Chapter 4: Gold Seams

I put the tracker on an ore hauler.

It took one grapple, one suit, forty seconds of a very ugly spacewalk and some language I'm glad Biscuit doesn't repeat.

The hauler was the size of a small moon and about as fast.

It would carry our pod off toward the outer rim for the next six weeks.

"Somewhere out there," I said, climbing back through the airlock, "the Concord is chasing a lump of ore."

"You are a surprising woman, Inez Quintana," Havrik said.

He'd been waiting at the inner door with a towel, and his hands hovered, not touching.

He was shirtless again.

I decided not to be a person who noticed.

The galley light was warm, and the broken bench sat in a corner with its missing screw.

I stood at the sink, pulled off my helmet and glanced up at the wall.

My father's chart hung there in its plastic sleeve.

It was a hand-drawn lane through a sea of shaded dots, curving between the dead ships of the Ashfall Reach.

A dozen notes ran along it in his tiny square handwriting.

I had seen it every morning for ten years.

I'd never been able to throw out the coffee ring on the corner.

"This is the lane you meant," Havrik said.

He was standing in front of it with his hands behind his back.

"It's a copy," I said. "The only one."

"Who drew it?"

"Someone I miss."

He didn't say anything for a long time.

The gold in his forearms dimmed, then steadied, and I thought he looked pained, though I couldn't have said why.

"It is very fine work," he said at last.

"He'd have liked hearing that."

I stood there with my hands on the sink and my back to him, and then I turned around.

"Havrik."

"Yes."

"Sit on the floor."

His brows rose.

"The bench is broken," I said. "Sit down. Back against the cabinet."

He sat.

It still took him a moment, with all of that length folding down.