“Where are you from?” Ariadne asked. Lane hesitated. She hurried to continue. “It will help me understand this lamp.”
“You don’t really need to understand the LAMP.” Or me, he didn’t add aloud. This was a transaction. Simple and easy, if she would let it be. “You just need to make a Wish.”
She shook her head. “If there are rules, I don’t know what they are. I won’t know if you can help me or not until I understand how this works.”
He needed to redirect the conversation. “The limits of my power to grant Wishes don’t have anything to do with the LAMP or where I’m from. They come from the contract.”
Confusion knit Ariadne’s brow.
“I’m not explaining this well.” Lane ran a hand through his hair and then tried again. “You know contracts, right?”
Ariadne nodded. “My mom runs this place. Sometimes she does more contracts than science.”
“Then you know the basics. This whole thing”—he gestured to himself, the LAMP, and her—“is a contract. Everyone has their role and their obligations. You Called me. For that, you get a Wish.”
“One? I thought there were three.” Ariadne placed her elbows on the table as she leaned forward, interested.
Now that they were on safer ground, he picked up his mug again, letting the warmth seep into his hands. “That’s just in stories. Wishes are a one-time thing. Because there’s only sufficient energy if you Wish for something with all of your being. It has to be what you want more than anything else. Most people don’t have three of those Wishes.”
She drummed her fingers on the table. “Okay, I can live with that.”
Lane nodded. “I’m basically a conduit. I am able to channel that Wish into something that can affect the world.”
“And you can change anything?”
Something in the way she stilled after asking the question, leaning forward just a bit, fingers flexed on the LAMP, made him pause before he answered.
“I can do things; I can’t change people.” She moved, maybe to object, maybe to interrupt; Lane didn’t wait to see. He continued, “Because Wishing another person different is never the right answer. Even if you figured out some way to make it happen, it doesn’t end well.”
“You think I want to change someone else? No, Lane, I wouldn’t have spent this much time trying to change something I could fix on my own.”
“Then what do you want? I can feel how much you want whatever it is.”
Ariadne’s mug clinked as she put it on the laminate and then pushed it away from her. “You already told me it wouldn’t work.”
“Tell me what you were thinking. There might still be something I can do. I’ve had a bit more time to know the ins and outs of this than you have.”
“Maybe it was just company I wanted. Something new and different. Maybe I was bored, since all my friends are gone.” The last words were bleak, cutting to the heart of whatever she wouldn’t tell him. Her Wish mattered deeply to her.
“Where did they go?” The question escaped before he could stop it. And once it was out, he was surprised to find that he wanted to hear the answer.
Something twisted in Ariadne’s face. “Oh, they went to Earth for school. Just like everyone when they turn fourteen.” She held his eyes, challenging him to say something.
Lane was fairly sure whatever he said would be wrong, but he couldn’t let the silence stretch. Not with the way she was staring at him. Still, he hesitated, nervous—for the first time in a very long time—about saying the wrong thing.
He took a moment to wish again that there were coffee instead of weak tea in his cup. He gulped down a swallow and almost choked in surprise as he tasted hot, strong coffee. “What?”
He’d been asking the cup, not Ariadne, but she answered anyway, her words chips of ice. “I know you haven’t seen many people here yet, but you will when second bell rings in a few minutes, letting off the main shift. The station is home to service members, research personnel, maintenance people, and their minor children. Once you reach fourteen, there’s no place for you here until you’re ready to take on a job, which, due to labor laws about the dangers of work on stations, is twenty-one. No one stays.”
“Except you?”
“Except me. Ask me why.”
Anger simmered just under the surface of her words, but Lane could tell that talking about it was helping Ariadne. Somehow. He was already getting energy from helping with Ariadne’s Wish. He wouldn’t have been able to Wish himself coffee otherwise. “Why?”
“Just before I turned thirteen, I developed immune thrombocytopenic purpura, which means I have really low platelets. I bruise when I brush the corner of a table. Going through the acceleration of liftoff, I’d die. And if we got my platelets up enough to survive leaving Venus, it would wear off before landfall on Earth. It’s been deemed an unnecessary risk.”
Ariadne scanned the shop, but from her expression, Lane didn’t think she really saw any of it. He recognized the restlessness, impatience, and frustration that he felt when he was stuck in the LAMP too long. Or, further back, before he was a Granter and was looking forward to being anywhere else. When that feeling hit, he was able to manage it, because he always knew that sooner or later he would be someplace new.
Ariadne met his eyes and said, “I can never leave here. I can’t even try to get a job until I’m twenty-one, no matter how many certifications I collect in all this spare time. Just make work, like trying to figure out the LAMP. There is no place for me here. Everyone else is moving forward, and I’m stuck.” Her voice broke as she continued, “If you can’t change me, then you can’t change that.”
* * *
Lane finished his coffee. Ariadne had fallen silent, turning the LAMP over from one hand to the other.
The shop was filling up, and now that Ariadne had pointed it out, Lane saw she was right. No one else was anywhere near their age. Except a couple of people in coveralls with a delivery firm’s logo on their backs.
Ariadne watched the waitress drop off another table’s order. “Maybe all I needed was someone to talk to. Maybe that will be enough.”
Lane was uncomfortable with the dull resignation in her voice. She couldn’t be giving up, not when they were this close to a Wish that actually mattered. He was beginning to get a feel for how much she had done to get this far. Maybe her willpower and determination could get them close to her Wish. But, to be sure, he asked, “How could you open the LAMP if you weren’t told how to by the previous Wisher?”