Quit Your Waning (Over the Moon #3)

JIHAE

I beamed at the several adults sitting around the playfield’s dark red picnic tables with a clap of my palms to gather their attention. They all looked up at me from their mock conversations with a sigh of good-natured relief, fanning the mid-morning humidity from their shirts and the backs of their necks.

“That’s it for today. Thank you everyone! I will see you next week.”

Mrs Gutierrez patted my forearm as she stood. “Thank you, mija. See you next time.”

I bowed, helping everyone collect their trick-or-treating scripts and Halloween vocabulary that I’d drawn in my down time, taking small bits of trash to throw away for them rather than make them carry it home. Even though I was in my mid-thirties, everyone in this group was older than me, so I gave them deference. As students they were terrible, but I looked forward to it every week. With the kids, I sometimes felt like the tremor made me look too timid to control my classroom, but being the youngest meant I felt permission to be a little clumsy with my fingers.

And it was fun. Relaxed. They didn’t really want to learn English, after all, but making contextual connections to our native languages would help our linguitors fill in the translation gaps. It’s why I had agreed to teach English in the first place—so that I could enjoy everyone else speaking Korean someday. At least in my own ears. And it had actually helped some. I heard basic greetings and swear words in Korean now if the speaker was using English.

I slid the plasdocs into my bag as people waved goodbye, and as I waved back, my key fob tumbled out of my hand. I reached for it just as it crunched under Jean-Baptiste’s shoe.

“Merde!” He jumped back on his aging heels, but it was too late. The fob’s casing was cracked open and in several pieces, revealing the delicate black transponder inside. “I am so sorry, Miss Jihae. N'étais pas assez rapide.”

He picked it up and ran a hand through his silver hair, tsking at himself. Mortified that I’d caused a ruckus, I took the pieces and held them tightly in my hand.

“No! It was my fault. I’m so sorry. Are you alright, Mr Aubert?”

“Yes, I am fine. You go—should go—to, eh, l’ingénieur…” He gestured towards the hangar far up the hill past the playfield.

I swallowed hard but put on an easy smile. “You’re right. I’ll go to the hangar to see Mr Fareshi. Sorry again.”

He waved me off with an easy smile, slinging his hands in his pockets like a man that had nothing but time and liked it that way. Then he sauntered away, watching the grey clouds roll in for a rainstorm.

And I slumped, scowling down at my fob. I was so stupid. Not because I’d dropped it, but because I knew I’d drop it and didn’t do anything anyway. I knew I’d break it and need to go to the hangar to ask the engineers to replace it. That I’d have to talk to them outside of my comfort zone. Be surrounded by their tendrils and hands and—

I avoided it at all costs. I knew the shilpakaari in our colony were good men, especially now that I’d had to get to know a few. Mr Fareshi, the chief engineer, had three children in my class. Two boys and a girl. They were wonderful kids, and he and his wife were amazing parents. Pom Pom was also one of my students, and I barely even noticed that she wasn’t human anymore.

But the adult men… scared me sometimes. Not because of anything they’d done, but because of the things I remembered from before we were rescued.

I took a deep breath, hoisted my bag over my shoulder, and put the broken fob bits into my pocket.

“It’s fine,” I told myself, choosing determination. “Every day is a step forward. Today is a little exposure therapy. And tomorrow…” I came to a stop, looking at the open doors of the hangar with a shudder. Grey clouds filled the skies and the air had gone still. It was eerie, and not in the way I enjoyed. “Tomorrow will definitely be beer.”

The hangar bore down on me like a Brutalist office building rather than the corrugated, rusty tin can it actually was. Vertigo made my gait wobble as I climbed the steep hill, and by the time I reached the entrance, it felt like a dark chasm rather than a sliding garage door.

My ear twitched at the sound of choreographed gunfire on the tarmac. It wasn’t the same as a human gun—more of a zzzzaplatplat that suggested plasma rounds—and somehow made my ears tingle. I rubbed my earlobes and turned towards the echoes, following a trodden grass path around the side of the building and feeling lighter with every footstep. Maybe I didn’t have to go inside after all.

Though the other side of the hangar was pressed right into the trees and an overgrown junkyard, the tarmac was wide open and flat. I breathed a side of relief as I followed the divot of packed earth that many boots had trudged through over the months. Feeling like an outsider, I kept one eye on the ravines left by frequent rain runoff and one eye on the security team currently training across the asphalt, targeting bright green drones floating in a pattern in the sky.

Sizzle and the chief of security—a massive red venandi with as many scars as the hull of a trans-atmo ship—were watching their team with critical stares. When they noticed me, Sizzle beat his tail against the ground, one tall jackal ear twitching in my direction. I nodded back politely, but he did nothing else. Just watched while the chief of security barked an order.

A male voice filtered through the grimy row of windows along the hangar wall, bringing me back to my task.

“You could put your own dishes in the cleaner, you know.”

“And you could take these work orders. They’re your food bays.” I recognized Mr Fareshi’s grumpy huff.

“Excuse me, your priya has me working very hard on Hahloin. Who knew one tiny human could make so much food each morning?”

“Hello?” I squeaked, trying to project my voice, and cleared my throat. “Mr Fareshi?”

A green hand swung one of the rusted windows out and up like a service window. Mr Fareshi stuck his head out sideways, tendrils crawling up the hydraulic window cylinders. I locked my fingers together in a nervous knot, trying my best not to stare at them.

“Miss Jihae,” he said with surprise. “Is everything alright at school?”

I cleared my throat again, trying to banish the frog that had taken up residence there.

“Yes, of course! The kids are doing a slime activity with Mr Jake this afternoon.” I dug part of the broken fob from my pocket and held it up, biting my lip. “I… um… I-I–”

Mr Fareshi’s expression softened and his tendrils slid behind his head. “Just a sec. Stay right there.”

I nodded, breathing in a tense inhale. A drop of rain splashed on my cheek and others dotted the metal siding of the hangar. Mr Fareshi was a nice man, even if he had a resting Scrooge face. The unreasonable assumption that I’d be punished for breaking my fob faded away as quickly as it had surfaced.

Another window opened further down the building, this one larger, heavier, with a broken tree branch used to prop it up. Mr Fareshi had secured his tendrils in a band behind his head and leaned his two upper arms on the windowsill, gesturing for me to show him the fob.

“Need a new one?” he gruffed as I got closer. I set the fob on the corner of the sill and gave him a shaky smile.

“I dropped it. I’m so sorry.”

He chuckled in return. “It’s fine. You wouldn’t believe how many I have to replace.”

“Two hands’ worth since last week,” another engineer said from inside. He was tall and blue, wriggling his lower hands towards me while inputting code on a deconstructed food bay sitting on his workbench.

“I see,” I trailed off, tone uneven.

“Looks like it’s gonna rain,” Mr Fareshi said, glancing at the drops of water plopping into the dust on the upturned window panes. “You’re welcome to come in. We have a break table. Tinsley should be back from her cooling bay soon.”

“Ah, I like the fresh air. But thank you.”

“Sure. I’ll grab you a new one. Any specific color for the casing?”

I perked up. “I can choose?” I asked, rolling up onto the balls of my feet.

Mr Fareshi nodded, took the fob with a scrape across the metal, mumbled its serial number, then tossed it in the trash. “Yeah, no problem.”

I pulled the broken bits of plas from my pocket and set them on the windowsill too. They were a nondescript silver, but the fob itself was shaped a bit like an acorn. Biria seeds were similar, weren’t they? A warm, dark purple that fell from the jungle’s tallest canopies. They were long seeds shaped like rifle bullets. Mrs Fareshi paid the children in morning pastries for collecting as many as possible so she could use them for making flour.

I’d always liked a more naturalistic design sensibility. Back when I’d worn glasses for style, my frames had been made of wood. The possibility of emulating the biria seed with my fob was soothing enough that I smiled, feeling more at ease.

What would I call that color in English? Maybe it was similar enough…

“Byzantium purple…” I tried. As expected, Mr Fareshi blinked his big bronze eyes at me in confusion. He scraped his knuckles across his chin, then pulled up his holotab.

“How about you tell me which one on here?”

Five minutes later, I held my brand new fob to my chest, thanked him, then bolted back down the hill in a steady patter of rain.