I could have died without him knowing anything. Not what was going on in my head when I took off this morning. Not the past I’ve buried for so long. And not the realization I had that night we came up with the plan that’s supposed to restore and redeem him in the eyes of his vicious empire. I owe him more than an apology. I owe him the truth I keep running from, the one that drives me to fling myself into the sights of would-be rebels and mobsters and Maxo Iral himself.
The burn behind my eyes gets stronger.
Next to me, Wen stirs. She rolls her head for a moment, then lunges forward against her restraints, clawing at them like a trapped animal. It takes a good fifteen seconds for her to wrap her head around her circumstances, and only after she’s wrenched her helmet off and pitched it into the cockpit window. It bounces back at her, she catches it, and then she glances sidelong at me.
“That…was a hell of a thing,” Wen says. In null gravity, loose strands of hair sway around her face, and she blows them away with a huff. Her eyes drop to the controls, fixing on the gyro stick. She looks rattled, but not entirely discouraged.
“It’s sensitive,” I tell her flatly, two minutes too late.
Her gaze snaps to me. “You okay, Ettian?”
Something in my voice must have betrayed me. I give her a terse nod, glad for my own helmet’s mirrored visor. Beneath it, I blink rapidly, trying to clear my vision. It doesn’t do much. “Vacuum flying—nothing stops you from spinning once you start. If you lose control, sometimes there’s no coming back.” I’m talking way too fast, my words as out of control as the Cygnet was.
Wen leans forward over the dashboard, but she stops when she sees me tense up. “Oh, come on,” she groans, setting her helmet back on her head. “It’s not the kind of mistake you make twice.”
“Like hanging around with the likes of you?”
She sticks her tongue out at me.
“Just…Just go slow.”
“You sure you’re okay, Ettian?” she says. Her hands pull back from the controls, and her impenetrable mirrored gaze feels locked on me.
I pause, my breath catching. I’ve spent so long avoiding this kind of talk—seven years, if I’m being honest.
I haven’t been okay for seven years.
And once that thought is in my head, it can’t be taken back. Gods of all systems, what a horrible time for this to sink in. I laugh, because it’s the only thing that feels right.
Wen’s not laughing. She pulls off her helmet again and leans over, patting my sleeve with one tentative, scarred hand. “You want to fly?” she asks, her other hand working on her harness. “C’mon, give me something. Stop giggling. It’s weird.”
I run one hand over my mouth, trying to get my emotions under control. Water beads catch on the inside of my visor, skirting along the rim.
“Look, I’ll close my eyes if you want. Do what you need to do,” Wen says, then presses her nose into the crook of her elbow, folding around the helmet in her lap. I wave one hand in front of her face, just in case, then duck my head and pull my chinstrap loose. My head feels so much better without the helmet compressing it, and as I rub down my eyes, some of the weight lifts off my shoulders.
The radio crackles. “Henrietta Base to Green Twelve, we noticed anomalies in your flight plan,” the tower announces. “Do you need assistance?”
“Green Twelve to Henrietta Base, all good up here,” Wen answers, because she knows I can’t. After I settle the helmet back on my head, she lifts hers. I feel the edges of a question in the air between us, but she doesn’t ask, and I nod, and she jams the helmet back over her head, her hands dropping to the controls. With a burst of the main thrusters, she sends us sailing. I brace myself, my fingers already on the weapons panel.
Wen’s survived this long by learning hard lessons fast, and her first encounter with the gyros has taught her well. She probes the stick cautiously, tensing when it tilts us into a lazy spin, then locks us onto a steady new vector.
My eyes drop from the weapons panel to navigation, watching our flight path’s curves bleed into lines. She flies with steady hands, cool under pressure, learning the ship more and more with every burst of the thrusters, with every spin of the gyros, with every second that passes.
I wait for the moment I have to open my mouth again. Wait for the need to correct her, the certainty that I have to step in. It doesn’t come. Wen melts into the Cygnet’s controls, into the cradle of the void, into perfect, natural flight. She escalates slowly, pushing boundaries, testing edges, experimenting with all the ways she can hurtle the ship through the dark. The Cygnet in her hands is eager and athletic, and soon she’s flying it the way she did in atmo, using its mechanical quirks to push it to its full potential.
When she scales the Cygnet’s vector down to a point, she lets out a long, enthralled breath. Our nose is pointed away from Delos, out into the black, and this far over on the night side, the darkness ahead shimmers with a thousand stars she’s never seen under the city lights of Isla. “So?” Wen asks.
“You’re not flying in space.”
“But I’m flying?”
I pretend to mull it over, just to work her up. She nudges me with her elbow—softly at first, then over and over until I give in, laughing and shoving her away. “I’ll have to talk to Iral, but I think we need a pilot with your kind of tricks.”
“I want a ’nottie,” Wen says plainly.
“Someday.”
“Promise?”
I don’t lie to her. I don’t think I can.
“Promise.”
CHAPTER 22
WHEN WE SPILL out of the Cygnet, smiling deliriously and unsteady on our feet, Gal is waiting in the hangar. A laugh drops back down my throat as I meet his sunken, tired-looking eyes. Wen glances between us, then tugs my helmet out of my hands and sets off across the hangar to the equipment lockers without a backward glance.
“Have a good flight?” Gal asks. His voice is flat, but I can’t tell if it’s from exhaustion or something more.
I stuff my hands in my pockets and approach him with a caution I used to reserve for stray dogs. After my breakdown in the cockpit, I know I need to talk to him. I also know this scares me more than any system’s hell.
I can’t lose him, but somehow it feels like I already have.
“Wasn’t all bad. Cygnet handles like a dream, but it’s no Viper.” I try to keep my tone light, but I know it’s a lost cause. Gal can read me better than anyone else, and I’m too nervous to keep my thoughts off my face.