Chapter 119: Harper’s Confession...

Vexa’s voice burst out of the galley speakers so bright and sunny and unbearably cheerful that everyone at the table flinched at once.

"Did everyone sleep well?!" she chirped, and they could clearly hear her tail thumping against the inside of her cockpit. "Because my passive sensors picked up the strangest vibration from your crew deck during third watch! It sounded like... like a valve cycling over and over and over, and then these weird little gasps that kept climbing higher and higher! My flight computer flagged it as hull cavitation, or maybe a loose coolant pump... I was going to hail you and ask if your life support was leaking, but then your thruster wake smoothed out! Is everyone okay over there?! Did your pipes burst?!"

PFFFT!

Jin-Ah choked on her tea and sprayed it all over her slate, and then she was coughing helplessly into her elbow with her face turning purple.

Camila let out a horrified shriek and dropped her tea towel onto the griddle, where it immediately started to smoke.

Aoi buried her whole face in both hands.

Elena closed her eyes and tipped her head back toward the ceiling with an expression of suffering martyrdom.

’Kill me,’ Leo thought, frozen with his mug halfway to his mouth while his whole face caught fire. ’Somebody just open an airlock and kill me...’

"Vexa," he ground out through his teeth, reaching over to hit the comm toggle. "The pipes... the pipes are fine. It was an internal calibration... Clear the channel."

"Oh! Good!" Vexa giggled, completely oblivious to the bomb she’d just dropped on the mess deck. "Just checking! Don’t let your gaskets blow, Leo... Nexus-Prime is only a hundred million kilometers out! See you at the boundary!"

CLICK!

The channel closed, and the silence that came back to the galley was apocalyptic.

SCRAPE!

Harper’s bench slid back across the deck plates, sudden and violent, and she stood up.

Her freckled face had gone completely colorless except for two bright burning spots high on her cheekbones, and she kept her eyes on the wall above everyone’s heads.

"I have work in the armory..." she said.

Her voice was hollow and there was a crack running right underneath it that sounded worse than any scream.

She turned on her heel and walked out of the galley with her boots slamming down on the steel, and disappeared down the companionway toward Deck Two.

The hatch hissed shut behind her.

Leo sat motionless at the head of the table for two full seconds, staring at the faint damp marks on the steel where her fists had been.

’That’s it... that’s the last time I let her walk away from me.’

He set his mug down hard.

CLACK!

He glanced once at Aoi, and she’d lifted her face out of her hands, and her eyes met his.

She gave him one small fierce nod.

"Well?" Elena said, without looking up from her fork. "Go after her, Captain... before she welds herself into the turret housing and we have to cut her out."

Leo got up, pushed through the galley hatch and went after her, taking the steps down to Deck Two three at a time.

The air down there was cooler, and it smelled of hot cutting fluid, copper and hydraulic oil.

He stopped for one second outside the hatch with his hand raised to knock, and he could hear her breathing in there, short and ragged, like she was trying very hard not to cry and losing.

’Don’t mess this up, Kaine. Whatever she says in there... just listen.’

The armory hatch was open a few centimeters, and he pushed it aside with his fingertips until it slid back into its housing with a soft pneumatic sigh.

The room was dim except for a single halogen lamp hanging over the main bench, throwing a hard pale circle of light onto the floor.

Harper stood alone in the middle of it with her back to the door and her head bowed.

In her right hand, held loosely against her thigh, was one of her eighteen-millimeter tungsten penetrators, and her thumb kept tracing the spiral groove cut into its core, over and over.

It was the groove she’d drawn on a scrap of paper and cut on the lathe back on Driftmark, laughing with him the whole time...

Her shoulders twitched once in a silent, shuddering hitch that she fought hard to swallow.

Leo stepped inside, and the hatch slid shut behind him with a quiet click.

’God... look at her. How long has she been carrying this around? How did I not see it?’

"Harper..." he said softly.

She stayed perfectly still under the white glare of the lamp with her thumb still moving on the slug.

When her voice finally came, it was low and cracked and terribly quiet.

"Twelve years, Leo."

He opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

"Twelve damn years," she said, and let out a sound that was half sob and half furious laugh. "Do you remember the winter Henderson’s space heater died? We were twelve, and we were rebuilding that stupid riding mower out back, and my fingers got so numb I couldn’t even hold a wrench... You took your work gloves off. Those big ugly canvas things that were way too big for you. You shoved them on my hands and blew on my knuckles until I could move them again, and you said that someday we’d build a plane and fly right out of that town and never come back."

She turned around slowly, and her boots scraped on the grating.

Her grey-blue eyes were rimmed in raw red and flooded with tears she refused to wipe away, and her jaw was set in the same stubborn line she always wore right before a fight.

"I built your plane, Leo," she choked out, waving the slug at the ceiling. "I lathed your sabot collars. I tuned your turret to half a micron... When the heat exchangers choked on basalt dust in the tutorial, I stayed up three days straight scrubbing carbon off that manifold until my palms were bleeding into the solvent, because as long as your ship had thrust, you were breathing."

A fresh tear tracked through the soot on her cheek and dripped off her jaw.

"And I watched you," she said, and her voice dropped to a ragged whisper. "I watched you look at Elena like she was some precious porcelain thing... I watched you bring Camila her seeds... I watched Chloe curl up on your chest every single night like a stray that’d bite anybody who came near your collar... I watched you fly with that pink girl like you’d known her your whole life. And then... and then last night."

She clamped her teeth together until the tendons stood out in her neck.

"You know what it felt like, standing right here in this armory with a wrench in my hand?" She laughed, bitter and disbelieving. "Listening to you... listening to you with Aoi? Hearing the woman who lectures us about stellar drift say your name through the ceiling like she was drowning in you? And all I could think was... twelve years of being the girl with grease on her nose. The girl who hands you the bolts... The girl who’s always there when you need thirty more horsepower out of a dying engine... And you never once came to my room at midnight."

She threw her hands up and let out another wet laugh, glaring at the ceiling like the rivets were mocking her.

"God, listen to me," she gasped, wiping her nose on the back of her dirty forearm. "I sound like a pathetic jealous idiot... We’re flying through a pirate corridor, we’ve got twenty-one thousand Zuni in the vault, we’re two days from a real world, and I’m crying over a schoolyard crush like some girl in a romance serial. Go on, Cap... Tell me to pull my head out of my ass and get back on the turret. Tell me to—"

Leo crossed the distance between them in two long strides and caught her face in both of his hands.

CLINK!

The slug slipped out of her fingers, bounced on the grating and rolled away into the shadows under the bench.

Harper froze in the middle of a breath with her mouth falling open and her flooded eyes going wide.

Her hands came up on instinct and flattened against his chest to shove him back, and the moment her fingers felt the heavy thunder of his heart under his shirt, all the strength ran right out of her wrists.

His thumbs swept slowly across her cheekbones, wiping away the tracks of tears and soot.

"You were never just the girl with grease on her nose, Harper," he said. "Never... Not for one single day."

Her lower lip trembled.

"Leo..."

"You think I didn’t see you?" His voice dropped. "When the sky caught fire over our town and the whole world went dark, you were the only thing that made sense. You were home, Harper... Before this ship, before the sun-stone, before any of it, you were the one who kept me from floating off into the cold."

He leaned in and rested his forehead against hers.

"I was scared," he admitted quietly, and closed his eyes for a moment. "I was scared that if I crossed that line and it all fell apart, I’d lose you, and I can’t do any of this without you. I thought being careful was protecting what we had... but standing here, hearing you hurt like this..."

His voice cracked. "Being careful was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done."

Her breath caught in a sharp little gasp.

"You... you mean that?"

He opened his eyes and held hers.

"Well, yeah... do I look like I’m joking? I just hope you don’t mind what I’m about to do..."

"Hu–?!"

He pulled her in, and his mouth came down on hers.

Harper made a muffled, shuddering sound against his lips, and then her fingers knotted in the front of his shirt and hauled him flush against her like she was afraid he’d vanish.

She kissed him back with all the wild fire that lived in her bones with her hands sliding up into his dark hair and pulling him down until their teeth clicked together.

’Finally,’ she thought, dizzy and burning. ’Finally, finally, finally...’

When Leo finally broke away and rested his forehead on hers again, both of them were breathing hard, and Harper was trembling from her shoulders all the way down to her boots.

Her cheeks were blazing crimson and her lips were swollen, and a slow breathless grin was spreading across her freckled face.

She reached up and roughly thumbed a smear of her own black grease off his lower lip.

"Twelve years late, you idiot," she whispered, and then leaned in and pressed a hard quick kiss to the corner of his mouth, just to make sure he was real. "You’re twelve years late... but you’re not getting away from me now... Not a chance in hell."

Leo let out a low breathless laugh, wrapped both arms tight around her waist and held her against his chest in the warm circle of the lamp.

For a while, neither of them said anything.

Then Harper’s voice came out muffled against his shirt, small and careful in a way he’d almost never heard from her.

"Leo... what about Aoi?"

He was quiet for a moment.

’Don’t lie to her. Not now... not ever.’

"I don’t know yet," he said honestly. "I’m not going to pretend last night didn’t happen, Harper... and I’m not going to pretend it didn’t mean something but I meant every word I just said to you... Every single one."

Harper was silent against his chest for so long that he started to worry, then she let out a long breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep, and he felt her shoulders loosen under his hands.

"Yeah... okay," she mumbled. "Honestly? She’s probably the only one on this ship I wouldn’t want to punch about it. She’s... she’s good people, Aoi."

She sniffed loudly.

"We’ll figure it out."

She pulled back far enough to look up at him, and her eyes were red and puffy, but the old brassy spark was finally back in them.

"But you’re buying me something really nice on Nexus-Prime," she said. "Like... a full set of Thyrrian calibration wrenches I’ve been hearing about, the expensive ones."

"Deal," Leo said, grinning.

"And you’re eating breakfast with me tomorrow, not hiding from Elena..."

"Also deal..."

"And Elena doesn’t get to know I cried. Ever. If she finds out, I’ll tell her you snore..."

"I don’t snore..."

"She doesn’t know that," Harper said, and sniffed again, and almost smiled.

"And you’re helping me re-seat the turret feed after lunch, because I definitely didn’t finish it while I was down here crying like an idiot..."

"Harper..."

"Yeah?"

"I’m not going anywhere, Harper," he said, and pulled her right back in against his chest. "You really don’t need to worry."