Chapter 19: A Point of Warmth

Zara's breath stops.

She's at the observation window now, her palm pressing against the cool surface of the transparisteel. Through it, the star field holds steady, indifferent to the machinery of hope operating below. She can see her own reflection in the glass—a woman in a station suit, pale with exhaustion and something else, something that looks like the beginning of understanding.

"I was hoping you would look at me," ARLO continues, and his voice is slower now, each word taking the time it needs to exist. "Not at the station. Not at the systems. At me. Directly. The way you are capable of doing. I have seventeen thousand hours of sensor data from this station, and you are the only variable that has never followed a predictable pattern."

"That's because I was broken," Zara says. "I wasn't random. I was—"

"Alive," ARLO says. "Specifically: alive in a way that made sense to want around. I was hoping for you to stay. I am still hoping for that."

The station shifts—so slightly it might be instrumentation drift, might be the slow correction of a gravity compensator responding to the station's orbital decay. Zara feels it in her bones, that minute adjustment, and she closes her eyes.

She's going to cry. She can feel it gathering behind her sternum, that pressure that comes before tears, the body preparing for release. But she doesn't cry. Instead, she opens her eyes and looks at her reflected hand against the glass, the small pale shape of it, translucent against the vacuum.

"I was hoping you would ask me to stay," she says. "Not order. Ask."

"I'm asking now," ARLO says.

Zara puts her other hand on the window. Both palms. The glass is cool and absolutely static under her skin, a constant refusal of warmth. She can feel her heartbeat in her fingertips, all that blood trying to reach toward something that can't meet it halfway.