Page 20 of Cloverleaf Station

In the end, “How do you feel?” was the one that came out first. Kieron was a little disappointed with himself for that.

“Practically perfect in every way,” Elenus quipped, staring down at his body, so carefully arranged in the modified Regen tank. “It looks like you did an adequate job of getting me back to fighting fit.”

“Your ribs won’t be a hundred percent for another day,” Kieron said without inflection.

“Ah, well, ribs. Always a little tetchy, those.” Elenus turned his head to look at Kieron and smiled. “Calm down, would you? None of the terrible things you’re thinking about are going to happen.”

What?

Fortunately, Kieron didn’t have to ask that question out loud. Elenus seemed to read it right off his face.

“Look, this was my fault. I get that. I went too far out there, and because I hadn’t told you about my condition, your reaction ended up causing a bit more of a mess than it needed to.”

“A bit more of a mess?” Kieron echoed. “I almost killed you. You were bleeding into your brain, you—you had two seizures on the way back to the station, you could have had a stroke, this could have been fatal.”

“I’ve almost been killed over fifty times since I was first diagnosed,” Elenus said blithely, detaching the headpiece and sitting up in the tank. “Once more doesn’t really qualify as an emergency at this point.” Liquid sloshed around him, and he blinked down at his body. “You kept my shorts on.”

“I wasn’t about to strip you naked,” Kieron retorted.

“Aw, too bad. Anyway, the point is, I should have been more forthcoming about myself, and I wasn’t, and for that I’m sorry. But look!” He grinned at Kieron. “Here we both are, no worse for wear, with several mysteries solved and a firm goal ahead of us. I’d say the day has been a complete win.” He held up a hand. “And before you think about hitting me or grabbing me or anything else again, I ask that you remember I’m a fragile flower in need of gentle treatment.” His eyes sparkled. “Two near-death experiences in one day is a new record for me, after all.”

You … I … this …

Kieron startled himself by laughing. He hadn’t intended to. A diatribe about personal responsibility had been right there, on the tip of his tongue, and instead he was laughing so hard he was almost gasping, laughing like he hadn’t laughed for years. It was the relief. The stress. It had to be—Elenus wasn’t that funny. But whatever it was, Kieron welcomed it. He didn’t even flinch away from Elenus’s featherlight touch to his shoulder.

“There you are,” he said with satisfaction. “Now move so I can go clean up and get into some fresh clothes. Then we’ll talk. And eat, I’m starving.”

Kieron wiped his eyes, fighting down the urge to hiccup. “I’ll get out a pizza,” he said.

Elenus’s mouth dropped open. “You told me there were no pizzas!”

“I lied.”

***

The pizza, sitting at the back of the station’s industrial freezer, had been there since time immemorial. Kieron honestly wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out after he put it into the oven and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually pretty delicious. Of course, he’d grown up on soldier’s rations and whatever he could scrounge off the ground when he was a child, so anything digestible fell into the “good” range for him.

Elenus, presumably, had a more refined palate. The fact that he was eating the pizza with every sign of enjoyment as well was a bit of a relief. “So,” he said in the middle of his third slice, “first things first, we repair the Lizzie. That shouldn’t take me too long—she’s not as good at self-repair as Catalina is, but she’s light-years better than the human-centric hulks most people fly. Then, take two, we head out again and—”

“Probes,” Kieron cut in. “Those come next. Now that we’ve narrowed down your ex-partner’s location, we’ll do a lot better with a new round of probes to update the maps.”

Elenus pouted. “Boring.”

“And after that,” Kieron continued, like Elenus wasn’t being obnoxious, “I’ll be the one going out in the Lizzie while you stay here and keep recovering.”

“Oh, no.” Elenus shook his head and put his slice of pizza down. “No, no, no. The Lizzie is my ship, I’m the one who does the flying.”

“Not when you’re recovering from broken ribs, you’re not.”

Elenus made a pssht sound. “What, these old things? They’ll be fine by tomorrow!”

“They’ll still be very fragile. One wrong move could have you writhing on the floor of your ship again at a crucial moment. It’s a serious safety issue. For me too,” Kieron added when he saw Elenus open his mouth to object again. “If you really want to get this done as quickly as possible, then you’ll let me take the Lizzie out tomorrow while you monitor from here. This is just going to be another prep mission, mostly working with probes and sensors, so it’s not like you’ll be missing a lot.”

“But what if it’s more than that?” Elenus’s voice had gone low and intense, his eyes feverish. “What if you find my baby? What if Catalina reaches out to you, and you don’t even realize it, because you don’t understand her?”

“It’s not like I’m going halfway across the galaxy,” Kieron said with an eyeroll. “We’ll be within transmitting distance. You’ll hear and see everything that I do.”

“That’s not—”