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Can I have another whiskey smash?” Cora asked, leaning onto the slightly sticky bar.

The bartender nodded. “Your tab?”

Cora started to nod back, but someone swooped in from her left. “Nope, this one’s on me.”

“Aw, hey, Smokes!” Cora said, giving them a warm hug. She had reached the point in the evening in which she hugged everyone. “Thanks for coming.”

“Of course!” Smokey said, clapping her on the back. “Happy birthday.”

The bartender interjected as he began to toss lemon and mint into a shaker. “And what can I get you?”

As Smokey ordered themself a beer, Cora glanced across the somewhat crowded floor of the Brick, trying to keep an eye on two people seated at a table by the wall with the framed moon maps. A high-stakes situation had developed in her absence, and if the circumstances had been different, she would’ve stationed herself there the entire night. But, as other people kept reminding her, this was her day. Most of the bar was filled with Flytown folks who were there to get drunk in her honor, and that meant she had to mingle. Not that it was a hardship or anything, and especially not with a pal like Smokey, but . . . still. She was starting to fret.

“Thirty-two, huh?” Smokey said. “Good job.”

“Thanks,” Cora said. “Let’s hope my luck holds.”

“Truer words,” replied Smokey, who would turn thirty-four that fall, fingers crossed.

A few of the bodies on the floor shifted, giving Cora a clear view of the table across the way. Twig was still talking; Signy was still listening. Cora had no idea what the topic was, but it really, really needed to be going well. Signy and Twig had met once before, over dinner, and it had been . . . fine. Decent. Could’ve been worse. They were very different personalities, Cora kept telling herself, and Twig was still kind of a kid, and besides, everybody was awkward with each other the first time they met. They just had to figure out a rapport, and it looked like they were doing that, so—okay! Good! Great! They were adults, and she could leave them to it. She didn’t need to hover. Yes. This was fine. This would totally be fine.

“So a little bird told me,” Smokey said, after they clinked glasses, “that you did Little Quarry and back in six days.”

Cora swallowed a sip that went down a little too easy. “I guess so,” she said.

“How the fuck,” Smokey asked, speaking the question as a statement.

Cora shrugged as she reached for her practiced answer through her whiskey brain. “Got lucky,” she said. “There was a big-ass ejection about halfway through the run”—that much was true—“and once it hit us, Colibri just . . . caught it perfectly.” That part was not true. The real answer was that Cora and Colibri had been keeping an eye out for the right space weather conditions—a coronal mass ejection, for example—to use as a cover for allowing Colibri to cut loose with the parts of her anatomy humans didn’t understand; the parts that could make her accelerate way past the quarry run speed limit. A pilot was not supposed to allow their rorqual to do this. This was one of the reasons why rorquals had pilots at all. There was fuck all you could do to chase down a rorqual that decided to bolt, and as pilots were constantly reminded, rorquals were expensive to rear and expensive to care for. But this pilot trusted her rorqual, and the rorqual in question wanted to explore what her body could do without human-imposed rules.

And what she’d done . . . was fly. Colibri flew at a speed that sparked a euphoria too overwhelming for Cora to handle. She’d blacked out for a few seconds, then woke to Colibri apologizing profusely for “smothering her brain.” Cora had told her there was no need to apologize. What sort of person would she be, to begrudge someone that kind of joy?

A good friend but a bad pilot, was the answer, which was why Cora added nothing further to her explanation of her excellent run time. She took another sip of her drink and shrugged.

Smokey shook their head, envious but approving. “I wish Sugar was that agile,” they said. “He gets so skittish about catching solar wind full on.”

“He’s so dependable, though,” Cora said. “There’s a lot to be said for slow and steady.”

“Slow is right,” came a laugh. Adam sidled up to them, thunking his empty glass on the bar. “Hey. Another South Side.”

Cora’s mouth flattened. Adam’s equivalent to her “hug everyone” portion of the evening was “brag and be an asshole,” and she didn’t love that he was throwing another pint into the mix. She also didn’t think his dig against a fellow pilot deserved any attention, so she ignored it. “Little bird told me that you’ve applied to switch over to teaching,” she said to Smokey. “That’s awesome. I think that’d be great for you and Sugar both.”

Smokey nodded with an optimistic smile. “I love being in the saddle, but I really think I’ve had enough of the up and down,” they said. “Instructors stay up for three-month stretches, so I wouldn’t have to get in the shuttle as much. I’m qualified, but, uh . . . well, we’ll see what ops thinks.”

Cora was on the verge of saying she’d have loved to have a teacher like Smokey during flight school—which was true; Smokey was so easygoing—but Adam had another beer in hand and more to say. “Do you know,” Adam said with an arrogant grin, “I had to wait three extra days in the stables for this one”—he jerked his thumb at Smokey—“and their old cart”—he meant Sugar—“to finally roll up?”

“That was a huge haul,” Cora said, coming to Smokey’s defense. “Two full tankers of ice, plus helium? Sugar must’ve bust his ass for that.”

Smokey gave her a grateful little glance. “He did,” they said proudly. “He may not be fast, but he works real hard.”

“Eh, just give him the prod and you’ll get both,” Adam said. “You’re so squeamish about showing him who’s boss.”

Cora ran her tongue over the ridges of a back molar. Rorquals did very little “talking” with one another while in their pens, purely because they didn’t care one way or the other about socializing. But about a month prior, Colibri had told Cora that her next-door neighbor Blaze—Adam’s rorqual—was coming back to the stables oozing stress pheromones that, quote, sour the space that stretches around us. Cora asked Colibri if she’d talked to Blaze about it. Colibri had tried to.

I do not like him, was all Blaze would say. I do not like him, over and over.

Can I help you? Colibri had asked. Can Cora help you?

I do not like him, Blaze had replied.