What We Keep

The chamber was silent, save for the low hum of the Archive Spire humming beneath his feet like a sleeping thing. Heliarch Regulus Sol sat alone, as he always did for this. No advisors. No guards. No one to see what his face did when he was no longer required to be a symbol.

The Curator had asked him, gently, if he was certain. A common life, Your Radiance? There are emperors in the Archive. Glactic conquerors. Saints. He had told her no. He did not want a life that had already been written into history. He wanted one that had simply been lived.

Find me someone who found love, he’d said. Not power. Not glory. Just love. Real love, if such a thing still exists anywhere in the Celestium.

She had returned three days later with a single thread of memory, pulled from a woman who had died an old, small, unremarkable death on an unremarkable planet, and who had asked, as so few did, for nothing but to be remembered by someone, anyone, after she was gone.

Her name, the record said, was Emelysa.

Regulus closed his eyes and let the crown of interface nodes settle against his temples, cool as river stone. The last thing he felt in his own flesh was the familiar ache behind his sternum, the one he had stopped bothering to name.

I hope you loved well, he thought, to a woman five hundred years dead. I hope, wherever you are, you can forgive me for borrowing your most precious memories.

Then the world fell away, and he was no longer Regulus Sol, ruler of ten thousand worlds.

He was twenty years old, and the sky above him was full of dead starships.

Emelysa lay flat on her back in the husk of the Meridian’s Vow (or what was left of her) with one boot braced against a bulkhead and the other dangling over open air three decks down, and she was, for the moment, perfectly happy.

This one’s got a voice, she thought, tilting her head against the cold metal.

Not a voice, exactly. Nothing so simple as sound. It was more like pressure. A held breath somewhere deep in the starship’s dead bones. A hum just beneath hearing, the kind of thing that made the hair on her arms stand up when she was quiet. Other scavengers swore the wrecks were silent as tombs. Lysa had never once believed them. She thought, privately, that they simply didn’t know how to listen.

She closed her eyes.

There you are.

The pull was faint but unmistakable; down, and forward, toward the aft compartment where the old capacitor banks would be. Half-buried under three centuries of debris, dust, and the accumulated wreckage of a thousand smaller ships that had crashed into this one over the years.

Somewhere above her, threading up through six decks of broken hull, she heard the tell-tale clang of a wrench dropped, followed immediately by a muttered curse.

“You’re gonna wake the whole graveyard,” she called up, not moving.

“The graveyard is already dead, Lysa, that’s sort of the—” A pause. A grunt. Another clang, this one louder. “Everything’s fine! It was deliberate.”

“You meant to drop a wrench down an access shaft?”

“I meant to test the acoustics.”

“And?”

“Bad. Very bad acoustics. Would not recommend for a concert hall.”

She grinned up at the dark, even though he couldn’t see it, even though five decks and a wall of scorched bulkhead stood between them. That was the thing about Ozkyr, he’d been making her grin at the ceilings of dead starships since they were seven years old. Some things simply didn’t change, no matter how much everything around them did.

Lysa hauled herself upright with a groan that had nothing to do with her muscles and everything to do with the state of her boots. Weylund mud had a way of working itself into every seam no matter how carefully you sealed them. She made her way aft, one hand trailing along the corridor wall to keep her bearings in the dark. She didn’t bother with her lamp. She knew this ship’s shape now the way she knew the shape of her own room, memorized through a dozen visits over the past two weeks, each one bringing her a little closer to whatever it was the Meridian’s Vow still had left to give.

A soft chime sounded at her hip. She glanced down at the small tracking display strapped to her wrist and found a single hovering shape had already peeled off from the entry hatch above and was gliding down the shaft toward her. Lights dimmed to a low amber so as not to spook anything living that might have nested in the wreck since her last visit.

“Took you long enough,” she said.

The drone, an oblong shape of scavenged plating roughly the size of a melon, rotated a full slow circle in the air in what she had long ago decided was the mechanical equivalent of a shrug. A single amber optic swept the corridor, then settled on her face.

[Perimeter clear. No competing signatures within four hundred meters.] The voice that emerged from it was flat, synthesized, faintly metallic, and yet Lysa would have sworn, if pressed, that she could hear something like disapproval buried in it. [You told the mechanic you would wait for backup before descending alone.]

“You’re the one who’s late, Chip.”

[My designation is not—]

“You’re late, Chip.”

The drone made a sound that might, in a more forgiving universe, have been called a sigh, and fell into formation a half-meter above her left shoulder, lights sweeping the corridor ahead as they walked. Lysa smiled to herself in the dark. She’d found him three years ago, half-buried in a scout ship’s wreckage with his memory core fried and half his plating stripped for parts by scavengers who hadn’t bothered to check if there was anything worth salvaging inside him. It had taken her the better part of a season to nurse him back to something resembling function, longer still to earn whatever passed, in a combat unit’s cold little processor, for trust.

Whoever had built him hadn’t built him to be gentle. She’d learned that early, the first time a rival scavenger had gotten handsy with her over a haul and found himself flat on his back with a scorch mark on his boot before he’d even finished reaching.

They found the capacitor banks forty minutes later. Exactly where the echo had promised they would be.

Lysa’s breath caught in her throat. It always did in that first instant of confirmation.

Then the practical part of her brain elbowed the wonder aside and got to work. “Ozkyr,” she called up through the comm patch at her collar, already crouching, already reaching for her tools. “You are going to marry me when you see what I found.”

A burst of static, then his voice, tinny and delighted. “Is it the core?”

“It’s the core.”

“The actual—”

“The actual hyperdrive resonance core, Ozkyr, fully intact, not even scorched, just sitting here under about a metric ton of debris like it’s been waiting for us.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the comm. Long enough that Lysa almost asked if he was still there.

“Lysa.” His voice, when it came again, had gone strange and quiet, stripped of its usual teasing. “That’s it. That’s the last piece. If that core’s good, we don’t need anything else. We could actually finish her.”

Lysa sat back on her heels in the dark, one gloved hand resting against the cool curved housing of the one part, out of ten thousand scattered across a hundred wrecks over four years, that stood between them and the endless sky.

“Yeah,” she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to, thick with something she didn’t have a name for. “Yeah, Oz. We could.”

By the time she climbed back up through six decks of broken hull with the core cradled against her chest like something that might bruise, Ozkyr was already waiting for her at the top of the shaft, silhouetted against the grey afternoon light spilling through the Meridian’s Vow’s ruptured hull plating. He didn’t say anything at first. He just looked at the thing in her arms the way other people looked at newborns, or miracles, or the first green shoot pushing up through a field everyone had given up on planting.

“Let me see it,” he said, and his voice cracked embarrassingly on the second word, and neither of them mentioned it.

She knelt and set the core down between them on a flat stretch of hull plating, and for a long moment neither of them spoke at all. Ozkyr crouched over it with the particular reverence he reserved for engine parts and, occasionally, her, running gloved fingers along the housing, checking the seal, murmuring something under his breath that might have been a prayer or might have just been math.

“It’s good,” he said finally, and looked up at her, and his whole face was doing something helpless and bright that made her chest go tight and strange. “Lysa. It’s actually good. We did it.”

“You’re the one who’s spent four years memorizing hyperdrive schematics off cracked holodiscs,” she said. “I just find things. You’re the one who knows what to do with them.”

“You find things nobody else on this whole rusted planet can find. That’s not nothing.” He shook his head, still grinning, still looking a little stunned, like a man who’d asked the universe for a small mercy and been handed ten moons instead. “We’re actually going to do this. We’re actually going to build a ship and get off this rock.”

“Don’t jinx it.”

“I’m not jinxing it, I’m manifesting it, there’s a difference.”

“There is not a difference, Oz, that is the same superstition wearing a nicer coat.”

He laughed, and the sound of it echoed strangely off the dead ship’s ribs, and Chip drifted a slow, unimpressed circle above their heads as if to remind them both that the graveyard, however dead, was still no place to be careless. Lysa barely noticed. She was watching Ozkyr’s hands where they still rested on the core’s housing, careful and sure, the same hands that had helped her build a treehouse out of scrap paneling when they were nine, that had held a rag to her split lip when she was thirteen, that had never once, in thirteen years of friendship, let her fall without at least trying to catch her.

He looked up and caught her staring, and something intangible passed between them.

“What?” he said, softer now.

“Nothing.” She looked away first, busying herself with the strap of her tool bag, cheeks warmer than the planet’s thin afternoon light could account for. “Just… thank you. For believing this was possible. Even when it was just me being ridiculous about hearing voices in dead ships.”

“You were never ridiculous.” He said it simply. “You were the only person on this whole planet who ever made me believe the sky wasn’t totally out of reach.”

She didn’t trust herself to answer that, so instead she bumped her shoulder into his, hard enough to make him stagger half a step, and said, “Come on. Help me carry this before Chip decides we’re taking too long and starts complaining about efficiency again.”

[I do not complain,] Chip said from somewhere above them. [I observe. Accurately.]

“Same thing,” they said, almost in unison, and then looked at each other and laughed again, and for a moment, walking back out through the dead ship’s broken ribs with a piece of the sky held carefully between them, neither of them was thinking about fathers, or mothers, or anything at all beyond the astonishing, ordinary fact of having somewhere to be together.

Once she’d dropped off the core at Ozkyr’s shop, the walk back to her father’s house took the better part of an hour, along a cracked service road that wound between the rusting hulks that made up the skyline of her particular corner of Weylund, and Lysa took it slow, the way she always did on the evenings she knew she’d rather not arrive too quickly.

By the time she reached the door, the windows were dark, and the only sound from inside was the low, ragged snore that meant her father had drunk himself into the kind of sleep that wouldn’t easily be broken. She let herself in without a sound, boots already loosened at the laces before she crossed the threshold and moved through the front room like a ghost who had long ago memorized every board that creaked.

She made it to her room without a single word being said to her, without a single cutting comment about wasted years or foolish dreams or girls who ought to know better than to hope for things they’d never have. She counted that, as she always did on nights like this one, as a small and private kind of victory.

Lysa set the core-shard she’d kept for herself on the shelf above her bed. It was a small, dead fragment, worthless for the ship but strangely beautiful, veined through with old crystalline growth. She stretched out, arms above her head, and lay down still fully dressed.

Yeah, she thought, echoing the word back to herself one more time before sleep took her. We might finally leave this place. Together.