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“Bingo,” Cora said.

“And the helmet,” Signy said, connecting the dots, “interfaces with your implants.”

“Bingo again. Here, look—” Cora slipped the helmet back off and flipped it over, giving Signy a better view of the nodes inside. “See?”

Signy did see, but Cora’s implants intrigued her more. She attempted to glance behind Cora’s ears without being noticed. She failed.

Cora, as was becoming characteristic, didn’t mind. She smiled understandingly and pushed her floating hair aside with her hand, holding it out of the way. “Go ahead.”

Signy almost apologized, but instead leaned in to take a closer look. The implants looked just like the pictures she’d seen—matte metal nubs embedded like surreal jewelry. “Do they hurt?” she asked.

“Nah,” Cora said. “Older pilots, they sometimes get headaches, or they get this sort of phantom itch, but I’m not there yet. Honestly, I don’t really remember not having them anymore.”

Odd as the inhuman additions were, Signy found them pretty, almost. She looked back out the window. “Where are Colibri’s implants?”

“Uh—mmm, you can’t see her nodes with the way she’s turned right now. They’re on the same side of her thorax as where the saddle sits. We call it the dock. I kinda hate that term, but whatever.”

“Why do you hate it?” Signy asked.

“Makes her sound like a machine.” Cora put her helmet back on and plugged it into the control panel. “All right, what else . . .” She pressed a few buttons, and a hum arose in reply. Something was warming up. “The way I’m gonna be talking with her in just a sec is less intense than when I’m in the saddle. Both for me and for her. Think of it like the difference between talking on the phone and having a face-to-face conversation like an inch apart. I’ll be the go-between for you two, but I’ll be less, um . . . how do I put this . . . less weird than when I’m working.” She laughed. “Or at least, relatively speaking.” Her shrug was affable. “It’s fine if you think I’m acting weird. That’s just part of the job, for me.”

Cora’s persistent calm made it easy for Signy to forget that the woman next to her was about to flood her brain with bioelectrical input it hadn’t evolved for. The part of Signy that took a first aid refresher every year became alert. “Is there any sort of weird I should watch out for?” she asked. “How do I know if you need help?”

Cora looked touched. “That is . . . kind of you, thanks. But, nothing for you to worry about.” She gestured at the control panel. “This measures my vitals, and hers, too. If anything starts to look bad, it’ll ping the medics. Absolute worst super-rare case, if my nose starts bleeding, yank my helmet off and hit that”—a large blue button, printed with a white medical cross—“but at that point, somebody would already be on the way here.” She shrugged again. “Really. It’s safe. People have been doing this for a long, long time.”

People, maybe, but not Signy. She made a mental note to read up on what a pilot’s nosebleed indicated. “What should . . .” She looked again out the window, at the animal. “What do I say?” She would’ve taken some proper time to think about what she wanted to say, if she’d known this interaction was going to happen. “What’s . . . polite?”

Cora chuckled. “She has no idea what polite even is. Just say whatever you want to say. I’ll put the brakes on anything that would get upsetting for her. But also, we should first find out if she’s up for a chat at all.” She reached out to the control panel and tapped a button rhythmically.

Outside, a light on the upper end of the window flashed red—three times, then two, then three more. A pattern. With the last flash, Colibri’s behavior changed. Her bulk shuddered, then shifted with a speed that made Signy startle. The rorqual began to move in a wave, as though her body were a puddle and someone had tossed a stone at her head. Or, not her head—her bell. Because she didn’t have a head, Signy reminded herself. She was having trouble making that idea stick. She had a mouth without a head.

“What just happened?” Signy asked, as the creature continued to ripple.

Cora beamed. “That’s my signal. The light. She knows I’m here, and she’s excited.”

“Do all pilots have their own signal?”

The question made Cora pause. “I don’t actually know,” she said. “It’s not in our training, it’s just . . . I dunno, something I started doing and told her to look for. You knock on the door before you go into someone’s room, y’know?”

The rorqual drifted close to the window, and from there, Signy could see the citrus-peel pits in Colibri’s skin, the ones that had detected the flashes of light. “Are they complex organs, or just full of photoreceptive cells?”

“Big ol’ mats of cells,” Cora said appreciatively. “That’s a good question.”

“Plants have something similar,” Signy said. “Similar in function, at least.”

“No shit?” Cora said. “For real?”

Signy nodded. “It’s how they know what time of day it is, and also what season, in part.”

“Huh!” Cora said. This new knowledge seemed to delight her, which pleased Signy in turn. “You’re gonna have to explain that one to me later, because I have never been able to wrap my head around what seasons are.”

Signy watched the shape on the other side of the window bob back and forth with an air of expectation. “Can she see us in here? For lack of a better term?”

“Yes. Ish. Yes and no.” Cora opened her mouth, then closed it. “I know how it is that she perceives us, but I can’t explain it. When I’m not connected to her, it’s like I’ve lost the translation key. Being with her is like a . . . like a dream I have every few weeks. It makes perfect sense when I’m in it. But when I’m just me . . .” She struggled, her mouth twisting. “It’s really hard to use words for things that don’t happen in words. Everything you tell me to tell her and everything she wants me to tell you is going to lose something in the back-and-forth. And that’s normal, when talking to rorquals like this. You can really only understand them when you’re in there.” She shot half a wink at Signy. “But I’m gonna do my best anyway.”

Signy felt something she hadn’t expected: envy. She wondered, often, what it would truly feel like to be a leaf turning toward a grow light, or to sense a neighboring root’s plea for nitrogen. Mysteries beyond knowing, she’d always thought. But here was Cora, who could communicate without language, who periodically saw the universe through different eyes. What a tremendous thing that was. What an incredible gift.

A gift with a cost, of course. Otherwise, Cora never would have come to the shop.