Celestial Bodies

[CHAPTER 6] - CRUX : FLORENCE WOLFE

It was clear that someone was playing some sort of sick joke. Enjoying my suffering? This break-in just got a whole lot more personal, and something deep down irked me that the kidnapping of Aurelia was not random.

At Marco's facility, the team had made major breakthroughs in our case. You may be questioning why we did not involve the police, as it was a legal matter, but we astronomers like to keep our affairs... quiet. Some parts of our work can be quite unbelievable, and best left in our hands. After all, Marco has the best in the business working for him, most notably a man named Arcturus, who he has sent to retrieve Aurelia. When I asked a few lab techs about the mysterious agent, it seemed that he had built quite the reputation for himself.

My mentor was our only hope, and I felt so helpless admitting it. He was the one person holding my life together. After the awkward boardroom meeting, the team were barely talking to me. Adrian still shot me glares of intensity, Zara and Lucy avoided me like a curse, and Leo couldn't bring himself to be in the same room, often locking himself in the engineering suites. Marco's building suited us all so well that it kept us divided, as I too would not leave my safe space, the place where I had danced drunkenly whilst everyone else socialised and made up. The observatory.

One morning, Leo approached me in the open-roofed observatory, bending double as he reached my station, panting heavily. This was the first time I had seen him in days.

"I got it. I know what they stole." He sucked in air between grave words.

"What is it?" I dropped the lens I was tinkering with, the reinforced glass skittering across a surface. The engineer looked up at me with those honey irises.

"You're gonna want to come look."

I had never been to the engineers' suites before, and it was no wonder I had barely caught a glimpse of Leo for the last few days. Kitted out with every single piece of tech you could imagine, the spacious pods were lined with sockets and design desks, each table coming with a built-in screen and interactive pencil, waiting for new designs to be birthed.

Leo's pod was... it made me consider how I viewed his mind. The place was a pristine, systematic, complimentary work environment of idea generation through to testing, deconstruction, and redesign. On a central screen, suspended above the many desks, projects, and tools, the frozen image of Hatysa holding a piece of Gecko lingered.

The tall, German man grabbed the image and threw it onto a closer display, the nucleus of this mastery, a central surface completely empty of distraction. We stood over her.

"I have been thinking about this all wrong. My process started with determining the most valuable pieces of Gecko and moving through the list, matching the designs of the compartments with the ones in Marco's database, until one piece visually fit." Seems logical to me. "That was stupid. First, Marco's database is very different to our own. Your parents made Gecko the way nobody else makes telescopes, this is why the tech is so uniquely special." He continued, his gaze analysing the surrounding desks. "Having searched for astronomy robberies in the police reports Marco permitted me access too, only one other has occurred- at the Matterhorn Observatory, a few months ago. This is interesting, because you may think, what do Wolfe and Arber have in common? Well, we know the differences like the back of our hands, but from a civilian perspective... we are both the best." A small part of me was happy knowing that Arber had been robbed too, and I crossed him off the list of potential kidnappers. His pledge of funding our recovery already boiled my blood enough, but Marco reassured me that it was a kindness born out of genuine generosity. My ego still flared at accepting his help. "This got me thinking, Hatysa was not after monetary value, there are easier, more reliable targets for that. She was after the best. She was after what makes the Wolfe Observatory the Wolfe Observatory. This group took what makes Gecko Gecko." My teeth grinded together as I realised this was so much worse than them breaching our files. Leo shared my demeanour, heavy hearted and defeated.