Three

[keaalu]

     Skydash looked out on the slowly deepening evening sky. “I think I’d like to sit outside. Enjoy the stars without having to worry if I’m going to fly into one.” She rocked her bulk carefully forwards onto her thrusters, and used the momentum to get upright. “Are you coming?”

     “Of course.” Blink followed her out, wrapped in blanket and trailing the corners behind her like the wings of a wet moth. The warm afternoon had been replaced by a chill breeze gusting in off the ocean; she shivered and huddled down in her coverings. “Rrr! Got nippy, out.”

     Skydash arched a puzzled brow. “What?”

     “It’s cold!”

     “I’m not. Come here.” Skydash settled on the ground and held out her arm, as a ramp to walk up.

     After a hesitant second of internal debate – walk on my friend? But she DID invite you to – Blink took the offer, and scrambled carefully up the shiny enamel.

     “Tomorrow, we can begin to make plans.” Skydash leaned carefully back against the rock wall, letting Blink settle in the crook of her bent arm, laying against her chassis close to where the warm air vented from her core. “I brought as much information with me as we could find in the archives. We can cross-reference it with the data you have here in the library. As soon as we know where we’re going, we can head off.”

     Blink examined the intricate scar in her left palm. “Do you think those creatures, Frond’s people… they’ll be easy to find?”

     “I don’t know. Not even the explorers from the past encountered them much more than once or twice, and when Frond left looking for you? Well, she was our only contact. We even went back to Surkea, but there’s nothing there since we closed all the little holes.”

     “You mean, maybe we locked them out of our universe,” Blink guessed, glumly. “And the only way for them to help me would be to somehow open all the little holes back up.”

     “I didn’t say that. And I think they’ve been here in this universe a lot longer than us, even. I don’t think a couple of children could lock them out forever.” Skydash hummed, softly. “Not to mention, we were following their instructions in the first place.”

     They sat together and gazed quietly up at the stars, and the fat wedge of moon cresting low over the hills on the other side of the valley. Blink let her head rest against her friend’s chest, and listened to the soft purr of her generator core, the muffled clicks of pumps and cables, the shifting frequencies of her central harmonic. Between her blanket and the warm air from her friend’s venting, she could barely feel the breeze any more.

     “Hesger’s not so bad as I was imagining, for a squishy ball of wet and muck,” Skydash allowed, generously. “Pretty, almost. Day always said that was the one thing he missed about the alien worlds he’d been to – how big and beautiful and open the skies were. You could just fly, without worrying if you were going to smack into a wall that some ignorant grounder had built in your way.”

     Blink grunted a reluctant acknowledgement. “But the mud does get pretty much everywhere if you’re not careful.”

     “Ha, now you sound like Uncle Star. I think his last words to me before I left were to be careful of the mud. I told him, I think organics are aware of the existence of ‘soap’.”

     “…they’re all doing well?”

     “Mm-hmm. Day’s even starting to get on with the local council. Kind of. If you squint.” Pause. “…At least, they’re not throwing things at each other across his office, any more.”

     Blink giggled, tiredly. “That’s good. It’s only taken them a few thousand years.”

     “Sadie said you still have an image capture of us?”

     “Yes. It used to be on my pinboard, but it’s got pretty rumpled since I left tiao’I, since I kept it in my satchel for a while.” Blink looked away, and added, quietly; “I liked the continuity it gave me. Everything else might be in turmoil, but thoughts of home, of family… Then I’d feel guilty, being sentimental about the family that I broke up.”

     Skydash gave her a little squeeze. “It’s not completely broken. If it was, you’d have never called me, and I’d have never come here,” she said, quietly. “Ama used to say that sometimes it takes space to think, to heal a mind that’s been hurt. Sometimes, you have to get away to get perspective. You can’t see the bigger picture if you’re too close to it.”

     Someone’s been listening to Doctor Panacea. Blink remained quiet, for a few moments. “I suppose.”

     “I mean it. There’s never been anything we can’t get over. Never been anything that we can’t fix.” Skydash vented stale air from her core in a small sigh. “But we’ve got plenty of time to figure out what we’re going to do. It’s not like you’re going to disappear in a puff of smoke if we don’t do it right now, hey? If we do decide to go our separate ways? It’ll be amicable, not because you were stranded on an alien world a million miles away, and not because we never gave it a second chance. Right?”

     “…right.” Blink nodded, against her shoulder.

     “I expect to hear all your adventures first, anyway,” Skydash teased, with a little finger-poke that made Blink snicker and squirm. “About this place, and the library, and all the creatures, and everything.”

     “I’ll try. My memory isn’t as good as it used to be.”

     “You said you kept a diary?”

     Blink actually jumped. “Well, I-I did, I just, I never thought anyone would want to read it-!”

     Skydash gave a wicked chuckle. “…sounds like Bee’s been writing naughty things in her dia-ree.”

     Blink suddenly felt very hot in the face. She pressed her cheek against her friend’s cool armour, but it didn’t help much. “Have not.”

     “Aw, you said you missed me.”

     “That doesn’t mean I wrote porn.” The heat in her face rose another few notches. It felt like it was soon going to melt a hole in the enamel. “It’s just, it’s… disjointed. It wouldn’t make any sense.”

     Truth be told, she’d written some very honest thoughts in her small diary – thoughts about their family, and whether she thought she still belonged in it – and wasn’t sure she felt quite up to showing Skydash just yet. She didn’t want to ruin the moment with that sort of awkward sorrow, not while she was still floating on a little elated bubble at being back in her company.

     “Your friends seem nice.” Skydash changed the subject, deliberately. “I’d been wondering where you were, if you were okay. Day said our people weren’t all that common, way out here, and I was scared you’d have turned into a lonely nomad.”

     Blink kept quiet, to avoid having to admit that for a while? She had been.

     “It was such a relief you’d not been stranded here all your own. Even if some of them are a little… well, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d like Rae, before I met him.”

     “He was the only one that knew the real me. He followed me here when I was abducted, and got stranded too. He’s a nice mech, really. He’s just-… hot blooded. Likes pretty girls.”

     “Hmm. Even when they say they’re not interested?” Skydash stroked her friend’s shoulder with the pad of her thumb.

     “He was drunk. He only did it once.”

     Another noise that suggested Skydash wasn’t entirely satisfied, but she didn’t push the issue.

     “Even with Rae vouching for me, no-one else believed me when I first said what I used to be. Not even when I showed them our picture.” Blink snorted, tiredly. “I don’t think I’d have believed me. Just some crazy little fessine, needing meaning in her life and cooking up a ridiculous story to go with a photograph she picked up one day.”

     “And then, along came a monster to help you prove it, huh?”

     “I don’t see any monsters here.” Blink rubbed her cheek briefly against her friend’s cool armour. “You’re still beautiful.”

     A snort. “I need a bath. I haven’t hit the washracks in… Pit, close to an entire solar orbit.” She shuddered, hard enough that Blink almost slid off her arm. “Everything I touch gets covered in soot.”

     “Baths are over-rated.”

     “Pssh. Seeing you crawl home all those times, covered in crud and almost in recharge on your feet? I know you’re biased.”

     “Totally wasn’t a secret ploy to get you to join me.”

     “Like I said. Biased.” Skydash chuckled, and struck up a satisfied hum. “You’re not wearing your ribbons,” she noted, brushing a finger over Blink’s tousled hair. “I noticed it when we spoke over the communicators, but I put it down to coincidence, since you’d usually just bathed, or been working, or something. I’d have thought they were more useful now than they ever used to be, since now you actually have something you need to tie out of the way.”

     Blink remained quiet for so long, Skydash had to actually look and check she hadn’t dozed off.

     “Is everything all right, Bee?”

     “I… told you about Tevak?” Blink started, carefully.

     Skydash nodded. “The one that took you prisoner.”

     “Well, he-… it… put a bad taste in my mouth.” Blink forced a smile, although couldn’t quite get rid of the frown creasing her brows. “I don’t really wear ribbons, any more, because of him. Brings back bad memories.”

     “That’s a shame. The littlebits found some they thought you’d like. Insisted on getting them as a welcome-home gift.” Skydash hummed, thoughtfully. “Maybe we can think of something else to do with them, if you’re not feeling up to wearing them.”

     Blink remained quiet for several awkward heartbeats. “…we don’t even know if I can be fixed, Dash.”

     “I know.” Skydash let her hand come up to cover her, protectively. “But we’ll keep assuming you can be, until we know for absolutely definite. And trust me, I won’t be accepting a negative easily, so they’ll have a fight on their hands if they refuse us.”

     Blink managed a little giggle. “So long as they don’t think it’s a good idea to turn you into a laima, too, for being impolite.”

     “Pssh! I’m never impolite. Just honest. I can’t help it if the truth sometimes hurts.”

     “Now that’s your uncle talking.” Blink thought she’d successfully swallowed the yawn, but her friend was more attentive than she’d given her credit for.

     “You need to go somewhere more comfortable,” Skydash murmured. “I might not know much about organics, but I know they need to sleep somewhere that isn’t mostly made of metal.”

     “I am comfortable,” Blink lied, sleepily.

     “And a terrible liar. You’ve been wriggling about all evening.” Skydash carefully picked her up, one hand under each arm, and lifted her to the floor, supporting her until the drowsy fessine had found her balance. “Go to bed, Bee. I’ll still be here in the morning.”

     “But we’ve only just got back together-”

     “And we’ve got a whole lifetime ahead of us. Please. Let’s not start that lifetime by you being crabby because you have stiff muscles.”

     Blink tried to scowl, but was too tired to carry it off. She turned away, and drooped back to the entry door, looking back over her shoulder every step of the way. “Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

     “Yes. For you. To go. To bed.”

     “…all right. Good night.”

     “Sleep well.”

     When Skydash peered in through the big windows, she found Blink curled up on Rae’s heap of discarded cushions, barely inside the doorway. She smiled and shook her head, but left her to sleep.


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