#border-tober

His favorite other him is stern, imposing and frankly beautiful.  Anyway, Troy thinks he’s beautiful.  He’s biased in more ways than one since he is him, and since he has a favorite at all.  It’s like-- maybe he shouldn’t with that last part, but of all the Troys in all the worlds he’s glimpsed, he’ll take this one any day.  And he has, since the first time he saw him, down in the moonlit ruins and now when they can kind of be together sometimes in the downbeat hours between days when he’s full of pot smoke and willingness.

Their timelines don’t mesh real nicely, but they also don’t snap and shudder like some of the other ones he’s tried to fit into place around him for better views of what could be and more of himself.

This other him has no facial mods.  He wears sensible prosthetics.

They both hate shoes.

Troy wonders if that’s part of what makes this one so easy to access.  That really simple thing they happen to share.

He wonders a lot of things about how and why, but mostly he watches himself combing his bangs out of his face.  He knows he had a church built here because it’s roughly contiguous with where the other him lives.

The other him and his family.  He’s married and it’s complicated.  He travels off-planet a lot and sometimes he just isn’t there for weeks.  Other times, it’s like: they might as well share the same universe even though they pointedly don’t.

The other him crosses over the sand.  He drops a bag on Troy’s lap.  “You like grits, right?” he says, taking a seat beside him.  He kicks his pretty, pedicured feet.  “Sugar says try those.  They’re high-protein.”

Troy hums.  He opens the bag and peers inside.  “I think that defeats the purpose of grits.  Also, these are green.”

“They’re made out of peas.  Somehow.  Still taste like grits to me.”

Well, that’s as good a recommendation as he can get.  He likes them.  He;s just not the him who’s tried them.  Plus, they do have that faint starchy smell like regular grits.

The other him puts his hand on his knee.  He leans over and looks him right in his face.  “You’re doing OK?”

“Ah, yeah.  Why wouldn’t I be?” Troy tries to laugh it off, even knowing the other him won’t buy it.

“That’s not oxide under your eyes.  What’s keeping you up?”

“I am.  There’s some stuff I wanted to know, so I’ve been tripping the light fantastic.  Maybe kind of a lot.”

“You could just ask me, you know,” other him chides.  He gives him a squeeze before settling back to himself.  

“Yeah, well, you…” he pauses, taking a deep breath and trying not to rub at his eyes.  “No, I can’t.  You never even tried the whole God King business.”

“Right.”

“You also have way different taste in women.”

The other him rolls his eyes.  “Putting it mildly.” And they grin at each other, one set of ordinary teeth and Troy’s gleaming grills with full fangs in place.

“And I dunno.  I’m just not into the other God King mes.  They got no aspirations of their own, pretty much.  Now here’s you, with your kids.”

“Our kids.”

“Never even tried it, but at least you want something that’s yours.”

“And you do too.” The other him stretches and sighs, his hands knitting over his head as he yawns.  When he comes back, he’s all staid and serious about how he says.  “Still won’t take care of yourself for any money, so here I am hauling pea grits across literally dimensions to feed your scrawny ass.”

Troy sighs.  “You know, that schtick is getting…”

But the other him has vanished, leaving only his pretty footprints in the dust, this faint scent of chai against the night.  

They think their visual processing firmware’s sprung a bug the first time they see her: the white skag.

She’s pale as the moonlight, rangy as a bandit child.  She crests the sand dune with the sort of silence they’d expect from a feline or a selachimorph.  She can’t be full-grown-- her hips are too thin and her tongue, as it swirls into the varkid body Mr. Chew opted not to finish, so short.  Pale too.  A pink ribbon.

They’ve heard stories about creatures like her, old hunter tales told around campfires and bottles of whiskey.  She isn’t the sort of thing that gets written down in macroecological surveys.  Besides that, she should, if her mother didn’t gobble her up as a weakling, be wearing enough dust that she looks like any other skag.

But no.  She’s there.  She’s so pale she seems luminous blue against the night.  Her spines (she’s a spitter; that’s unusual in and of itself) have a gloss like nacre to them.  The only dark part of her would be the grayish pits of her eyes.  Her irises flash with Rayleigh scatters in the Outrunner headlights.  

They think too at first that she must be starving, nibbling on a kill from another skag who’s not from her pack.

Perhaps she doesn’t have a pack.  Then, how has she survived to adolescence? 

Perhaps she isn’t eating because she needs to.  She seems to be tasting, ripping off small, tender bits and taking her time to swallow.  How refined, they want to say, but the clicking of their optics seems too much sound.  Even Mr. Chew has gone quiet, sitting back on his haunches and observing despite the trail of curious drool that runs from his jaws.

So she belongs to someone.  She might even have been engineered for that person.

A sauroraptor whistles in the distance; that or a person who’s versed at impersonating one.

The white skag lifts her head.  She takes one more rip off of the body and disappears over the dune.

FL4K does their best to triangulate her footsteps, and that noise she might be answering.  The night though sings on, full of bandits and more ordinary creatures, all masking any trace of her.

*

They meet with the other hunters in a bar at the edge of the Droughts.  They hesitate to call them Vault hunters, since hunting Vaults is one thing they’ve done very little of since arriving on Pandora.  Hunting Bandits on the other hand…

Anyway, they buy a bottle of moonshine and they light a candle, playing at this being a campfire story even though the evening’s too shot full of tension and battle for anybody with an inn at their disposal to risk sleeping under the stars.  Humans are so fragile and they like their stories told just so.  Whiskey for white skags, beer for comedy, blood everywhere for happy childhood memories.

They transload all of the pictures they took onto their ECHO and they pass it around.  Most of the images make her look dim, but in one they snagged a lens flare and that almost replicates her glorious nature.

“Now that’s some Where The Red Fern grows shite,” Zane remarks once they’ve finished explaining the encounter.  

“What in the who now?” mutters Moze.  She has a mouthful of chilli from her second bowl.

“Old book.  Just about his boy and his dogs.  Got this bit about a magic fern in the middle and then the dogs die.”

“That sounds like a terrible book,” says FL4K.  “What is the point of having a story about dogs if the dogs don’t live to see victory?”

“Well, they do, erm, that.  They just also kinda die.  The one goes out with a bang!”

“Anyway,” Amara changes the subject and also her shot glass.  She’s chasing the moonshine with some floral cordial from offworld.  She also leans across the table, batting the remains of her eyeshadow at FL4K.  “I’m glad you got to see your albino skag.”

“Not albino.  Leucistic.  Albino skags are blind and not uncommon in inbred packs, although they rarely live long.”

Moze chews on her spoon.  “I didn’t know that.  Actually, I didn’t know what leucistic meant either and I’m not sure I’ll ever need to know that ever again and… Meat Thief, these are my beans.” She shoos the jabber off of her lap.

Before it can take the space beside Zane on the bench, Zane activates his DigiClone, occupying the area. 

“I do not think she was mine,” FL4K says, thoughtfully now.  She could be, though.  They never failed to realize that.  All they have to do is wait for her in the particular way that will earn her trust.  First though, they must find her.  And there’s a lot of smoking craters in town for that to be feasible for the moment.

Amara though lifts both of her glasses, “Well, if you want her, go get her! At least try.”

FL4K nods.  “I will need meat.  Do you think any of the survivors will mind if I appropriate some from the mass grave?”

“Just, ah, try to stick with the cultists and don’t let anybody see you,” says Moze.

*

They take a tattooed leg from the grave and carry it out into the dunes.  Elpis crests at midnight.  The desert still sings, or did it, they wonder, ever really stop?

The precise place where they saw the white skag no longer exists.  Winds and other beasts have changed it, though the GPS coordinates remain.  The varkid is long gone.  FL4K slices open the leg and leaves it in a similar spot.  They hold with their pack in the Outrunner, waiting and listening.  They’ve brought water and silicone chew toys and half a dozen biofluids to rub on their fingers if that might tempt her.

A thrill sparks somewhere deep inside their wires.  No, the archives were never like this, not even when ancient copies of Audubon turned up to be scanned, not even when an anonymous scientist brought over an Eridian epic she insisted described a real planet, but a dead one.  The Grand Archivist didn’t even want to take that one.  The day they convinced him rings awfully clear now in their circuits.  They wonder, not for the first time, if things changed more in those hours than any of the ones before.

In the present, Mr. Chew raises his head.  He turns over his shoulder.

FL4K follows.  They think if it’s her back there, she must be awfully wily.  It makes sense the way she’d stand out in full sun.

The white skag is not alone.  She trots around the feet of her master.  Mistress, rather.

“You.  I was not expecting.”

Tyreen shoulders her rifle.  She smiles.  She shrugs.  Aside from the careless omission of the left sleeve of her jacket, her hunting gear seems practical, especially compared to her costumes.  Her rifle has been used, and not that long ago.  Without makeup, her lips are a pale tan color and she’s got oxide in the pits of her eyes.

The white skag circles her, once and then again.

It knows not to touch her or come too close, but it also knows her gravity.  So, they have been together, she and her.  They have been together for a long while.

They shoulder their rifle as well.  It’s not like this “God Queen” can hurt them, or that they’d let her hurt their pack.  Besides, she is very much alone, save for the white skag.

She’s also snickering at them.  So she knows.  She seems like she knows.

“Is she yours?” they ask.

“I dunno.  Is she?”

“I am uncertain what need you would have for a hunting dog, considering your siren powers.”

Tyreen takes a handful of steps closer and the white skag trots ahead of her, coming close enough that Broodless puts her head up.  Mr. Chew sniffs.  Oh, the bodies and the strange blood he must smell on her.

“Serious question there.  Is she mine?” says Tyreen.

“You are not trying to play mind games with an ex-archivist.”

“I’m not playing anything.  Do you want her? Like you said, I don’t need a dog.”

And the white skag, she lays belly down in the sand.  She looks to them and to the pack.  Her eyes flash, but she stays so calm.

FL4K thinks.  If they had a tongue, they think they would lick their lips.  As things are, the white skag does just that, her pink ribbon tongue flickering out above the ground.

“Yes,” they say.  “I want her very much.”

“Good, good,” croons Tyreen.  She upends her rifle, dumping the bullets out.  “I can help you with that.  Walk with me.”

Nodding, they do likewise.  They motion for their pack to follow.

He tears eases himself away from Tyreen to go out that night.  

Troy has little concept that he ‘shouldn’t’ be hooking, that his is a fool’s errand into the night.

He kisses his sister on the scars across her nose and it’s fine.

He gets something that he wants and people pay him for the privilege.  Some of them pull his hair and some of them cry all over him.  It’d be about the same if anybody came to him without him enticing them over vodka and streetlights.

 He might have a bottle open by midnight.  He might be dancing with some other person given the next thing he remembers, but the guy’s on him like a sandstorm, grabbing the bottle and trying to kiss even though they’re fresh out of a bar and it’s really late.

Troy kisses him back for the tip.

The guy is thin and tall, armed like he’s going to war despite the shine of his boots.  He’s a redhead too, a real one, so far as Troy can tell, and he’s grown that hair down to his ass.  His lips are so soft.  He smells like sunshine on fresh dew.

As he says: “Put that thing away.  I’ll buy you till dawn and the math’s whatever.”

That’s a lot of hours and a lot of incidental nonsense intruding.  Troy doesn’t know if he wants this: this moment, this person, this situation between the two of them and the moths in the corners of their vision.

The guy presses closer.  He smiles, imploring.  “However much you want.  I don’t find a lot of guys taller than me.”

He doesn’t even seem that tall, but Troy nods.  He lets him take his hand.

They sway together over bugs and rotgut poured into a much nicer bottle than it once belonged to.

The guy puts hits hand to Troy’s face, tracing out the weird, sharp marks of it.

He smiles like a spilled bucket before the next kiss falls.  How he’s managing to push out of his high-heeled boots of his, that’s anybody’s guess.

Troy starts to remind him: butchers used to wear high heels, but that as longer ago than humans had space travel for their own and also who cares.

Troy doesn’t care at all, even given the thick and drunken embrace between them; given the words.  “How are you like this.”

Troy insists as he has since he came to Pandora.  “I was born this way.”

The same as that, no questions follow.  The guy takes his hand.  Nobody asks which way.  It must be his room waiting at the end of all things.

In the moonlight between the streetlamps, his hair shows no color.  Red’s the first color to vanish given the right wavelength where any colors show up at all.  

Troy swallows as he’s lead along by this person.  He swears he seems him in slow-shot stutters of a camera.  He looks like a model and he looks like nobody at all besides the person holding his hand, squeezing his fingers.

“You know, I didn’t catch your name if you’ve got one,” he says.

“I go by Troy, but you know, whatever, not like...”

They swirl to a stop at what would be a street corner in a real town.  The guy presses one finger to his lips and he says: “Troy, I’m Mikael.”

What third kiss follows wells up drowning deep.  Troy almost drops his bottle.  But ah, he’s at work  She shouldn’t.  He won’t  That would complicate tomorrow when it comes.

Like the fact Mikael tastes so hard of cherries and tobacco.

She doesn’t think Troy remembers, but she was watching the night Dad threw the glass at him.

She’s also the one who cleaned it up after he froze, shuddered, disappeared.  He didn’t even run.  He was just gone after a certain point.  So she swept and she got glass in her fingers and she decided.

Later, he curled up against her in bed.  He didn’t stay on his side at all.

“You know how Mama was always saying we should drag the sliding walls out of the ship...” she starts.  The ship is in terrible shape, getting worse by the day, sinking in the forever bone dust that covers Nekrotafeyo in place of soil.

Troy nods.  He shifts against her.  “I know,” he whispers.  “I saw us getting it out.  We built  a pulley and then we had rooms.  It was nice.” And he sighs.

He’s so weird sometimes, but at least she’ll have help.

*

He doesn’t think Tyreen remembers, but that first night after they got the partitions up, he had what he later learned was a panic attack.

He lay there alone in his personal darkness, shaking and gasping.  They’d done so good.  They’d gotten every panel out and put them up in the vault.  They’d done it all by themselves.  They’d even made Dad his own room and he’d almost looked happy about it.  

Troy really had seen them doing it.  Just one day on the way back from hunting, it had come into his mind.  It had suddenly been so obvious how to make their own spaces.  Now that he had one though?

It bothered him so badly he could only lie there shaking, fumbling his empty shoulder.

Tyreen knocked a little after midnight.  “I can’t hear you snoring.  You in there?” She hadn’t bothered whispering.

He’d said her name. She sighed and got in bed with him.  He held her to his chest as his pulse evened out.

*

It’s funny now, like neither of them remembers, even if they pretty much have to, what they went through putting those walls up.  Now, they never rent two rooms.  They don’t ask for two beds.  And they have no urge to explain themselves about why or why not.

They sleep entangled, their scars rubbing together through their dirty clothes.  

If a glass breaks somewhere in the night, Tyreen will pull him closer.  Sometimes, she doesn’t even really wake up to do it.

He snores and snuffs against her.  He seems himself doing it, but only sometimes.

They’re not content, because contentment isn’t something that happens on Pandora, but they are some kind of comfortable alone with each other most nights.

It’s probably kind of weird.

Waking up at Dr. Black’s had been embarrassing more than anything else.  She’d had no idea where she was the first few times she came around.  There were now two holes in her torso and two in her right arms.  She couldn’t do anything for herself. Ugh-- that part was the worst.  Troy gave her a bath with fucking people wipes.  She got sacks full of doped up skag pups and chickens for food.  She did not get to toilet herself.  Nope, stuck in bed except for leg stretches twice a day, no complaints, ring the bell if you need anything. 

And then that woman, leaning over her, poking her with clamps and sounds because she couldn’t use her hands.  Well, it took the fever rolling off of her for Tyreen to take notice of it, but Dr. Black seems to keep all of her dexterity in those fingers of hers.  The rest of her had some mild form of dyskinesia, probably an old injury pretty far down her spine.  It happened to make her look like easy prey, but Tyreen figurds not devouring the person who procured her pain meds might work out better in the long run.

Meds meaning she slept a lot.  Actually, Tyreen wasn’t sure that she’d ever slept so much in her whole life.  She spent most of the days under for a few restless hours at dawn or dusk spent ticking over a third-hand ECHO and feeling her guts lurch at random as the moon smirked down the operating theater skylight.  She made it to the bottom of a music swapping forum she’d been eyeing and listened to old school synth jazz while reading Vonnegut or something called “Pirate AU Fanfiction” which she didn’t realize was derivative until she found the one starring Arthur Gordon Pym of all characters.

So it wasn’t like she was bored.  Hell, the weird thrum of her body knitting back together could have kept her occupied.

The stillness in her bones though ached worse than her bullet wound.

Tyreen sighed.  She ran her hand down her torso to the sore, bruised place trailing off from her entry wound.  She pressed ever so lightly until her belly twinged and her toes curled.

This didn’t so much remind her of the fact she was going to be wearing a lovely S&S Munitions bullet for the rest of her life.  It reminded her of that other itch she couldn’t scratch, the one that was going to take talking instead of prowling to fix.

~*~

Dr. Black at least took hints.  Tyreen bitched at her about being woken up closer to noon than not exactly once.  Next time? Dawn hadn’t even cracked

She got her vitals taken and her bandages changed.  The IV came out and that was the only blood that leaked out of her that day.  Her wrappings still got all sticky and rheumy, but they weren’t brown anymore in that way that kind of made her want to suck on them.

So, a lot of next times later, it finally happened: “Well, you’re healing up nicely if I do say so myself.  What do you want to do first?”

Weird.  Tyreen never asked Troy what he wanted to do when he started improving after a spell or a fall.  She squinted at Dr. Black.  “Is that a trick question?”

“Well, I don’t recommend BASE jumping for obvious reasons, but no?” Not that Dr. Black sounded sure of this.

“I need my hair washed.  That dry shampoo made it all sandy and shit.  Then I wanna go outside and, you know.”

“I’m out of chickens, sorry.”

Tyreen rolled her eyes.  She’d actually meant piss on a fence post and scope out the best vantages for ambushes, but she was getting hungry too, so of course the woman had to mention.  “Whatever.  Hair first.”

“Well, your brother and me already figured out how to do that since you’re still not cleared to shower because germ transfer.  Get ready.”

The two of them maneuvered her onto one of the rolling stools and pushed her into the kitchen rather than any of the bathrooms-- for a woman living alone, Dr. Black had at least three according to her hallway.

Tyreen’s impression of the kitchen was what it smelled of some unfamiliar grassy-brown spice and eggs.  Most food didn’t tempt her anymore, but there was something about the whiff of a runny yolk that got her tongue to stir.  Anyway, the stainless steel sink had been scrubbed out and Tyreen knew where this was going.  She groaned.

She’d been all of four the last time anybody washed her hair for her, let alone in a sink.  Sink salons were for babies.

Troy’s hand rested on her shoulder.  “It’s just for a couple of times.  What else have I been doing for you? And did the world end, Ty?”

“Fine.  I want two washes and extra gooey stuff.” She meant conditioner, but she flicked her tongue over her lips pronouncing it gooey stuff like a drunk her.

Troy blinked way too hard, but he nodded and finished wheeling her over.

So much for innuendo getting her anyplace today.  He was probably stuck in his own head for a change.  Contemplating caring for her.  Like it was… like it was that big of a deal after all the trash that had happened.   

Just like when they worked on her, Dr. Black handed over the equipment and he used it, though this time, easy on the instructions.  

Troy bundled her up in a towel, wet her and worked the first round of shampoo in slow, scratching over the residue on her scalp and using the dish sprayer to double rinse.  The whole time he leaned over her, face tight with concentration.  He wouldn’t look her in the eyes and Tyreen couldn’t say she wanted him too, not even when he went for the wet/dry trimmer and neatened up her unintentional undercut.

“You want anymore off?” he asked the window and not her.

“Just get the really messed up part in the back.”

“OK, turn.”

The hum of the trimmer felt kind of nice on her damp skin; that and the way he combed his fingers over her fuzz after, even though the next spritz got her free of snibbles, would have without his intervention.

For the conditioner, he let that set and combed her out, streaking the remains of her bangs down her forehead, then rubbing them away from her eyebrows when they got too close.   

Tyreen sighed up at him.

Since she caught his eyes, he did manage something resembling a smile and his fingers dragged against her for the last round of rinsing.

With him and her both patted dry, she finally got hoisted back to a sitting position, her hair dropping once more down her cheeks before she reached up, scruffing it out and sneezing by some coincidence.

Dr. Black stifled a laugh.

Dr. Black

Dr. Black was a small, fat woman with a crooked jaw and a crooked smile and a penchant for wearing hoop skirts with no panties underneath. 

-Says her full name is Calvin Decker Black

-Has at least one ex-husband and is possibly using his name???

-Probably not a doctor, but close enough

-Good at working with what she has; absolute kludge queen

--Has an affection for out-of-date equipment, but can run almost any test off of her ECHO.  Somehow.  Don’t ask. ---Speaking of which, carries the Twin’s genomes around on hers and has heavily notated them.  Heaven forbid that got into the wrong hands.

---Recognizable ECHO device with a formal Delft print

--Sometimes uses medical equipment for secondary purposes, i.e. pointing with a sound, employing that nice steel vomit tray as a casserole

-Cheerful, enthusiastic, curious, bit of a spazz, insensible to gore.

--It’s possible to get her and Mouthpiece going at the same time.  Mind your eardrums.  

-Loves food.  Pretty good cook.  Rather more fond of food other people have prepared.

-No, she doesn’t eat her patients! Any human flesh stored in her fridge is from other people, you silly.

--Yeah, I can’t in good conscience recommend her ‘famous breakfast scramble’.

-What’s she doing in the CoV? She’s the person who walked Troy through patching up Tyreen after Satellite.  They couldn’t leave her running around after that.  Apparently joined their caravan without complaint and has been riding around with them ever since.  

-Has been known to dress up and give sermons or go out in the field for negotiations.  

--Ugh.  Torture takes so long.  Don’t make her do that.  We could have steak instead.  

The jump brought them to a space so empty it didn’t even seem black.  No— darkness rested between other stars, far off and distant.  Here was a clear nothingness, out of reach of the rest of the universe.  

Tyreen drifted at his shoulder.  He could feel her fuming.

Neither of them had made much sound since they’d stopped.  The lights were low, the gravity still off and wherever they were now, it seemed like there hadn’t been a sound there since the galaxy formed.  A word from either of them would disturb this.

Besides, this wasn’t Pandora.  This wasn’t even the Pandoran system.  Or any system.  This was nothing.

“Stars move, you know,” Troy said, fumbling the silence apart.

“It’s only been like twenty years,” insisted Tyreen.  “They can’t move that fast.  We should at least be able to see it!”

He gestured a spiral with his hand.  Did she even care that the star cluster where Nekrotafeyo had grown spun opposite this one, that they were blue-shifting verses each other and that had choked the navigation system?  He decided to summarize.  “I think the computer’s a little off and umm...”

“Umm what?”

“I might have overcompensated for stellar drift since I ended up doing it manually.”

“Troy!” She made his name sound like she’d broken something.  He half-expected a slap.

“Look.” He forced calm into his voice and turned to face her as he spoke.  

She was livid, her whole body tense and her hair standing on end.  

“We can’t run out of power.  We jumped just fine.  We have water.  We have food.  We have a working toilet.”

“And where are we!”

“I’m gonna run an extrapolation and figure that out while the jump drive resets.”

“Can’t you math it in your head?”

“Um.” Sighing, Troy turned back to the view screen, focusing first on the blank reach where their ship rested, then letting his vision float to the stars.  The blackness lived between them, but in some strands there was no between, only points of light thick enough to make mist out of each other.  “I kinda don’t think so.”

Tyreen groaned and swam off towards the bed.

*

Tyreen moved better in zero g than he did.  Troy was always twisting around to his left to push, pull, founder.  Still, he hated to turn the gravity back on.  There was something about watching her float above the bed with the covers billowing around her.  She seemed so right like that, singular and and easy and in this case put out.  

Her Coeus reader was flickering lately.  She ended up groaning and setting it loose to float through the cabin where Troy caught it.

She also said— “Hey, turn the heavy back on.  I gotta piss.” 

“Alright.  On three.  Three.” Troy threw the switch.  His back crunched as weight returned to his spine through the seat at the command console.  His sister landed with a thump.  Their foodstores yelped and howled and shed feather-forms along the floor.  Tyreen caught herself with a huff and pulled herself into the water closet, giving the cage of spindly hexlings a sour look before she shut the door.  One of them shrieked after her.  Troy shushed it and went back to the console.

The keys pressed easier with weight back in his body.  He pulled up the extrapolation program.  Another likely set of coordinates failed a final round of testing and ticked away.  The system was working to match the spectrographic information of visible stars to known clusters as far as he could tell.  Color seemed such a tenuous way to determine place, but that might have been the emptiness intruding on his thoughts more than anything rational.  Besides, he kept thinking he had somehow spied the white supergiant that held Pandora out among all the other points of light.

Troy was tempted to ask his sister to try.  She was the siren.  She might be able to do it if she listened across all the dark matter between them and that place.

She was still in the water closet.  

Troy let the extrapolator run in the background and idly tabbed into the superstructure of the ship’s hard drive.  It had been made to be piloted by someone with little skill, all of the command icons in welcoming jelly style art with three to four clicks needed to access any functions more complicated than the gravity or the sublight engine speed.  He’d picked the interface up fast enough, but modifying the OS to accept a jump drive had been more hours of frustrated keystrokes than any actual handiwork.  

Every system responded in good order.  He’d done the same check once they’d cleared Nekrotafeyo’s gravity well and before the jump.  The only difference was thousands of light years to nowhere and the bottom falling out of his stomach halfway there, not more than a heartbeat.  

He even dug into the audio system.  If Tyreen asked, he wanted to be able to tell her literally everything was fine.

A handful of loose example recordings bothered the top folder.  Troy thought about moving them, but the system considered their poor placement de rigeur and complained when he tried.

Tempted to try, he clicked down the list, which was when he realized: one of them had a different date than the others.

He leaned over a speaker and hit play, curious what had been loaded on this particular sound test file.  Since that was probably it.

Instead, he heard Dad say, “Well, if it isn’t my favorite little minx.  Yeah, that’s a good girl.  Let me see those eyes shine.  I love it when you...”

He slammed stop.

There was somebody else on the file too.  They were laughing that bubbly way he knew happened, but he barely remembered as something he’d experienced in his own life.

Troy stared at the file.  He breathed again.

A thump sounded behind him and Tyreen came tripping out of the water closet, pants around her ankles and her underwear yanked up in her fist.  “What the hell was that?”

“Ah, system check.  Since we’re here, you know.”

She growled and she sat down right where she was and in the puddle of her pants.  “Warn me next time.”

“Your intuition didn’t tip you off?”

Those words didn’t even merit an answer.  She closed her eyes and turned her back to him.

The ship was so small he only would have had to lean out of the chair and he could have had his hand on her.  She wasn’t in the mood though, not about that, not about anything to do with Dad and definitely not about playing siren anytime before they made planetfall.

And well, then she wouldn’t be playing anymore, would she?

*

Maybe that fact had settled funny someplace in her stomach.  Troy just knew that after a while she stole her Coeus back and stood in the corner, smacking the screen.  The extrapolation program ticked off another hundred coordinates that didn’t suit, approaching 50% complete at a crawl.

Tyreen peered over his shoulder, but said nothing about the progress bar.

It looked like half of their chances for finding themselves had been spent.  Troy thought it was more of a best match situation.

He wondered what he would do if he was wrong.

The jump drive ticked down to usable quiescence.  Tyreen swore and started to get back into bed.  Instead she kicked her pants off and stretched out belly-down on the floor which was chalky with the bookmarks of the night they’d left.

It had only been two days.  He thought.  The active time on the sublight engine monitor was somewhat misleading.  Startup had taken so long, but he’d been fumbling all over himself, movements thick with the shock of what he was about to do.

What Tyreen said they were doing.

Like, she just… dragged him.  Now?

Now there his sister lay, looking like she’d melted into the ground.

“What’re you staring at?” she muttered without looking up from the well of her arms.

“Mm.  Nothing,” Troy murmured.  “I was thinking about when we were kids.  That game we’d play about not getting off the bed back when we only had the one and...” Well, he thought about that a lot, even though it hadn’t been bothering his mind in that moment.

Tyreen sat up, still hunched over.  Her Coeus rattled in her grasp.  Eventually, she tipped it into one of the charging slots.  “I’m eating now.  You want in?”

“Sure.”

Food was something to do anyway.  Troy hauled himself out of the chair and got himself into the cupboard after some of the stale rye bread they’d taken from the stores back at the homestead.  He checked it for mold and then also took a plum.

Tyreen picked over the cages with a tongs.  Did she want manta eggs? A hexling or two? A flush of air coral and sprat? One one of the lonesome baby Djira mewing in their own slime?

She took two eggs.  

The two of them hunched together on a sheet of tanned air algae.  Troy’s plum was sour, but he sucked the pit clean while Tyreen stared at him.  As he reached for the bread, Tyreen shoved one of the eggs at him.  “Open it for me.”

Troy sighed.  Speaking of games from when they were children— Tyreen could have eaten the egg regardless, but he’d gotten awfully good at spinning the tops off with his knife and one hand.  He smiled and he did this for her now, placing the egg on a spare sack so that his sister’s leavings would spread through the ship, get into the Instruments.  

The egg squished as she pressed her fingers inside.  It turned to dust and glass.  “Hmm.  That was fresher than I thought.”

“Good.  Want me to do the other one too?”

“Sure.”

So, he sliced again.  He was going to have to wash his hand before he finished his own super as much as the second egg leaked.

This time, his sister stared at her dirty knees.  “Are you sure you didn’t fuck everything up?”

“If I did,” Troy said softly.  “Then we’ll deal wi-...”

Tyreen sucked the other egg down, sloppy now, sand leaking between her toes.  She grabbed the piece of rye and stuck it in Troy’s mouth before burrowing into the bed and covering her head with the pillow.  

Troy chewed thoughtfully and then moved to clean up.  The baby Djira chortled in their cages as though night had fallen.  Well, it was that time by the engine clock.  

Troy stroked the back of his sister’s hand.  She shivered despite the heat on her skin, and he held her tight through it, all the long instants that it lasted.  He reached up and smoothed her damp forehead after.  “She was doing better.  I thought she might be OK.  Then she got all limp while we were on the road.  Now this.  She was joking with me, right? I didn’t dream that.”

Dr. Black patted his back.  “Now.  Don’t start.”

He looked over her way— even seated, he was taller than her.  “I know I kinda lost it a little.”

“Well, yes.”

He didn’t feel shame over the fact he’d ranted and raved at Dr. Black the whole first fifteen minutes he’d known her.  For starters, he still didn’t remember that part, only what happened after she’d given him soda slush and a hit of anti-anxiety meds.  He felt a weird sort of comfortable that they’d rushed everything complicated out of the way.  He was though still painfully worn out.  

“And passed out.  Anyway, understandable even before your little story.  Which was not funny at all and I protest.” Dr. Black wagged her finger at him.

“We have different senses of humor.  And Ty, she...” 

“People don’t heal in straight lines.  It isn’t just you.”

“Right, right.”

“Now, she needs sleep and you need food.  Don’t give me that look.”

Troy, unsure of what look she’d meant, straightened his face out into a blase sort of smile.

It got her to huff as she turned for one last look at the monitors, which she checked against her ECHO before tossing him the receiver for the bedside monitor.  

It had a slot to clip it into a phone or an ECHO.  Troy possessed neither.  He slid it into his pocket.  “I’m not that hungry.”

“I can fix that.” Nodding, Dr. Black grabbed him by the shoulders and rolled him out of her operating theater towards one of her med lockers.  She might have been kind of abrupt the way she insisted on touching him, but she had a deftness in her curious crone-hands and she hadn’t dumped him onto the floor yet.  

Presently, she extracted a vape pen from a box marked with pot leaves.  “Take a good hit off of that.”

Troy did.  He put the pen in his pocket too, figuring it was his now.  It tasted baby mild and bit sweet.  It also made him cough as Dr. Black brought him into her kitchen.

The space would have seemed old Terran country kind of homey to most people, but to Troy it seemed overwrought and crowded.  He found the ceramic chickens on top of the fidge especially disconcerting, and so tried to keep his attention on Dr. Black as she bustled about, inspecting her cupboards.  None were empty, though that was definitely a set of jumper cables and a giant bag marked “Lie LYE DAMMIT” in the one, as opposed to any food.  

“Hmm.  Cream of wheat, girts or toast?” she asked.

Troy blinked at her.  People asking him what he wanted to eat? He still wasn’t used to that, not at all.  “I like grits,” he said.

“Me too.  Grits it is.  And coffee, military-style.” The coffee turned out to have been made some time ago, recirculating through the percolator since however long that had been.  It was now black and oily.  Dr. Black served him a giant mug accompanied by a pound bag of creamer granules.  

Troy was perfectly happy with this turn of events, though he did sniff the creamer before applying any.  “You remembered.”

“I sure did.” Having giggled, Dr. Black set about making the grits.  She measured nothing to do this, and moved as though she should have been humming, though she stayed very quiet.  She was that light on her toes despite not being light at all otherwise.  The water boiled and she dumped in half a canister, whisking furiously until the mixture began to spit and got covered for its trouble.  Satisfied, she whacked the pan on the burner, then returned to Troy.

Who she poked in the temple.  ”Ehh! What’s going on in there?”

“Too much.” Troy sighed. 

“Well, for the record, after some of what you told me? I’d be concerned if you weren’t having sex with Tyreen.  Does that take care of some of it?” Despite the utter audacity of that remark, she made it with a sort of sympathy too uncomplicated to be easily put on.

Still— “Seriously?

“You’re clearly both sensuous people.  You’d be miserable if you weren’t.”

“And she can’t touch anybody else.”

“Oh.  Right.  Is it weird I keep forgetting that part? Hmm, yeah, it probably is.”

”You’re OK with this?” Troy slid into a laugh.

Dr. Black joined him, shrugging.  “I told you, I prefer interesting patients.  A boy siren who’s schtupping his sister? Sign me up!”

“W-we only did it like twice, you know,” he ended up insisting, trying to clear the thought from the air.  “I’m not even sure if she wants to keep going with that. She’s not in a great place to ask right now anyway and...”

“You’re blushing.”

“So what? I just really love her, OK?” Though he felt he was stating the obvious there, there was something freeing about making the point in his own uncomplicated words and to someone who wasn’t themself Tyreen.

Speaking of whom, the monitor in his pocket groaned.  He pulled it out and checked the indicator lights.  Apparently, the thing was bi-directional.  And it had been on for a while.  

“Troy?” Came a faint voice.

“I’m here.  You OK?”

“Ugh.  Kinda.  Anyway, you’d better do me again.  You’d better, or I’ll fucking eat you.  Got it?”

“Got it.  I’ll be back soon.  You sleep some more if you can.” He blew a kiss against the mic before he flipped the thing to listen mode and set it aside by the coffee.

He also went to ask Dr. Black if he could maybe eat in the operating theater.  However, he found her with her fists balled up close to her mouth, her eyes sparkling, and a faint keening noise rising from her chest.

Of course the first person he told was into them as a couple.

1.

In his very first clear memory, he’s crying.  A dull, throbbing ache winds through his whole body.  It’s worst around his middle.  There’s this sharp spot on his back too.  He squirms. 

Mama holds him up on the potty chair.  He’s terrified to be there.  He doesn’t have the words for why.  She sings to him, or she says hush with her voice all teary, her big hands stroking his sides or his hair.

One moment when she pauses close to his face, he grabs her thumb in his hand.  He pulls her down.  He picks over her scratched silver rings.  He still hurts, but playing with her keeps his mind off of how much. 

Leda sings again.  She doesn’t hold him so tight.  But she doesn’t let him take his favorite ring off of her thumb.

“That’s mine,” she whispers, hardly missing the words of the song.

~*~

2.

Troy refuses to eat after a bad ‘spell’.  Mama makes a jammy paste out of the almost too old plums to try and tempt him.  Ty munches on glowbugs, the really tangy orange ones, but his head has started to hurt by the time she comes to feed him too.

When she tells him, he whimpers.  “I wanted to play too! It’s not fair.” 

“Just eat! You can’t throw up light!” They never say ‘magic’ about how the two of them work.  ‘Spells’ are ‘magic’, but ‘spells’ are also what Troy has. 

He wonders.  There’s clearly something not OK in his belly.  Maybe he can throw up light.  Maybe it’ll come out of the old IV pinpricks in his veins.  Maybe his Siren markings will bleed it like stuck Djira.

Tyreen tells him she hates him and she leaves.  He thinks she’s whimpering too.  The sound of Mama and Dad arguing drowns it out though.

He starts to figure throwing up light can’t be much worse than crying, listening, being there and knowing this fight is his fault.

After everybody’s gone to bed, Troy rolls over against his sister.  Tyreen throws her arm around him before he’s got any chance to stop her.

There’s light.  His senses fade back into being, one by one.  So, there’s pain too.

He stares up at the ceiling, tasting glowbugs underneath his skin.  He realizes that if he’s magic, magic must be a terrible thing.  It makes people scream and cry.  

He’s four.  Deciding this breaks his heart so badly he can’t sleep even though he’s starving and his whole, hurting little body wants to sleep.

~*~

3.

Mama spends time in the medical suite with him sometimes if the homestead is all set with food and fire.  It’s kind of like how Dad works on the robots.  Well, Mama helps with those too, Troy and his sister soon enough since they have “tiny fingers”.  They both get told no a lot for carrying screws in their teeth, but especially Tyreen since she’s got two hands and no excuse.

Troy doesn’t mind being “worked on” too.  The medical suite is simply part of the homestead to him.  A lot of his other earlier memories start and end there.  None of them scare him as bad as the really old one about the potty chair.  Some are even kind of nice, like the one where he woke up next to Tyreen and Mama had posed them like fish with the very last two of the sparkly bandages.

“It’s your shoulder.  There’s a little more that has to come out,” Mama tells him now, petting his head.  

Troy nods.  He breathes the disinfectant and the steely warmth beneath the lights.  

When he wakes up a while later, the room is dark and something is very wrong.  He knows very well what sutures feel like and he is covered in them.  Also, he’s alone.

He calls for Mama.  Something in his belly stabs with agony.  He catches his breath and holds his hand over his mouth.  Monitor noise fills the room.

It’s Dad who comes to get him.  “There’s my little man,” he says cheerfully.  “Wow, you were really down for the count.  Did a number on Mama too.  She’s dead to the world someplace out back.”

Troy balks, wide-eyed.  He points to where he’s hurting.

“Huh? What about your business?” Dad seems ever so slightly taken aback.

No.  Troy shakes his head.  He ends up clumsily grappling with the bedclothes while his father laughs and laughs.  Like the loop of missing skin on Troy’s stomach and the drain sticking out of the wound perfectly normal.

He can hear Tyreen whispering.  “I think she had to fix his belly button like she did mine.” Then, to him— “Can I see?”

Troy sobs and pulls the sheets up.  Not that Tyreen doesn’t end up seeing anyway.  It’s days before he can walk himself to the toilet.  Tyreen takes him.  She doesn’t complain much.

~*~

4.

Mama dies.  Dad doesn’t let Troy help dig the grave.  He has the robots do it even though they’re too precise and they don’t seem to realize not to laugh about it.

It’s that plentiful season after the rains on Nekrotafeyo when new mantas are born and there’s so much spawn and sprat in the lakes that Tyreen can go wading for supper, though Dad says that’s wasteful. 

It seems deeply wrong for Mama to be gone at all, but especially then.  When everything else is alive and she’s not anymore.

Troy picks around the homestead, looking for where Dad might have put her rings.  He couldn’t have burned them.  Silver doesn’t burn.  But then where are they?

Once again and after dark, Troy goes out to Mama’s grave.  He starts to ask her, but the night is cool and whistling.  His voice seems like too much for the valley below.  Besides, he does know where one of Mama’s rings went.

Troy pulls up his shirt and plays with the round scar she left underneath his belly button.  He wonders if maybe she fixed his spells since he hasn’t had one since.  Part of him knows it’s wishful thinking.  Besides, why didn’t she tell him what she found?  Why didn’t she tell him she was going to?

The same reason she didn’t give him her ring to play with.  Some things were hers.  

When he heads back to the homestead, Tyreen’s waiting for him in the shadows, her arm tucked against the wall so she’s awfully hard to see.

“Was she there?” she asks.  

He thinks at first she’s trying to scare him, although that’s funny stuff to say if she is.  “Ah, no?” he answers like it’s normal.

Next thing, she’s fists balled up and trembling in front of him.  Troy puts his hand up to guard, concerned she’s going to hit him.