Page 47 of Cloverleaf Station

“It’s too briiiiight.”

“Since when do you not like bright? Since when do you not like to color yourself like a dozen rainbows were vomited all over a canvas?”

“Since foreeeever! I’m a biiiig girl nowww!”

“Too big for rainbows? Can you even get too big for rainbows?”

“Daddeee! Do a different ooone!”

“Fine, fine.” He swiped through some more images until he came up with something pebbly and fine-grained. “How about dinosaur skin? You could even have it in just one regular, boring color if you want to.”

“Mageeeenta.”

Elenus made a startled sound. “You want me to fly around in a magenta ship? Do you want me to lose all the respect of my peers? Do you want them to laugh at me every time we land? Is that what you want?”

“Mageeenta, Daddee! And feathers!”

“Feath … why would I put feathers on a—how would we even do feathers on you? How is that supposed to work?”

“Dinosaurs did have feathers, you know,” Kieron offered from the doorway. Elenus spun around to look at him, his face momentarily brightening before he put a stern expression back on it. Catalina burst into a song of greeting, finishing up with a trilling, “Eeeee,” that tapered off into a register Kieron couldn’t even hear.

“Yes, of course, I know dinosaurs had feathers, Doctor Obvious, everyone with the slightest knowledge of ancient Earth paleontology knows that dinosaurs had feathers. I’m just not sure how they’re supposed to be incorporated into a new skin for my ever-so-picky child here.”

“Maybe a different pattern along the thrusters and up at her nose,” Kieron suggested, walking over to Catalina and shaping the idea of it with his hands. “Something arcing back like this … in a complementary color to magenta, which—I have no clue what that would be, that’s entirely up to you.”

“Oh gee, thanks. I think—”

“I liiiike iit!” Catalina hummed gleefully. “Pretty feathers for my front and baaack! And top!”

“Why not just cover you in feathers while we’re at it?” Elenus asked with an exaggerated sigh. “Why not just make you look like a bird instead of a dinosaur?”

“Okaaaay. I’ll look for pretty biiiirds and piiick one!”

“Catie, I—” But her lights had already dimmed, a sign that she’d turned her attention to other things. It wasn’t that she couldn’t split her focus—her brain was designed to perform hundreds of complex functions at once. But, and Kieron knew she’d gotten this from her father, she tended to home in intensely on one thing at a time when it came to external interactions. It made her a little moody at times, but Kieron appreciated her thoughtfulness.

“A bird.” Elenus looked at Kieron and raised one eyebrow. “She wants to look like a bird now. Probably a magenta one, given my luck. I’m going to be laughed out of conferences for showing up in a ship that looks like it should be flocking ahead of the storm.”

Kieron didn’t understand the idiom, but he let it pass. “Would you really?”

Elenus scoffed. “No, of course not. Are you kidding me? I could refuse every conference for the next ten years, and people would still be begging me to attend on year eleven, asking for a closer look at my baby. When I say she’s advanced, that’s me doing my best to be modest.”

“And you don’t really do modest in the first place.”

“Not in the slightest.” Elenus paused. “So … how did the big reveal go?”

Kieron sighed. “There were tears. It was uncomfortable.”

“You’re doing a very good thing for your friend’s wife; of course, there were tears.”

For more reasons than you know. But Kieron didn’t want to get into a conversation about fundamentalism on Trakta right then. He had something else to talk about. He cleared his throat. “I need to speak to you about something.”

Elenus’s hand froze over his projector. “Sounds serious,” he said, his voice casual but his posture already screaming discomfort.

“It is. This doesn’t have to be a bad conversation, though.”

“Why would it be bad?”

“Because I want to know what you’re planning to do with Deysan Moritz.”