Page 25 of Crave
“A memorial,” Sil said. “A memory of the light.” Sometimes an echo was all that remained. Like what he’d have of Kinsley once she left.
“Yes.” Glimmers danced through the crystal. “Sing into the dark.”
Chapter 9
Following Roxy’s updated route, they made their way to the center of the interference field. Kinsley watched Sil closely. After the rock had revealed its intent to them, he’d been almost silent, withdrawn.
Cold, dark, lonely.
She pushed away the memory that wasn’t her own. Except it wasn’tnother own, was it?
No, she wasn’t going to think about that at all.
“Why is it bothering you?”
He didn’t look over at her. “Nothing’s bothering me.” He huffed out a breath. “Other than having stolen a shuttle and bringing it through the remains of a space battle of unknown origin and conclusion, not to mention—”
“Yeah. It’s bothering you,” she said. “Roxy is only asking you to do something you already intended to try.”
“I was just going to collect some interesting molecules,” he countered. “Mining some space dust, which is what theDeepWanderhas always done to stay alive. And yes, maybe I was going to show that I had something special to offer, to add something no other orc could. But preserving a memory…” He shuddered. “I felt it fall apart, the light going out.”
His distress revived the memories she was trying to repress. And every impulse within her demanded she return to that silence and distance.
Cold, dark, lonely.
The shuttle made slow progress, navigating around huge obstacles many times larger than their ship while dust hissed around them.
“TheDeepWanderusually works in asteroid fields, planetesimal disks, and circumstellar belts around solar systems,” Sil said. “This appears to be the remains of an interstellar object, perhaps a wandering exocomet.”
Kinsley peered at the screens in front of him. “Does it matter?”
“Just that extrasolar bodies and trajectories often correlate with rare materials.” He glanced back. “Like Roxy itself. Maybe its origin was cometary, or perhaps the collision that broke apart its original mass became a comet.”
Though the temperature in the cabin never fluctuated, Kinsley wrapped her arms around herself. “Poor Roxy. I suppose there’s a scientifically measurable correlation between rare and lonely too.”
He was still fiddling with his screens, but his antennae angled toward her. “I thought Roxy was able to communicate with you and Oliver because of anomalies in your universal translators: Ollie’s because he is a hatchling and yours because I had to rig up a nonstandard device. But I think now that’s not the only reason.”
When he paused, as if letting her fill in the blank, she wanted to let the expectation hang, unanswered. But why? What was she hiding anymore that mattered to anyone?
Still, she tightened her grip on herself. “I might have some experience with being alone, yeah.” Looking out at the starscape somehow made it easier to speak. “But maybe compared to all that nothingness, my wandering path isn’t so fucked up after all.”
He sat back, his opalescent gaze steady on her. “Maybe you just haven’t yet fixed upon your destination.”
The silence stretching between them wasn’t cosmic, and they both had translators. But she didn’t answer.
The ping of the shuttle’s proximity alarm startled them both.
“We’re here,” Sil said.
But was this really her destination—or just another mistake?
***
“Just breathe normally.”
“Sure. Because hyperventilating is the part that’s not normal in this situation.”
Sil’s soft rumble of orc laughter reached her, not through the exo-suit comm but in vibrations of all his hands that were checking the fit and seal of her suit.
