[cont. from the previous chapter due to character limit]

They returned home after the sun had already sat down. Due to his mom’s bad mood, Robert was assigned chores around the house. She probably still blamed him for what had happened, at least partially. He didn’t feel too angry about it. He did feel somewhat guilty.

When he made his way upstairs, he noticed the hatch to the attic was open but didn’t pay it much attention. He walked into his room and found it empty. Blinked. The toiletries his mom bought for Nikolai were laid out on the bed cover, together with Robert’s old t-shirts and shorts. And the new shoes. He stared at them for a full minute before turning around and focusing on the open hatch again. 

Robert climbed up the ladder, poked his head into the attic, and found Nikolai there, at the closed window. The boy was trailing his fingers along the edge of the window frame as if looking for a way to open it. He didn’t try pulling on the handle at the top.

“What are you doing?” Robert asked, startling Nikolai into falling on his butt. He backed into the corner, looking scared and unhappy. His eyes were rimmed with red. He held Rob’s gaze for a good 10 seconds before hiding his face in his hands and curling forward into a ball.

Robert pulled himself into the attic and closed the hatch behind him. “Were you trying to run away?” He asked as he sat down next to the boy.

Nikolai didn’t move, didn’t react in any way, and just stayed silent, his forehead pressed to his knees.

“Like you ran away from the previous place and ended up on that cargo ship?”

Silence stretched between them. The attic was dusty and the motes glimmered in the light of the evening sun, spinning lazily in the air.

“How many times did you run away before?”

Nothing.

“My mom thinks you’ve never been to a planet.” Robert tried a different approach. “Judging by how you struggled with that window, I bet she’s right. Here’s the thing. The planet is not like a space station. If you run into the desert, you will die. Heatstroke. And there’s no water out there. And packs of rabid dogs who are craving for little boys to walk into their territory. Plus, your fingers are in a cast, how would you take it off when the time comes?”

Rob picked at the loose end of one of the medipatches on his chin. “Nah, there’s nothing waiting for you out there. My mom is your best chance at surviving at Port. Or on Mesa in general. You should stay, at least until they find someone you can return to.”

“She is angry with me.” Nikolai whispered without moving. His voice was muffled, and by the sound of it, he was crying again.

“Well. A bit. I mean, who wouldn’t be angry? But so what? She’ll cool down soon. There’s just lots of shit she has to deal with, you know? Especially for a Sixthday, when we are supposed to stay at home but barely anyone does anymore. There’s me and Moishe being idiots, and Natan and Hershel constantly fighting about Hershel’s job, and Natan’s baby constantly crying, and there is never enough money… And aunt Katz was kinda mean. But what’s new, all enforcers are bastards.”

“They will send her to prison because of me.”

Robert snorted and stared down at him, baffled. “What? Of course not!”

“They will send me to prison.”

Robert groaned and leaned his head back on the rough wall. “You are 12! And also we don’t have a prison in Port. They just send you to work in the mines. Like, in the worse parts of the mines compared to where Natan works.”

They sat in silence for another five minutes. Robert started getting restless. “Listen. Kolya, can I be frank with you?” He didn’t get an answer but he carried on. “At the start, I hated the idea of having to share my room with a weird kid from who knows where. And I still hate it a little bit. But, you know what? You’re alright. Saved me from a poop shower, eh? Thanks for that. I would’ve never washed off my reputation.”

He waited for a reaction. Sighed. Stretched. Sighed again. Finally, he leaned forward, ready to get up. “Well. The window you were struggling with? There is a handle on top. You need to turn it, pretty much the same as the one on the tap.”

“Please, stay.” Nikolai finally looked up. He wasn’t crying anymore but he looked scared. Robert hesitated, suddenly feeling a bit uneasy.

“I was hoping to catch a nap before it’s my time to take a bath.”

“Can we sit here until that instead?” There it was again, the hopeful face, the puppy eyes.

“Uhm… How about I grab a project to work on, at least?”

Nikolai nodded fast and started rubbing his face dry from the remaining tears.

Robert hurried to his room, shoved several bigger pieces of junk into a shoulder bag, paused, grabbed the translation processor from the windowsill above the new bed, and hurried back to the attic. When he returned, Nikolai was where he had left him and the window was untouched.