Page 122 of Red Scale Daddy
Her throat works.
“Roma.”
She closes her eyes for one second, and when she opens them, the fury is still there, but something scared lives under it.
“It may reduce maneuverability in the event of debris interference,” she says.
“That your way of saying yes?”
“It is my way of saying the risk is mathematically defensible.”
“Everything’s defensible when you’re desperate enough.”
She looks at me then, really looks, and her voice comes quieter. “I am so close.”
“I know.”
“No,” she says, and the force of it cracks through the restraint. “You do not. He is not a theory to me. He is not a ghost in a signal model. He taught me how to solder before I could reach the workbench without standing on a crate. He used to let me paint constellations on scrap panels and pretend they were navigation maps. He called every bad drawing a prototype because he said invention needed room to be ugly first.”
Her breath catches, and she turns back to the display like she can hide inside the data.
“I remember his hands,” she says. “That is the part that never leaves. I remember grease under his nails and burn scars across his knuckles, and I remember thinking nothing bad could happen if those hands were building the thing that carried us home. Then everyone told me those hands were gone, and now his signal is right there.”
The cockpit hums around us. The dead ships drift outside. My hand stays over the control, but the fight in me changes shape.
“Roma,” I say softly.
“If I slow down, I might lose him.”
“You won’t.”
“You cannot promise that.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t.”
Her eyes shine, and she hates it. I can see that plain enough. She hates that her body is betraying the clean architecture of her mind, hates that grief still knows where every door is.
“I can promise something else,” I say.
She swallows. “What?”
“I’m not letting you turn yourself into wreckage to prove he’s alive.”
Her expression twists. “That is not your choice.”
“Yeah,” I say, my voice roughening. “Maybe I’m bad at choices.”
She lets out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh and almost like pain. “That is possibly the most accurate thing you have ever said.”
“Probably.”
The corner of her mouth shifts for the barest moment before she reins it in.
I lift my hand from the console slowly, giving the control back because forcing her will only make her fight me harder. “Plot it wider.”
She looks at the display.
“Roma.”
