“Hey, Doc. What’s your first name?”
She looks at me blankly. “You didn’t know? It’s—”
• • •
The waters of Puget Sound lap at the pebbly shore. Sarah kisses me on my bullet scar as we stand and watch the sun disappear behind the Olympic Peninsula. Her organic arm is snug around my waist, and her helmet hangs from her gloved prosthetic fingers.
“So have you thought about where you’d like to come down?” I ask her, voice quiet, almost afraid to break the mood.
“How long is this going to take?” she says.
“Depends on how long we decide to stay. No more than two hours travel time, round trip. More if we go the long way, but not much more.”
“I’ve never seen Hawaii,” says Sarah. “It’ll still be light there, won’t it?”
“Yeah.” My fingers trace her flank. I will never get tired of the feeling of her body in my arms. “For another few hours, at least.”
Sarah leans down to kiss me. Her teeth gently pluck at my lip as we part. “Then let’s go.”
“And you’re sure about this?”
“Quit stalling, Danny.” She steps away from me and settles the helmet onto the steel collar of her spacesuit. It locks into place with an equalizing hiss, and the close fit of the material grows downright snug as hypertech fibers work to prepare the suit for orbit. Technically, we’re not supposed to use the spacesuit except on superhero business, but how can we use it if we haven’t trained with it, right? This is totally business. We checked our flight plan to be sure it was free of orbital debris and everything.
We double-check the harness that connects her suit to mine by a yard or so of titanium-strong tether, and then come back together for the flight position. Face-to-face, my arms tight around the small of her back, hers tight around my shoulders.
“And you remember the signal if you need to go down?”
“We’re going up?” says Sarah, her voice coming to me through my earbud radio. “I’d assumed we were going to stand here until we rot.”
“Smartass.”
She smiles, and I take great pleasure in the way her eyes bug when I bite down hard on the lattice and blast us into the sky at three Gs. Her hands clamp down on my shoulders as the ground drops away beneath us, and by the time we’re pushing through the wispy clouds, the color has mostly returned to her cheeks. From the look in her eye and the twist in her smile, I can tell I’m going to pay for this when we’re on the ground. I will probably enjoy paying for it.
Sarah shifts her hold to look back down over my shoulder at the world as it falls further and further away from us. Even through two suits, I can feel the shiver of excitement run through her. The horizon curves away from us in a gauzy blue line. To the west of us, the last rays of the afternoon light the Pacific. To the east of us, the grid of city lights spreads in drips and drabs across North America. I want to show her everything so we travel east, and head deeper into the night until the blanket of amber stars beneath us becomes an almost solid pattern.
I let off the acceleration and let us coast into a low orbit. In the perfect silence of the night, there is nothing but us, the Earth, and the stars. Sarah looks everywhere at once, her face open with wonder. Below us, a panorama greater than any other. And above us, numberless stars, more vivid than seem possible. We float above the world, hand-in-hand, more alone and more together than anyone else. When I tug her close with a twitch of my wrist, she gently clasps her arm around me.
She speaks, and my earbud vibrates silently. Her helmet automatically projects a transcription on her faceplate in illuminated turquoise letters: “I love you, Danielle.”
There’s more than enough air in my lungs for a little bit of extravagance. I exhale on the front of her helmet, fog it with a thin rime of ice. In that ice, I trace characters with my finger:
I ♥ U
What feels like a few minutes later, the sun comes up over the horizon. A new day is born in gleaming fire, rippling pools of light racing in from the horizon. It is one of the most breathtaking sights you can see. And we miss every second of it.
We only have eyes for each other.
Acknowledgments
In all the hectic stress of getting my first novel out the door, I forgot to ask at what point I should write the acknowledgments. Consequently, Dreadnought went to press without any such page, and that’s an error I hope to rectify now. Consider the following as the acknowledgments for both books.
Thank you to my agent, Saritza Hernandez, who fought for these books and helped me get my feet wet as a professional writer.
Publishing is a team effort. To everyone at Diversion Books, thank you.
Thank you to Grace Li, who provided invaluable sensitivity reader services.
Many friends listened to me spitball ideas or answer gut-check questions. They listened to me whine and moan when I was stuck, and also to my wildly optimistic bragging when things were going well. Many friends also read early versions of my manuscripts and gave me their honest and valuable feedback. Special thanks to Erica, Autumn, Clarissa, Tor, Devin, Sara, and Cal.
Thank you those special teachers who, from kindergarten on up, kindly tolerated my habit of ignoring them to read instead.
Thank you to my mother, who raised me, among other feats of endurance.
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