Page 39 of Cloverleaf Station

“Good. Now, you’re going to be miserable for a while without more painkillers, so how about I go grab you some, and some water, and you sleep the worst of this off?”

“M’kay,” Kieron managed.

“Good. Don’t go anywhere.” Elenus got up before Kieron could pinch him for that—honestly, where was he going to go?—and left the room. He came back before Kieron could fall asleep, injected him with a painkiller that made everything go floaty, then put a straw to his lips so he could suck up water that he hadn’t even realized he’d needed before it sated his growing thirst.

“Time to sleep.”

“Mmm.” Kieron barely had time to turn his face into Elenus’s side before he did just that.

***

Waking up felt like being wiped clean. The pain was gone, but Kieron’s mind was clear, too, which meant he’d probably been asleep for a long time. Elenus’s side of the bed was empty, but Kieron could read the imprint of his body there in the curve of the blanket and smell his scent on the sheets. There was a full glass of water waiting for him and a note on his tab: Try it now.

Try it … ah, his implant. It had gone into hibernation mode when he fell asleep. Kieron reached out with his mind and, a little gingerly, activated it. The old station overlay came into focus in his vision, complete with its new update, Catalina’s little pink eye. Kieron opened his implant to the main channel, and—

“Keeeeron!”

“A little quieter, baby.”

“Sorry, Daddee. Hi, Keeron!”

Kieron smiled. “Hi, Catie.”

Pink bloomed in swirls around the eye icon. “Come baack,” she said, sounding both eager and plaintive. “I miss yooou.”

“I miss you too.” Kieron heaved himself into a sitting position, then onto his feet. He drained the water in the glass. “I’ll be there in a minute, after I clean up.”

“Good,” Elenus interjected. His voice was almost the same over the implant as it was in person. “Then we can start talking about the algorithms you’ve got running to find Zakari while you get to work on Lizzie. Don’t think you’re getting out of that. You broke her, you fix her.”

Technically, it was an asteroid field that had broken her while Kieron was risking his life for Catalina, but this was one of those times he knew it was best not to get caught up in the details.

Chapter seventeen

Three days of running revised location algorithms, all greatly refined thanks to the fleet of probes guided by Catalina, had left them with only one truly viable spot to check for the remnants of his and Zakari’s old ship. It was within a reasonable amount of drift from its last known location, it allowed for all the impact variation the ship could have withstood without breaking apart, and it was relatively protected from the rest of the field. If Zakari wasn’t there, then he wasn’t anywhere.

The thought rested with odd quietude in Kieron’s mind. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel the importance of such a discovery or look forward to finding out his friend’s fate once and for all. It was more that … well, there was only so much anticipation and exertion he could take at any one time, and all of that personal bandwidth was being fully occupied right now by Catalina and Elenus. They’d kept him so busy, working on Lizzie and remembering to eat and sleep and watching light shows in the dark of Hangar Five that, well … resigned despair just didn’t get the chance to find purchase inside of him.

Which, he knew, was surely a lot of the reason the pair of them had been so insistent on keeping him occupied, but he couldn’t find it in himself to resent it. He knew better than to try too. Otherwise, he might end up cornered in his room again, having affection and guilt forced on him in equal measures.

“It’s going to be a tough spot to reach,” Elenus commented, tapping the point of his chin with one long finger. “Doable, but tough. Baby, you’ve been working on your new defensive laser array, right? How long until full implementation?”

“Tonight!”

“Pull the other one; you only started that project two days ago.”

“Tonight, Daddeee!” Catalina was insistent, the whine evident both over the implant and in the air of the hangar. Listening to her in two different frequencies had been a little overwhelming at first, but Kieron was quickly getting used to it.

“Since when have you been able to implement system-wide hardware changes in under a week?”

“Since noooooow.”

“She’s getting so big,” Kieron whispered, just loud enough for Elenus to hear him.

“Shut up,” Elenus snapped, but there was no real heat to his voice. “She’s big when I say she’s big. Until then, she’s my baby.”

“Kids don’t work that way.”

“I’mma biiiig ship!” Catalina added because of course she heard everything they said no matter how softly they said it. “Smart and faaaast!”