Cracking the Sky (21 page)

SECOND SHIFT

Kami closed her eyes
and replayed Lance’s tender whisper. “I love you.”

Three words filled her. She listened again and again, memorizing the rise and fall of his voice. Glancing at the clock, she stripped the bud off her ear and pocketed it, afraid the temptation to hear him yet another time would take the tiniest bit of glow from the night.

Being this happy was as new as a dawn, as fresh as becoming an adult three years ago. Maybe it was even as good as being born in the first place. Her bones smiled.

Stupid. She knew it was stupid, knew Lance was a lifetime away from her and that every time she came on shift to be his company, his rocket companion, he was further away.

The HR girl who hired her had told her not to do this.

She liked the rebellion in it. It was only a small rebellion anyway, since her contract was good as long as Lance approved of her and the job existed.

Besides, she hadn’t
done
it. Not really. Love happened, right? The long nights sitting alone and talking, or even listening to the silence of his sleeping breath had surprised her into love, delighted her in a way she hadn’t expected.

Right on time, Sulieyan opened the door and started her morning routine. She plugged in an electric pot to heat water and opened the cupboard for tea. “Do you want a cup?”

Kami shook her head, hoping she didn’t look as giddy as she felt.

“No? Anything I need to know? Was the night sweet?”

She always asked that way, but this morning Kami felt her cheeks grow hot. “Sure. He’s asleep now.”

Sulieyan smiled at the unnecessary observation. The monitors on the walls relentlessly reported whether Lance slept or woke, exercised, ate, or worked.

Kami picked up her empty lunchbag, and gave the older woman a brief hug. “Gotta go.”

An hour after she got home, she pulled on her running clothes and practically danced down the metal steps outside of her apartment complex. She jogged through the bright tunnel under the maglev tracks and emerged in the park, her feet springy with her mantra for the morning “
Lance Parker
loves me. Lance Parker
loves
me. Lance Parker loves
me
.”

When she couldn’t take another step, she sat on the little beach by the koi pond, running sand through her fingers and making a tiny house as if she and Lance would ever live in it. The tragedy and impossibility of it all sang in her, as if she were the star in a Saturday night film.

There were other pilots—men and women—doing solo trips to the moon and back. That’s how the need for rocket companions came up in the first place. All the things about the flight and safety were handled by AIs, but computers weren’t companions.

None of the other solos had been famous test pilots and race-jet drivers first, and none of them was set to go as far. The prize was the rocks themselves; towing them back to the station being built above the Earth could make a lot of money—if it could be done on a shoestring.

The next night, Kami told Lance she loved him back. It was the first time she’d said the words. To seal them, she told him about the park and the koi pond and the little bite of fall in the air as she ran, about the one time a single gold leaf fell in front of her.

“Tell me what the air smelled like?” he asked.

His must be stale and metallic. “It smelled like water and sunshine and insects and the sand along the water. It smelled like the maglev when it sang by, and once of a wet dog that I almost tripped over.” Because she couldn’t think of anything else, she said, “It smelled like the promise of talking to you again.”

She hadn’t thought a smile was something you could hear.

“What are you doing today?”

“The air system filters need to be cleaned and changed. Fifty sit-ups and twenty pull-ups and a long trip round the world on the elliptical. And I’m working on a secret.”

“A secret?”

His secret was a poem written to her. He sent it back with his day’s records. Kami blushed when she realized the techs must have seen it. She posted it on the wall in her kitchen so she could read it every morning.

All the next year, she noticed smells and sounds in as many ways as she could, speaking descriptions into her wrist-recorder. The sun warm as a sleeping dog, the tiny perfection of the yellow in the center of a magenta azalea, the paper flutter of dogwood snow against her cheek. It became a game to come to Lance every night and give him a new description at the beginning of every shift.

*

Kami read about Lance with morning coffee after she left him to Sulieyan when they changed shifts. Tidbits. Things he said back to scientists and journalists and rock stars who wanted to know what it was like to be the first man heading to an asteroid.

She had meant this for a short job, a dalliance with the romance of rockets.

By her twenty-fifth year—her third with him—it grew harder to find Lance in the news. But not impossible. She followed others who followed him from around the world, little audible alarms that burred against her wrist to remind her he was real and alive. She followed his conversations and the conversations others had about him. The fact that the he was not entirely a forgotten hero touched her in each nerve.

She slept and ran and did laundry and surfed the nets, and late in every day she went to spend the night with Lance. What work to be with your beloved? She read him stories and he wrote her poems. She told him of beads of water on lacy spring-green leaves the size of her smallest fingernail and the brilliance of sun-struck snow on far mountains.

Noticing the world for him became habit, like green tea steeped for exactly three minutes and like running in the park and chanting his name as her feet hit the ground one after the other. When the distance built in a tiny time delay, she used the seconds to contemplate her next words.

Every morning, when she and Sulieyan shared cross-shift data over tea in the neglected break room, the older woman asked her about her plans for the day.

Kami said she would run through the park and she would find something beautiful. Tea with Sulieyan made a zen transition in her day and gave her someone else to talk to besides Lance.

On one of those mornings, Sulieyan said, “There is almost no rebellion in you anymore.”

“I am in love.”

“Are you?”

“Of course. I think of Lance all the time.”

“Can you be in love with someone you can’t touch?”

“Aren’t your parents in India and hasn’t it been five years since you touched them?”

Sulieyan nodded, and smiled, and sipped her tea. Kami couldn’t really read her face so she decided Sulieyan agreed with her.

When she took the job, Kami had been told that travel to the asteroid belt was a story of slow ships and far-away places.

One September evening after she and Lance shared a meal together (using the valuable virt screen that he bargained for with free interviews when he could get them), he told her, “I never expected to get back. It’s not like a government ship or anything, or the long arm of the taxpayer. They chose me because I was willing to sign papers that said no one would sue them, ever, if anything happened. The company may stay alive for the fifteen or twenty years it will take, they may not. They could get sold or go bankrupt or a key player could die and then where will all the publicity and money go? A faster ship could get built and pass me and come home before I even get to the belt.”

“Why did you go?” she whispered, although she would never have known him if he hadn’t. He was famous and she was a shift-girl at a two-bit rocket company with no real fame except for Lance and this trip.

“I was lonely, so I didn’t care if I came back.”

She held her breath.

“And now I’m not lonely any more, but I’m no more likely to get back.”

She had known he might never come back, but the knowing felt deeper after he said it to her. Running was harder, and sometimes she stopped and bent nearly in two and heaved air sour with longing to hold him.

He almost never cried or seemed sad, except sometimes she heard those things in his smiling voice, pale as the whispers of wind against her cheek in the early morning on days she wanted to hold him so much she couldn’t sleep through the afternoon heat. But some nights the loneliness piled up on him, so heavy she could see his shoulders struggle to bear it and his head bend under the weight. He would only talk about it a few times a year. Although she didn’t ask him why, Kami thought it was for her, so she wouldn’t feel his loneliness so hard that it drove her to stop coming to him every early evening with her dinner in a brown bag and a cup of hot chai clutched in her hand, and a bit of memory from her day on her tongue.

Once, in spring when Kami looked forward to the first ornamental cherry blossoms against a blue sky, she patted Sulieyan on the shoulder and wished her good luck with the sleepy day shift, and walked away from work. It had been a tender night and she ached with emptiness. It was not yet morning, even though spears of light from the solar collectors beamed power down onto the city, a sign of coming true-dawn.

She liked this quiet time, the pad of her footsteps soft on the soft sidewalks, the first birds rustling and warming their throats, the cool nip that would fade early this time of year. Far away from her, Lance would be settling in to sleep through day shift, his way of choosing her.

A dark shadow separated from a dark wall and came toward her.

She clutched her backpack close.

“Kami,” the voice said.

“Do I know you?”

He shook his head. “No. But you could.”

He was getting close enough to reach for her. She took a few steps away, keeping some space between them. She started to stretch her calves, getting ready to run if she had to, watching him closely.

He stopped. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You did.”

“Not. I mean, I didn’t mean it.”

She shook her head and let herself relax a little bit. “Who are you?”

“I want to interview you.”

She blinked stupidly at him. Her contract didn’t let her do interviews, and Lance never talked about her to others. She and Lance were each other’s secret. The company knew, of course. Techs that supported the connection. Sulieyan.

She liked being invisible.

“I’m Hart. I’m also Sulieyan’s grandson.”

Oh. “I’m probably too old for you.”

It felt like an awkward thing for her to have said, but he laughed. “No. She started young. Why else would she still be working at dead end jobs?”

As if that was a bad thing. Kami said nothing.

“Grandma got pregnant when she was nineteen and had to drop out of vet school.”

She should know more about Sulieyan than her patience and her way of making tea and that she never missed a shift. But Kami could think about that later. “Why do you want to interview me?”

“Because my grandmother said it might teach us both something about love.”

Now
he had startled her. Her voice shook. “We can have coffee together.”

In the too-bright light of Morning Blend, Hart looked far less threatening than he had as a dark silhouette in a place she expected silence from. He remained dark on dark, dark hair and dark slightly almond eyes over dark skin. He had a broad smile, and he looked both totally earnest and as uncomfortable as she felt.

After they’d ordered coffee and scones and sat down across from each other at a window table, he didn’t seem to know how to begin.

“Who do you want to interview me for?” she asked.

He looked down. “I blog at Celebrity Love.”

She couldn’t stop herself from wrinkling up her nose.

He saw it, and he laughed, brittle. “I’m trying a small column about relationships we don’t usually see. I’ve done two of them, and I want to do a third. Grandma told me you have the best invisible relationship in the world.”

“Why do I want to be interviewed for a place frequented by teenage crushes?” She took a sip of her coffee, savored the bitterness. “Why do you write for
them
?”

He shrugged. “What else do you do with an English degree?”

“Does it pay more than teaching?”

“No.”

“So why?”

“It’s writing. It’s what I want to do, what I love. I’ll get better jobs. But for now I have to do this one well.”

“Shhhh . . . don’t be defensive.” She imagined him sitting at home working on novels. She didn’t want to do the interview, but he was looking at her so expectantly, and she hadn’t done anything different in a year. Maybe two. God. More. “What do you want to ask me?”

“Is it true? Grandma says you love a man you’ve never met and never held and never will see, and she says you are so loyal it’s got to be true love.”

She’d thought of it as a miracle. Famous Ship’s Captain loves a pretty little nobody. She looked into Hart’s eyes and she didn’t know how to answer him. She couldn’t do an interview. “It’s private.”

“Do you love him?”

Whatever she said, Lance could see it someday. Strange things got sent to the ship, the choices made by people she didn’t know. Being asked about her feelings made them seem as if they couldn’t be real. She fought dizziness by putting her palms flat on the table and taking a deep breath. “I can’t, I’m sorry.” She’d gotten her coffee to go, maybe out of instinct, and he had a white porcelain cup in front of him. She grabbed her cup, taking her pastry naked into her hand and said, “Look—this isn’t for the world. I’m sorry. Good luck.”

Ten minutes later she shut her door behind her, sank to the floor, and finished her breakfast, spilling white crumbs on her chocolate brown carpet. Lance loved her. That’s what she sang when she ran. And she loved him; she loved hearing his voice every time she worked, she loved laughing with him about small things, collecting the world for him and whispering of leaves and beetles and babies.

She changed everything about her routine except where she lived. She ran in a greenbelt with a long quiet path that was nearly always empty except for a few old women from nearby apartments walking dogs.

One Tuesday at midday, she stopped by a small bronze statue of a curious deer by a stream where no real deer ever came any more. She was running her hands across the nose, registering the feel of petting bronze, noticing that even though it was cold she felt like it might move under her fingers.