“Tree,” Jainan said.
“Noted!” At the last second, Kiem yanked them around to bear straight down the course of the river. The sharp turn took the flybug diagonal, and Kiem slammed on the manual tilt with his foot at the same time. They swerved wildly. Kiem’s harness dug into his side as the world spun in front of him. He frantically kicked it back the other way as he felt them flipping and tried to steer downward at the same time.
The side fin hit the water with a shock that echoed through the filaments and up his arm. Kiem whooped, but he could only hold it a moment. The buffet of the water surface on the fin physically hurt his hands through the mesh—the flybug was reaching its limits and was letting him know.
They plowed into an eddy, bounced off a piece of floating ice, and flew in a sickening arc upward while Kiem fought for control. He just managed to pull them up in time to avoid the trees.
The flybug skimmed the treetops and climbed slowly, while Kiem let his head fall back and realized he was laughing.
Jainan let go of the dash in front of him. He flexed his fingers, his attempt at a thoughtful expression completely failing to hide his smile. “One and a half seconds.”
“I’ve got the hang of it now,” Kiem said. “Next one will be at least three seconds.”
He half expected to be told there wasn’t going to be a next one. But Jainan was clearly as bad as Bel about flying, because all he said was, “I think the next valley may have another good river for it.”
“How am I the most sensible pilot in this household?” Kiem said. “How did that happen?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Jainan said mildly. “I’m sensible.”
“You only pretend to be sensible,” Kiem said.
“I never pretend,” Jainan said. “Perhaps try a little more speed next run.”
“Do you want a go?”
Jainan hesitated. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
Jainan looked torn, as if he was getting away with something. “Yes.”
At the next valley, Kiem switched the flybug’s controls to Jainan’s seat. Jainan’s first failed try turned into a four-second run on the next pass, which Kiem completely failed to beat in several subsequent attempts. The next ravine brought them to a system of canyons filled with glittering tunnels of light, where they realized at the same moment that they’d been stunt flying all the way to the tunnels and shared a mutual sheepish look. The moment their eyes met, Kiem broke into a snort of laughter, and Jainan reverted to his poker face.
Kiem took them into the tunnels. A diffuse light flooded around them, the pale color of eggshells, and the flybug shifted of its own accord as the tunnel slotted them into a traffic pattern. Blocky freight flyers zipped around them. Kiem took his hands out of the steering mesh and flopped back against the seat.
The tunnels were dull, and there wasn’t anything else to do, so they started to talk idly. At least Jainan talked idly, and Kiem, who was now aware of the rarity of that, listened with a feeling in his chest like he had been thrown a ball made of glass and tried frantically to make his own answers casual. They talked about Iskat and Thean culture and what they’d grown up with. Somehow they got into Thean music, and Jainan went as far as attempting to find some song he knew on the flybug’s system before discovering the signal was unusably bad.
“Oh, yeah,” Kiem said, mentally cursing the signal for putting a wrench in the conversation. They were in an overground section of the route, weaving through a dry gorge. “Sorry about that, there’s a big dead zone over the mountains, and we’re on the edge of it here. Tacime deposits near the surface.”
Jainan raised his eyebrows and looked at the ground below. “Tacime?” he said. “Ah. I forgot Iskat is swimming in it. Still, I would have thought you’d have stripped it out.”
“It would have ruined the mountains if we stripped it out for every tunnel,” Kiem said apologetically. “We just kind of deal with the dead zone.” In its processed form, tacime did a great job at fueling spaceships, but in its natural form, its main property was blocking communications. It probably did other things; Kiem wasn’t a scientist.
“It’s not a problem,” Jainan said. He turned to the stored music. The upbeat chiming of a popular track from some time ago came out of the hidden speakers. As soon as he heard the first few notes, Kiem pulled one hand out of the steering mesh and clapped it to an ear, groaning.
Jainan looked at him quizzically. “Sorry,” he said, turning it down.
“No, it just takes me back,” Kiem said. “Not in a good way. I must have been back in university when I put that in the system.”
“It brings back … bad memories?” Jainan said.
“Not really,” Kiem said. “Just, you know.” He waved a hand. “I got into a lot of scrapes back then. This was playing everywhere at one point. It was probably on the speakers when I got exiled.”
“What did you—” Jainan said, and then stopped himself.
“—get exiled for?” Kiem said, completing the question. “Uh, there was a. Um.” He tapped his feet on the floor. This was surprisingly hard. “We may have started a fire on a night out.”
“How?”
“By accident. With fireworks. Nobody was badly hurt.” Kiem paused. “We were drunk.”
Jainan didn’t say anything.
“I’m not proud of any of that,” Kiem said, mainly to fill in the silence. “I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”
Jainan was silent for a while longer and then said, abruptly, “No, I can’t see you doing that now.”
“No,” Kiem said, immensely relieved.
“But it fits with…” Jainan trailed off. Kiem winced internally, knowing that Jainan must have picked up some of Kiem’s history from the newslogs. “Why did you change?”
Kiem had a whole repertoire of jokes to smooth over that kind of question. It was easy to deflect, because he hadn’t changed—he’d just been an irresponsible teenager with more rank than sense getting on everyone’s nerves, and now he was an irresponsible adult who tried not to. That didn’t excuse anything. But Jainan hadn’t meant that.
He stared ahead at the snow-covered canyon and said, “I started acting out fairly early. You know how my other parent was Prince Alkie? They passed when I was fourteen. Neurological disorder. My mother didn’t cope very well, and neither did I, and somehow we made each other even worse when we tried to talk about it. Or about anything else, really.”
“I’m sorry,” Jainan said.
Kiem flashed him a sideways grin out of habit. “Don’t be sorry.” Jainan’s returning glance was grave and thoughtful. Kiem’s smile felt too fake to keep up; he let it disappear. “It took me a few years to realize I was just playing things up for attention. You know, it really hurts when you realize you’re doing what millions of teenagers have done before, especially when it takes you until your early twenties to realize it. I dropped out of college after that, stayed away from bars, then I got Bel.”
“Mm,” Jainan said. He didn’t sound censorious or pitying. He didn’t come back with a flurry of probing questions either. Kiem usually floundered when he had to talk about his parents, but this felt oddly like touching bedrock. Jainan said, “What happened with Bel?”