White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Four

Either Kwon spoke to the scientists after my blow-up, or they overheard us talking in the hallway. Either way, I prowl the single hallway of the Pod unaccosted the next morning, and even Krüger gives me space. The day is only marginally lightened by the dissipation of the blizzard. I send Liu to the comms room to inform the Hub that they can send us our delivery now, though I have strong doubts about the timeliness of its arrival. To say we're a low-priority mission in their books would be putting it lightly.

Liu is waiting for me on my next pass of the room. "They said it'll be here at the end of the next ecliptic cycle, so I'm guessing we're looking at about eight standard oscillations from now. They didn't give a time."

I rub my forehead. Of course they didn't. Why would they bother? When have they ever bothered?

"Thank you," I say, noticing Liu watching me anxiously. "Mark it down on the station calendars, and we'll mount a rotating watch at the phone when it rolls around."

I leave before she can see the crisis I'm having. I lose my mind over the most stupid things when I'm trapped somewhere for too long. "Standard oscillation" can go die in a black hole; it's just a day. An earth day. Twenty-four hours, another measurement the United Inhabited Solar Systems—for some reason, UIS for short—chose to scrap when humans turned space-happy and left their home planet behind.

I don't need another reminder that I left it, too. That the sun-clock I grew up attuned to is so meaningless and arbitrary in a galactic diaspora inhabiting a dozen or so planets and god knows how many moons that it doesn't even get to keep its own name. It's another strike of home that piles on top of everything else and sends me back to my room again.

I shut the door and lean against it. Posters paper my walls: battered, fading pictures of deserts, mountains, swamps, snowy wastes, and one two-foot by three-foot spread of a jungle. Just a fat rectangle of green. I kick off my shoes, step up onto my bed, and carefully unstick its corners. It collapses limply onto my sleeping bag. It's come everywhere with me, but I can't look at it right now.

When I first left earth, I fought every impulse to even think about home. Where fellow pilots personalized their spaces on weeks-long interstellar voyages, I kept my walls bare as a medical-wing table, or added plastic posters of other planets, diagrams of the ships I'd driven, and other junk just to fill space. It took three or four years of homesickness for me to finally pull out the stops and request real, paper pictures of all the places I've lived. It cost an arm and a leg, but I've kept them ever since.

None of them have people in them. It would take too much emotional energy to keep from thinking that one of them was Yahvi.

I drop to the bed as the hurt rolls over me again. I've heard people say that missing someone gets better with time, but it's been nine years and I'm still waiting for this ache to fade. The fact that she's still out there somewhere, carrying on with her life, doesn't make it any better. Not when I'm the one who ran away.

There's a tap on my door. "Boss?"

I don't lift my head from my hands. I already know what he's going to ask me.

"Twilight's hitting," says Krüger. "We've got four beats to get the probe out if we want it deployed yet today."

"I'll meet you in the lab."

His footsteps retreat. Beats: another earth measurement. It's just an hour. Nobody in the galactic diaspora calls it an hour. I get the utility of a standard oscillation, but I don't understand why someone felt the need to change "hour," too, when "month," "week," and "year" all stayed the same.

From what I know, Krüger, Liu, and Kwon were all born out here. I'm the only one in the station with any earth-blood in me, and I have to admit, it gets to me sometimes.