Brightly Burning(7)
“You should cut that silly long hair, girl. Or else someday you’ll catch it in a gear shift and tear the scalp straight off your head. Won’t be pretty.”
I grunted a response, the best I could offer him in a conversation we’d had many times over the last three years. We were two hours into the shift; Karlson and I were checking and double-checking the systems that had failed earlier that week, just in case. Thus far, we’d come to the same conclusion repeatedly: the ship was old, and things like this would continue to happen.
What I didn’t bother to tell Jatinder: I had considered a haircut, more than once. The dangers of long hair in a machinery environment were very real. But I kept my hair long for the same reason I put up with ship repair: for the tenuous connection it gave me to my parents. To my mother, who used to pull a wide-toothed comb through my long hair fifty, a hundred times until it lay glossy and sleek. To my father, a skilled engineer who took pride in every job, no matter how thankless. They were long dead, and as such, I barely remembered them, but for the tug of that comb; the softness of my mother’s voice; my father’s strong, weathered hands as they guided mine over a machine part.
“You going to the memorial later?” Karlson asked as he paused to wipe the sweat from his brow. “I hear they’re bringing in a DJ after the speeches. Good stuff to dance to.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking of turning in early.”
“That’s so boring,” he chided. “We only get a chance to have fun, to dance, maybe three times a year, and you’d actually skip it? We should enjoy it while we can. There won’t be any DJs down on Earth.”
“Don’t get on that stuff again. I don’t get why you’re so obsessed. We should be trying our hardest to stay up here, not planning on going down there.”
“It’s just practical,” Karlson said for the thousandth time. He was an avid “Earth truther,” telling anyone who would listen that Earth was in all probability habitable again, and we were wasting our time, wasting away up here.
“Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t been to the last five memorials,” I said. “The speeches don’t change.”
“Is this because you’re trying to avoid someone whose name rhymes with Morge?”
“No,” I answered a bit too quickly. Karlson smirked.
“You should come to drink away your sorrows, then. I’m sneaking in some hooch. It’ll help.”
“I didn’t hear that!” Jatinder mock-shouted.
“I’m happy to share, though I’m sure the adults have their own stash, better than mine.”
“Maybe I’ll confiscate your stash.” Jatinder waggled his eyebrows.
Karlson ignored him, turning back to me, lowering his voice to accommodate greater privacy. “Seriously, Stella, come. We’ve had too hard a week not to have a little fun. Go with me as friends.”
It had been one hell of a week. Jon Karlson might not have been my favorite person on board, but spending the evening with him would trump orbiting George and his groupies for the evening. I shrugged and nodded in one movement, drawing from him an all-too-unsettling grin.
The space usually home to transport and cargo planes had been transformed. A platform at the aft end displayed a familiar red-and-black banner emblazoned with the fleet logo and motto: Survival Through Unity. Beneath that were the symbols of the fleet’s fifteen primary ships representing Earth’s wealthiest and most advanced nations that fled at the time of the disaster, plus the logo for the private ship federation.
My eyes traced over the familiar lines of the pitchfork and wheat stalk of the Stalwart emblem before moving to the top of the banner, where I found far more beautiful symbols. The elegant fleur-de-lis and Eiffel Tower of the Versailles, the lion and vibrant flames of the Shanghai, the emerald lady surrounded by stars for the Lady Liberty. Technologically advanced, thriving ships I’d never see. Or at least never see again. My eyes locked on the jeweled crown entwined with tea leaves of the Empire.
Joy hissed through her teeth, taking me away from unpleasant memories. “They didn’t take the Crusader off. Awkward.”
I wondered if, when we were finally forced to deorbit as they had been, they’d leave our logo on there too. When the Empire held its Remembrance Day ceremonies for years to come, would my aunt think of me? Probably not.
I spotted Karlson saving us seats in the third row, but first Joy pulled me toward George and the other girls to show off her handiwork. Against my better judgment, I’d let her dress me and do my make-up. The underlayer—?my trusty moisture-wicking bodysuit—?was mine, but everything else was clearly Joy’s. Bright and showy and wildly impractical. The overdress bodice was laced tight, with a skirt that flared at my hips, swooshing as I walked. The color was bright saffron—?a hue that complemented both our brown locks but felt foreign on me, like a second skin that didn’t quite fit. My hair was slicked back, gathered into a high ponytail, my eyes lined with dark kohl. I actually felt sort of pretty.
“Stella, you look amazing!” Destiny said, giving me a high-five, which I met a little too enthusiastically. My hand smarted from it, but I didn’t care. Joy had plied me with her secret stash of booze, which she called “magic juice,” and I had to agree with the term. I might as well have been floating. George gaped in my direction, and I simply smiled back.