Chapter 118: Aftermath Of Last Night

Four hydraulic door seals let go at the exact same split second, and the hiss sounded like a firing squad racking their bolts in unison.

PSSSHHH!

Leo froze in the doorway of Cabin One with his shirt half tucked into his black trousers and his collar sitting crooked where slender fingers had gripped it in the small hours of the morning.

At his shoulder, Aoi was still smoothing down the hem of her charcoal tunic with a hand that wasn’t quite steady and her face was already going red.

’Oh... oh no.’

Directly across the corridor, Elena stood framed in the open door of Cabin Two like a magistrate presiding over a treason trial, with her honey-blonde hair pinned into a perfect knot and her arms folded tight.

Her icy eyes weren’t even on Leo.

...They were on the top button of Aoi’s collar, which was sitting in the wrong buttonhole.

Two doors down, Jin-Ah had stepped out of Cabin Six clutching her slate to her chest like a breastplate, and she was staring very firmly at the ventilation grille on the ceiling.

Further along, Camila stood outside the cabin she shared with Chloe with her hands buried in the pockets of her leather apron and her face flushed a deep mottled rose, and her eyes kept darting between the floor and the far wall without landing anywhere near the two of them.

Beside her, Chloe stood with her hands lost in her black sleeves, looking perfectly calm and completely unsurprised and leaning against the frame of Cabin Five was Harper.

She was already dressed for the armory, with her knuckles stained dark with grease, and her grey-blue eyes were locked on Leo’s chest while her jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped under her freckled cheek.

...Nobody said a word and the low purr of the air recyclers overhead suddenly sounded very loud.

Aoi took one shallow breath through her nose, and the red climbed straight up her throat and set the tips of her ears on fire.

’Six years in front of lecture halls... two hundred students at a time... and I can’t think of a single word to say.’

So she said nothing at all.

She turned ninety degrees on her heel with a stiff wooden snap of her spine, clamped her elbows to her sides and walked toward the bridge companionway at three times her usual pace, with her eyes fixed dead ahead.

PAT-PAT-PAT-PAT!

Her bare feet vanished up the ladder well, followed by the distant hiss of the bridge hatch sealing behind her.

Leo cleared his throat, ran a hand through his dark hair and gave the remaining doors a small, thoroughly helpless nod.

"Morning, everyone..."

"Good morning, Captain," Elena said, crisp as frost. "I trust you slept well? Or, more accurately... at all?"

Camila made a tiny strangled squeak like a stepped-on mouse, spun around so fast her green linen skirt whipped against the frame and bolted for the galley.

Chloe stayed exactly where she was.

She tilted her head, looked up at Leo with her calm green eyes and sniffed the air delicately, once.

"Aoi smells like you now," she observed, in the tone of someone commenting on the weather. "It’s nice... It suits her."

Then she padded off after Camila, swinging her sleeves, and left the corridor in a silence so total that Leo could hear his own pulse.

Harper held his eyes for three more agonizing heartbeats with her face set like stone then she pushed off her doorframe and stalked past him toward the galley, and her boots rang on the deck plates in dull heavy thuds.

’Harper... come on. Look at me, at least.’

Elena waited until Harper had cleared the corner, then gave Leo a single razor-sharp nod and glided past him toward the mess, leaving him alone in the hallway with Jin-Ah.

Jin-Ah slowly lowered her gaze from the ceiling until it landed on the exact patch of skin between his eyebrows.

"The morning consumption cycle has commenced, Captain," she said, in a flat voice humming with unnatural formality. "I recommend attending the mess deck before the tea’s cooling curve reaches ambient equilibrium..."

She turned and marched away.

Leo stood alone in the quiet corridor and let out a long, suffering sigh through his teeth.

’This,’ he thought, fixing his crooked collar with a grimace, ’is going to be a disaster...’

Then he thought about last night, about Aoi’s dark eyes on his and the way she’d whispered his name, and a stupid grin crept onto his face anyway.

’Worth it... totally worth it... I just really wish these walls were thicker.’

He went up to the bridge first.

Aoi was standing in the cartography pit with her back to the hatch and both hands braced on the glass table, staring at the star map like it owed her money.

"Hey," Leo said softly from the top of the steps.

She didn’t turn around.

"Everyone heard, Leo..."

"Yeah... pretty sure everyone heard."

"Elena heard... Camila heard... Jin-Ah heard..." Her voice climbed half an octave with every name. "Chloe was asleep, thank goodness, but Vexa is thirty meters away in a separate ship, and I’m genuinely afraid to ask whether she heard."

Leo came down into the pit and stood beside her, and after a moment, he bumped her shoulder gently with his own.

"Do you regret it?"

Aoi went very still then she turned her head and looked at him, and under all the mortification, her dark eyes were soft and bright and completely honest.

"No," she said quietly. "Not even a little bit... I just don’t know how I’m supposed to sit at a breakfast table with them."

"Same way I am," Leo said, grinning. "Badly. Come on... we’ll be bad at it together."

She let out a small shaky laugh in spite of herself, pushed her glasses up and let him take her hand as far as the bottom of the companionway, where she let go very quickly before anyone could see.

The galley on Deck One was usually the warmest room on the ship, with its long steel table, its padded benches and Camila’s little herb wall filling the air with crushed mint and sweet basil.

Today, it felt like an interrogation room.

The six of them sat around the table in suffocating stillness.

Leo sat at the head with his hands flat on the steel, and on his right, Aoi had recovered just enough composure to sit with her hands folded in her lap, staring fixedly at an empty mug.

Across from her, Elena sat as upright as an iron rod, inspecting the tines of her fork with microscopic attention.

Jin-Ah was at the far end, scrolling her slate with desperate concentration, and beside Leo’s knee, Chloe swung her legs under the bench with her glass of lemon water, humming a tuneless little melody and in the middle of the bench, directly opposite Aoi, sat Harper.

Her hands were curled into loose fists beside her empty plate, and she was staring at the center seam of the table so hard the metal looked in danger of warping.

Under the table, Aoi’s fingertips found the side of Leo’s hand on the bench between them.

It was the lightest touch, there and gone in a heartbeat, and her ears went pink all over again.

’Okay... okay. At least one person here isn’t mad at me.’

SIZZLE-CRACKLE! POOF!

A thin grey wisp of acrid smoke drifted up from the stove behind them, carrying the unmistakable stench of burnt bread.

Camila stood at the griddle with her back to the table, gripping a spatula so tightly her knuckles had gone pale while she poked frantically at the smoking black squares on the burner.

COUGH!

She slid the blackened slices onto a platter with shaking hands and carried it to the table in small terrified steps, with her face burning beetroot red.

"I... I made toast," she whispered.

The six pieces of bread were charred solid, pitch-black slabs with their edges curled up like burnt paper.

"I’m so sorry," Camila blurted. "I’ve never burned anything in my whole life, I swear... I just... I wasn’t paying attention, and I was thinking about... about..."

She caught herself, looked straight at Aoi by accident, squeaked and slapped both hands over her own mouth.

Leo reached out, picked up the nearest black slab and took a big, deliberate bite out of it.

CRUNCH!

"It’s great, Camila," he said, chewing heroically through what was basically charcoal. "Really... very crunchy."

Camila stared at him with her eyes going wet, half mortified and half grateful.

Elena slowly set her fork down.

CLINK!

She looked at the smoking slabs, and then across the table at Aoi, and her voice dropped into a smooth, velvety and utterly devastating drawl.

"How remarkably tragic. It appears our domestic biosphere is experiencing some turbulence... One can only assume that the excessive sounds traveling through the bulkheads during third watch was intense enough to disturb the griddle’s thermal calibration."

Aoi’s breath caught in a sharp pained gasp while Elena took a tiny elegant sip of water.

"It’s truly a marvel of Graventhal engineering," she went on, setting the glass down without a sound. "The outer hull can deflect tungsten penetrators at twenty-four kilometers per second, and yet the partition between Cabins One and Two have the density of wet paper... It’s been an extraordinary educational experience to learn that our esteemed cartographer has such remarkable lung capacity during private tutorials."

Aoi looked like she wished the deck would open up and vent her straight into the vacuum.

"Elena..." she managed in a tiny voice. "Please."

"Elena," Leo said. "That’s enough."

Elena met his eyes with cool defiance and lifted her chin another centimeter.

"I’m merely making an engineering observation, Captain. Some of us were trying to sleep." She flicked her fingers dismissively. "But very well... I’ll file my complaint with the ship’s maintenance log instead."

Chloe looked up from her lemon water with an innocent tilt of her head.

"I didn’t hear anything," she said. "Camila put a pillow on my ears..."

"Chloe!" Camila wailed, and buried her face in her tea towel.

Before the silence could settle back in, Jin-Ah cleared her throat with the force of a pneumatic hammer and stood up.

"Propulsion telemetry remains optimal," she announced, three decibels louder than any galley required. "The coils are functioning at ninety-seven point eight percent, our velocity is twenty-eight point four kilometers per second, and we’re approximately one hundred and ten million kilometers from Nexus-Prime... All systems are green, structural integrity is nominal, and no domestic anomalies have been logged in the official ship’s record."

She sat back down with rigid precision, picked up a slab of charcoal and started sawing at it with her knife, chewing the bitter carbon without a flicker of expression.

’Jin-Ah... you legend,’ Leo thought, and then pinched the bridge of his nose and glared up at the audio pickup in the ceiling. ’I love you!’

"Vela," he said, flat and weary. "Did you turn off the dampeners last night?"

The small green sensor on the grille blinked once and stayed completely silent.

Harper let out a sharp ugly scoff through her nose without lifting her eyes.

Camila hurried around the table with a fresh pot of tea, filling Leo’s mug and then Aoi’s with hands that were still shaking, like she was serving drinks in a room full of primed explosives.

Leo wrapped his hands around the warm mug and looked across the table.

"Harper," he said gently. "You haven’t touched your tea... Camila made the mint blend you like."

Harper kept staring at the seam in the steel.

"Not thirsty, Cap," she said flatly.

"Harper—"

"I said I’m not thirsty."

The muscle in her jaw twitched once, twice, and a ragged breath hissed out between her teeth.

Elena glanced sideways at her.

Then, without a word, she reached across the table, picked up Harper’s untouched mug and set it down right in front of Harper’s fists with a firm little clack.

"Drink it, Bell," she said, without looking at her. "Sulking dehydrates you, and I refuse to carry my chief mechanic to the medbay because she fainted into a coil housing out of pure stubbornness..."

Harper’s eyes flicked up at her and for a second, it looked like she was going to snap something back then she picked up the mug, took one stiff swallow and set it back down, and Elena went back to inspecting her fork as if nothing had happened at all.

Across the table, Aoi was watching Harper with a quiet, sad sort of understanding.

’She knows something,’ Leo thought. ’Aoi knows exactly what’s going on with Harper, and I’m the only idiot here who doesn’t.’

’Okay... I need to talk to her. Properly... Today.’

Then the universe decided to test what was left of Leo’s sanity.

CHIME!

The comm panel on the galley bulkhead clicked to life with a bright chirp, and the channel from the Mirage burst open without any warning at all.

"Gooood morning, Wanderer!"