It was late into the afternoon when Kviye truly felt that she was close, that it was this precise configuration of spheres that would accomplish what she intended, and that she just needed to find that imperceptible movement that would lock them into place. Valyen’s help mostly came in the form of moral support through impatient tongue-clicking and sarcastic grunting. On more than one occasion, she expressed her displeasure at the fact that the process seemed to her more art than science, which according to Valyen was entirely misplaced when approaching a poorly-understood part of the skiff that had the capability of blowing the whole ship up on a whim.

“Why are you so sure you know what you’re doing?” Valyen asked, looking over Kviye’s shoulder, who had her tongue sandwiched firmly between her lips as the worked the array into place.

“I’m not, but I think that’s kind of the point.”

“You’re going to have to give me a bit more here.”

“I don’t have any more to give you, and I swear I’d explain it if I could.” Kviye’s fingers slipped and the larger of the spheres dropped to the bottom of the reactor with a louder thud than its diminutive size would have suggested. At least, Kviye had assumed it was some kind of reactor. Had Valyen known the full string of assumptions that led Kviye to that day, Kviye expected she would have clocked her over the head with a wrench and strapped her to a chair in the garage so that she couldn’t escape.

The particular piece of the skiff’s equipment that she was working on continued to puzzle Kviye. She had found it in the engine room by pure chance, trying to trace the source of a leak to an innocuous wall panel that had been sealed off centuries before her and revealed a device far more elaborate than she expected. By its configuration, it appeared to her to be some kind of support system for the engines. There was a whole host of connections that had once been intended for the engines but that at one point had been severed, while other connections led to dead ends near the ship’s hull, and whatever they may or may not have originally connected to had been completely erased from the ship’s memory. There had been no manual for the skiff, and her mother left no instructions, though Kviye suspected that it was more than likely that even her mother hadn’t known about the device. The empty chamber that she was currently working on, however, did bare an uncanny resemblance to parts on alien ships that she occasionally serviced alongside Valyen, and which were used as a type of auxiliary reactor for their faster-than-light engines, each equipped with a sphere similar to the one that she received from Valyen. But even rerouting all available power to this ‘reactor’ had only given them a small burst of energy, a miscalculation that had almost led to the disastrous end to her last attempted spaceflight.

Kviye scooped up the smaller pebble-sized pieces into one hand and the larger ball into the other and resumed setting them into place.

“How do you even know they’re supposed to go in there?”

“I don’t,” Kviye answered as the first pebble crossed an invisible threshold and jolted slightly before stabilizing in a floating position. “I can hear you rolling your eyes, you know.”

Valyen merely snorted in response.

“Remember a couple of years back?” Kviye continued. “Those half-starved Wintis that spent four months flying barely above light speed before they reached us? Everyone knew their subspace skimmer was busted yet nobody knew how to fix it.”

Valyen straightened up at this suggestion. “There’s no way this hunk of junk is part of a skimmer.”

“Maybe a primitive one. That’s not the point, do you remember who fixed it?”

“Yes,” Valyen answered, her voice dropping, but then she smiled. “Those Wintis were so mad you started rooting about in there. For a moment I thought they might tear you limb from limb, or at the very least toss you right out of the ship.”

Kviye snorted. “They weren’t too happy with me. Until they realized I fixed it. I was just there to help you out, not really looking to go off on my own.” The whole time Kviye spoke, Valyen watched her hands intently at work, fingers moving and manipulating without any discernable pattern. One of the pebbles started to float away from the group, but Kviye’s left pinky shot out and shepherded it back into place. “I was looking over your shoulder as you fiddled with something and it caught me out of the corner of my eyes, the heaviness these things emit that you can’t quite put a finger on. It was also somehow different that time, almost as if it was upset.”

“Oh stop it.”

“I’m serious. I know it makes no sense but that’s what I felt. I can’t tell you what I heard or what I saw because the answer is pretty much ‘nothing’. When it pulled me, and I followed, I forgot all about you and all about the Wintis. The only thing that remained was that black ball and that whine it sent to the back of my head. I could feel that the shroud around it was darker and somehow knew that I could stop it. So I lay my hands on it and adjusted it and I can’t even say if those were my hands, let alone if I was moving them. And through the haze I heard the distant shouting and then a hand roughly tore me away but by that point is was all done. The darkness had thinned and I returned to the ship. Good thing that it started making all the right noises and the Wintis kindly opted not to kill me.”

Valyen, somehow even paler than she normally looked, shuddered. “I never liked these things. Some deep space dark magic bapa zhaga stuff.”

“Maybe so, but face it, from what we’ve seen, you can’t run a subspace skimmer without one. And without a skimmer, how am I supposed to take to the stars?”

“The stars, Kvee, just take a moment to think what you’re talking about here, what kind of precise calculations and what kind of specific knowledge is required here. You can’t fly a skiff across the continent without crashing if you don’t have years of training and what are you going to go on? Feelings?”

Kviye bit her lip as a particularly finicky dark pebble refused to find a place for itself, but after a few moments of concentration, she whispered “yes”.

“You can’t take a ship to the stars with feelings alone.”

“Well, not alone, it’s feelings and these little things.” And as she finished speaking, Kviye felt through her fingers a bit of resistance, a sensation that spread up her arms and through her whole body, as if for a moment she had been locked in placed, and when she pushed herself out of the stupor, she knew she could let go and she removed her fingers to leave the little pebbles orbiting the larger ball, all suspended within the open chamber of the device.

“I’ve certainly never seen them do that before.” Kviye couldn’t remember the last time Valyen looked so perplexed while looking at something ostensibly mechanical. A faint hum emanated from the long-extinguished device and a smudged display came to life.

“Me neither.” The panel displayed a few words she didn’t recognize, written in that intricate script that the ship’s systems used, but as far as she could tell, everything, whatever “everything” was in this situation, was functioning as it should have been. “Looks like it’s working.”

“And how did you make that conclusion, more feelings?”

“I’d call it more of an ‘educated guess’ and it’s gotten me this far, so why stop now?” Kviye got up and rubbed her hands on her pants. “Let me just check if dad’s picked up any commissions for today.”

Kviye briefly popped into the cockpit and came back after discovering radio silence from her father. She wondered if he even noticed that she was gone, or if he was still in town, trying to get word on whether anyone needed anything, as long as it was profitable, even if that profit was hardly worth Kviye’s time to get the ship’s engines running. She returned to Valyen, shaking her head.

“Nothing?”

“I guess that means I’ve got time to try.”

“Right now?”

“You have a better suggestion?” And before Valyen could open her mouth, Kviye added with a laugh, “I mean before ‘never’.”

“I don’t suppose I can find any other way to stop you?”

“Val, I can hardly hear you above my heartbeat. I need to try this.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Kviye raised her eyebrows.

“Okay. If that’s the look you’re going to give me because you can’t wait another five minutes, I’m not sure I could handle looking at your face much longer anyway.” Kviye cast her glance down to the floor, but when Valyen added, “Now let’s go get this thing fired up,” Kviye quickly looked up at her friend.

“You too?”

“Sure,” Valyen said coolly, though Kviye noticed the perspiration suddenly form under her hairline. “Can’t let you have all the fun.”

“I’m not sure either of us will be having much fun with you hugging your seat with your eyes closed and moaning the whole way through.”

“That was one flight.”

“That was your only flight!” Kviye laughed and put a hand on Valyen’s shoulder. “Besides, I need someone on the ground so they can point to whatever swamp I end up crashing this thing into.” Kviye’s words cast a shadow over Valyen’s smiling face.

“You’ll be fine,” Valyen said as Kviye pulled her in for a hug.

“I’m just going to see the stars and be right back.”

“C’mon,” Valyen’s voice was tense as she wiggled out of Kviye’s embrace. “Before this starts feeling like a goodbye.”

Kviye thought Valyen looked like she had something else to say, but instead she gave Kviye a thin smile, and headed towards the loading ramp.