Chapter 18 - Nails & Boys

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

—Ernest Hemingway

The smell of nail polish remover hit Emily the second Zoe uncapped the bottle, sharp and chemical and so aggressively normal that her chest ached. She and Zoe were cross-legged on Emily’s bed, polish bottles spread between them on a protective data-slate. Outside, the Triumph hummed steadily through the void, but in here, it could have been any Saturday afternoon back home.

“Okay, seriously, are we going ‘Cosmic Coral’ or ‘Nebula Blue’?” Zoe asked, holding up two shimmering bottles, her brow furrowed in mock concentration. Her own nails were already a vibrant, electric purple.

Emily leaned back against the bulkhead, inspecting her freshly painted thumbnail, a deep, star-flecked crimson. “Blue, definitely. It’ll match your eyes when you’re trying to intimidate Ryan into actually following instructions.”

Zoe snorted, uncapping the Nebula Blue. “As if intimidation works on him. He thinks it’s foreplay.” She began to meticulously apply the first coat. Zoe painted in silence, the click of polish bottles the only sound between them, then set the brush down. “So… Pierre. You haven’t mentioned him much since we left. Everything… okay there?”

Emily sighed and set her own brush down. She'd known this was coming. Two weeks of Zoe not asking, which for Zoe was basically a world record in restraint. “We broke up, Zoe. Right before the launch.”

Zoe paused, brush mid-air. “What? Em, why didn’t you say anything?”

“It was a whirlwind, you know? Boarding the ship, running for our lives… ‘Oh, by the way, my long-distance boyfriend and I are kaput’ didn’t exactly feel like priority information.” Emily picked at a non-existent cuticle. “He was great, mostly. Smart, charming, that accent...” She trailed off with a small smile. “A good distraction, I guess.”

“Distraction from what? Or who?” Zoe asked.

Emily didn’t answer right away. She didn’t have to. Zoe already knew.

“You know who.” She looked down at her hands. “Pierre wanted me to join his team, Les Aventuriers. Said we could make a great partnership, exploring the outer systems under their banner.”

Zoe’s eyebrows shot up. “Seriously? After everything with the Triumph? After this team?”

“Exactly.” Emily’s voice went flat. “It felt like… a betrayal. This is where I belong, Zoe. All of you. This team.” She sighed again. “When I told him no, that my place was here, with the Triumph Initiative, he wasn’t happy. Said I was choosing a bunch of idiots over a real future.”

“Asshole,” Zoe muttered, resuming her painting with slightly more vigor.

“Maybe,” Emily conceded. “Or maybe… self-absorbed, like Luca said. After I turned down his ‘proposal,’ he didn’t contact me again. Not a word. And then the launch happened so fast…” Her gaze drifted to the red hoodie draped over her pillow. Luca’s hoodie. She’d practically lived in it during those first chaotic days, and she still hadn’t given it back. Didn’t want to. “Everyone else has gotten a message or four from home by now. But him? Silence. So, yeah. Over.”

Zoe nodded, the vibrant blue on her nails stark against her warm skin as she finished her last finger. “Men are idiots. Some are better at hiding it.” She waved her hand to dry the polish. “My family, on the other hand… I swear, if I could block their comms, I would. Mom sent a three-hour lecture on vitamin supplements, and my little sister, Maya, is convinced I’m going to come back with an alien boyfriend.”

Emily smiled. “At least they’re… enthusiastic.” She loved Zoe’s family, even from a distance. They were loud and impossible and they cared so hard it was almost suffocating.

“Enthusiastically invasive,” Zoe corrected, but her eyes softened. “Still, I’d give anything for one more annoying, over-enthusiastic message from…” She stopped mid-sentence.

Emily reached out and took Zoe’s hand. “From Darron,” she finished softly. The name settled between them the way it always did, too heavy for the small cabin. They’d been seventeen when he died, all of them, defending Sandworth during the worst portal overflows. Three years ago, and Emily still caught herself expecting him to walk through a door sometimes.

“Yeah,” Zoe said, her gaze somewhere else entirely. “My stupid twin.” She squeezed Emily’s hand. “He would have adored this, wouldn’t he? This ship, this adventure.”

Emily laughed, and the sound came out thicker than she intended. “He absolutely would. And he’d be insufferable about it.” The Triumph of Darron. They flew his name through the stars now, and some days that felt like enough. Other days it didn’t feel like anything close.

“He’d be so proud of you, Zo,” Emily said, her throat tight. “Proud of all of us, but especially you. Flying his namesake to another star.”

Zoe’s eyes went glassy, but the tears didn’t fall. They never did, with Zoe. “Yeah, probably. He’d also be hitting on you relentlessly, you know. Telling you your nail polish perfectly complements your strategic mind.”

Emily laughed again, for real this time. “Probably. Not like there’s a huge dating pool out here to compete with him, anyway.”

They went back to painting. The hum of the ship and the clink of polish bottles filled the silence, and neither of them said Darron’s name again.

“So,” Zoe said eventually, screwing the cap back on her Nebula Blue, the mischievous glint returning to her eyes. She leaned back, surveying Emily. “Speaking of the boys… when the hell did they decide to grow up on us?”

Emily snorted and nearly smudged a fresh coat. “Tell me about it. One minute they’re all elbows and annoying jokes, the next… well.”

“Next thing you know, Ryan’s looking surprisingly… buff these days,” Zoe said, smirking. “All that heavy equipment must be agreeing with him.”

Emily smiled. “He is… not bad looking,” she admitted, remembering how flustered he’d gotten in the lounge. “And Danny, with those freckles and that curly red hair… he’s adorable when he’s not blowing us up.”

Zoe sighed dramatically. “Danny is a cinnamon roll, too good for this ship and completely oblivious to it. I practically have to wave signal flares to get him to notice I’m not just another piece of lab equipment. Those dimples, though…” She let out another sigh. “It’s a struggle.”

“Chris, though...” Emily said, a little quieter. She traced the rim of a polish bottle. “He’s… a lot. All that muscle, packed into that bodysuit like he’s about to burst. Not to mention he’s charming. And confident. Did I mention his muscles already?” She could feel Zoe gearing up.

“’Confident’ is one word for him,” Zoe said. “More like a walking thirst trap. But hey, if you’re into the ‘alpha male rescuing you from a rogue asteroid with his bare hands’ fantasy, he’s your guy.”

Emily shook her head. “You’re terrible.”

“Which brings us,” Zoe said, leaning forward, “to the Captain. Your Captain. Luca ‘Painfully Oblivious’ Rossi.”

Emily groaned and fell back against her pillow. “Don’t even start, Zo.” But her stomach was already doing the thing it did whenever someone said his name, which was embarrassing and she hated it. “He looks at me like… like that, and I know he feels it too. We both do. But four years, Zoe. Four years of keeping it professional, waiting for the right moment…” She stared at the ceiling. “He puts his arm around me, and it feels… right. Then he pulls back into captain mode. He’s… Luca. Beautifully, infuriatingly disciplined.”

Zoe’s expression sat somewhere between sympathy and exasperation. “He’s got blinders on when it comes to what’s right in front of him. Or he’s terrified. Or both.” She picked up another bottle, pretending to consider the color. “Honestly, Em, sometimes I think you and I are doomed to pine after ridiculously cute nerds for the rest of this voyage.”

Emily looked at her newly painted nails. She’d gone with Nebula Blue, matching Zoe’s. “Maybe you’re right.” She managed a wry smile. “At least our nails will look good while we’re doing it.”

---

Engineering smelled like hot metal and ozone, and the overhead lights buzzed at a frequency that lived right behind Luca’s left eye. Pipes ran across every surface. The deck was a mess. Ryan’s mess, specifically, which meant it made perfect sense to Ryan and looked like a bomb went off to everyone else.

Ryan was crouched at the open access panel of the drive housing, tools scattered around him like shrapnel from a toolbox explosion. A diagnostics tablet propped against a crate beside him flickered with readouts that might as well have been written in another language. Ryan’s hands moved fast, tightening cables, checking power flow, never pausing. The guy didn’t waste a motion. Luca had never seen anyone work like that who wasn’t getting paid for it.

Danny sat nearby on the deck, laptop balanced on one knee, lines of code scrolling past as he ran calibration routines. His brow was furrowed in that way Danny got when he was three problems deep and didn’t want to be interrupted.

Chris was behind them both, checking the power feed from the auxiliary capacitors. He moved slower and double-checked more, careful in a way that kept him useful even when he wasn’t Ryan. Chris knew enough to contribute. He just wasn’t Ryan, and everybody in the room knew it, including Chris.

Luca stood a few feet back with his arms crossed, sweat pooling under his collar, doing a spectacularly bad job of looking like he belonged here. His palms were damp. His jaw hurt from clenching it. People, decisions, reading a room, he could do all of that. Engineering was a foreign language, and right now three of his best friends were having a conversation in it while he stood there like a mannequin with anxiety.

The FTL drive hadn’t come with an instruction manual. No startup wizard, no neat boot sequence. Dad’s engineers had been thorough, but they’d lost comms before the calibrations were finished. So now it was on them: four twenty-year-olds and a drive that could turn them inside out, which was just fantastic.

“What’s the holdup?” he asked, because standing here silently was making his skin crawl and at least asking questions felt like doing something.

Ryan didn’t look up. “The power sync between the containment coils and the field anchor is drifting. Might’ve been from the surge last time.”

Cool, Luca understood about half those words.

“The logs show the last calibration was clean until we got pulled out mid-sequence,” Danny said. “The field anchor wasn’t fully mapped. We’re trying to align it to a ghost signal.”

So they were calibrating the thing that could kill them based on a ghost signal, which meant data that wasn’t really there anymore. Luca’s stomach did something unpleasant.

Ryan snorted. “It’s not that bad. We’ve got most of the mapping done. But we still don’t know what this secondary channel is doing. It’s pulling load, but it’s not reporting.”

Chris leaned over the tablet. “Could it be cooling? Some kind of passive bleed? If it’s not wired to a monitor circuit, it won’t report.”

“Maybe,” Ryan said, tapping his fingers against the deck. “Or it’s shielding, and we’ve just been lucky so far.”

Lucky, as in the thing keeping them from dying might be running on accident. Luca’s mouth went dry.

Danny looked at Luca, then back at his screen. “Do we know what Athan’s crew used for baseline field alignment? We’re guessing at their settings.”

Luca shook his head. “They didn’t have time to send anything more before we lost the uplink. Last message was that they’d tuned the anchor coils to match the ship’s mass distribution, but nothing about the subfield geometry.” He had no idea what subfield geometry meant. He’d memorized the sentence from a briefing file so he’d sound like he was tracking. Judging by Danny’s face, it worked.

Ryan cursed under his breath. “That’s half the equation. No wonder it nearly blew.”

Luca’s heart rate ticked up. “Can you finish the calibration?” It was a straight question, yes or no, and he needed to hear it because if the answer was no, they were turning this ship around, and everything they’d done so far was for nothing.

Danny gave a small shrug. “We’re close. I’ve got the field resonance under one percent drift. If Ryan can stabilize the feedback loop from the secondary core, we should be able to finish the alignment without another surge.”

“I’m working on it,” Ryan said. “Don’t ask me to explain it in plain English.”

Luca wasn’t going to. He’d stopped trying to follow the specifics two minutes ago and switched to reading their faces instead. That, he could do. Danny was focused but not panicked. Ryan was annoyed, which for Ryan meant he was close to solving it. Those were good signs.

Chris wiped sweat from his brow. “Good. Because Luca’s about two steps behind already.”

“Three,” Luca said. His stomach sat somewhere around his knees. “And I’m not even pretending anymore.”

He should get Emily down here. She’d cut through this in minutes, ask exactly the right questions, the ones that got Ryan and Danny talking solutions instead of problems. She had this way of walking into a room and making everything make more sense, not because she was smarter than them, but because she saw the shape of things when everyone else was stuck on the details.

And she’d catch his eye from across the room, and he’d know she was thinking the same thing he was. She always did.

He shoved the thought aside. He could handle this. They were flying to another star system; a little FTL calibration wasn’t going to break him.

Nobody was cracking jokes. That was the part that got to him. The snide throwaway comments that usually filled Engineering were gone. Even Chris had nothing. When Chris wasn’t talking shit, things were actually bad.

Ryan gave a tired grin. “Worst case? We boot the drive, micro-jumps collapse mid-run, and we have to recalibrate in deep space. We figure out how far we got, realign, and try again.” He said it with a shrug, like he was talking about rebooting a router.

Danny nodded. “As long as the stabilization field holds, we don’t get turned into spaghetti.”

“Comforting,” Luca muttered. His hands were shaking. He shoved them into his pockets.

He looked at the drive, this quiet, humming piece of salvaged insanity jammed into the guts of their ship, and tried not to think about how many other crews out there were flying something they understood even less. They might as well be waving their arms and chanting.

“Alright,” he said. “Finish the calibration today. We hit the passage in two days, and if this thing doesn’t run, we don’t get to Alpha Centauri.” He left the rest unspoken.

Ryan nodded once and bent back over the panel.

Luca stayed near the wall and tried to look like a captain.

Mostly, he was hoping that the people he trusted most knew what the hell they were doing, because he sure as shit didn’t, and “spaghetti” was not how he wanted to go out.