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Absolutely not.

You are appalled.

Yes.

I apologize for offending.

Don’t be sorry. I can feel how difficult this is for you to grasp. Perhaps this is—

One of the many things we will not understand of each other.

Yes.

You miss her. Whenever we come to the idea of Signy, I feel you. You miss her presence.

I do.

Do you regret our time together now, if it diminishes time spent with her?

No, no, Colibri, not at all, not ever, not ever. I cherish you. I do not regret.

I feel your truth, and I know. But it is harder now, for you to leave Fortune.

It is never hard for me to leave Fortune, but I wish I could bring Signy with me. Impossible. Absurd. There is crackling metal stitched into my brain and a box of nutrients latched to my stomach, and this craft affixed to your body is meant only for me. There is nothing for her here. Nothing to do. No way to feel. This task is not hers. She has her own.

And yet, you wish you could be here and with her simultaneously. You wish your split time was one time, and that all the things that are of your love could be present together.

Yes. I know that doesn’t make sense—

But neither does eating plants that are of your love. Yet, you do.

I suppose.

You are allowed your paradoxes, Cora. I enjoy the time we spend with them.

“Goddammit,” Cora sighed. “Five. Five flavors of porridge powder. Come on, Cora. Be here. Stay here. Five flavors of porridge powder . . .”

Chapter 41 Signy, Fortune

Signy knew what Cora’s job was, obviously. It was the first thing she’d ever learned about her. Sometimes Cora flew to the moon on the back of a giant space beast and couldn’t pick up her phone for a while. That had always been a given. And it wasn’t as though two weeks was that long a time. Signy had more than enough to keep herself busy over two weeks, and it wasn’t like she saw Cora every day when she was planetside anyway, and . . .

. . . and in that moment, the wait was intolerable. Her lips ached and her chest ached and everything between her legs ached, and it didn’t matter how many times she told herself she was being ridiculous, it didn’t matter how many times she reread old texts from Cora, it didn’t matter how many times she touched herself. Signy wanted. She was inclined to say she needed, but she’d always felt that need was a term best left in the realm of anything whose absence might kill you. She would be fine without Cora. She had been fine without Cora for the majority of her life. She wasn’t a child. She could survive two whole weeks.

Except that her lips ached and her chest ached and everything between her legs ached, and god.

Signy picked up her phone and began to compose a new message. Cora couldn’t get texts while on a quarry run, but she’d see them when she got back to Flytown. Often, in these stretches, Signy sent along commentary about her day in the shop, or pictures of pretty plants, or a comment about a radio show. But right then, Signy didn’t want everyday fluff. She wanted to reach into her chest, pull out the ache, hold it up to Cora, and ask: Do you feel this way, too?

Signy’s thumbs hovered over the keyboard, but the message field stayed empty. It wasn’t that she’d never ached for someone before, and she wasn’t afraid of her own feelings, either. She just couldn’t find the words. You were supposed to say something beautiful, something original, some combination of phrasing no other human had previously been inspired to string together for another human, because your feelings were different, your connection was singular, the two of you had invented something the universe had never seen before. And if you really cared that much for somebody, you couldn’t say something cliché, and you certainly couldn’t make it awkward. You had to dig deep and summon the lyrical poet who resided inside everyone’s heart of hearts for moments like this, and if your feelings were sincere, then—and only then—would the words hit their recipient in precisely the intended way, and if they didn’t, well, it must not have been meant to be.

Signy knew she was stalling by way of overthinking it, but now that she was overthinking it, she was annoyed. Why did something as universal to the human experience as love require originality in order to prove its legitimacy? What a ludicrous idea, to pretend that the way you felt about someone had never been experienced before. Were there not thousands of years of written human history in which no other topic had been covered as extensively? How many ballads, how many stories, how many songs had been composed about exactly this? That quantity of experience didn’t make any of it any less profound. On the contrary, wasn’t it all the more exquisite, to know that people had the capacity to connect to others on that level, and then to find yourself in those shoes and know, from all the records that preceded you, regardless of whether this connection went well or went disastrously, this feeling was about to sculpt your life into something new? Was that not enough? Did you have to embellish, in order for that to fucking matter?

The message field remained empty.

Signy groaned. She tossed her phone onto the shop counter. She rubbed her face. She picked her phone back up. She began to type, thumbs drumming angrily.

Do you want to move in together? I have no idea how we’d make that work, but I want to. Do you?

She hit send before she could second-guess, then turned on the radio and fussed with genes.