by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
“Loi, do you want to go back?” Anno asked, hating the words as she said them. They were the right words to say. It was the right thing to do, giving her daughter a way out of a situation she didn’t want to be in. But Anno knew Loi would take the out, and then her own trip would be over.
“Yes, please.” Loi’s voice never sounded that small and hopeful. Loi wasn’t about hoping for things she wanted; she was all about demanding them, because she knew her worth and her rights and what the universe owed her… even if she was sometimes wrong, because small children have a way of thinking the universe owes them the fulfilment of every single desire that whimsically crosses their tumultuous young minds.
This experience had truly rattled Loi, and Anno felt horribly guilty about that… and yet, there’d been no way to know. Until the very moment that the spacewalk had begun, anyone who knew Anno’s children would have guessed Loi would be the least likely to be frightened… by anything.
“Okay,” Anno said, steeling herself for telling the others to go on without them. She and Loi could play at one of the nice, safe playgrounds for a few hours, until the others came to join them—
But then Kya’s voice crackled over the radio, “I can take her back, Anno. I’ve done this recently. Just a few weeks ago. You should go on with the others, and I can hang out with Loi. We’ll have fun. You wanna hang out with Auntie Kya, Loi?”
“Okay,” Loi sniffled.
Anno felt guilty about foisting her frightened child off on an adult who the girl had only met two days ago… but also, she didn’t want to miss out on her other kits’ joy, or on this trip down memory lane. Anno had done this spacewalk so many times as a child, and it felt both exactly the same and completely different doing it again with children of her own. “Thank you, Kya,” Anno said. “That would be really kind of you. Will you send updates though? So I know you’re both doing okay?”
“Sure thing,” Kya promised. “I just triggered the emergency abort on my jetpack. I’ll be back to you shortly. Loi, can you trigger yours when I get to you?”
Again in her small, scared voice, Loi said, “Okay.”
Kya’s spacesuit cruised back toward Anno and Loi, and then Anno let go of Loi’s paw as the child’s own spacesuit began turning the other way.
Anno’s sister and daughter disappeared behind her, and she found herself alone, floating past the yawning windows of light and wide beams of steel of the space station on one side and the dark, glittering void of space on the other.
Anno pressed down on her jetpack controls, speeding her journey until she caught up with Drathur and their other two kits up ahead.
After about twenty minutes, Anno’s spacesuit computer pinged with a message from Kya, containing an image file. When she viewed the image on the screen embedded in her helmet’s faceplate, she saw Loi grinning widely as she swan-dived through one of the anti-gravity bubbles inside Crossroads Station, perfectly happy and content at the same playground she’d been playing at every day since they got here. In a familiar environment, she once again looked bold and brave — a little red fox ready to face anything the universe wanted to throw at her. Anything except a spacewalk.
Anno wondered how much of Loi’s fear had simply come from feeling like she was out of control of the spacewalk — so much of a child’s life is out of their control, and yet, often it’s in ways a child doesn’t really understand. Loi hadn’t been in control of the gravity jumper or the space freighter… but they’d both been big enough for her to imagine that the control she had over her own body inside of them meant she had any power to save herself if something went wrong.
Anno had a broader view of the universe, and she knew how much she was relying on those vessels to keep every one of a hundred thousand parts moving and working properly; she knew how much she was relying on the pilots to fly safely and not, say, suddenly lose their minds and decide to hijack the vessel for a suicidal nosedive into the nearest sun; she knew too much. Loi, on the other paw, hadn’t realized how little control she had over her own safety without a planet under her feet until her whole body had been wrapped in the nothingness of space, the suffocating vacuum held away by only a thin few millimeters of spacesuit fabric.
Anno never forgot how closely death hugged around them as they zipped, zigging and zagging, around the rings of the space station, but somehow, it stopped scaring her and flipped to something that felt exhilarating. An adrenaline rush that heightened every sensation, making the sparkling stars sparkle even brighter, the gleaming curves of the station shine more, and her own joy bubble up inside her with a sharpness that could almost cut her open, eviscerating her with a happiness she didn’t know how to contain.
Mei and Darso chattered to each other over the radio, making up games where they chased each other, playing tag or trying to count the most stars or spot certain types of things through the windows as they sailed by. It reminded Anno of herself as a child, playing games with Am-lei and later Jeko too. They’d done this same spacewalk back then. Some of the exact swoops and swerves had clearly been re-programmed in the intervening years to be even more exciting or get slightly better views, but overall, she had experienced this same outing from the other side — as a child playing, instead of as the adult watching.
Anno couldn’t go back and be the child again. But this side of the experience was good too. And watching her children do the things she’d done as a child was as close as she would ever come to time travel, getting to skip backward over the years like a stone skipping across a lake, and look at something up close again that usually had faded into the distance, lost among the crowded scenery of her life.
By the time the jetpacks steered Anno, Drathur, and their two children who’d stayed the course back to the original airlock they’d exited from, the walls closing around them felt strange and confining; the return of gravity felt almost like a punishment, making their own limbs into awkward, heavy weights, dragging them down. For several hours, there had been no down or up, just freedom. Freedom and floating.
“I don’t want to be inside the space station!” Mei cried as Anno helped the girl, against her will, out of her space suit.
Anno had considered letting Mei keep wearing the suit, but the suits had been expensive and weren’t really appropriate gear for a child running around inside a space station.
“I want to float in zero gravity FOREVER,” Mei insisted. “I’m not a Heffen anymore; I’m an ASTEROID!”
“Your sister is playing at the playground with all the gravity bubbles right now,” Drathur pointed out. “We could go join her, and you could float in zero gravity there.”
“Playgrounds are for children. Didn’t you hear me? I’m not a child; I’m an asteroid.”
Mei pouted, but eventually, she accepted the offered substitute for her preferred option — a lifetime spent living as an asteroid isn’t really practical when you’re actually a mammal. Though Mei insisted she wasn’t really a mammal — not at heart; at heart, she was a space rock and wanted to return to her true, natural home.
Anno remembered feeling that way about the spacewalk as a child as well. She’d like pretending she wasn’t a Heffen who needed air to breathe, but actually a starwhal who didn’t breathe at all and grazed on space dust to survive. Now though, older and slower than she’d been back then, Anno had loved the spacewalk, revisiting those memories and experiencing something so powerful again, but she was also kind of grateful for it being over. She was glad to have her feet on solid ground, with gravity anchoring her down, and breathable air swirling all around her again.
Continue on to Chapter 16…