Chapter 5: Forty-Eight Hours

The communications array took him four hours and cost him the skin on three of his knuckles.

I watched him work. There wasn’t much else to do — my technical skills ran to weapons systems and navigation, not the archaeological resurrection of forty-year-old broadcasting equipment, and he’d made clear in the polite way he made most things clear that hovering didn’t help. So I sat against the wall with the medical kit and the data chip and the sound of him problem-solving aloud in the half-dark, and I watched.

He talked to the equipment when he thought I wasn’t listening. Not conversation — more like negotiation. Come on. There you are. No, not that one. The voice he used was different from the voice he used with me. Looser. Unguarded in the way people are when they believe they’re alone.

I didn’t tell him I could hear everything.

When the array came live — a sputter, a hiss, then the clean carrier tone of an active transmission channel — he made a sound I hadn’t heard from him before. Pure, unguarded relief, shapeless and brief, and then he was already composing the distress signal with the same focused efficiency he brought to everything else.

The response came forty minutes later.

A freighter. Independent registry, the kind of ship that asked few questions of the kind we couldn’t answer. Forty-eight hours out. The captain’s voice was flat and professional and the most beautiful thing I’d heard in five days.

Ashton gave our coordinates and broke transmission. Turned to me.

We looked at each other across the width of the room.

Forty-eight hours. Three days. And then a ship, and new names, and a future that bore no resemblance to anything either of us had planned when we woke up six days ago.

“Forty-eight hours,” he said.

“Yes.”

He crossed to where I sat and lowered himself to the floor beside me, close enough that his shoulder met mine, and we stayed like that for a while in the facility’s thin emergency light. Outside, the jungle moved through whatever passed for evening on Sanctuary 7, and the communications array hummed quietly behind us, and neither of us said anything because the silence had stopped being empty sometime in the last five days and had become instead a language we both spoke.

“What do you want?” he asked. “After.”

I considered the question seriously, the way he’d taught me to consider things — not the first answer, which was trained reflex, but the one underneath it. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’ve wanted things inside a structure for so long I’m not sure I know how to want things without one.”

“That’s honest.”

“I’m learning to be.”

He turned his head and looked at me, and I looked back, and the distance between us was the same distance it had been for five days and was also, in some way I couldn’t map with military precision, considerably smaller.

“I want to make sure the logs reach someone who can use them,” I said. “That comes first.”

“Agreed.”

“And I want—” I stopped.

He waited. He was very good at waiting.

“I want to know what I am without the rank,” I said. “I’ve been Captain Sira Velryth since I was twenty-two years old. I want to know what’s underneath that.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I’ve had some opportunity to observe what’s underneath that.”

“And?”

“She’s someone worth knowing.”