The Galaxy, and the Ground Within Becky Chambers (books to read to get smarter .txt) 📖

to her still-shaky self, the words becoming a rhythm as she grabbed each pole. ‘You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.’

Tracker would know how to secure a signal, Speaker thought. Well, maybe. Maybe Tracker would have come to the same conclusion the comms screen had, that sometimes things were just too broken for even the cleverest of workarounds. But puzzling these sorts of things out was Tracker’s skill. It was why she had the name she did. She loved patterns and order; so did Speaker, but in an entirely different capacity. Where Speaker loved the weave of grammar, Tracker found solace in the march of numbers. Where Speaker treasured nuance, semantics, word roots, double meanings, Tracker feasted on riddles of calculus and the satisfaction of solution. The ends to their respective means were the same: finding the most elegant way of expressing a desire. They were two components of the same tool, in that respect. All Akarak twins were halved souls, but Speaker and Tracker’s bond was what was called a triet. ‘Straight cut’ was the literal definition, but the word in Ihreet was weighty, reverent, a way of describing a pair made whole by the other’s complement.

And now Speaker couldn’t reach her.

The screen went white, and like a fool, Speaker hurried up to it once more. Error, the screen read. Comms signal cannot be established with requested recipient. Atmospheric disturbance suspected.

‘Stars!’ she spat. ‘Dammit!’ She hit the screen with her palm and yelled in wordless frustration. This behaviour wasn’t like her. Tracker was the one who got angry, the one who popped off, in contrast to Speaker retreating inward. Tracker made noise; Speaker calmed her down. This was their balance, the flow of their emotional tide. But therein lay Speaker’s problem: the other part of herself was in the sky. It wasn’t that Speaker never left Tracker’s side. She did so often on stops like these, given her sister’s reluctance to leave the Harmony. But that was always a matter of hours. An afternoon, maybe. The stretch between waking and sleeping. She’d never been through a night without Tracker, not ever.

She thought of the times she’d awoken to a particular sound – or rather, an absence of sound. The sound of Tracker not breathing. From time to time, her struggling lungs simply forgot what they were meant to be doing, and though Tracker’s imubots were supposed to sound the alarm on her scrib if her blood oxygen dropped too low while she slept, rarely did they react as quickly as her sister beside her. There had been dozens of nights interrupted by Speaker shaking Tracker awake, helping her to sit up, pull in air, take her medicine. Tracker was often quick to fall back asleep, accustomed to it as she was. Speaker, on the other hand, never did. Commonly, she lay awake and listened until the morning hours came and Tracker got up to start her day. Only then did Speaker feel safe in returning to sleep.

Would Tracker wake up at all, Speaker thought, without her there?

Speaker swung herself to the sleeping hammocks and sat down in one. She closed her eyes. She unclenched her beak. This frenzy would not help. This was panic, and while panic was a normal sort of response to have when the world was falling apart, the place her mind had leapt to was unhelpful and unlikely. Tracker wasn’t an infant, and she wasn’t stupid, and the mere presence of Speaker was not what determined whether Tracker’s lungs behaved or not. Tracker was resourceful, resilient. Speaker told herself she did not need to worry like this.

She worried all the same.

Speaker rubbed her palms together. No, this would not do. She would not spend a day or however long like this – and she doubted approximately one GC standard day was an accurate estimate as to how long this would take. Approximately one GC standard day was exactly the sort of cut-and-paste response given when the authority in question wanted people to ready themselves for a long wait, in the same way that please be twenty minutes early could mean anything from instant service to an hour. One GC standard day was an empty phrase, a figure that offered fast-absorbed comfort in the foundational concepts of one and day, then defused any real meaning with the administrative application of the word approximately. Speaker had stood in enough queues and filled out enough formwork to know better than to trust phrases like that.

So, then. If the comms were a lost cause and the shuttle was already making her insane, what else could she do? What was a better use of approximately one GC standard day?

She got back on the poles, and went to find her scrib.

PEI

The eelim moulded itself around Pei as she sat down, its putty-like polymer flexing and curving around her body. Doorways had melted open in a similar fashion as she’d gone from room to room, on her way to getting off her feet. The shuttle, like all Aeluon living spaces, was an object whose interior shapes and fixtures changed to suit her needs. The item of furniture she settled into now was a large, practical piece, which could serve as a communal bench or a shared bunk by three people (or more, if you didn’t mind getting close). But for this trip, Pei had travelled alone, and that meant she could enjoy the luxury of spreading out without bumping elbows with her crew. She normally didn’t mind being crowded – comfort was so often a secondary consideration in her places of work – but with no other option than the alternative here, she had to admit it was awfully nice to have the ship to herself.

It was odd to be enjoying such things while the sky was on fire.

Pei was not a stranger to an atmosphere aflame, as underlined by her initial reflex to run, move, shoot, react, protect. But Gora was not a war zone. Her guns were in a