“All right,” he said. “Can do.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“I do not accept your apology. You’re right. I get it.”
She took his hand. She felt cold. Her skin was dry. She’d grown thin enough that he could feel the individual tendons shifting over her bones. “I’m so sorry I pulled you into this.”
“It’s hellish, that’s true. But the company’s good.”
“No one I’d rather face the end of everything with than you.”
“It’s because I have a cute ass, isn’t it? That’s my secret power.”
She managed a smile. “You got me.”
“I can crack a walnut with these cheeks,” Fayez said. “I mean, you wouldn’t want to eat it afterward, but—”
“I love you,” she said. “Stop cheering me up. Send Cara back. I need to get some work done.”
He found Cara in her quarters with Xan. They were floating together in the space between their bunks, with Xan chattering excitedly about something from his entertainment feeds. Cara’s face was the polite boredom of older siblings throughout history. It was weirdly reassuring to see something normal, given their context. When Fayez cleared his throat, the pleasure on the girl’s face was as clear as the disappointment on her brother’s.
“Is Dr. Okoye ready?” Cara asked, and there was a hunger in the question that left Fayez a little uncomfortable. He swallowed it.
“She is. Sorry I interrupted. Just had some stuff I needed to talk with her about.”
“It’s okay,” Cara said. “But I should go.”
Fayez pulled himself aside and let the girl haul herself out. As she floated down the corridor, he had one of those moments he had sometimes where his sense of balance tried to wake up. For just a moment, Cara wasn’t floating away to the side, but falling headfirst down the hallway. He grabbed the handhold to steady himself, and after a few breaths, the feeling passed.
“Is something wrong?” Xan asked.
“No. I just . . . I’m never going to get used to living on the float. Spent my formative years down a gravity well, and some things are baked in.”
“I’ve heard that,” Xan said, then turned and touched the ceiling to press himself down toward the floor. It was hard to read his expression. The kid had been a little boy for several decades now, and between his child-stuck brain and the depth of his experience, he wasn’t really one thing or the other. His sister was like that too. It was impossible to see them as children, and it was impossible not to. Xan’s mag boots locked onto the deck, and he turned almost like he was walking in gravity.
“What about you?” Fayez said. “All well in your world?”
“I’m worried about Cara,” he said without hesitating. “She keeps coming back different.”
“Yeah? Different how?”
“Changed,” Xan said. “The thing that’s teaching her? It’s making her too.”
The chill that ran through Fayez had nothing to do with temperature. He kept his tone light and jovial. “What’s it making her into, do you think?”
Xan shook his head. An I don’t know motion. “We’ll find out,” he said.
Chapter Eleven: Teresa
At fifteen years since the first permanent settlements, New Egypt was a younger colony system. It had two planets with large habitable areas. The school where she was going to live, like most of the other established settlements, was on the smaller of them, the fourth planet out from the sun. The planet—called Abbassia—had a little under three-quarters g and a thirty-hour day. For reasons that hadn’t been investigated in depth yet, the magnetosphere was very strong, which was important given the very active and frequent solar flares. Even near the equator, the auroras were supposed to be magnificent.
The total population of the two planets together was less than the Laconian capital, and it was spread across half a dozen small cities and a score of mineral extraction sites. Only a third of Abbassia was covered by ocean, and most of the land surface was arid, though with extensive cloud forest analogs at upper elevations in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
Sohag Presbyterian Academy was nestled in a river valley in the south, a few hundred kilometers from Nouvelle école, with which it cooperated academically. Sohag Presbyterian’s grounds were a little under a thousand hectares of terraformed soil and agricultural cultivates. The buildings had been designed by Alvaro Pió shortly before his death, and they were listed in the top thousand most significant architectural sites in the new worlds.