with a big sheepish grin. She had never felt so head-over-heels in her life. “Why?” she asked.

“Because I’m trying to impress you!” Cora said. “Because you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met, and all I do and all I talk about is pilot shit, and I don’t want you to get bored with me. And also because . . .” She threw her hands in the air with good humor. “You make me feel like I’m gonna explode, and I want to buy you fancy cake about it! Jeez!”

Signy did not care that they were standing in the middle of a ferry station bathroom. She did what Cora had done to her in the crowd: hooked her index fingers into her belt loops, pulled her close, and kissed her hard. “Would you like to get some takeout and go back to my place?”

“Fuck yes,” Cora said. “Please. Get me away from all these high-interest-rate dweebs.” She glanced at her phone. “We should wait, like . . . fifteen more minutes, though.”

“Why?”

“Well, y’know.” Cora cocked her head toward the door, and to the crowd outside of it. “We gotta sell it.”

A laugh burst from Signy, abrupt and messy. “Oh my god.”

“Do you not think so?” Cora said.

“No, you’re right,” Signy said. “God.” She glanced around the tiled cubicle. “Just so long as you don’t actually . . . want to, here.”

“Oh, no,” Cora said, laughing as well. “No, this is . . . gross.”

“It’s gross,” Signy agreed. “It would be gross.”

“I mean, sure, it’s clean and all, ish—”

“Yes, but . . . on principle.”

“On principle, yeah, it’s gross. I mean, I hear you, we don’t have to go anywhere special, but that doesn’t mean we have to get tragic about it.”

Still chuckling, Signy pulled Cora into her arms. She rested her cheek on her shoulder and tried to shed the last of the worry that had sent them through this door. “Thank you,” she said.

“For what?” Cora said, holding on.

“For hiding with me” was how Signy replied, but it didn’t encompass all that she felt. For being someone who will hide with me, she thought. For being someone who wants to.

Chapter 786 Cora, Lodestone

Sometimes, when Cora was lounging around or if she couldn’t sleep, she’d get her tablet and learn about something she’d never seen before. One time, she’d learned about fireworks. Another time, she’d learned about waterfalls. Another time, she’d learned about roller coasters, and that had been a mistake, because those sounded super fun, and she couldn’t stop reading about them, and it hadn’t helped her get back to sleep at all.

This other time, though, she’d learned about what kinds of animals humans were descended from. Mammals and primates were concepts she’d learned in school, because everybody learned that, but she’d never had cause to walk through the family tree step by step. She found out that if you went back past apes and monkeys, and then back further, then back even further still, you eventually wound up with these tiny skittery guys—tiny, tiny skittery guys that burrowed underground and didn’t come out until after dark, when all the big scary guys had gone to sleep.

Cora thought of the tiny skittery guys sometimes, when she considered the places people lived in the Ring. Some folks lived in moonlets, like she did. A single rock carved out for a family or two. The majority of their community, however, lived on Lodestone, the biggest little moon on the block. And just like their genetic ancestors, the people there had burrowed deep. Way deep. Lodestone didn’t have an atmosphere, and its flimsy magnetic field wasn’t enough to shield people from radiation. The only thing to do was dig down.

The elevator ride from the shuttleport to Lodestone City—population one hundred and fifty three, as of last Thursday’s new baby—took ten minutes. Signy hated the sound of Lodestone’s elevator, and as per usual, she had her earplugs in and was resting against Cora’s shoulder. Cora leaned her cheek against her wife’s head, never minding an opportunity to do nothing more than sit close.

She shifted her weight against the metal bench, absentmindedly studying the repurposed bulkhead plate worn smooth by dozens of butts. Like so many things on Lodestone, this bench had been part of a spaceship, once. In some ways, Cora was also repurposed space junk, and on occasion, she made that joke aloud to people. Other times, she didn’t. Her feelings on that topic depended on the day.

The sides of the elevator were covered in metal grates, partially open to the shaft outside. An emergency ladder was bolted out there, with climbable platforms in between. Lights flashed by in steady intervals; some of them needed new bulbs. Mostly, though, the view was just of rock. Seeing rock up close had fascinated Cora the first time around, and a little bit of that wonder still lingered. She’d been born and raised on the water, after all, and she’d spent the first chunk of adulthood in the sky. It was probably weird, she thought, that her first introduction to the ground was to go into it.

She didn’t know if the tiny skittery guys in her ancestry nodded at one another the way humans did, but she imagined that if they could see the rock, they would give her a nod of approval. Maybe when stuff got tough, underground had always been the best place for mammals to go.

Cora felt Signy cuddle closer, but otherwise she didn’t budge. Cora kissed the top of Signy’s head, and in comfortable silence, they rode the elevator down into the middle of the moon.

Chapter 34 Cora, Fortune

Cora had brought a toothbrush to Signy’s apartment, and on the shelf above the hot plate, chicory packets now sat next to the tea. This particular morning, the sort-of-kind-of kitchen was also supplied with a bag of mandarins, which Cora had brought along the night before. She understood why Signy didn’t have a kitchen garden, and she understood that the apartment was more of Signy’s crash space than her actual home, but even so, she thought they could both do with a better start to their day than porridge powder alone.

The two of them sat facing each other in the middle of Signy’s bed, naked and cross-legged. A pair of mugs containing their respective beverages stood in the window sill. A growing pile of mandarin rinds lay in one of the now-empty bowls of porridge (Vanilla Sunrise, of course). Cora ripped the rinds away in quick and careless chunks, like she always had, but Signy, she’d discovered, liked to peel her citrus in one long, unbroken strip that formed a hollow sphere when set back down. Cora was captivated by this habit, though she couldn’t say why. It didn’t mean anything. It was just a way to peel a mandarin. But the sight of it sparked a glow inside of her, the same glow that fired up when she watched Signy wash her face or ball her socks or stir sorghum into her tea. Tiny details, little nothings, but with each one, she burned a little brighter.