She pulls up a map and the cockpit floods with a ghost grid: lanes like threads, beacons blinking steady as old saints, warning halos around the places where physics gets drunk. She points with the edge of her mug. “Option one: we cut straight across the polite part and hope no one notices a shiny bird with a guilty conscience. I don’t like it.”
“No.”
“Option two: we skim this belt, eat a little rock dust, pop out near the Sparrow Lane and aim to intersect the IHC patrol that misses dinner twice a week.”
“When?” I ask.
“Two hours if we stay loud,” she says. “Three if we dead-stick and kiss the ice. I can make it two and a half if I flirt.”
“Do not flirt with space,” I tell her. “Space does not flirt back.”
“Space absolutely flirts,” she says. “It’s just subtle. Option three: we bounce through the Athena subcorridor and pray no one on shift remembers what a ceremonial cruiser silhouette looks like when it’s pretending to be cargo.”
“Athena’s crowded,” I say. “Too many eyes.”
She nods. “Sparrow it is. You in the mood to time a chaperone?”
“Yes,” I say, and slide into the navigator’s seat because I will not let my hands be idle while there are still teeth behind us. “Queue the patrol schedules. Show me their laziness.”
She pulls up patrol arcs, blue cones sweeping in tidy discipline. “This is today’s lie,” she says. “They’re never where the map says they’ll be. But theyarecreatures of habit.”
“They cut the corner here,” I say, pointing at an overlap where economics beat doctrine every time. “And they run wide here when the beacons glitch for a fraction. If we drop into the lane at this time stamp”—I mark a spot with a claw tip—“we will slide directly into a picket’s blind shoulder. We will call it a mercy meeting.”
“Hot,” she says. “I love when you and geometry flirt.”
“I do not flirt with geometry.”
“Sure,” she says. “Tell that to the angle you just made me.”
“CynJyn.”
“What? It’s a nice angle.”
I let the banter sit because it calms us both. My hands move across the board, spooling a course that leaves as little scent as a ship this silly can. Pulse, coast, mask. Pulse, coast, breathe. She hums a song under her breath that keeps time with the navticks. The stars smear and reassemble, ghosting into different constellations that don’t care about our small concerns.
“You didn’t deny it,” she says after a quiet minute.
“Deny what.”
“The very obvious, glaring, heroic, can-be-seen-from-orbit chemistry,” she says, turning the mug in her hands so the metal catches the dim. “And the part where you’re different now. Less… sharp around the edges.”
I check a burn time because I am a coward in matters of the heart and a professional in matters of everything else. “She is sleeping,” I say finally. “I am not going to discuss private things while she is sleeping.”
“That’s not a denial,” she sings.
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
She beams. “Good. I’m sick of being the only house heathen who believes in love.”
“You are not a heathen,” I tell her, because accuracy matters even when the world is unkind. “You are a useful heretic.”
“Frame it,” she says, pleased. “So. You’re in charge of telling her parents she is coming home with teeth and choices and an attitude.”
“I am in charge of getting her to where telling anyone anything becomes a question,” I counter. “Then we can write our corrections.”
“You really think the Alliance patrol will play nice?” she asks, squinting at the next set of beacons. “Half the time they act like bounties are a tacky rumor.”
“They like Khong even less than I do,” I say. “And we have something they want. Proof. Survivors. A hull signature. If we arrive under their umbrella, anyone who wishes us harm will have to write a letter first.”
