The Soulmate Curse

Fortitude - Part 3

The ride back home was not fun. Except for launch and landing, Zhen was confined to a tiny windowless storage closet. It broke her to imagine that Finn was likely in the same predicament. This trip wasn't something that civilians could do more than once in a lifetime, not to mention the fact that they'd been banned from the Lunar Base. The fact that Finn wasn't going to witness the spectacular views of Earth on their trip back ate away at Zhen for the duration of the trip. Let out of the miniscule room only for bathroom breaks and the mandatory two-hour workout session, she didn't see Finn for all of three days. Not until landing time. And even then, Commander Stevenson, who was royally pissed off at them both, made sure that there was no communication between them.

The reusable rockets flipped and landed successfully in the desert, which was soon swarmed by an army of personnel. In the crowd of staff were police assigned to accompany Finn and Zhen to the space company's recovery institute and then to the station once the doctors checked them out and released them. Before they left recovery, Zhen got the news about her status in GSI. She'd been fired and blacklisted. She could no longer apply for any space faring job. Ever. And then, on top of that, she got the postponed court date for her hearing and the exorbitant fine for skipping town. Everything she ever knew about who she was, was gone.

Recovery always took a few days as astronauts got used to gravity again. Unlike every other time she'd gone through this, Zhen went through the whole process alone under the watchful eye of her assigned uniformed police. The experience was wretched. It was way more fun laughing with your crew mates as your muscles worked to regain full function. Like learning to walk again, but with silly grownup friends who made fun of you the whole time. However, because they had been in artificial gravity for a good chunk of time, the process was much shorter this time. Soon, it was time to be transported to the station for the charges levelled against them.

On the way to the heliplane, with both Zhen and Finn handcuffed in the back of a squad car, Zhen felt the helplessness close in on her. Her world was in ruins around her. And for what? She'd tried to do the right thing. Tried to be true to herself. Tried to save the world. For what? Everything was taken away from her. Including Finn, who stared silently out of the window as they neared the heliplane pick up point. Zhen turned away from her and looked outside her own window trying to tame that feeling of deep despair and keep the sting in her eyes and the painful lump in her throat from manifesting into tears.

"Who did you call?" Zhen asked Finn.

"What?" Finn asked, turning away from the window to face her.

"When they let us call our families back at Recovery," said Zhen. She'd called her dad. She'd considered calling Tisha but decided against it at the last minute. "Who did you call? Your mum?"

"A friend."

"Jesse."

"No."

"We're here," said the driver, interrupting their conversation.

It was always weird seeing someone drive. Quaint. Most cars were autonomous, but police cars were always manned. Just in case. The driver and his partner opened the door for Finn and Zhen, leading them to the awaiting helicopter. The flight would take about an hour over the mountains. Once they got to the holding cells, they'd be booked and then released on bail if possible until they were needed back at the courts a few days, maybe a few weeks later. It didn't matter. They were both going to have a criminal record and it was going to make their lives hell.

They were strapped in and the doors were slid shut. The flight was quiet. Zhen had always loved being in the sky. The helicopter-plane hybrid flew a little too low for her liking, preferring the vacuum of space, but it was still wonderful to watch the patterns of landscape from afar. The Earth seemed so unbreakable from this height. Especially now that most public land had been transformed into carefully farmed food and medicine forests tended to by reclusive indigenous tribes who were marrying science and tradition in the most beautiful of ways. The forests spanned hundreds of miles, having swallowed up former agricultural monoculture landscapes that were abandoned when the soils died after the end of fossil fuels.