During the jump, Skidoo was bathing. More and more, she stayed in the chamber that the Thing had prepared for her, filled with water instead of air, its texture silk on her skin, its warmth welcome. She and the ship talked then, conversations that were not just words but touch and motion and the glide of skin substance against skin substance.
At these moments, she shared memories with the Thing about herself that she had never told the others—what it had been like growing up and knowing herself destined for a particular death, while all the time seeing those around her go to that death, which came with reproduction, with an ease she did not feel. Everyone else seemed to know themselves destined, to feel it in every inch of tentacle, and yet she never experienced that sureness of purpose. They had also been so serious, so dismissive of pleasure.
It was not that she had not been loved. There had been siblings, and cousins, and her beloved mentor, Weyu, who’d taught her rhetoric and communication.
So she made forbidden modifications, left her planet, went into exile, and became a Tlellan unlike other Tlellans. In the intervening years, she had never seen another of her species, although she knew there was a handful of them scattered across the stars.
There were others from her planet on Coralind. Not her species, but ones who knew her species and its special, complex physiology. She had researched and found a medic on Coralind who specialized in such symbiotic relationships, one like the pairing that made her up. It was very important she talk to him: She had a question.
That was another thing, to be going into a future unlike that of most Tlellans. They knew what was to come: that they would mate, and produce offspring, and die in that production.
She had spurned that fate, was making a journey into a future she couldn’t predict. She worried about the state of her craft, the body moving her forward into that future, the body that brought her so much pleasure and joy, the body she lived in so happily. It could fail, this body.
When it first happened, it had been a mere sliver, a moment when her two halves did not communicate and somehow, she was in two places at once and yet not anywhere at all. As though she could exist only in the intersection between her two parts. It terrified her. Since then, there had been two other instances in the space of a year. Nothing predicted those moments; there seemed to be no cause that she could tell.
She was a body with its own rudimentary mind. And she was the mind contained within a watery sack deep inside her, another species that depended on those bodies. What happened to one of those parts if the other failed? That was the question that she carried. She wondered if she would find the answer the hard way.
She coiled herself around the thought and continued. She would not speak of it to the others, or the ship, until she knew better what was happening.
Instead, she reached out and stroked the wall, felt the ship’s created textures, knobby ridges, then a series of waves, letting the tentacle dip in and out of a narrow channel. Lost in the pleasure of touch, she put her worries away.
The ship noticed nothing.
Petalia and Niko encountered each other in a hallway as Niko was headed to the kitchens and Petalia to her own destination. Niko was walking along with her usual determined stride; she turned a corner and almost ran into Petalia, whose own pace was a languorous drift. They avoided each other at the last moment, but both paused.
“I am sorry,” Niko said with reflexive courtesy.
“For what?” murmured Petalia.
“For…” Niko drew a breath and gestured around herself. “For all of this. For your situation … both then and now.”
“Then and now,” Petalia echoed, giving them a bitter edge the originals had not possessed.
“What can I say beyond that?” Niko asked. “Are there any words you are waiting for that I have not spoken, more than once? Will we forever be lost in a sea of my apologies?”
“No. Perhaps no. I don’t know.” Petalia’s face held more sincerity than Niko had seen … since before any of the things that had driven them apart, making Petalia hate and distrust her. They burst out with, “Do you think I find this any more pleasant than you? Do you think I am enjoying myself in ‘all of this,’ as you call it?”
Niko shook her head. “I do not. Where would you be, if you had any choice before you, if I could cast a spell and put you in the place you most desire?”
Petalia’s face shuttered. “On my planet, with all my folk still alive around me.”
The words stabbed Niko precisely as Petalia intended. They relished the pain filling Niko’s face even as they filled with self-loathing for taking such pleasure in someone else’s pain. The Florians were a sweet and empathic people, and nowadays, Petalia felt they no longer retained any part of that, or at least, the only part they kept sat writhing in agony at what they were doing now. Still, that cruel side pressed. “What spell will you cast, Niko, that will bring back an entire planet’s worth of beings?”
“I spoke in what-ifs,” Niko said with stiff formality, then dropped Petalia a nod. “I have duties now,” she said and fled.
Alone, Petalia turned and made a fist, driving it against the wall in their frustration. The surface gave way accommodatingly under their hand.
“Would you like me to pretend you are hurting me?” the ship inquired. It had, as ever, been listening but had not been able to take part, since Niko had forbidden it to take part unless specifically invited. However, it had several strong opinions about Petalia, the majority of them unfavorable.
“Are you being sarcastic?” Petalia accused.
“YES!” The ship felt satisfaction thrill through every fiber of its being. This was much better than hourisigah. Much, much better. It would definitely do more sarcasms in the future.
Petalia said nothing more and turned on their heel. They resumed a drifting pace, but if a drift could ever be said to be angry, it was this one.
Niko insisted on common mealtimes, with exceptions made only for Petalia, who preferred a tray in their room and was accommodated. The Thing had tried to find out why an exception was made in their case, but Niko had been short to the point of snappishness when asked. Everyone else refused to talk about Petalia and Niko with the ship and usually changed the subject immediately.
The meals also gave Dabry a chance to try new dishes, an experimentation that no one objected to. This one featured a dish he’d picked up from a ship at their last Gate, balls of dough into which a savory filling had been injected. The trick was to eat them in one bite, something Atlanta and Milly learned when they tried two bites and found themselves with a burst of contents all over their faces.
Jezli navigated a number of these with finesse. She licked her lips, eyeing the next, and asked, “So Coralind will be in Festival when we get there, eh? How far in?”
“Actually, it won’t,” Niko said. “I’d hoped to skip the opening, which is always the most chaotic moment, but we arrive two days before.”
“Are you truly planning on opening another restaurant there?”
Dabry took the question. “Yes and no. We didn’t buy a festival license early enough—”
“You have to secure them months in advance, to be clear,” Niko said.
Dabry ignored her and continued. “Without that, anything we do has to be unofficial and a bit, er…” He gestured vaguely with a lower hand.
“Illegal,” Niko interpreted. “The trick is to get away with enough profit to outride the potential fine, and even that’s a gamble, because it’s randomly determined.”
“I think I’m going to like Coralind,” Jezli said.
“You’ve never been there?”
“Roxana had, and spoke of it.” The words came easily from Jezli, but the name hit all of them in its own way. Roxana, who had given her life for them, there in the depths of an ancient relic, but had given her mysterious powers to Atlanta, who still did not entirely understand the gift.
Each of them had loved Roxana, somehow, from the first moment they met, but Jezli and Roxana had the most history, years of it, so Jezli’s lightness made Niko look harder at her. The green eyes lifted to meet her own. “I simply wish to visit the famous gardens,” Jezli explained. “Nothing more than that. No sinister intentions, no complicated swindles.”
“Like you had a chance of pulling one over on all of us,” Niko said, leveling a stare across the table.
“Oh, don’t challenge me, Captain, or you might find me quite capable of rising to the occasion.” Jezli took another dumpling.
“Ladies,” Dabry interjected politely but firmly, and they regarded him with irritation. He exchanged looks with Niko, who shrugged and spread her hands. “Very well then,” he said. “Undoubtedly we will all enjoy Coralind, and hopefully make some small but highly profitable trades, and find news of the sort we are seeking.”
“If we want to call ourselves Free Traders, then we must do trade,” Niko said. “If we can do a pop-up, that is excellent, but we may have to resign ourselves to simply taking goods on in order to sell them elsewhere.”
“That takes money,” Dabry said. “Or some sort of collateral. Not to mention fuel and Gate costs to the elsewhere.”
Niko hedged. “I think we have enough, if we’re careful. We made enough at the last Gate with the Second Last Chance—and before you ask, the next one is definitely not going to be named the Third Last Chance—to keep going a little while.”
She didn’t mention that “careful” meant “as tight as possible.” Dabry knew the state of their finances as well as she did. If the insurance money came through—as it surely would—they would be more than fine. But trade flows as trade will, she reminded herself of the old Free Trader maxim.
Still, Coralind, ripe with festivalgoers, all of them hungry? If they could figure out a way to take advantage of that, everything would be smooth, and that would be a pleasant change.
A very pleasant change, to be sure.
The person most delighted by the thought of the Festival was Skidoo. There would be decorations and music and dancing and touching. There would be joy. Enthusing at dinner, she said as much to Milly, but the pastry chef rolled her eyes, forking up a mouthful of Dabry’s latest noodles, tri-striped not just in color but flavor as well, mixing sweet, salty, and savory in each bite.
“Festival is a way of saying ‘spend money,’” Milly said. “You can dress it up however you like, but it’s about making money circulate. The rich sponsor things and thus exchange it for status. Others come from far away and spend at an inflated rate before they go away. Every station has something like Festival, it’s simply because Coralind is so large, and has so many resources, that its Festival has become so famous.”
“There is being new plants for the gardens,” Skidoo enthused. “Some that people is being making, some that people is being discovering and bringing. Imagine!” Staring down at her plate of noodles, Niko thought, in her heart, that Petalia, who once would have blazed with excitement at the thought of something like Festival, was the least excited of them. Niko had often tormented herself with thoughts of what the Florian’s life with Tubal Last had been like. This manifestation, this lack of delight or excitement, was one such moment. What had he done to remove their zest in life? How? More importantly, could it be cured in some way?
Worse than their lack of interest in the Festival—or perhaps a sidestep into just as bad—whenever they could be coaxed from their room for a meal, such as now, Petalia took no joy in food. They drank barley water and ate lozenges of nutrients.
They remained expressionless while eating these, as though satisfaction did not exist as a concept. That hurt Niko. Truth was, food was one of the main ways she expressed her love, by tailoring it to the person, figuring out what would nurture them. When you were a leader, you couldn’t really do that in the same way you could when you ran a kitchen. She would have loved to make Petalia little treats, to coax their appetite, their smiles. Coax any sort of reaction, really.
She looked up from her thoughts to see Jezli regarding her somberly. She braced herself for sarcasm, but Jezli forbore, saying nothing, but giving Niko a sardonic nod that might have been sympathetic from anyone else.
Petalia said sharply, “Is there an organized plan other than go frolic at a Festival?”
“Beside the fact that you yourself mentioned it as part of Tubal Last’s net of contacts, I am going to see that old friend from my military days,” Niko said, twisting noodles around her fork with deliberate care.
“They work at the station now?”
“In a sense, they are the station now,” she said.
Petalia sniffed. “Another biomachine, like your ship?” The ship filed the remark away in its lengthy list of reasons of why it did not like Petalia.
“They were once a brain in an organic body, and now that brain resides in another body.”
“Your Holy Hive Mind produced abomination after abomination.”
“On that you have no disagreement from me!” Niko said with a curtness she rarely employed, setting down her fork. Hearing the edge in her voice, she chided herself. There was no point in letting the Florian rattle her this hard. While at least Petalia had given off being sullen and swoony, this new, argumentative Petalia was an equally unpleasant companion.
Proving themself such, Petalia pushed harder. “But you joined them. You knew what they were before you signed with them.”
“Do you understand the concept of no choice?” Niko snapped, regretting the words the moment they left her mouth.
Petalia smiled. They had scored a point in a long-standing game that occupied their mind whenever dealing with Niko. “Yes.”
They let all the years of forced companionship to the sadistic pirate ring in that single word.
Niko bit her lip and turned away. The rest of the meal was subdued and Petalia said nothing as they left. They should have felt triumphant, Petalia told themself. Let Niko know that she remained unforgiven for all those unrescued years. The edge of sweetness in the moment crumbled away as they tried to savor it, and what was left was very bitter.