“You look like shit.”

Alexa frowned, and turned around in Steven’s chair. “Excuse me?”

Jerod stood there, clipboard in hand, scanning through the list of contacts she’d just given him. “Well I’m not sure how else to say it, Alexa. I had enough tact not to mention it yesterday but have you had enough sleep?”

“...not really.” She struggled to suppress the yawn, but the way Jerod blankly stared at her told her it was a failed endeavor. “I don’t know, I just haven’t been falling asleep quite as fast.”

“Excited or something then, perhaps?”

She licked her lips. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“But you won’t mention it to any of the other staff?”

“I wouldn’t still be here today if it wasn’t for my, should I say, legendary discretion. How do you suppose Steven got the budget for this studio?”

“I’m kind of scared to know about that now. It wasn’t illegal, was it?”

“Perhaps a story for another day. You were saying?” He pulled out a stool from under the workbench and made himself at home, clipboard aside.

“So you know how on Tuesday I wasn’t in? I actually got invited to look at that spaceship in the mountains by a rich guy. Armitage.”

“Did you enjoy it at least?”

“Yeah, right until the Stateship slapped him with the bureaucratic process I guess. We went through two entire decks of it, but I can’t stop thinking about it. None of it makes sense.”

He raised an eyebrow. “In what way?”

She put the pad and the stylus in her hand down, causing the 3D model on the projector wall to freeze up and retreat into a menu for its own safety. “So the ship, right? It’s an old Federation invasion lander, like a big egg thing. Dropped from a bigger carrier when they’re trying to get troops on the ground.” She leaned over to the computer and searched up some images, turning the screen so Jerod could see it. “Look at that. First production 2184. But Kurt said the pit carbon dated to over three thousand.”

“But I assume the spaceship itself is different.”

“Very different. There’s probably carbon fibre in the hull somewhere they could do that with, but the traditional way is to just figure it out from context. But there’s something else. Someone got in before us, tried to seal up the place. Talismans and red rope like it’s a Samudra ghost festival or something.”

“That’s…quite the image.”

“That stuff was newer. I could tell the ship is way older, but the magic was maybe three hundred years ago?”

He sat up. “And this planet wasn’t colonised three hundred years ago.”

“I keep thinking about it.”

Both of them were silent for a bit, letting Alexa radiate her frustration to the inactive Octopus hovering between them.

“There were murals in there,” she finally said.

“Oh, that’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know if I can say that. Steven would probably roast me for it. But I think the people who lived and probably died on that ship wanted to come here. Like they really had a whole story about sailing through the stars and they drew it all over the bridge. And now they’re just gone.”

“Was it a pilgrimage?”

“It’s looking that way.”

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“...kinda.”

“That woman on Monday talked like you were old friends. Maybe it’s better if you talked to her about this.”

“She hasn’t picked up since yesterday. You know, people have their own lives, like…living in a motel outside of town and being really stubborn on telling me her free hours.”

“Ah, so a former partner then. I did get a sense of it  the way she said your name”

Her cheeks flushed and she turned around in the chair. “Okay, getting real unprofessional here, I have to complete this 3D topography now…”

Jerod stood and opened the door to the studio. “Maybe you should actually tell her about how you feel,” he said. “You have a good excuse right now. And Alexa?”

She glanced over her shoulder.

“You might be stuck with the dig, and the bureaucrats won’t budge, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only problem you have to have to work on.” He looked down at the work table.

Her gaze followed his, finding a colourful leaflet left for her. It was mainly a sky blue, fading into a photo of the sky and a mountain she recognised as part of the southern part of the Vestin. But what caught her attention were the round, bulbous and colorful shapes that were both in and out of frame, rising from behind the title:

Hecate Balloon Exhibition.
She snatched it off the table and flipped it open, ignoring all the photos of last year’s exhibition, scanning the text under the admissions section for the words she was desperate to find.

Our exhibition welcomes all kinds of hot air balloons, including polymer, composite, aergogel…pleasepleaseplease…

She flipped the booklet over and found the contact details wedged in a very small font near the seam of the fold, reading it over a couple of times before she put it down and typed it into her phone. With bated breath, she stared at the pending connection.

And then someone picked up.

She immediately put it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Can I help you?” a young man’s voice asked. Probably an intern, by her estimation.

“I’m calling about the hot air balloon exhibition?”

“Ah, are you an applicant?”

“No, I’m just attending.”

“Ah, that’s okay then. Applications are just closed, that’s all.”

Alexa tabbed to her email inbox and quickly found her outgoing emails. “I wanted to ask if you also admitted any canvas balloons?”

“Oh! I think we have a few. Could you hold for a second while I check?”

“Go ahead.” She continued to hold her breath as the call was replaced by a melodic chime that was a little too loud, forcing the phone from her ear.

I got you, you bastard. She read her own email over again, the third one she’d sent, and found it almost sickeningly polite. Can’t avoid me forever.

The intern came back on. “Yup! We’ve got eight canvas balloons this year actually. Some of them are co-exhibits with other types.”

“When?”

“Uh, two the opening night, and the rest will be there starting Saturday morning. Are you just walking in or would you like a ticket to the demonstration on Sunday as well?”

“I’m just looking. It’d be great if I could talk to some of those guys. Speaking of, this event is sponsored, right?”

“Yup! It’s all paid for by the sponsors.”

“Does one of them happen to be Aerostat?”

“Um…” He was silent for a moment. “Yeah, they’re actually one of the platinum sponsors. Why do you ask?”

“Is a representative going to be there on opening night?”

“There should be. It’s the opening ceremony. If you want a dialogue I can put it on a list, but it’ll depend on how busy they are.”

“I’ll find a way, don’t worry. Put me in that note.”

“Aaaand done! Can I help you with anything else?”

“That’s all. Thanks.” She hung up, and switched to her instant messaging app. She opened up a new chatroom with a contact number she hadn’t touched in the last two days, one given to her that first rainy night at her house.

Wanna go see a balloon show? she typed.

Aerin, naturally, did not respond immediately. The way she had left that Tuesday afternoon, taking all her old clothes and some of Alexa’s, left a weird taste in her mouth. It wasn’t like anything had happened between them, especially with her choice to continue sleeping down in the living room while Aerin got the nice cushy bed, with the washed sheets. And then, before she had the opportunity to say anything, she suddenly had to go help Kurt with the few materials recovered before the Stateship had forcibly ejected the lot of them. No matter how much she tried not to think of it that way, it felt like avoidance, at least a little.

But do you actually know how I feel?

The words were old, but they still stung. She mashed her hands together trying to rid the weird clammy feeling and wipe the sweat off, before turning back to the computer. With one button press, she returned to the mapping of the paint layers, the closeup shots of Guernica laid across the screen like a cadaver on a dissection table. Each stroke from each attempt at preservation was rebuilt in digital space, in hopes of finding the best way to process them all.

She stared for a minute, and then turned to the Octopus, manually moving the surface scanner on the secondary arm aside so she could see the full painting. The tissue covering the top left quadrant had been removed, exposing the bull with its off-kilter pair of eyes. “What do you think?” she said quietly. “Should I tell her tomorrow night?”

Bzzt.

She grimaced, and reached over to the space beside the computer terminal for her phone. “Yes?”

“Sorry I was late,” Mendoza said. “The director called an emergency meeting. Any progress on the topology?”

“About ninety-five percent done,” Alexa said lazily, leaning back in her chair. “There’s some sections not coming clean on the scans, might have to use radiation to really get all the details.”

“It should be fine. Nothing should react disastrously with that.”

Should. “I just finished reading Carlotta’s report this morning too. The adhesive reacted to some kind of wax? Do we know what that is?”

“I never got to examine the actual interaction for long before Sullavahn put it away. But I would start with optical microscopy. It was applied from the back, so you might be able to get a sample without affecting any of the paint.”

“With the extent of the absorption I doubt it’s worth the risk. Hoping to get a source tomorrow though, I’ve cornered the supplier.”

“They replied? That’s great news.”

“Not exactly, I’m ambushing them at a balloon convention. I’ll just leave an algo running to mine the real brushstrokes from the deep scans, then I’ll start hashing out everything before we get to the adhesive.”

“Do you have any tests for that in mind?”

“I can think of a few. But it’s not gonna be useful until we figure out what that wax is.” She commanded the Octopus to hold its microscope to one of the deformed ridges, lighting the canvas from behind. Every distortion was made into geography on the giant projector screen, the paint as black as it ought to be under the facial tissue. The valleys, however, were dotted with amber flecks too small for the human eye to see, and even the smoothest curves she had witnessed from mere inches away were now a mess of jagged cliffs and translucent peaks. The fibres of the canvas looked like straw when lit from within, the lattice giving away to abject chaos where it had clearly peeled from the paint.

The adhesive announced itself as expected, as tiny black veins that seeped into everything, swallowing up the amber shards and pooling around something grey she hadn’t noticed before. She turned on the UV again, but the grey grains remained as is, dull and lifeless as it had been under normal light.

“What are you?” she whispered, panning over the zoomed in image.

“Yes? Did you say something?” Mendoza asked.

“Sorry, just talking to...myself. Maybe if I can get a flake or something I can put it in the mass spectrometer.”

“You have one there?”

“No, but there’s one at the local uni.”

“Well, I hate to say this, but I’ve got to go again. It’s getting hectic around here.”

“Oh? Already?”

“Stay safe, Miss Romilly.” Mendoza hung up.

Alone once more, she was left staring at the mysterial substance on the microscope image. Once she understood the reaction, the path would be clear. Not now though, she thought as she saw the notification on the corner of the phone screen.

For now, she had a date.

By some providence, it didn’t rain that evening, and the weatherman so confidently predicted her downpour. As per the law of equivalent exchange, or whatever else sounded poetic to Alexa, there were no clouds, allowing the full might of the sun to bear down on Globi Street, turning the cars on the street into furnaces. That was well and good, for it made her all the more excited to get back inside and continue painting, now that she knew she didn’t have to clock in the next day.

And yet, as she stepped into her domicile, something felt…wrong. She couldn’t put her finger on whether it was the temperature change or the way the air moved when she shut the door, but she climbed upstairs, and found the attic ladder still yawed open.

Her mind raced. The last couple of days had been a haze, and she had slept downstairs, so-

Cool relief washed over her, condensing the last of the sweat from the sun. She hadn’t been upstairs since the night of discussion with Aerin, and so she hadn’t even bothered to close it. Even now, dust was drifting down from the opening, setting on the steps.

She grabbed the bit of material attached to the back of the ladder, and pushed it up, getting on her tiptoes to push it flush against the rest of the ceiling. There was a soft click, and the lever-key in the wall between the books notched up, allowing her to remove it.

The rumbling of an engine caught her attention, and she went over to the big window looking out over the front of the house. A black sedan that had been parked on the opposite side of the street, baking in the heat, had just peeled off. Her neighbors’ cars were silver and occasionally maroon. This was…new.

She shoved the key back in its mechanism and popped the attic open again, swiftly ascending the steps and turning around once she was most of the way up.

The covered canvas in the corner was in the same place she’d left it, nudged into the shadows. In fact, the attic looked exactly as she had left it with Aerin once she switched on the lights.

Alexa went through the process of closing the compartment back up, and made her way downstairs. Paranoia, it seemed, was contagious. She was beginning to think too much like Kurt.

Just in case, she checked where she’d left every spare key, every bundle of emergency cash that was downstairs, and finally slumped on the couch.

Alexa faced her incomplete painting again, returned to the easel for her show-and-tell with Aerin. The grey prism in the middle would be an office, she decided. More windows mean there were more figures she could place behind the glass, looking up at the source of the shadow. Office, she repeated in her head.

She picked up the palette from the floor.