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This was her first time seeing his cabins. She’d expected his living area to be larger than hers—Per Halen did apologize for the size of her quarters, and of course the colony heir would have an even more lavish space than that. So the fact that she saw three doors branching off the space she found herself in wasn’t surprising.
Neither was that faint, ever-present musk of coffee and mint that she’d grown almost used to. She’d never admit it, but sometimes when she smelled traces of his passing in the hallways at the bow, she caught herself taking a deep breath to inhale the scent. Kaia was surprised to have developed this unwelcome positive association to it—the opposite of her association with its actual owner.
The space was dark. Whereas the walls of her cabin were a bland beige-ish white, these were a warm-tinted charcoal. Her cabin’s lighting seemed sterile against the white fixtures, white bed, white tiles in her bathroom. Here, the light was a dim, dark orange washing over the space.
There was no bed. So one of the doors must’ve led to a separate bedroom. She stole small peeks into those open doorways. Not long enough to really see anything, as the other areas were unlit.
“Let’s go to the office.” Orion tossed the towel he'd been drying his hair with into a hole off the side of the wall. Kaia knew what that was now. Her cabin didn’t have one, but she’d seen them around the common areas: a laundry chute, which sucked dirty clothes down into some designated chamber where they’d then be cleaned and returned. Must be nice to have a private version.
“The office” was smaller than the first space, and more intimate than she would’ve liked. It contained a desk with a single chair, but Orion didn’t lead her there. Instead, he motioned for her to sit on the long cushion with a padded backrest against the wall. A low table sitting before it was strewn with physical printouts.
“Paper? Why?”
Paper was expensive, and Orion had his Neurosync. The NS could show him anything he needed to see without the need for antique copies.
“Had to get some of this shit straight in my head.” He gathered the strewn page, shuffling them together and shoving them in a drawer slot in his desk. Kaia had just enough time to glimpse diagrams, tables, maps of some sort.
“Is that related to the expedition?”
“Sort of. Sit.”
She did, sliding onto the cushion and folding her legs under the glass surface of the low table, ignoring their bruised protests.
Orion sat next to her, and she had to resist shuffling to the side for more distance. They got closer than this when sparring. But that was different. It was harsh and adversarial enough to block out any semblance of intimacy. Every other time they’d been this close, things ended badly—either with her finding out he was part uhyre, or with him forcing a non-kiss kiss to her mouth.
Now they were alone, and Orion was half-naked, and his eyes were shifting behind his closed lids. He must have been doing some NS op because a second later, an image appeared on the frosted tabletop. Kaia looked up, spotting a projector embedded in the ceiling right overhead. Looking back at the image, she began to make sense of what she was seeing.
Three columns of data and a bunch of stats she barely understood.
“These are the planets Mother has shortlisted for potential exploration. Well…” He flicked the first column out of the way with a gesture. “She’s ruled this one out.”
Kaia stared at the table. It was a bunch of gibberish. She was sure if she looked closer and longer, she’d figure some of that stuff out. What had made her pause was the realization that these two planets, condensed into a lump of data, represented this colony’s next great hope.
It was futile, of course. Buttheybelieved. That was whyColossaland every other colony ship existed: to wade through space, gathering resources and preparing for voyages to search for a new Earth. Now the hopes of thousands of people hinged on two columns labelled X1s-B and X1s-C. She wondered what Orion thought about all this.
“You don’t really believe that crap, do you?” She looked up at him from the projection.
“What?” He shook his head a little.
“You know. Another Earth.”
When he looked up at her, the wide-eyed uncertainty on his face took her aback. “You don’t?”
It made her falter. She could tell him what she really thought—that New Earth was a bullshit pipe dream for rich people who had nothing better to do. Instead, she found herself softening the blow. “My brother did.”
It was the right thing to do. She needed to stay on his good side. That was why she did it.
“How likely is it,” Orion searched her eyes, “that there was only one planet like it? One perfect little orb in the whole entire universe?”
“It’s just that it’s been so long and—”
“And we haven’t found it yet,” Orion finished her thought for her. “I know. I know we likely never will. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
He watched the projection on the glass while Kaia recalibrated her image of the man next to her. Orion seemed to hate the prospect of being back onColossalso much. She’d just assumed he thought this whole New Earth mission was as ridiculous as she did. But the childish hope in his eyes reminded her of Ahton, only Ahton was eight and Orion was a grown man who had no excuse for fantasies.
Kaia resisted the hasty urge to give him something—anything—of comfort. The entire mission was stupid. Wasteful. Idiotic. She wouldn’t pretend otherwise just because the sad faith on Orion’s face reminded her of her dead little brother.
“So why does your mom think it’s one of these?” She changed the subject to something safer.
