He smiles, shrugging. “I’m just glad you do.”
“I do,” I whisper.
And I move closer, and I feel his arm slip around my waist, and a slight shock as our lips meet, electricity and butterflies surging inside me as the station rocks around us and he presses up against me and Zila’s voice rings out over the wailing alarms.
“Are you two spending precious minutes in the middle of a heretofore unheard-of temporal paradox engaging in frivolous presexual activity?”
We look down the shaft, see Zila climbing up quickly with Lieutenant Kim right behind her.
“You’re such a hopeless romantic, Z,” I call.
“We do not have time to waste on trivialities, we may—”
“Relax, Legionnaire Madran,” Fin says, giving me a wink and slipping out of my arms. “By the time you’re up here, I’ll be done.”
“You ladies got the passkey?” I yell.
“We were successful,” Zila calls back. “Thanks to Nari’s quick thinking.”
“Nari?” Fin mutters. “She and Dirtgirl are on a first-name basis now?”
“Behave,” I mutter.
“What if I don’t wanna?” he asks, winking again.
The lock clunks, Fin extinguishes his cutter, and with a labored whine from his exosuit, our Gearhead wrenches the elevator doors wide just as Zila and Kim reach us. Like always, the silent alarm will be sounding somewhere as soon as we set foot in the corridor, but we have a little time left before the SecBoys intercept us.
Fast as we can, we dash down the smoke-filled corridors, arriving at Pinkerton’s office. Zila swipes the dead man’s passkey through the reader, an agonizing few seconds pass before the lock switches to green and we hustle inside to the tune of wailing sirens.
The office is plush—well, about as plush as you’re going to get on a space station, at least. There are dozens of glass cases around the room, dimly lit by emergency lighting. A bunch of strange objects float inside, suspended on cushions of zero grav. It reminds me a little of Casseldon Bianchi’s office on Sempiternity.
Looks like Pinkerton was some kind of collector.
I squint at one of the artifacts slowly revolving in a thin beam of light. It’s flat, rectangular, its surface old and cracked. There might have been writing on it, but it’s worn away with time. And there’s … paper inside?
“What’s that?” Fin asks, peering through the glass.
“No clue,” I murmur.
“Are you joking?”
We glance behind us, find Nari staring at us like we’re simple.
“Almost always,” Fin shrugs. “But in this case, I honestly have no idea what this is.”
“Don’t they have books in the future?”
“This is what books used to look like?” I ask, bewildered.
“A hundred or so years ago,” Nari nods. “Dr. Pinkerton collects antiques. First day I got posted to station, he gave me a lecture on preserving the treasures of the past.” She shrugs. “Then he never spoke to me again.”
“This is a book?” Fin blinks. “It’s wrapped in dead animal skin!”
“That’s the way we used to do it.”
Fin raises an eyebrow at me. “You dirtchildren, I swear …”
I smile, looking more around the room. I can see holopics of Pinkerton’s family. There’s a row of potted cacti that must have been lined up against the plexiglass window, but impacts to the station have knocked them all over, and they lie shattered on the ground.
“Who puts spiky plants somewhere they can— Never mind, don’t try and explain,” Fin mutters, carefully circumnavigating them.
A long glass desk sits against one wall, the glowing screen of a personal dataport lighting the gloom.
Zila has already slid into the chair, swiped the passkey through the terminal, and begun typing. Say what you will for humanity’s technological strides over the past two centuries, aside from being way slower, the computer seems to function basically the same. Zila is soon scrolling through menus, hands waving before the sensors, sweeping holographic displays aside in her search for information. Lieutenant Kim stands behind her, looking over her shoulder. Fin’s there too, murmuring advice.
“Attention, Glass Slipper personnel. Hull breach on Decks 13 through 17.”
I stand by the window, looking out at the chaos beyond.
Space is mind-bendingly big. Even the subspace pocket of the Fold is simply too massive for the human brain to wrap itself around. But that storm of dark matter out there is just colossal enough to be terrifying. As I stare out at the pulsing tempest, that same feeling returns—the impression that I’m tiny, insignificant, in too deep and all the way over my head. I think of Tyler. I think of Auri. I even think of Kal. Wondering where they are. Hoping they’re okay.
I turn away from it, too big, too much. Wandering instead through Dr. Pinkerton’s little collection while Zila and Fin keep searching. There’s something comforting about it—relics of a past Terra that have outlived the age they were born in. In a way, these objects are time travelers like us.
I mooch past an old boxy lump of plastic, with a circular number pad and a weird handset. There’s what might be a pistol of some sort, its surface pitted with tiny spots of corrosion. And in a case against the window …
“Holy shit,” I whisper, looking over to the workstation. “Fin?”
“There,” Fin murmurs to Zila. “Try that one.”
“I see it,” she nods.
“Fin!”
He glances up as I call. “Huh?”
“Come look at this.”
He frowns a little, but leaves Zila and Nari to it, stepping out from behind the console and crossing over to me. “What’s up?”
Heart beating wildly, I point to the object inside the case, spinning softly on its beam of zero gravity. A thin, silver, rectangular box. Perfectly mundane. Impossibly familiar.
“Isn’t that … ?”
His big black eyes widen, those pretty lips part in astonishment.
“Maker’s breath … ,” he whispers, looking at me. “That’s the cigarillo case de Stoy and Adams left for Kal in the Dominion vault!”
“Attention, Glass Slipper personnel. All engineering staff report to Gamma Section, Deck 12, immediately.”
“Scarlett,” Zila calls. “Finian, I believe you should look at this… .”
“Zila, you’re not gonna—”
“This is important, Finian.”
We exchange a glance, and I can’t quite seem to catch my breath as we hurry over to Nari and Zila. The pair are still huddled around the terminal, and on the holographic displays hanging in the air in front of Zila, I can see streams of data, glowing in the dark.
Most of it is totally incomprehensible to someone who spent her physics lectures wishing she was anywhere other than a physics lecture, but I can see the folder is titled “Project Glass Slipper.” And illustrated in glowing light above a flurry of unreadable charts is a familiar shape. A chunk of polished stone, teardrop-shaped, cut like a piece of jewelry, a thousand facets for the light to dance on.
A shape I recognize.
“That’s a probe,” I whisper. “That’s an Eshvaren probe!”