I know where you sleep

[Sarah McFarlen]

Sparks

---

"Thanks. Missed you too." The door hissed shut between them. Vaelin's here. The thought sent a shiver from the base of her spine to her skull. How long had it been since they last spoke aboard a station? Buffalo, ten years ago, fifteen? She had still been a child, patching up raiders to convince Dervin she was more valuable with them than on a slave ship to Malta.

Surely it hadn't been that long. Vaelin was a good friend. But he never bought good news. The man drew disaster like a candle drew moths. Any similarities in outcome were something she pushed from her mind. If something wasn't going wrong around him all it meant was that something was about to.

Sparks collapsed on the bed and tugged off her sweat-lined bodysuit. Insulated boots came away from her feet with a dull pop, like a starfish leaving a rock. She tossed them at the end of the bed to air. The bodysuit followed a moment later.

She peeled a panel from the wall, exposed the room's shower. The word shower applied to the Widerstand only in the most fundamental sense. No free flowing water, just a collection of damp sponges and towels. Sparks pulled a sponge from the wall and wiped the day's grime away, each touch of water bringing her a little closer to human. Her hair looked as though a small animal had taken up residence in it, but that was nothing new. Life in low-G killed hairstyles only slightly slower than it killed skipping routines.

Something about the room was different. Off, like a ripple in a still mountain pool. It looked the same on the surface, but beneath...

Oh no.

"Vaelin!" Sparks stared at the empty space at the foot of her bed in silent horror. "No, don't come in! What have you done with my clothes?"

A heartbeat.

"No, wait. It's okay. Situation's under control. You can stop worrying now." Her clothes sat at the foot of her bed, folded and stacked like a store display. Sometimes, it was easy to forget Vaelin's military past. This was not one of those times. Hospital corners protruded from the corners of her bed, top sheet folded neatly back. It would have been crisp, if not for the Sparks-shaped dent where she'd sat on it.

She'd never seen fabric look smug before.

Sparks tugged on her least-stained trousers and a green and grey T-shirt marking her as a station mechanic. Every member of the Widerstand wore similar clothing. The fist of the Widerstand sat emblazoned on her shoulder like the flag of an old-earth nation. With any luck, it would be enough to keep security from getting trigger happy around Vaelin. It would be the first thing that did, but you had to keep hoping. Magnetic boots, peeled away from her suit, and her arm terminal, fished from beneath her mattress, completed the outfit.

Sparks paused, hand held before the door control. There was one more thing to do. Slowly and deliberately, she walked back to the bed and pulled the sheet back. Her folded clothes drifted to the floor like snowflakes in the low gravity. They settled in a heap on the steel with a whispered thud.

"Much better." A coyote's grin flashed across her face, fierce and fast. The door slid shut behind her.

Chris - Vaelin, she corrected - reclined against the wall opposite her. Headphones wrapped around his skull like some invasive sea creature, head bobbing in time with the music. She could hear it from across the hall, sharp beats and pounding melodies. If steel and gunpowder had a soundtrack, than that was it. Alone there, against the wall, he looked like someone else. Not so different from Rutgen, when she first arrived. A shy teenager lurking at the outskirts of his first concert. Only the glint of metal on his hip and something harder still in his eyes spoiled the illusion.

"Hey." Sparks jerked her head down the corridor, waited for him to remove the headphones.

"Up for a walk? You're not meant to be down here, you know." She added conversationally. "Widerstand only on the crew decks. The public area's upstairs, near the docking bay." Where the gravity doesn't cut out every eight hours. I really need to do something about that.

A few paces down the hall Sparks paused to replace the wall terminal in its mounting. The red and white EMERGENCY banner hung over the screen like a shroud.
"I'm guessing that was you that pinged us, right?" Because if it was, I really shouldn't have lead you back here. And if it wasn’t- Sparks forcibly derailed that train of thought. She adjusted a wire at the base of the terminal. A beep from the machine confirmed the connection.

Freya's going to kill me.

---

"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."

- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.

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