Chapter 125: Tarn Point

Leo opened his mouth to answer her, and Vexa pressed one white-gloved finger right against his lips before a single word could come out.

"Nope," she said brightly. "Not today..."

He blinked down at her, and her finger stayed exactly where it was while her tail swayed lazily behind her calves.

"You heard me, Captain Handsome," she went on, tilting her head as she looked him over from his messy hair down to his scuffed boots. "You’ve crossed three whole systems, you fought off a Federation hunting wing, and half of your crew looks like they haven’t slept properly since the day your sky broke... Look at Harper, she’s got dark circles under her dark circles."

"Hey!" Harper called from across the hangar, without lifting her head from the racing turbine she was drooling over. "I heard that, cat-girl!"

"You were supposed to!" Vexa called back, and then she turned back to Leo and finally took her finger off his mouth. "I’m not racing a tired pilot, Leo... Where’s the fun in beating you when you’re half asleep? When I win, I want you to know you lost fair and square, with your eyes wide open."

"When you win, huh?" Leo said, and a slow grin crept across his face.

"When I win," she repeated, completely unbothered, and her fangs flashed in a wide smile. "So you’re all staying here today. Eat, sleep, explore, do whatever you want... and tomorrow morning, we race."

Leo looked back over his shoulder at the girls.

Camila was clutching the strap of her apron with shining eyes, Elena was pretending very hard not to look interested, and Aoi gave him a small nod that said she agreed with every word.

’Honestly... a day off sounds pretty good right about now,’ he thought. ’When was the last time we even had one of those?’

"Alright, Vexa," he said. "Tomorrow, then."

Vexa’s tail shot straight up in delight, and she clapped her hands together once.

"Yay! Okay, okay, come on... I’ll show you around before you all get lost!"

She led them out of the hangar through a wide archway and up a set of white stone steps that climbed along the face of the cliff, and the warm sea wind came rushing up to meet them the moment they stepped outside.

WHOOOSH!

The estate opened up around them in tiers.

There were three pavilions stepping down the cliff face, all sweeping curves of white ceramic and tall panels of blue quartz, joined together by open walkways and terraces lined with flowering vines that glowed softly even in daylight.

Far below, the violet sea rolled in against the black rocks in long slow waves, and the sound of the surf drifted up to them like the whole planet was breathing.

"This is the main pavilion," Vexa said, walking backward in front of them with her arms spread wide. "Kitchens are on the ground floor, the hydro-spa is on the east side, the training room’s down that hall, and the library is... somewhere. Honestly, I never go in there."

"You have a library you never go in?" Elena asked, with one eyebrow rising.

"I bought the house with it already inside," Vexa said with a shrug. "It came with the books..."

Elena looked like someone had just told her a priceless painting was being used to cover a hole in the wall, and she pressed her lips together very tightly.

They passed a few of the household staff as they walked.

There was a tall slender maid with pale green scales and four gentle golden eyes who bowed politely as they went by, an old stocky groundskeeper with a thick grey beard of fine tendrils who was trimming a hedge of blue leaves, and somewhere deeper in the building, somebody was singing in a language none of them could understand while pots clanged in rhythm.

"That’s Ollo, my cook," Vexa said fondly. "He sings when he’s happy... He’s going to be very happy, because I told him I’m having guests."

The suites were on the second floor of the main pavilion, and when Vexa opened the first door, Camila let out a small gasp.

The room was bigger than the Wanderer-7’s entire bridge.

It had a wide bed with thick white blankets, a floor of smooth warm wood, a bathroom with a deep tub carved out of pale stone and a whole wall of glass that looked straight out over the sea.

"This one’s yours, Camila," Vexa said. "Everyone gets their own... There are thirty of them, so you can swap if you don’t like the view."

"Thirty," Jin-Ah murmured, glancing at her slate as if she might find a reasonable explanation there. "For one person."

"I like having options!" Vexa said.

Harper stuck her head into her own suite, took one look at the bed and turned right back around.

"Yeah, that’s great, really," she said. "Cap... Cap, I’m going back to the hangar. Vexa said I could touch the lathes, and I’m going to touch the lathes."

"Go," Leo laughed. "Try not to take anything apart that she still needs."

"No promises!" Harper said, and she was already halfway down the stairs.

After that, the crew drifted apart one by one, each of them pulled toward something different.

Down in the hangar, Harper sat cross-legged on the floor of Vexa’s machine shop with her sleeves pushed up past her elbows and a Thyrrian calibration tool in each hand, talking out loud to an open racing turbine like it was an old friend she’d just bumped into at the market.

"Look at you," she murmured, running her thumb along a coil winding finer than a strand of hair. "Look at you, you gorgeous little thing... Who wound you? Huh? Who did this to you? Because I want to shake their hand."

Camila followed the old groundskeeper down a winding path of stepping stones to the lower terrace, where a long greenhouse of curved glass sat tucked against the cliff with warm wet air fogging the inside of its walls.

The moment she stepped inside, the smell hit her... it was wet soil, green leaves and the sharp sweet scent of fruit ripening on the vine.

The groundskeeper showed her rows of round sun-melons glowing faintly orange under their leaves and little red fire-peppers hanging in clusters like tiny lanterns, and he didn’t seem to mind at all when Camila knelt down in the middle of the path and pressed both of her hands flat into the soil.

It was warm and damp and real, and it crumbled between her fingers exactly the way the soil in her grandmother’s garden used to.

’Real dirt,’ she thought, and her eyes filled up before she could stop them. ’Real, living dirt...’

She cried a little, quietly, while the old groundskeeper pretended to be very busy with a watering can, and then she wiped her face with her sleeve, stood up and started filling her apron pockets with seeds.

Up in the east wing, Elena lowered herself into the hydro-spa one careful centimeter at a time.

The water was hot and smelled faintly of some mineral salt she didn’t recognize, and it rose slowly up past her shoulders until she was sitting with only her face above the surface and her honey-blonde hair floating loose around her.

She let out a long completely undignified sigh.

’This is acceptable,’ she told herself firmly, closing her eyes. ’This is merely... acceptable.’

She stayed in for almost two hours.

Leo spent the first part of the day wandering the estate on his own, or at least he tried to, because Chloe followed him everywhere he went.

She never said anything about it.

She just drifted along three steps behind him with her hands tucked into her sleeves, stopping when he stopped and walking when he walked, like a small dark shadow that had decided it belonged to him.

They walked along the top of the cliffs, where the grass grew thick and soft and came up past his ankles, and Leo crouched down and ran his hand through it just because he could.

’Grass,’ he thought, and laughed under his breath. ’Real grass... Man, I never thought I’d get this happy about grass.’

The wind tugged at his hair and pushed his shirt against his back, and when he stood up and looked out over the sea, there was nothing on the horizon at all except water and sky and two pale suns sitting low and warm over the waves.

There were no proximity alarms, no turret readouts and nothing out there trying to kill them.

’This is nice,’ he thought, and shoved his hands in his pockets. ’Like, actually nice... I could get used to this.’

When he turned around, Chloe had stopped following him.

She’d found a wide flat stone on one of the terraces that the suns had been warming all morning, and she’d curled up on top of it with her knees tucked under her sweater and her face tipped up toward the light, like a cat who’d finally found the perfect spot in the house.

Her eyes were closed, but the moment he moved, one green eye cracked open and followed him.

"I’m right here... you don’t need to worry." Leo said, smiling.

"I know," Chloe said, and closed her eye again.

Leo walked over and sat down on the edge of the warm stone beside her, and after a moment, she shifted over without opening her eyes and rested her head against his hip.

"Do you like it here, Chloe?" he asked.

She thought about it very seriously for a while.

"The sun is nice," she said at last. "And the air smells like rain... and salt and flowers too."

She paused.

"Though it does smell very much like cat."

"Cat?"

"The whole house smells like her," Chloe said, wrinkling her nose slightly. "Everywhere..."

Leo laughed and ruffled her bangs, she let him and for a little while they just sat there together on the warm stone and listened to the sea.

On the second floor of the main pavilion, Jin-Ah knocked on the door of Aoi’s suite in three short precise taps.

Aoi opened it with her hair still damp from a shower and her glasses pushed up on her nose, and her face brightened a little when she saw who it was.

"Jin-Ah... Is something wrong?"

"Nothing is wrong," Jin-Ah said, with her slate held flat against her chest like a shield. "I’ve made an appointment..."

Aoi blinked.

"An appointment?"

"With one of Vexa’s maids... Her name is Sira, and she has basic medical training." Jin-Ah’s voice stayed perfectly even, though her eyes were fixed somewhere just to the left of Aoi’s face. "The estate has a small medical suite on the lower level, with a full diagnostic scanner... I asked Vexa about it this morning so she didn’t ask why I needed it."

For a second, Aoi didn’t understand then she did, and all the color drained out of her face before rushing straight back in as a deep, burning red.

"Oh," she said, very quietly. "Oh... I see."

Her hands had gone cold.

She looked down at them, and she realized her fingers were trembling against the doorframe, and she curled them into her palms so Jin-Ah wouldn’t notice.

Jin-Ah noticed anyway.

"It’s better to know," Jin-Ah said, a little more gently than before. "Whatever the answer is... knowing is always better than guessing. I’ll be there the whole time."

Aoi looked at her for a long moment, and some of the tightness in her chest eased.

"...Thank you, Jin-Ah."

The maid, Sira, was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs with her hands folded neatly in front of her and her four golden eyes soft and kind.

She bowed to them both and led them down a quiet corridor without asking a single question, and Aoi was grateful for that in a way she couldn’t have put into words.

The medical suite was small and white and very clean, with a padded diagnostic bed in the middle of the room and a curved scanning arm folded above it like the neck of a sleeping bird.

"Please lie down, miss," Sira said softly. "It won’t hurt at all... It only takes a moment."

Aoi took off her glasses, folded them carefully and set them on the little tray beside the bed then she lay down on her back and stared up at the white ceiling while the scanning arm unfolded above her with a hum.

WHIRRR!

A soft band of blue light swept slowly down over her body from her shoulders to her knees, and then back up again.

Neither of them said anything.

Aoi’s heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her throat, and a dozen thoughts were crowding into her head at once.

’What do I tell Leo? How do I even say it? We’re being hunted... we live on a warship... How would I ever...’

A small blue panel lit up on the wall beside the bed.

[Analyzing...]

Aoi’s hand shot out and grabbed Jin-Ah’s without her even meaning to, gripping it so tightly that her knuckles went white.

Jin-Ah looked down at their joined hands, and then she squeezed back just as hard, and she didn’t let go.

’Don’t worry... I’m here.’