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Behind them, Signy’s bewilderment peaked. “Why does Cora get to help?” she demanded. “I have spent years trying to get you to sit your arthritic ass down—”

Otto leaned in toward Cora. “It’s not my ass, it’s my knee,” he clarified.

“—you have never once let me help—”

“Because you didn’t want to,” Otto said. He snitched another bite of dough.

Cora wasn’t looking at Signy, but she could hear her blink. “What are you talking about? I have offered—I don’t know, ten thousand times to help you cook dinner.”

“But you didn’t actually want to,” Otto said, wiping his hands on his apron as he headed to retrieve salt and pepper from the cupboard. “You were being polite. I could tell. You don’t cook for yourself, you don’t like it.”

“I’ve never said I don’t like it,” Signy said.

Otto gave her a knowing look. “I can tell,” he said, tapping his nose. “Your lady fair, on the other hand—”

“My what?” Signy said.

“I’m a what now?” Cora said.

Otto coasted over them both. “—she’d never done it, and as soon as she did, she got a little sparkle in her eye. She wanted to give it a shot. You didn’t. Now, you sit your skinny ass down and have a lager.”

“Her ass isn’t skinny,” Cora said, correcting the record in the same way Otto had about his knee. “It’s just those skirts, y’know, they’re so loose, it’s hard to tell.”

“Oh my god,” Signy said in a weary monotone. She abandoned the whole situation and headed into the living room.

“Leaving so soon?” Otto called jovially as he began to mash the spuds.

“I am finding,” Signy said, hitting each word hard, “some music.”

Otto leaned toward Cora again, clandestinely. “Do you think we’re in trouble?” he whispered.

“Nah,” Cora whispered back. “But if we are, you’re gonna have to let me crash on the couch.” From the living room, she could hear Signy pawing through a shelf of memory sticks. The smell of roasting mushrooms mingled with the scent of unbaked dough, sugar sweet. Poison rain hammered the windows and the clouds churned brownish-gray, but behind Otto’s painted walls, all was sunny and clean. Cora understood why Signy loved it here. She’d come to love it, too.

Chapter 791 Signy, Lodestone

Signy dug idly around bins of bits and bolts, contentedly listening to Cora chat away with the repair shop’s proprietor. This was Signy’s ideal form of small talk—the kind where she didn’t have to talk at all.

Cora stood leaning against the counter on the other side of the shop, her pupils back to normal, her patter charming and effortless. “—I’m telling you, it’s a great show. And the music is stupid good.”

The man behind the counter looked convinced. “Y’know, I don’t usually go for old radio, but you’re making an awfully good case,” he said, unsurprisingly. James had always been open to all sorts of new things, even when they’d first met him, well before the Ring. In those days, he’d been a teenager working in a docking bay; now he was a bearded father of two, fixing household items inside a pair of repurposed colony supply containers welded together. The OCTA logos on the outside had long ago been painted over with a rough-but-heartfelt mural of Solace and its moonlets—Cypsela included, represented by a rock with a sprouting leaf. The shop within the containers was a tidy jumble of machines, crates, and spare parts. James himself fit into the scene perfectly, the pockets of his work apron hanging heavy with tools. “What’s the title?” he asked.

“It’s an episode of Saturday Spectacular called ‘Lunar Larceny,’” Cora said, as James jotted it down. “I know for a fact it was uploaded into the Fortune supplement forever ago, but if you have trouble finding it, I’ve got a backup copy at home.”

None of this was news to Signy, but she wanted to kiss Cora for it all the same.

“Now,” Cora said, switching gears, “what can you do about these?” She pulled the bundle of kitchen knives from her backpack and unrolled them on the counter.

“Well, I could melt them down, or throw them into a wall somewhere,” James said, “but I assume you’d like me to sharpen them.”

Cora grinned. “I would like you to sharpen them, yes.”

In the far corner of the shop that served as an office space, there rested an old escape capsule painted with flowers and sunbeams. The hatch had been removed, the opening covered with a small curtain of cheery fabric. Without any real warning, the curtain was tossed aside, revealing only a quick glimpse of the cushions and string lights within before all the adults in the shop turned their heads instinctively toward the sound of two tiny running feet.

“Simmy!” a little voice cried.

Signy looked to see Rosie, James’s toddling daughter, barreling toward her knees. But before Rosie could reach her destination, Cora swooped in, scooped the now-shrieking kid into her arms, flipped her around, and held her aloft by her ankles. “Rosie, what happened?” Cora gasped. “You’re upside down!” She threw Signy a quick wink.

Rosie squealed at the top of her lungs, delighted. “No, Cora!” she laughed, her whole body squirming. “No! Down!”