Pendt’s storm of fury had passed, and when she looked up at him, her eyes were dry. He relaxed his hold on her, giving her the space to put distance between them if she wanted to, but she didn’t move away.
“Thank you,” she said. “I can’t imagine going through this on my own.”
“Not to make it transactional,” Fisher said lightly, “but I seem to recall at least one time in the past week when you made sure I wasn’t going through something hard on my own.”
She rubbed her face on his shoulder.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I don’t mean that I owe you. I’m doing this because I want to. But if it makes it easier for you, you can remember all the things you do for me.”
“You know,” she said thoughtfully, tracing one finger across his chest, “it doesn’t make it easier. I mean, it would have, even just a few weeks ago. But everything has been different since you kissed me. It doesn’t feel like give and take. It feels . . . permanent.”
Fisher swore his heart stopped beating for a few seconds.
“And you’re okay with that?” he asked. He tried not to hold his breath.
“Yes,” Pendt said. “It’s new for me and it’s a bit scary. In a way, it’s kind of . . . good? I was worried that you might think I had just transferred my arrangement from Ned to you, but the things I feel now are entirely different from how it was with him.”
“I did not think that,” Fisher admitted. “But that’s possibly because we hadn’t had enough time for me to really unpack it yet before, well, you know.”
“Will the people on the station think it’s weird?” Pendt asked. “Like I’m betraying Ned or, I don’t know, taking advantage of you?”
Fisher hadn’t considered that either.
“I don’t think so,” he said after a moment. “They like you for your own sake, now. If anything, I think it would make everyone more comfortable, to know that both of us are making the best of a sad situation and moving forward together.”
“Is that what we’re calling it?” Pendt asked.
“We don’t have to call it anything, if you don’t want,” Fisher said. “But I would like to sit down again, if you don’t mind. I’m exhausted.”
She laughed and let him lead her over to the sofa. He sat and pulled her down into his arms again. It was cozy.
“I checked with Dulcie about the legal situation,” Pendt said. “Everything is in order. Now that I know what I know about the Harland, I realize that legality might not be enough, but it will matter to the station. If the Harland can’t trade here, they’d be exiled to the mining belt forever.”
“I’m tempted to enforce that anyway,” Fisher said. “I hate to think that we’ve been letting people be smuggled through the station, but it’s unavoidable. Who knows how many of the ships we’ve sent out since you got here have been delivering so-called passengers to your aunt? You said your Dr. Morunt is almost sixty. That’s too long.”
“We can talk to Dulcie about it,” Pendt said. “She seemed to be right on the edge of making the same conclusions I did. She didn’t know to talk to Dr. Morunt here. We’ll have to tell her, and then she can help us.”
“I can pass along the information to Ned’s rebel contacts too,” Fisher said. “The only person I knew was Choria, the captain of the Cleland, but if we look through his message history, we might find someone else to talk to. If they aren’t already, they can start looking into people being moved from Katla.”
“You think the trafficking is that organized?” Pendt said.
“It would have to be,” Fisher pointed out. “If the people came from Brannick Station, we would miss them.”
That much was true. Brannick had a large population, but it was mostly a series of interconnected families. If there was trafficking going on, someone would have been missed by now.
“I’m still going to poke around,” Pendt said. “There has to be someone here who knows what’s going on. Someone had to clear out the Harland’s lower hold.”
“Maybe they were just contracted to clean,” Fisher said. “If the hold was already empty, there’s no reason for them to know any of the details.”
“They might still have seen something,” Pendt said. “Even if they didn’t know what it was they were doing.”
Fisher considered it.
“That’s a good point,” he said. “I’ll go over the schedule and see who was on cleaning duty that day. You can talk to them, or we’ll have Dulcie do it if you want to stay a bit anonymous.”
Pendt rested her head against his shoulder, and they breathed together. Half an hour ago, everything had seemed to out of control and beyond her, and now they had a plan. Fisher was more than reliable and steady for her, he was the answer to questions she wasn’t even sure how to ask.
“Pendt,” said Fisher.
“Yes?” she answered, looking up at him again. His eyes were dark.
“I—” Whatever he had planned to say went unheard as Pendt leaned up into him and pressed her lips to his.
This kiss was different from the first one they had shared. Slower, more deliberate, it burned through him. He relaxed into the sofa cushions, taking her full weight against his body. She settled between his legs, her hands on his thighs for balance as she dragged her tongue along his teeth.
She was so tiny, compared with him. He knew it was the result of an underfed childhood, and he tried not to think it was attractive. She’d put on so much weight since she arrived on the station, rounding out her stomach and her hips, and still his hands felt perfectly sized to hold her against his body. She was soft now, her skin having lost its papery feel even as the body underneath it filled out with calories and fat and muscle. This was who Pendt was meant to be, her true form. Not the waif her family had tried to suppress. Not the unwilling mother they would have forced her to be once she turned eighteen. This glorious girl in his lap, her mouth on his with a hunger he could match.
She pulled back, panting for breath, and smiled at him.
“I’m not entirely sure what you want,” she said.
“To be honest, neither am I,” he told her. “This is new for me as well.”
Her smile grew even wider, her hands sliding up his chest to brace herself against his shoulders.
“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “I have a certain amount of confidence in us.”
She said it so matter-of-factly that he blinked. Then he saw the quirk of her lips and realized she was making fun of him. He laughed and pulled her body flush against his. Fisher never wanted to leave Brannick Station, but he had finally found something he wanted to explore.