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“Why did they even bring the weapons?” I wondered.
“I don’t know—just help me hold this arm still?” she asked, and I did so. She ejected something from it and caught it in the palm of her hand before it fell. “Where is my—oh, gosh darn it. I dropped that bag outside.”
“I will go get it for you, later,” I said, taking the piece of equipment from her and tucking it into my belt. I was not leaving her in here by herself.
We moved from body to body, her peering into the suits along the way, at the men who, with the exception of an expression of surprise on their faces, seemed to be entirely intact.
And when we reached the last one, she sighed. “Goddammit, Haberman,” she said, frowning and shaking her head.
“Were you close?” I asked her. A dark and primal part of me wondered if I should be glad this man was dead.
“No. Just colleagues. Ran in the same circles, but didn’t often overlap. He was smart though. Smarter than me.”
“I do not think that that is possible,” I told her, and she laughed.
“Keep pouring it on like that, mister,” she thought, and then looked around again, crossing her arms to hold her elbows. “Other than that, I’m scared to touch anything.”
“Finally, some sense,” I agreed.
Her mind gave mine an irritated push on the ’qa. She was getting better at using it, quickly.
“Not because I think you’re right—but because I’m scared if I hit the wrong button, I’ll have to drive this thing. Assuming any of these weird bumps are buttons.” She drifted over to one of the walls that was emanating interesting colors, and then looked to me. “Do any of these make sense to you?”
I blinked and considered them.
“Shift to match, Ceph!” she said, nodding fiercely.
“Why?”
“Because if the outside was the story of your life, maybe this has something to do with you too!”
I was unhappy—but I did as she requested, watching the colors for long enough to figure out and create their pattern, slowly timing it so that the colors on my body matched them. There were only twenty different ones; it didn’t take very long.
“Okay!” Elle said, clapping, once I’d managed it. “Now tell me the story!”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, the colors on my body flowing in time with the lights.
“Pick a beginning—and then tell me what they mean!” I felt her mind swirl close, and realized thinking about these sorts of things delighted her.
I took a moment to concentrate. Blue and green had the feelings of beginnings—of calmness, friendship, joy and hope. And then there was the industriousness of brown and the thoughtfulness of gray, the courage of orange, then red-red-red, followed by an explosion of yellow, and the expansiveness of black.
My people used black as an amplifier, to provide more context to colors before and after—but this was quite a lot of it, in comparison to the other colors in the pattern. Was this the black of the space they had traveled through to get here?
And then red-red-red-red in another sequence of flashes, and then, at last, blue—the same color that was Elle’s favorite—and then the color of light that was unique to her skin, Elle’s precise and beautiful shade.
It was why she shone to me at night through her window or her helmet, when she was my little pearl—the wavelength I knew she couldn’t see with her human eyes.
Like it was referencing her.
Only I knew her own eyes couldn’t see it.
“Ceph?” Her mind pressed against mine in a question.
I swam away from the color-shifting wall. “I cannot say.”
“Can’t or won’t?” she asked. “I’m in your mind.”
“Anything I tell you would be a guess. We’d be better off taking these back for you to analyze,” I said, grabbing for the pocket I’d put the data sleeves in on my belt.
