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Over the course of the next four days, she sent no other messages to Cora. She sold houseplants, printed seeds, rode the ferry, rolled her eyes at Otto’s teasing, and brooded.

On day five, at five sixteen in the morning, Signy was awoken by a text message. She normally kept her phone on silent when she slept. She’d turned that setting off the night before, because she knew Cora was scheduled to touch down at five ten.

Signy opened the message. She was barely awake, but she didn’t need full consciousness to understand the single word sent to her in reply.

Yes.

Chapter 793 Signy, Cypsela

When they’d first started making their home in Cypsela, the necessities had come first: air supply, plumbing, radiation shielding, gravity mesh, lighting, heating, comms, the means to eat, the means to sleep, the means to bathe, the means to grow things. The very last touch had been the nook—a snug, semispheric pocket carved right up against Cypsela’s surface. There was a floor-to-ceiling window, and lights tucked into the walls. You could only walk forward a couple of paces into the nook before you had to step down into a lower hollow filled with floor cushions and oversized pillows. Everything surrounding that soft space was packed with decorative plants—pothos, prayer plant, ficus, ferns—bursting out of their shared pots and growing as they liked.

Signy had assumed she’d find Cora resting in there after the market, as she often did. What she hadn’t planned on was finding Cora in tears.

“Hey, hey—” Signy hurried in, stepped down, and dropped cross-legged beside Cora on the cushions. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, it’s—” Cora, puffy and red, tried to dry her face on her own bare forearm. When that didn’t work, she pulled up the bottom edge of her shirt and pressed it to her eyes. “—old shit. Stupid. See, this is why I shouldn’t look at this stuff.”

Signy looked at the tablet in Cora’s lap. A text document lay open, one of many Signy had seen before. Space is big, so the people who made OCTA couldn’t go out of the Solar System, which is where Earth is. They sent out colony ships to other systems to make colonies in other systems because one system isn’t enough I guess.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Signy said. She pulled Cora into her arms. “Yes, you should look. Sometimes you should look.”

“It doesn’t help,” Cora managed to say.

Signy ran her fingers through Cora’s hair, pressing her fingertips down as she caressed her scalp. “Well, I can’t speak for you,” Signy said. “But it helps me.” She kissed the crown of Cora’s head and nuzzled her nose there. “Sometimes I have to look, too.”

T-Minus 1

Chapter 42 Signy, Fortune

There had to be a way to make this work.

Signy tried to keep an open mind as she sat behind the reception counter in Cora’s dorm listening to Red continue his friendly spiel about Flytown’s family apartments. “There are three different floor plans available, depending on your needs,” he said, displaying the options on one of his computer monitors. “Do either of you have any extended family you want to have room for? Elderly relatives?” He glanced at Cora. “Live-in siblings?”

“No,” Cora said, shaking her head.

“No,” Signy echoed.

“And, um . . .” Red cleared his throat. “Potentially loaded question, but are you two thinking about kids?”

“No,” Cora and Signy replied at the same time.

“Well, that makes it easy, then,” Red said brightly. A few clicks of his mouse brought up the floor plan of a one-bedroom apartment, complete with a small living room, a closet, a toilet, and a sink.

Signy looked it over. “No kitchen?” she asked.

“No, all cooking spaces here at the dorms are communal,” Red said. “There are kitchens available if you want to cook, but most folks just use the cafeteria or go out to eat.”

“It’s not like you cook anyway,” Cora said to Signy with a somewhat nervous smile. Her tone was congenial, but her eyes were anxious, as they had been from the moment Signy met her at the ferry station. It wasn’t hard to understand why. This was Cora’s space, Cora’s home, Cora’s place of work. She, too, wanted this move to happen, and she wanted it to be a good thing for both of them.

What Cora had said was true—Signy didn’t cook. Having a full cafeteria at her disposal without having to suit up and decide on takeout would be an upgrade, as would a separate bedroom. This was, in some ways, a better situation than her current apartment, and she wasn’t particularly attached to that place to begin with. But Flytown was twice as far from the plant shop as where she lived now, and the town part of the name was more apt here than in other neighborhoods. Signy didn’t really know her neighbors on raft sixteen. She kept to herself, didn’t chat at the taps, didn’t chat in the showers, just used her apartment as the point A mundanely destined for a point B.

That sort of privacy would be hard to maintain in Flytown. Pilots, as she’d learned, were gossipy as hell in one another’s company. Signy had neither patience for nor interest in that, but she was also afraid that if she did keep to herself, it would reflect badly on Cora. Signy wasn’t dense; she knew she was a shut-in. And maybe that was fine, maybe no one here cared, but every time there’d been occasion for Signy to meet Cora on this raft, Signy had felt decidedly out of place. She wasn’t sure if embedding herself here for the foreseeable future would improve anything in that regard.

But. Then again. Living outside of Flytown would be even more difficult for Cora, who had saddle drills and medical exams and suit fittings and bail-out practice and a standby roster to think about. She’d been so sweet when they’d first discussed which of them should pack up their things and move to the other, visibly mustering optimism over the idea of leaving Flytown, saying she wouldn’t mind the ferry every day, saying it would be a great opportunity to expand her horizons in the Berth. But they both knew it would be hard tacking a commute onto a pilot’s complicated schedule, and Signy’s apartment was already starting to feel cramped for any shared use longer than an overnight stay. And so here they were, assessing their options with Red and seeking the upsides.

There had to be a way to make this work.

“What’s the availability of—” Signy paused as her phone buzzed in her pocket. Ramona was calling her, for some reason. That wasn’t typical, but then, nothing Ramona ever did could be described that way. She probably wanted to share a dream she’d had, or some such. Signy silenced the buzz and continued. “Sorry. What’s the availability of a unit like this?”