Corvai'shala'renvitho — "Shalare"
The Renvitho Archive Enclave, Sixth Terrace, beneath Csaplar — Csilla
I had been counting them since midyear. Three, for most of the winter cycle. One at my left temple, two hidden in the heavy part of my hair behind the ear where nobody could see them unless they were the one doing the braiding. Four now. This one was worse than the others because it wasn't hiding. It ran from my part down along the right side, a single thread of silver against black, catching the glow lamp and throwing it back at me like a filament of cold wire.
I sat very still on the edge of my bunk and looked at it in the mirror.
Any other Chiss girl in the Ascendancy would have been delighted. Silver is a mark of distinction. The child of a graying parent will move the world, the old saying goes — every matron in Csaplar with a streak in her hair wears it the way a Syndic wears a collar-piece, and my grandmother had hers lacquered into place with gold pins every morning of her life. Silver means you have lived long enough to matter.
For an ozyly-esehembo it means something else entirely.
It means the fade has started. It means the Third Sight is packing up its things.
I let out a slow breath through my nose, the way Divessa taught me when I was nine and prone to breaking things, and I kept brushing. Fourteen and a half. Thalias of the Mitth lost hers at thirteen, and they still talk about it in the corps like a bad omen. Sah'Zya kept hers past twenty and they talk about that like a miracle. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle, and the middle is where I am and mine has an ending.
I made sure to do all eighty strokes. Then I got up and dressed because Divessa was coming, and Divessa has opinions about being greeted by a girl in her sleep shift.
Semi-formal, because it was a corps review day and because I am — technically, according to a great deal of paperwork my birth-house pays lawyers to argue about — a daughter of Renvitho. The corps says a sky-walker belongs to no family, that the corps says we are unfamilied until the Sight leaves us and some house takes us in as a merit adoptive like a prize brought home from a hunt. House Renvitho says I was born theirs in a Sixth Terrace birthing hall with the Archive seal already on my record, and that no bureaucrat with a fleet commission gets to strike a line out of their ledgers. Renvitho keeps the records of every family in the Ascendancy. Renvitho is very good at insisting things are written down correctly.
The underlayer went first, close woven the deep near black that reads as charcoal in lamplight and as violet in daylight, though there hasn't been daylight over the city in years. Then the tabard, cut to the hip colored Archive red. Not the loud arterial red of the fleet trim but the older, duller more expensive red, the color of banked coals. Gold on the hairband, which I set behind the fresh silver strand rather than over it, and then I moved it and then I put it back where it had been and told myself I was being ridiculous.
There was a scar on my cheekbone small, pale blue-on-blue, from a thruster housing that had come loose during a rough insertion two rotations ago. Divessa had wanted the medics to erase it but I had said no. She'd looked at me for a long moment and then said fine, in the voice she uses when she has decided to let me win something small in order to bank credit for something large.
Nine minutes of dressing. Then I stopped because I wanted to know how long I had.
There's a clock above my door. Plain black face with luminous ticks, because the corps does not believe in a sky-walker who can't read time to the second. I sat back down on the bunk putting my hands flat on my knees and let go.
The room stayed where it was and also went thin. I watched the light from the corridor slit change as the terrace cycled to third-shift amber. I watched a maintenance droid pass the door and not stop. I watched the numbers on the clock climb, and climb and I held on to nothing at all, and then the door opened and Divessa came through it, and I read the clock over her shoulder at the moment she crossed the threshold.
Fifteen minutes. Fifteen and perhaps forty seconds, but the corps grades to the minute and I have never once been wrong to the minute.
I let it go. The room came back solid, the way a breath comes from waking up.
The clock above my door read four seconds later than when I'd started.
I had time to start something.
The desk is bolted to the wall under the ventilation grate, which means the whole surface hums at a frequency I've stopped hearing. I woke the terminal and the Archive glyph rotated once — Renvitho's sigil, the seven-rayed collar-piece that every Renvitho matron wears in miniature at her throat — and then dissolved into the corps course work, which has no house sigil at all.
[NAVIGATION THEORY — # 7. PLOT A THREE-LEG STANDARD JUMP. ORIGIN: CSILLA. TERMINUS: COPERO. SHOW ALL MASS-SHADOW CORRECTIONS. NAVICOMPUTER PERMITTED AND EXPECTED.]
I pulled up the astrogation frame and started.
First leg: Csilla out to the Rentor junction, because you never jump straight off the homeworld's gravity well and any instructor who sees you try it will fail you on principle. I fed the navicomputer the departure vector and let it chew. The unit in a training desk is a decade old and it thinks about things. Numbers assembled themselves in the frame — the shadow of Csilla itself, then the dead moon, then the whole miserable smear of a debris field that nobody has ever cleared because clearing it would cost more than routing around it.
Correction. Correction. Correction to the correction, because the field given with the question and the tables are eighteen months stale.
The second leg I was halfway through the final approach solution, tongue between my teeth, when the door opened.
I hadn't looked up at the clock. I didn't need to.
Divessa came in the way she always does — the doorway first, then all the rest of her, because Prard'ivessa'omli is a tall woman and the enclave was carved for shorter generations. Court robes which meant she'd been up at the Terrace level arguing with someone on my behalf. The long dark underdress falling straight to the floor, the crimson overrobe drawn across one shoulder and down over the arm in that heavy diagonal sweep the old houses still wear, the fabric worked in a pattern so fine you only see it when she moves with a bright light.
She has been my caregiver for five years. Most of us go through most caregivers in eighteen months. I have had exactly one.
Her eyes went to the assignment first then to me, then to the hairband, then she did not let her emotions or thoughts show.
"Ch'a vah, Shalare" she said. Good evening. Then, in Basic, because she says my Cheunh has gotten lazy and Basic is the punishment: "You're dressed and working. Before I arrived."
"You took the long way" she said.
"The machine has to."
"Yes" Divessa said. "It does."
And she put one hand on my shoulder and did not say anything at all about my hair.
Divessa didn't move her hand for a moment. Then she did and straightened, and I felt the shape of the room change before she said a word. She has a particular stillness she gets when she's carrying something official. It's like watching a door close somewhere down a long corridor.
"Save your work" she said.
"It's autosaved."
"Save it anyway."
I saved it and as soon as it was processed Divessa was speaking.
"The Patriarch and the Matriarch have requested your presence"
I didn't say anything at first. In Basic you'd render those titles as lord and lady, which is what the Imperials say when they come through, and which is wrong in the way most translations are wrong — it makes it sound like a matter of blood and land. It isn't. A Patriarch is the person who holds the ledger. In House Renvitho that is not a metaphor.
"Requested" I repeated.
"Requested." Divessa's mouth did something very small. "It's the word they used. I'm passing it on as given."
"When?"
"Now."
I got up. My hands wanted something to do, so I gave them the last piece of dressing — the band, from the shallow tray on the shelf above my bunk where I keep the four things I own that aren't corps issue.
It's a slender thing. A cord of worked gold, fine as wire, meant to run back through the hair above the ear on both sides and hold the front of it flat. Set at the center, where it sits against the forehead just below the hairline, is a swept silver glyph — two wings folded outward from a narrow spine, the old Renvitho record-mark, the sign a Sixth Terrace archivist used to strike into a page to say this account is closed and true. Below the glyph, on a hair-thin chain, hangs a single small gold star. It has no meaning at all. My mother put it there when I was four because I liked stars, and every archivist in the enclave has considered it an offense against the design ever since.
I set the cord, seated the glyph, felt the little star settle cold against my skin.
I did not check the mirror to see where the silver strand had ended up.
"Ready," I said.
_________________________________________________
The Sixth Terrace runs three kilometers from the ventilation stacks to the deep archive, and all of it was carved not built. Csilla went under the ice thousands of years ago and the Chiss went under with it, and everything we have since made we have made by taking stone away rather than piling it up. You can feel that in the atmosphere when you walk into the older buildingsa.The walls curve where a lesser people would have cornered because a corner is a stress point and stone remembers being cut. Glowlamps run at hip height in a continuous recessed channel, so the light comes from below and the ceilings stay dark and the whole enclave feels like a place you are walking into rather than through. Somewhere under the floor geothermal exchangers thump at intervals slow enough that you learn to breathe on them.
Divessa walked half a pace ahead. Court robes make a sound on Renvitho stone like a dry sweep of a broom.
I looked at the art because there was nothing else to look at and because art deserves to be seen by anyone with a reason to be in the corridor. That's a house doctrine. A record no one reads is a record that has already been destroyed.
The first art piece sat at the junction was the relief of the Descent, cut directly into the corridor wall a thousand years ago and left unpolished, so the tool marks show. Figures going down. Not fleeing — the artist was very careful about that — walking, in ordered file, carrying things. A woman at the front of the line carries a case of data-slates and nothing else. Not food. Not a child. Slates. Renvitho commissioned it, so of course she does.
Then the long gallery, where they keep the pieces that came up out of the pre-Ice strata: a bowl of hammered blue metal that nobody has been able to date, three panels of some pigment work so faded the surviving image is only a suggestion of a horizon, and a single carved figure the size of my hand, faceless, that has been in Renvitho keeping for eleven hundred years and about which the house's official position is we do not know. I have always liked that one enormously. An entire family of record-keepers, and the best they can put on the placard is an honest shrug.
And then, past the second set of stairs, the panels.
There are forty-one of them. Thirty are blank smooth rectangles of dark stone set flush into the wall, unmarked, unlit, each one about the size of a doorway. The first eleven have names on them, and the names have been ground out so thoroughly that all that remains is a shallow trough where letters used to be, and the trough has been polished to a shine by a thousand years of Renvitho hands touching it in passing.
That is what happens when a family line is struck. That is what Renvitho does. Some house somewhere fails, or shames itself, or backs the wrong argument in the Syndicure, and the erasure is voted, and the actual grinding out of the name happens here, in this corridor, by our people, with our tools.
After passing the final slate the small side room appeared. It was a reading room not a hall, which told me something before the door even opened. Four chairs. A low table of black stone. A single glowbar over the table, angled down so that the light pooled and the corners stayed dim.
Divessa stopped at the threshold and did not come in.
They stood when I entered. That, too, told me something.
"Corvai'shala'renvitho" said the Patriarch.
"Corvai'thel'renvitho" I said. "Corvai'liri'renvitho."
"Corvai'shala'renvitho" said the Matriarch.
Full names, all three of us, every syllable, the way you address a stranger or an inferior or someone whose standing relative to yours has not been formally established. There is a version of life where a girl in this room would say father and mother and get Shala back. That version requires all three people to belong to the same family, and one of us doesn't.
Nobody moved for a beat too long. My father gestured at a chair, and I sat then him and my mother sat last, arranging the fall of her overrobe with the unhurried precision of a woman who had rehearsed something and was now stalling in front of it.
"You've grown" the Patriarch said.
"Yes."
That exhausted the small talk between us. It usually does. It took him another moment to find the other thing, and when he found it, he took it in both hands.
"There is a mission" he said. "It requires a sky walker. It requires you specifically. And it requires that you go before you stop being one."
I kept my face where it was.
My mouth turned down. Only slightly. Only at the corners. I felt it happen and I could not stop it, and both of them saw it, and both of them had the decency to look at the table.
"Outside Ascendancy space" I said.
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"Long enough" the Matriarch said "that the question of your Sight will have answered itself."
There it was, then. Laid out on black stone under a lamp. Go out into the Chaos while you can still do the one thing that makes you worth sending, and by the time the thing is gone so are you. No panel in the corridor. No grinding-out. Just a girl who was never on the ledger in the first place, becoming permanently a girl who was never on the ledger.
"Does the corps know?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do the Nine know?"
A pause a real one, not a rhetorical one.
"Yes" said my father. "It was their idea before it was ours. And ours before it was mine to bring to you."
I sat with that for a moment.
"Then say the rest of it plainly, please" I said. "Because from where I'm sitting, the corps and the Ruling Families have agreed to put a fourteen year old outside the border and let the border close behind her. We have a word for that. It's on the wall in the corridor outside. What's the purpose?"
The Patriarch didn't flinch, but he took his time, which is the same thing as flinching.
"Renvitho has been one of the Forty for generations" he said at last. "Do you know what that actually means, Shalare? Not the version they teach in the corps."
"You keep the record."
"We keep the record." He turned his hand over on the black stone of the table, palm up, as though weighing something invisible. "We keep the genealogies. We keep the Trial rolls and the merit-adoptive registers and the erasure warrants. We keep the art, the pre-Ice strata, the pigment panels that nobody can date. We keep the Core Name registry, which means that in a very literal sense no Chiss alive has a name until Renvitho writes it down. Every family in the Ascendancy has needed us at some point. Nuruodo needs us when they want to prove a bloodline. Sabosen needs us when they want to prove a precedent and Mitth—" he allowed himself one dry breath "—Mitth needs us most of all and pretends hardest that it doesn't."
"I know all this."
"You know the recitation. Here's what it comes to." He leaned forward. "Years of being needed by everyone, and not one hour of being feared by anyone. We hold the ledger. We have never once been at the top of it. We're the hand that writes the names of the Nine and has never been permitted to write our own among them."
I understood then why the room was small.
"The house has been given two opportunities for advancement" my mother said. "Separately. From different quarters for different reasons, within forty days of each other. And they align. That is the part that made us take it seriously. Shalare, not either one alone but the fact that both roads happen to run through the same girl. Fortune of that specificity is either a gift or a trap and after four months of checking we believe it's a gift."
The Matriarch leaned forward slightly. "We will not order you. We cannot order you as you are not ours to order, which is the one mercy in the whole arrangement. The corps will not order you either they've confirmed it in writing, and the writing is in this house, which means it will still exist in a hundred years." A dry flicker of something that was almost humor. "It is a choice. It is a real one. If you say no you finish out your Sight in the corps, you fade and some family adopts you for the prestige of it, and you live a long quiet life."
I put my hands flat on my knees.
I took the thing that was rising in my chest — the hot, childish, absolutely useless thing — and I did what Divessa taught me when I was nine and could not stop breaking things. I let the breath out slowly through the nose. I found the geothermal exchangers thumping under the floor and I put my breathing on them, one to four. I noted the temperature of the little gold star hanging against my forehead. I noted the grain of the stone table. I noted that my father's collar-piece had been re-painted recently and that my mother had chosen not to wear hers at all.
By the fourth thump I was a person who could ask a question in a level voice.
"What are the missions?"
They exchanged looks. My mother tipped her chin very slightly: 'you brought it, you carry it.'
"The first" the Patriarch said, "is a retrieval."
He touched the table and the surface woke as a soft field of light unrolled across it, deliberately low. The way we display things we do not want reflected in a window.
It was a page. A scan of a page warped where the original had buckled, the script in a hand I didn't recognize.
"You've heard the story" he said. "Every child in the enclave has. The deck."
"The deck is a nursery story."
"The deck is a nursery story" he agreed, "which was told to children specifically, in this enclave for at least six hundred years, and which appears nowhere else outside the Ascendancy. Did you ever wonder about that?"
"A set of cards," he continued. "Numbers vary in the telling — most accounts say a full sabacc deck, some say fewer, one says the count changes depending on who is holding it which is the sort of detail that either discredits an account entirely or is the only honest thing in it. What is consistent across every version we hold is the claim that the deck is not inert. That it responds. That it shows a thing to the person turning it and that the thing is true.
He didn't look at me when he said the next part, and I appreciated that more than I can express.
"It is described in four of our oldest sources, using the same word the corps uses for you."
"You're telling me a Ruling Family has authorized a hunt for a Force artifact," I said. "In Our Space?"
"I'm telling you a Ruling Family has authorized a Renvitho retrieval of a historical object of contested use." my father said "for containment. Which is the phrasing on the warrant, and the phrasing you should learn now because you may need to say it to someone one day."
"A sighting" the Patriarch said. " Has been confirmed. Not a rumor, not a trader's story but confirmed twice by parties who did not know about each other, North in the deep Chaos. Beyond any lane that survives longer than a season."
That landed in a strange place. I turned it over twice before I set it down.
"And the second mission?"
"The second" my mother said "is dull. Which is why it's the one that will actually make us."
The light on the table changed. The page folded away and a galaxy map opened in its place.
Two points brightened.
"Naporar" she said. The nearest one to a point far from where we sat. "To here."
The far point sat deep inside a great red bruise of territory, high and coreward of the Ascendancy's in among the worlds the Sith Empire holds and garrisons and does not let go of.
"Bastion" I said.
"Bastion." She let the two points burn there against the dark. "Presently, to move anything from Naporar to Bastion, the Ascendancy sends it down and around out through the transit corridors, along the chartered lane through the neutral traffic at the edge of the Rim and back up through Imperial space with an escort and an inspection at every step. Count it in weeks. Count it in inspections. Count it in the number of parties who see our ships and learn our tonnage and our schedules and our habits."
"And a direct route?"
"Would be ours" she said simply. "Not the Empire's. Not the fleet's. Ours, because a route through the Chaos exists only as long as the person who found it is willing to say where it is."
I looked at the two points for a long moment.
It would take years. Not one jump. Dozens, hundreds maybe taking years I do not have very many of.
"And if I do one?" I asked.
"Then the house rises" my father said. "Permanently. A seat perhaps a claim on the transit revenues, the right to send a Speaker to the floor rather than a petition. Most families never manage that much in years."
"And both?"
"If both then Renvitho holds the only route into Imperial space that the fleet cannot use without us, and an object that four of the Nine will privately want and none of them can be seen wanting. That is enough leverage to gather support. That is enough to be voted." He met my eyes.
"You want to replace one of the Nine" I said.
"No" My father said it fast and flat and with distaste I hadn't expected. "Understand me clearly. This is the difference between a house that rises and a house whose name gets ground out of a panel forty meters from where you're sitting. We do not want a seat that belongs to someone else. That is how you make eight permanent enemies in an afternoon."
"Then what?"
"I want to be in a position where a different question can be asked." He turned his hand over on the black stone again, that same weighing gesture. "Not why should we have an occupied chair. The question I want asked by someone who is not us, is why only nine?"
"Because the moment that question is genuinely on the table" my mother said, "the Ascendancy has to go and look at the record to answer it. And there is exactly one house that holds the record."
The exchangers thumped under the floor. One.
Nobody spoke.
Two.
My mother's hand curled slightly and she did not move it more.
Three.
"How many days until I have to go?"
My father made a low, pleased hum which was quickly suppressed, the sound of a man hearing a question he had prepared for and had not been certain would come. I filed it. I filed it very carefully, in the place where I keep things I might need later.
"Ten" my mother said.
Then I watched as my father for once had an awkward look on his face. He is uncomfortable now.
"One last thing" he said. "The survey is not a government undertaking...not technically. The warrant is Renvitho's, the funding is Renvitho's, the object of retrieval is our property already which is a legal position I would rather not have to defend but which will hold." A breath. "Which means the house cannot send soldiers with you. Not an armsman, not a bought charric, nobody with our seal on their shoulder. If our people are found out there, the whole thing stops being archival containment and starts being an unauthorized armed expedition into the Chaos by a Family."
"Then who's going?"
"You" he said. "And your caregiver."
I did not say anything.
"We can give you a ship" he went on, and now the words came faster the way they do when a man is filling a silence he can hear. "A good Deep-hull, the survey configuration with the extended cyclers and the reinforced deflector array. It will be clean no seal no registry we can be traced through. Supplies for years that can be resupplied through channels I'll set out for you before you leave. Credits in three currencies with charts such as they are. Along with anything else you name in the days, if it exists and can be bought you will have."
I sat very still and let my mind do the arithmetic it had been doing quietly underneath the whole conversation the way it does whether I want it to or not.
When I was certain that my voice would come out level I asked.
"May I go?"
My mother's mouth opened very slightly. My father nodded "Yes."
I stood. I did not push the chair back too hard. I inclined my head the precise number of degrees owed by an unfamilied corps asset to a Patriarch and Matriarch of a Great House, which is fewer degrees than a daughter owes a father and which I had been taught by a protocol instructor at the age of eight.
"Corvai'thel'renvitho. Corvai'liri'renvitho."
"Corvai'shala'renvitho," they said not quite together.
I walked out.
Divessa was where I had left her, one shoulder against the corridor wall beside the doorframe, arms folded into her sleeves. She straightened as I came through and fell in beside me without being told.
"Shalare."
"Not here."
She let three steps go by. "What did they want?"
"I'll explain when we get to my room."
I heard her take a breath to say something and then decide against it, which is one of perhaps four hundred reasons why I will make sure I have only one caregiver.
After some time I reached my door and pressed against the panel to read my palm.
The moment I walked in my hand closed around the brush and it went first. I took it off the shelf and threw it overhand hard, and it hit the wall above the desk and came apart in three pieces, and the sound it made in a small stone room was enormous.
Then the shelf itself. There's a trick to it — you don't pull, you get under the front lip and you lift, and the bracket pins shear before the stone does, and everything comes down at once. The tray with my possessions in it. The lamp. The little ceramic thing from Sposia that I had liked and now do not have.
I heard Divessa move once, behind me then stop.
The chair next placing both hands on the back of it, up over my shoulder and down onto the edge of the desk. The frame bent. I did it again and the frame folded causing a leg to come off and I stood there breathing like I'd run the length of the terrace.
And then I did something which the instructors would have taken a strip off me for.
I let go the other way and saw what would happen.
I watched a girl in an Archive-red tabard with a broken chair in her hands turn to the bunk, drag the mattress off, tear the sheeting, put her heel through the storage locker's door panel. I watched her stop there kneeling in the wreck of it with her hands over her face. I watched Divessa cross the room at exactly that moment and kneel down beside her.
I came back. The clock over my door had moved four seconds.
And I thought, with a clear and vicious little joy: no.
Not because the path was wrong. It's never wrong.
So I turned the other way and put the chair through the desk terminal instead of the mattress. Then the locker panel.
Finally running out of steam and taking a moment to breathe I was on the floor against the bunk frame with my back pressing against the cold material.
The headband had come off somewhere. I found it near my knee. The silver record-glyph was fine, but the hair thin chain had snapped and the little gold star was gone. I couldn't see it anywhere in all that mess.
I looked for it for a while hands were shaking, which was interesting to note.
Divessa crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside me.
She reached out picked something small and gold out of the debris by her ankle, and put it into my palm without a word.
____________________________________
(Ten days later)
Surface pad Kesh-Nine, above the Sixth Terrace — Csilla
The surface of Csilla is not a place people go. It's a place where people are briefly in armor only.
Wind comes across the ice sheet unbroken for kilometers and arrives with nothing left in it but speed and cold. The sky was the color it always a low grey-white lid, no sun visible through it, only a diffuse smear where the sun is supposed to be.
I stood at the edge of the deck plating with the loading crews working behind me and I looked at my ship.
The Survey-pattern armor I was wearing helped. Armor plate over a black underlayer with heavier plate on the left with two bands of red laid across it, deliberately not the fleet's brighter red. Bare of any seal. No house glyph no corps mark, nothing on it anywhere that could be photographed and traced back to a family. Off brand blaster on the right hip, vibroblade across the back with the corded grip standing up past my shoulder, four sealed pouches at the belt that Divessa had packed and I had not been permitted to argue about.
I'd let her do my face that morning because she asked and because there are so few things left she gets to do for me. Gold on the lips. A pale wash worked from the outer corner of each eye up along the temple, so that in the pad lights my eyes look less like two red coals and more like something deliberate. The band across my brow, silver glyph seated and the chain repaired.
I liked to think I looked older than fourteen and a half.
The ship sat on her gear with her ramp down and her running lights up, and she was beautiful.
The hull is built around a great open ring, a crescent of structure sweeping out and around and back, with the body of the vessel slung along the inside of it like a blade held in a curled hand. Dark blue over grey the blue so deep it looked like black except where the pad lights find it. Twin drive running out and away long and flat throwing their own shadows into the fog. She has no name painted on her anywhere. My father's people had been extremely thorough about that.
Two decks.
I had walked it four times in ten days and could close my eyes and see it. The main spine corridor running fore to aft, deck plating dark. The galley and the common space with the crash benches in red along both walls and absurdly, a stand of live hydroponic growth bolted to the deck in the middle of it which had been my caretaker's single nonnegotiable requisition. Aft of that, the medbay with its slab and its cabinet of banded canisters then the cargo ranging from sealed crates to sealed fuel and color-coded chemistry stores, and behind a hatch at the very stern, the reactor housing and the cycler bank which looked like a long spine of machinery.
The upper deck is the living half. Cockpit right forward in the nose with four seats, two forward and two behind, the pilot's station at the port bow with the yoke and the shrouded scope.I messed with the whole console lighting and changed it to a pale blue white that doesn't wreck your vision. Behind it two cabins each with its own bunk and their own workstation.
Between them a sky-walker suite had been built for ease of use.
The loaders finished the last of it while I stood there.
I heard her boots on the plating before she spoke. "She's ready" Divessa said as if nothing was wrong.
I nodded.
I looked past her, down the pad to the pressure lock door where the terrace lifts come up.
They were standing there. Both of them, in cold weather robes off in the distance and not coming closer.
My mother had one hand resting low against herself, over the coat in a way she probably didn't know she was doing.
I inclined my head to them. The precise number of degrees not one more.
My father raised his hand while my mother did not move at all and I turned around.
I took the helmet off my hip and put it on while turing around and walking up the ramp without looking back with Divessa came up behind me. The ramp cycled shut on its own the sound of the outdoors stopped entirely.
Reaching the cockpit and sitting down as I ran the preflight from memory. Reactor to full draw. Repulsors online. Gear pressure nominal. Deflector array at standby.
Divessa came in behind me and settled into the seat at my right shoulder and buckled in while letting out a breath.
"Course?" She asked.
"Naporar" I said. "For a test stop then our adventure starts."