“What happened to being glad they rejected me?” I sniffed.
“I can be both. Happy you’re staying, and mad at them for being stupid enough to reject you.” He leaned back in his chair, rolling into a stretch. I tried my best not to stare at the way the muscles of his stomach went taut under his thin shirt. It should be illegal not to wear your day coat on board. “Where else did you apply?” he asked.
“To the Shanghai. They said no weeks ago. And then I applied to this funny little private ship I’ve never heard of. The Rochester?”
George shook his head. “Never heard of it either. Must be on the other side of the orbit order.”
“Yeah. So that’s my last hope. And of course, it’s the one I wanted the least.”
“Come back to the mess with me.” George hopped up, pulling me toward the door. “They’re showing a movie. Apparently there are witches and crazy Earth weather.”
I pictured myself sitting in a dark room for two hours with George, watching as the other girls tried to play footsie and sneak hands where they shouldn’t go. All while nursing a bruised ego over my failed prospects. I just couldn’t muster up the emotional fortitude it would require. “No, that’s okay. I’m going to head back to my room. Draw myself into a better mood.”
George did not appear convinced this was a good idea, but he let me go without any further chastisement. Ward Z was as dark as I’d left it that afternoon, and my quarters were cramped as always but blissfully quiet. I pulled out my tablet from where I’d stowed it earlier, clicking it on to find the warm glow of the screen and the half-finished landscape I’d been toying with for days. Using the watercolor setting, I’d dashed an orange smudge against the sky to represent what I thought a sunset looked like, purple-and-white mountains rising in the background, a blue-green lake in the foreground—purple because I’d heard them described as “purple mountain majesties” in an old American anthem once. Orange because books told me that was the color of the sun dipping in the sky. And water was blue -green, the colors of life so rarely found in space.
I sighed, abandoning the fool’s errand of trying to capture an imaginary, long-forgotten place, opening a new file, switching to the charcoal setting, and starting a portrait. I always began with the eyes—they were bright, laughing, and kind. Then the line of his nose—strong but fine—then those lips. How many times had I wondered what it would be like to kiss him? To kiss anybody, for that matter?
This wasn’t making me feel better. My life was nearly half over, and I was stuck. So many of my peers retreated into romance, companionship, finding solace in the familiar rhythms of family life. But I couldn’t ignore our position, and I didn’t want to be married off to some boy, like a prize cow. Not that we had any of those on board. Old Earth expressions had a funny way of persisting.
I gave up on representing charcoal George, just like I knew I should give up on flesh-and-blood George. But I’d tackle that challenge tomorrow.
Chapter Three
A tendril of hair loosed itself from the bun coiled tight atop my head. It teased against my ear and caught Jatinder’s disapproving eye.
“You should cut that silly long hair, girl. Or else someday you’ll catch it in a gear shift and tear the scalp straight off your head. Won’t be pretty.”
I grunted a response, the best I could offer him in a conversation we’d had many times over the last three years. We were two hours into the shift; Karlson and I were checking and double-checking the systems that had failed earlier that week, just in case. Thus far, we’d come to the same conclusion repeatedly: the ship was old, and things like this would continue to happen.
What I didn’t bother to tell Jatinder: I had considered a haircut, more than once. The dangers of long hair in a machinery environment were very real. But I kept my hair long for the same reason I put up with ship repair: for the tenuous connection it gave me to my parents. To my mother, who used to pull a wide-toothed comb through my long hair fifty, a hundred times until it lay glossy and sleek. To my father, a skilled engineer who took pride in every job, no matter how thankless. They were long dead, and as such, I barely remembered them, but for the tug of that comb; the softness of my mother’s voice; my father’s strong, weathered hands as they guided mine over a machine part.
“You going to the memorial later?” Karlson asked as he paused to wipe the sweat from his brow. “I hear they’re bringing in a DJ after the speeches. Good stuff to dance to.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking of turning in early.”
“That’s so boring,” he chided. “We only get a chance to have fun, to dance, maybe three times a year, and you’d actually skip it? We should enjoy it while we can. There won’t be any DJs down on Earth.”
“Don’t get on that stuff again. I don’t get why you’re so obsessed. We should be trying our hardest to stay up here, not planning on going down there.”
“It’s just practical,” Karlson said for the thousandth time. He was an avid “Earth truther,” telling anyone who would listen that Earth was in all probability habitable again, and we were wasting our time, wasting away up here.
“Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t been to the last five memorials,” I said. “The speeches don’t change.”
“Is this because you’re trying to avoid someone whose name rhymes with Morge?”
“No,” I answered a bit too quickly. Karlson smirked.
“You should come to drink away your sorrows, then. I’m sneaking in some hooch. It’ll help.”
“I didn’t hear that!” Jatinder mock-shouted.
“I’m happy to share, though I’m sure the adults have their own stash, better than mine.”
“Maybe I’ll confiscate your stash.” Jatinder waggled his eyebrows.
Karlson ignored him, turning back to me, lowering his voice to accommodate greater privacy. “Seriously, Stella, come. We’ve had too hard a week not to have a little fun. Go with me as friends.”
It had been one hell of a week. Jon Karlson might not have been my favorite person on board, but spending the evening with him would trump orbiting George and his groupies for the evening. I shrugged and nodded in one movement, drawing from him an all-too-unsettling grin.
The space usually home to transport and cargo planes had been transformed. A platform at the aft end displayed a familiar red-and-black banner emblazoned with the fleet logo and motto: Survival Through Unity. Beneath that were the symbols of the fleet’s fifteen primary ships representing Earth’s wealthiest and most advanced nations that fled at the time of the disaster, plus the logo for the private ship federation.
My eyes traced over the familiar lines of the pitchfork and wheat stalk of the Stalwart emblem before moving to the top of the banner, where I found far more beautiful symbols. The elegant fleur-de-lis and Eiffel Tower of the Versailles, the lion and vibrant flames of the Shanghai, the emerald lady surrounded by stars for the Lady Liberty. Technologically advanced, thriving ships I’d never see. Or at least never see again. My eyes locked on the jeweled crown entwined with tea leaves of the Empire.