Triz drifted downward from Justice, first across the open escalators down to the Arcade, and then around each spiraling level, past the ‘shine sellers with their sputtering still and the sizzling griddles of fatty sausages and flatbreads, past strings of beads and squares of shimmering scalecloth. Usually, any spare time to browse the Arcade would be a welcome holiday, but right now, every step raised her blood pressure. Unbelievable, that everyone else went on with their lives while Casne was pinned in Justice above.
And yet when she reached the lowest level of the Arcade, Triz gravitated to a lift and fobbed in a request to be carried downhab. The wrenchworks exerted as much pull on her as the local star did to the Hab. The wrenchworks was a place where she always knew which end was up. Everything was up when you hung out at the bottom of the Hab all the time.
But when the lift doors opened, Triz found she wasn’t alone. Quelian had stripped the warped plastiglass from the cockpit of a Skimmer. The plastiglass reformed its original shape after an impact or even a puncture, but when overheated by the superheated blast of a plasma cannon, the substructure memory of its original architecture was destroyed. He’d begun to paint a layer of sealant on the cockpit frame to prepare it for the replacement.
The soft swish of the lift doors closing behind Triz made him look up and push his goggles to his forehead. “Good, you’re here. Losing the morning’s got us behind schedule, and the bursar will want a discount for every day, every minute we delay in getting these things back to them.”
Triz walked to the wallmount, picked up a wrench, and turned it back and forth in her hand. She was tempted to take the wrench to the discarded piece of plastiglass, but of course, the whole point of plastiglass was that it wouldn’t break except under a level of stress much greater than an angry mechanic could produce. “Is that what you’re worried about?” she asked. “Having to offer the Fleet a discount?”
Quelian set the sealant hose aside and leaned on the nose of the Skimmer with both hands. His face showed no emotion, but a telltale flush of his forehead betrayed him. “What should I be doing? Tearing my clothes, screaming and wailing? Should I smear my face with mourning paint and say my prayers over the recycler hatch?”
“She’s not dead.” Triz replaced the wrench and chose a bolt extractor instead, which she carried over to Kalo’s fighter. She remembered the conversation with Nan and the thought of Kalo calling her like he was practically a part of their family still burned her. The cold core at the heart of that fire whispered: Maybe they’d rather have him in their gon than me. No—she shrugged off that selfish thought. At least someone had remembered Nan.
But she’d rather get Kalo’s Skimmer back in fighting trim and have him out of her hair sooner than later, especially if the alternative was him haunting her for the next week. The respiration cells on the shitting thing weren’t letting air flow through; Triz hated greenwork but even starfighter pilots needed to breathe. She climbed atop the Swarmer, just behind the cockpit, and began to work the paneling above the cells loose. “She’s in Justice. Stop acting like they’re the same.”
“I’d ask you to stop acting like you can see stars between the two.” Quelian pounded on the Skimmer’s wing. The impact sent the sealant hose skittering away; it crashed to the ground beneath the fighter and he barked a curse. He dropped down heavily beside the fallen hose. “I know how you feel about each other.” The absence of the word love there sent supernova sparks up behind Triz’s eyes. “But she’s not the same woman who left Vivik, and that’s something we all have to come to terms with.”
Triz wrenched the paneling free, and a barked laugh came along with it. Now here was something she could do for Casne: throw herself on the grenade of Quelian’s anger. “That’s what this is all still about? She was never going to take over the wrenchworks. She never had the sense for a busted ship, let alone the ins and outs of every make and model that comes through here.” It felt good to say the things to Quelian that she’d balanced on the tip of her tongue for years. Maybe a little too good. Was her anger for Casne’s benefit or her own? She frowned and started working the algae cells free from their frame. “Isn’t that why you keep me around? Because you needed a spare?”
“Don’t turn this around on me.” Quelian threw the hose back up over the top of the fighter but didn’t follow it up. “My daughter made her decisions. You not liking how they came out doesn’t erase them.”
Triz’s tongue worked its way out between her teeth as she ripped off panels; now she bit it hard. “And you not liking them doesn’t make a war crime out of a rough goodbye!” Each algae cell she pulled free was brown, and their gelatinous enclosures were hardened from their usually soft state. Too dry? She flipped the frame over to check the intake and found it crusted over reddish-brown. Flakes fell away when her fingertips brushed against the ragged coating; she let the cell frame fall back against the Skimmer as she crawled forward and into the open cockpit.
Her work gloves dropped into her lap as her bare fingers searched the smooth, cold interior of the plastiglass cockpit shell. Ah: there it was. Someone untrained in the arts of the wrenchworks might not have been able to find it, but yes, a small, irregular dimple marked the place where the plastiglass had slowly closed back around a puncture. Some piece of microdebris or shrapnel had penetrated the cockpit. She turned to kneel against the pilot’s seat; someone had scrubbed this side of the air return intake clean, but she could see more ragged crust peeking through from the other side. Her heart hammered in her ears. The knot of frustration tying up her guts over the past months unraveled: not in relief, but in a wild expansion that balled up in her fists and closed off her throat.
The algae cells had died because the air intake was blocked by dried blood.
“Triz!” The banging of her heart echoed back from the wrenchworks. She blinked. Quelian was pounding the hose nozzle against the Skimmer’s fuselage. He stopped only when she fixed him with a hollow stare. “Have you heard a single word I’ve said?”
“I’ve heard plenty.” She unwound herself from the cockpit and slid over the side of the fighter to the floor. She didn’t land as neatly as Quelian, catching herself with one hand on the fuselage before she could fall. “I’m sorry I’m not her. If that’s what you’re wishing. If I were the one locked up in a Justice cell, she’d be doing everything she could to get me out. She wouldn’t hole up here in the works wishing things were different. So I guess I’m going to do what she would.” Turning her back on Kalo’s Skimmer and on Quelian too, she let herself stride back toward the lift.
“Don’t you walk away from this wrenchworks!” Quelian shouted. “Veling is a recycling engineer, not the shitting owner of this place. I am, and she doesn’t get to give you a bereavement day to roll around moaning.”
“Then I quit.” Triz mashed the lift call button with her knuckles and kept her back to Quelian as she waited. Better not to see his face just now. Maybe the other quadparents would try to walk her words back later; maybe they wouldn’t be able to. At this moment Triz didn’t really care one way or another. “I’ll be back for my stuff later. Right now, I’m going to go save your daughter.”
Anger or shock leached the strength from Quelian’s words. They ripped ragged out of him and fluttered helplessly, begging for Triz’s attention. “If you walk out of here now, you won’t get the wrenchworks when I kick on. I’ve got more than enough time to train up another wrench and if you don’t think there’s a dozen pups on this Hab who would jump at the chance—”
“Then I’ll take my luck waiting around to see who PubWel and the Distribution Council choose to hand the works over to.” Triz shrugged, a tight little jerk of the shoulders that cranked up her tension rather than releasing it. “If not, I’ll hitch a ride to some other Hab.” The thought of launching herself out there—out into that bottomless darkness—of long empty days unmoored from any Hab, sent a tremor down her spine.
“I like my odds,” she finished.
Something heavy crashed behind her, metal yelping against metal. “Over my dead body!”
“Maybe.” Triz tried to shrug and failed. “Or maybe the Council will redistribute early if I give them a reason to think the wrenchworks would do better under new ownership.” Finally, the lift doors opened. Triz turned as she entered.
Quelian’s eyes watered in his flushed face; she’d really pissed him off this time. Triz drank that down and found it tasted good, despite the skim of guilt floating on top.
“Remember,” Triz said. “You’re the one who walked away first. Not from the wrenchworks. From everything that really matters.”
The doors closed between them, and Triz waited until she was two levels up before she slammed both fists against the hard metal of the lift door.