The Cherry Coffin

“Contortions of cognition. Ju-Jitsu of justification.”

Nearly two years after it happened, my fiancé Merceda wakes up in a cold sweat telling me about the dream she had about the universe where we got caught—the interrogation. Everything else, she tells me, was the same. It started with Lumera and a coffin. At least that’s how we joked about it at the time.

Lumera, whoever she really was, functioned as our contact on Athos for the Network. In Mercy’s dream, she’s in a room with all the people in the chain of custody of the casket, and she swears that the only person she recognized apart from me in that room was Lumera. Cold sweat. The interrogators were threatening to put me into a casket and dump it into Athos if she didn’t tell them everything.

“What did you tell them?” I ask her.

“I didn’t get a chance, Brix. I woke up.”

“You were going to give me up,” I joke, and it’s just a joke I’m thinking.

“No. No. I don’t know,” she says, her hair soaked in sweat and anguish.

“Aw, hell, Mercy, we made it, didn’t we? Everything’s fine. I kinda like it out here, right?”

“Right,” she says.

Alpha Richard is okay, I guess. Relative to Athos, obviously everything is smaller and not as well fixed, but I think that matches our lifestyle anyway. Me and Mercy were never going to make it onto the ring anyway. So what’s the difference between a cylinder group there or one of the Sternwheels here?

But ever since the dream, Merceda keeps asking me if she thinks they can get us. Honestly, I have to think Athos could get us if they wanted to. That’s if they even know.

The Athosian government never made it easy for people like us. Travelers, they called us, alternatively floaters or drifters, both terms that always bothered me, though I can’t say why.

But they’d been squeezing tighter every year since Mercy inherited the Sassamon class short shuttle from her grandfather, and the more Athos squeezed on docking fees, recharge rates, and flight licenses, the more little jobs we had to take from Lumera to keep our fun little lifestyle afloat.

So one day, out of nowhere, Mercy gets the idea we should visit Ithaca for Founders’ Week, which I thought was a dumb idea, considering the docking fees anywhere within a thousand kilometers of the capitol that time of year could keep us floating for months. But that instinct paid off, because Lumera pinged us and offered to pay our fees, fuel, and a tidy commission for returning a box to the Ag cylinders.

“Just a box?” Mercy asks her. “An empty box?”

And Lumera says that’s the deal.

“Why all that fuss over a box?” I ask Lumera.

She tells us it’s an Ithacan thing—overregulation. Venue rules. Walkway access. Fines.

“Must be a big box, eh?” Mercy says to me. “I wonder what was in it.”

It turned out to be cherries, a refrigerator crate for fresh cherries that came in for a wedding. Day-of delivery, straight from the Ag cylinder that grew them. The happy couple wanted them date-of harvest right to the celebration, the freshest cherries one could get on Athos. And the box was more of a crate than a box—a proper refrigerator crate, really.  It was heavy as hell, supposedly. Lumera gave us strict instructions not to touch it. She’d arranged bots on both ends to do the lifting. All we had to do was open the back gate, fly out to the destination, and let the bots out there take it off our hands.

“Looks more like a coffin than a food crate,” Mercy says.

“Cherry coffin,” I say. “That’s how I’d like to go. Plenty of tasty fruit for the afterlife.”

It occurred to me on the flight over, once we’d cleared the outer dock, that it was strange Lumera was so insistent that we never touched that empty box. I could understand the need to get it off Athos before the venue got a fine, especially if they didn’t have the space for all the stuff coming and going on the day of a big feast like that. But us not being able to lift that box under any circumstances? It’s not as though there were any regulations on an off-market flight. Lumera had also given us her word that she’d never put us in an awkward place with the law, beyond the fact that what we were doing wasn’t strictly legal in itself. “Back-channel,” maybe. “Unregulated,” more properly. But “illegal” was a bit of a slur for the off-books work we did.

I was thinking all that, not even discussing it with Merceda, really, and suddenly she pipes up, stating, “I swear I just heard a noise from that box, Cambrix.”

I didn’t hear it myself. But I wasn’t about to tell her she might be imagining things. I might as easily have been imagining I didn’t hear a thump, because what do you do if you do hear a thump?

Well, we did what we did, pulling into the airlock bay for the short shuttle at the Crawford Bantham cylinder, where we were met by two multi-use models that took that box off our hands. And no sooner had the bots cleared the loading bay than Merceda’s bank pinged with a balance update that caused her eyes to pop a little wider than I’d seen them for a while. She shared it to my eyepiece, and then my eyes popped.

We’d cleared about three months in an afternoon flight out to the cylinders, which we both felt was worth a celebration.

“Let’s get some cherries,” Mercy says. “How often can we get them this fresh, right from the plantation?”

Sound enough logic, I think. So we had them pull the Sassamon into one of the short-term bays and figured we’d have a walk about the cylinder to find the ripest cherries the two of us had ever seen. It’s always good to get a walk in regardless.

And if all that wasn’t funny enough, another funny thing happens.

We get up to the innermost drum, thinking this ag-plantation would be like all the other fruit production farms—box growth, stacks and crates. And we figure there’d be a layer or two that were harvesting, as most production lines staggered their crops evenly so that there was always something coming and going. So we expected to see lines and rows of grow boxes, maybe columns, but definitely not what we saw. This drum’s innermost layer was a flat field from one end to the other, and covering it was the tallest, greenest grass field we’d ever seen. It was beautiful and the air so fresh, the two of us could hardly take it. But not a single cherry in sight. So we decided to ask around.

“No cherries here,” a man says. “Crawford’s only ever grown wheat.”

“Our mistake,” I say. “Any chance there’s a place a couple travelers can get dinner before we float off again?”

That man suggested a few options along the inner aperture with good food and a view back toward Athos. So me and Mercy started that way to see about a meal.

The novelty of the place for us wasn’t so much the view of Athos, spectacular as it always is—the bright seas of white clouds raging in striations, with that hair-thin ring cutting across the planet. That fine line, nearly imperceptible at this distance, the seat of human civilization in the Battery, is home to trillions. Out here in the Bantham cluster, the monolithic masses of the other Ag cylinders seem far more impressive megastructures than the Athosian ring herself. Nor is even that matter of optics the novelty either.

The real novelty is sitting for a meal like that with a view like that in gravity—or, well, spin gravity, as just about all habitable places in Dreeson’s system rely upon in some form.

We travelers, floaters, drifters, etc., we tend to relish it more than most. The Sassamon has a hitch on the top-hull for a cable tether, and me and Mercy have a few sets of friends in a similar weight class we can tie off to, which is almost always a necessity if you’re on a transit to Iophos. But the people here on a cylinder like the Crawford Bantham or any city on Athos or Iophos, they sure take gravity for granted.

Sitting at that expansive window at the aperture, staring at the planet, basking in the weight of our two bodies, eating a hot meal cooked at a stove by a chef—even if it was a bot chef—well, all that was about the best we’d felt about life in a good stretch, especially after a score like the one Lumera had just dropped in our lap. We ate so well and breathed so light, me and Mercy had almost forgotten about the cherries we never did find.

Then she says, “I wonder who was in the box, Brix.”

“Well, damn,” I say back. “You had to go there.”

“I wonder if it was a criminal. Did we help him escape justice?”

“It was a refrigerated cherry box, Merceda, coming back from a wedding. The rest is just our imaginations running wild.”

“Only the galaxy’s most expensive cherries,” she says.

Contortions of cognition. Ju-Jitsu of justification.

“It was,” I declare authoritatively, “a box of cherries.”

“In the shape of a coffin,” Mercy says. “Maybe it was a dead body.”

Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Merceda.

“Could we interest you in dessert, friends?” the table prompt asks us, a smiling, sweet-looking avatar seeming to look up at us with great anticipation of our order.

Mercy winks at me. “I’ll have a slice of cherry pie.”

“Make it two,” I say.

If you’ve already sunk the cost, you may as well enjoy the ride.

Dessert was delicious.

So there we were, walking the causeway along the aperture, taking in Athos from all three hundred sixty degrees as we circled around, digesting, discussing our next destination, back to Athos, Iophos maybe, tethering up with some friends in the outer orbitals, the Midstation maybe, and Mercy tells me she’s enjoying the walk so much she suggests walking back.

“All the way to the Sassamon?” I ask her. “That’s nearly fifteen kilometers, Merceda. Long way.”

“Not all the way, Brix,” she says. “We can hop off the tram before the airlock, have a stroll along the wheat fields.”

It was a rare opportunity for us to be in such a green, open space like that, so I figure, why the hell not. If my legs get spent, I know we’re going to be penned up in the Sassamon for days anyway, so I agree.

We stopped at the Jade band along the inner drum about three kilometers from the midline airlock where the Sassamon was put up. And apart from the farm equipment, a few multi-use androids working the fields, and the irrigation posts, there was nothing out there but the knee-high green of the rising wheat.

We walked along, enjoying the fresh air and the empty causeway. For a couple floaters who spent most of the last few years penned up in the Sassamon or our pop-out or spacesuits, it was hard for us to figure the people of Crawford Bantham wouldn’t be out here every day stretching their legs. How the familiar becomes invisible.

Then something did become visible out on that green. They were about halfway up the drum from us, or maybe a quarter turn would be a better way to say it, and they were far enough in the distance, Merceda thought we could catch them as they were coming our way. She thought it would be fun seeing those sideways people get more right-side up as we two climbed the cylinder wall. So we quickened our pace and set what we thought was an intersecting course.

“Can we walk here?” I ask her several hundred meters into the field, our feet trampling the wheat underfoot.

“They’re out there, Cambrix. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to follow them out there too.”

It seemed like sound enough logic.

At first, they were just three figures, humans we presumed because of the way they were walking—not in a tight, perfectly coordinated formation. But as we got closer, we could see, two of the walkers did keep an even line. It was just the third person whose gait deviated from a calculated linear progression. Two bots and a human for sure. A young woman, we could see as we got within a hundred meters.

And as we got closer, me and Mercy saw that this beautiful young lady was out here walking alone and seemed to want to be left alone, trying to walk at an angle behind the bots, her face down, hiding her head under a hat, but not so perfectly that we couldn’t see the strikingly blonde hair. And as we got very close, she seemed to understand that to walk away from us directly would make her seem conspicuously evasive. So she allowed us to approach, simply returning the hello we both greeted her with, neither quickening nor slowing as she stepped, clearly signaling that she didn’t care to pause for a longer conversation than that greeting, but it was long enough.

“Don’t look back,” Mercy says to me as we continued. “Just keep walking, Brix. I figured it out.”

I keep my eyes fixed straight ahead. “Figured what out, love?”

“The cherry coffin. That was our passenger and the two bots that carried it away.”

It made sense. If she hoped to go unnoticed out on Crawford Bantham, walking through the drum instead of taking the tram would be the right move—and walking through the wheat field instead of the causeway.

“I wonder who she is,” I say. “She looks familiar—has one of those faces.”

“On Athos she sure does,” Mercy replies. “I caught a snapshot in my eyepiece, love, but I’m pretty sure it’s who I think it is. Let’s not talk about it out here. Wait till the Sassamon, Brix.”

I noticed that Merceda started looking over her shoulder as we got close to the midline. Then as we started to pass people and bots, she was doing double takes, just to make sure no one was looking back at us or following. I started thinking about who that girl could have been to get Mercy all jumpy like that. We’d run little jobs here and there for Lumera to keep our heads above water, but our agreement this time, as it always had been with Lumera, was nothing illegal. We made it clear we didn’t want any trouble. Life was tough enough for us drifters.

As soon as we get back to the docking bay, I ask Mercy who it was.

“Wait till we clear, Brix,” she tells me. “Then we need to figure out where to go next.”

And she was looking around the interior of the port like something was coming for us around each corner. It was a tiny bay, though. We could see the whole thing. And the first thing she does is run a clearance on the scanner—see who’s out there, how many ships.

“There’s nobody out here, Merce,” I tell her. “It’s a granary, love. No one comes to the wheat fields.”

“Carolina Dreeson,” she says, pulling up the snapshot she took with her eyepiece.

“Like, the Chancellor’s daughter?” I ask, looking at the floatscreen skeptically. “There’s a lot of Dreesons.”

Mercy pulled up some pictures of the Chancellor’s family. It sure looked like her, but it was a little difficult to tell. In those family pictures she was smiling, her face proudly on display. That girl on the cylinder had a hat looming over a face that was hiding. But then, who would hide their face out there? Somebody who didn’t want to be seen, that’s who. Somebody walking through the field instead of the causeway, walking instead of taking the tram, all the way out on Crawford Bantham, one of the most obscure places we’d ever been in Dreeson’s System, and we’d been travelers for years now.

“Carolina Dreeson?” I ask Mercy.

“It’s her.”

“Okay,” I say. “But so what, right? She didn’t seem like she was walking with those bots against her will. We didn’t know she was in there if she was, so she couldn’t have been fighting. She must have wanted to sneak off Athos.”

“Who knows, Brix? And even if she is sneaking off of her own free will, do you honestly think every branch of the Athosian security apparatus won’t be looking for her in a couple hours, trying to figure out how she got off the ring undetected? Somebody’s going to know. It’s only a matter of time.”

That was a fair point, I thought.

We must have talked it through for a couple hours, floating in between two of the Bantham cylinders. What to do?

Ultimately, we decided the best thing we could do was nothing, sit tight and stay quiet, which is something we travelers do pretty well.

We took the Sassamon out to the Flood Gap, which I was never sure why it was called what it was called. It’s not as though anything floods in space, but there was a gap there between the two asteroid clouds that sort of float out in that area of the system. Lots of us floated out there as well, as it was hard to keep track of us travelers and our comings and goings among those cosmic rocks.

Denny and Taj were kicking about, tethered to a rock, riding out the Founders’ weeks, I guess, and they agreed to tether up with us. We knew they’d been running items for Lumera for a couple years more than me and Merceda. It might have even been them two who connected us in the first place.

We tethered our busses together, but before we spun, Mercy suggested we should zip the pop-outs together and have a proper afternoon out there looking back toward the Sisters. So that’s what we did.

From that position out in the Flood Gap, Iophos was sitting up close along the starward side of Athos, not so far now from the months in her elliptical she’d be hiding behind her bigger, more distant sister. They looked more like a planet and a moon from that distance than the two momentous gas giants they both were.

So each bus popped open our outer compartment, and Taj and me went out for a little space walk. First, we clipped the popouts together, opened them up, and then waited for our tanks to inflate them from the comfort of our separate busses.

Once the big, transparent tent was inflated and warmed up for us, we all put on our belts and headed out the hatches into our shared annex.

I hadn’t seen Taj or Denny in months. They hadn’t seen anyone and were happy for the company. Mercy had some treats we’d picked up on Athos, and Taj had a little mint gin he’d been stashing away for a special occasion. We didn’t want to talk about the cherry coffin until we’d properly caught up and enjoyed each other’s company—that was just courtesy among us travelers. The first thing could never be of that other world. If we allowed ring life to come first, then we were still being run by the very system we’d made a point of rejecting. Athos came after everything else important.

Denny hung the music stick, and we floated together catching up on our latest travels. We talked about the green of the wheat fields, and yeah, we recommended they stop by Crawford Bantham or another cylinder on the same schedule when the crop was coming up. They were both intrigued by that steady expanse of green all the way to the light of the skyroll. They had just gotten back from a visit to the River Rocks—a stretch of several hundred kilometers on Iophos that was pure parkland starting at a great mountain lake and running down to the reservoir at the western edge of Sowenia.

“It’s a vast enough and pretty enough area to trick your mind into thinking it might be a planet,” Denny claims as we float, and Mercy looks skeptical but interested as she continues with an even bolder claim. “Maybe even Earth.”

“Earth?” I say.

“Like Earth,” Taj says, hedging. “Not quite. Similar. Denny’s a cylinder girl. She has a tendency to get carried away over the rings.”

“Where did you grow up, Taj?” Mercy asks. “On one of the rings?”

“Charris. So I know the feel of a planet.”

“Ever think of going back to a planet?” Mercy asks, trying, I can see, to steer the conversation toward our conundrum.

Denny takes the bait.

“Why, you two had enough drifting already?”

“We might be looking to get out of Dreeson’s,” I say. “Not necessarily abandoning the lifestyle, exactly. But me and Mercy are thinking of a change of scene.”

Those two were pretty sharp, exchanging a look before probing a little deeper. And though we never exactly talked about the nature of the trouble we might be in, nor did we even specify that we were in trouble, still, though, they picked up on the urgency, even directing the conversation back to Lumera.

“Yeah, we’ve picked up some work recently,” I confirm, “and, yeah, it’d be nice if she took care of getting us out. Things haven’t been going smoothly.”

“Trouble? Cylinder-sized? Asteroid-sized? Moon-sized?”

“No,” Mercy says. “Ring-sized. Athosian-scale. Big bad.”

“You don’t want to go back to Charris then,” Taj insists. “Athos has a heavy reach there. You want to get out to the boundary systems at least.”

“What about the vehicle?” Mercy asks. “I don’t want to have to sell it. The Sassamon was my grandfather’s baby.”

Taj sort of grimaces. “It’s going to cost a small fortune for you two to get out in that little bus. Lumera might be able to get you out though. Depends on where you want to go. Most of the travelers out in the Protectorate migrated to the boundary systems in the Alphas when the war broke out. I’ve heard Alpha-Richard has a good energy.”

“Nothing like here,” Denny says. “Just, you know, numbers and places in close proximity. Nowhere else in the galaxy like Dreeson’s, of course, but Alpha-Richard is a double system with two colony planets and thousands of cylinders. Most of them are residential, too. Urban. Lots of clubs. Great music.”

“You’ve been out that way?” I ask her.

“When I was a kid. My parents took my brothers and sisters out to visit. I was too young to appreciate the nightlife and all that, but it’s a great system, and the Trasp leave it alone—sort of an understanding between the Protectorate and the Letters. It’s safe.”

“Good to know,” Mercy says.

“Can you get us in touch with Lumera?” I ask Taj.

“It’ll pretty much burn you for good,” he says. “You better be certain you want out.”

Mercy and me look at each other. A long look. Home. Could be this blows over, my eyes tell her. Could be the Chancellor’s daughter makes this bigger than either of us can possibly imagine her eyes say back.

“Yeah,” I tell Taj. “We’re certain.”

“I’ll get word to her,” he says.

And then we got back to the drinks and the music, casual conversation.

We tethered up with them for three days while Taj was setting up the meeting. In the meantime, we were aggregating the social sites and government chatter passively. There wasn’t any official news about the Chancellor’s daughter in media, but there were rumblings in Ithacan circles—the connected class. They were still talking about Sayla Purcell’s suicide—the Chancellor’s sister and Carolina Dreeson’s aunt. Carolina going missing couldn’t go unnoticed, but it also couldn’t be publicly acknowledged unless it was undeniable. It was still just chatter, but the fact that there was chatter meant me and Mercy might have been right. It could’ve been Carolina Dreeson in the cherry coffin after all.

Another clue was the fact that Lumera didn’t dismiss us outright. In fact, after going back and forth with Taj over a couple days, she agreed to speak with us, but only in person, and only in a secure space. We told Taj we were happy to offer up the Sassamon. Taj accepted on our behalf and before giving us the coordinates, he says, “Lumera even asked whether you guys had a pop-out. She’s nervous about something. Won’t talk anywhere she can be recorded,” which was pretty much everywhere in Dreeson’s System at all times.

The coordinates we got through Taj were a full eighteen hours away at the Sassamon’s best speed. Lumera came to us immediately. She was already out in space, belt and nanosheet, awaiting our arrival. She floated out back, watching ominously as we deployed the pop-out and inflated it. Then, as soon as it was out, she came in through the airlock and scanned the tented annex for tech. We knew better than to bring any.

She was much older than I’d guessed, grandmotherly almost. But not the warm kind. Cold.

“What did you two get into? You’ve never had any trouble before.”

“It was an accident,” Merceda says to her, looking as apologetic as she could without actually saying the words.

“Did you know?” I ask.

“No,” Lumera says.

“But you know what he’s talking about?” Mercy asks.

“Anyone on Athos who knows anything knows something about it. The Dreeson girl’s gone off. They know she wasn’t taken, but they’ll still be asking about her—how she got off the ring, where she’d heading. Daddy needs to know these things.”

“Does he know yet?”

Lumera shrugs. “Matter of time. Did you tell your friends?”

I shake my head.

“Good.”

“Can you get us out,” Mercy inquires. “We’ve been thinking about systems on the heavy carrier route.”

Lumera gives us a funny look. “You don’t mean to take the evidence with you? They may have lax logs over in that Ag group, but they’ll clear right up the second the Chancellor’s people poke around. Cameras that don’t see minor details have a way of finding clarity under the right circumstances. That old bus is distinct enough.”

“What about a new registration?” I ask. “Could it be done?”

“I’m not even sure I can get you two out, much less the ship.”

“It’s more our home than Athos is,” Merceda says. “Please.”

“It’s funny how you two seem to understand and not understand at the same time. If they find you, they find me.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” I say.

“It doesn’t feel that way, though, does it? You two are going to have to come with me. Pack a bag each and join me on my cruiser. Make it quick.”

“What about the Sassamon?” Mercy asks. “It’s the only thing I have left of my grandfather. Our home.”

“It’s possible I’ll be able to move it someday. Heavy freight carriers keep close tax records. Athos’s wheels turn slowly, but eventually, they see everything consequential. Best plan is to wait till they don’t care anymore. Get your things.”

Being travelers, we didn’t have that many possessions that couldn’t be stuffed in a bag at a moment’s notice. Mercy wasn’t loving the idea of leaving the Sassamon, but she began packing anyway. I could see the sadness in her face, the slumped shoulders. This was a tougher day than we’d bargained for when we set up the meeting with Lumera.

“It could be worse,” I say.

She looked at me as if to inquire how it could be any worse than losing our home, getting dragged away to who knows where.

“We could be getting dragged off by the Chancellor’s Guard.”

“We haven’t done anything wrong,” Merceda says.

I was certain the Athosian government would find a way to see things differently if they found out.

Apart from a few items of clothing and our personal devices and files, we always traveled light. From what I could see, Mercy, ever the optimist wasn’t treating this departure as though it was really our last time in the Sassamon. There were a few icons here and there in the interior with that classic S branding. I figured if we did come back, I could just replace them, so I pulled off two of the metal ornamentations and stuffed them in my bag. Then we hopped out the back, one by one, and migrated over to Lumera’s cruiser.

We should have known. We only ever thought it was Lumera’s little underground currier service, but once we were aboard her ship, the feel of the whole situation shifted. Two dodgy fellows Lumera had working with her took the keysets to the Sassamon from Mercy and pulled away. Lumera told us coldly to strap in.

“It’s going to cost me to get you out,” she tells us. “That is better than the alternative, I promise you. The two of you are good kids. I did everything I could to keep it from ending bad for you.”

“Where are we going,” I ask her.

“Wherever I tell you,” she says.

Lumera dropped us at another small midline airlock along another Ag cylinder. It was the middle of the night by their time when we arrived. There were no bots and only another young guy on the loading bay Lumera gave strict instructions to.

“Ferry them out the old way,” she says. “One unit. The arbor route.”

“You’re the boss,” the young man says.

Then Lumera turns to us. “If you two still love each other at the end of this trip, you’re meant to be together. Anyway, good luck. Don’t contact us again.”

“What did she mean?” Mercy asks the young man after Lumera left us. “Where is she sending us?”

“It means far. A long time in a small space. You two are okay with that, right?”

I smile at the guy. “Yeah, I think we can handle that. Any idea where we’re going, though?”

“Actually, no,” he says. “It’s better that way. All I know is I loaded a package when I was supposed to, and it went with the currier. They don’t know their part, and that way nobody knows nothing.”

“Makes sense,” I say.

“She wasn’t kidding. Close means close. You two can freshen up in the sanitarium there.”

It had been a few days for each of us since a proper shower—back on Athos. So we each got clean and stepped back out to the loading platform. The young man handed us suits to put on.

The coffin waiting for us was slightly larger to my eye than the one we’d smuggled off Athos. Maybe. Could have been just that we were closer than those bots ever let us get.

“It’s not so bad once you get underway,” he tells us. “You don’t feel so compressed once the gravity goes away.”

So he loaded us inside the under compartment, and a few minutes later, on top, we could smell a bounty of day-fresh cherries being loaded into our container.

“The cherry coffin treatment,” Mercy says. “Good sign. We know how it turned out for the Chancellor’s daughter.”

“Where will we pop up though?” I whisper in the darkness.

“Does it matter as long as we pop up?”

“I don’t suppose it does.”

Lumera had us put all our tech in a faraday bag the young man had us stuff in our packs. That was loaded in a small compartment below our feet. Inaccessible. It was just me and Merceda.

We were there in silence for what seemed like a very long time. It could have just been minutes, though. It didn’t take long for time to warp and stretch. Hours later or maybe only minutes, we could feel the cherry coffin being lifted, lugged along, presumably by two of Lumera’s bots.

“I’m sorry it came to this, love,” I tell her so quietly. “I know you loved the life we were living. I know you loved traveling.”

“It’s been a great couple years, that’s for sure,” she whispers back. “Maybe the best years of my life.”

“Mine for sure,” I say. “My favorite stop was the Hycean Falls, near the reservoirs outside Katherineberg on Iophos. What was yours?”

“Cambrix, it was all of it. Every day getting to be with you. Even this right now is tolerable because we’re together. And I know wherever we pop up, as long as we’re together, everything will be okay.”

“Now I feel stupid, love. You say something like that, and I really liked the waterfalls.”

I can’t see her, but I can hear her and feel her laughing, and now I can picture it because I know that laugh and that smile so perfectly, like they’re a part of me. And I know when the laughter dies down that she’s going to touch my hair and lean in and kiss me.

The cherry coffin thumps as the bots set us down somewhere, loaded, presumably, onto the shuttle that would take us to our cargo carrier. Next stop would be some FTL freighter to the outer systems, probably somewhere in the Indies or the Letters.

“I never would have done it without you, Brix, living on the Sassamon. It wouldn’t have been fun either, alone.”

I wish I could see her. Then she could just look at me and know what I was thinking. In the darkness, though, I had to say it. “I think we should be together forever, wherever we go, Merceda.”

And I was thinking, as she kissed me, that those metal ‘S’ icons I took from the Sassamon could make good rings if we took them to a jeweler.

It wasn’t long after we made it unofficial that we began to float, our shuttle pulled away from the docking port, and we were off on our next journey together, two people and two bags, and the rest of our lives.