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“Ziggy.”
He’s still not used to her saying his name. In the few weeks since the last battle with Venjix, they’ve been busy getting permits and funding and paperwork secured for their school, doing and re-doing budgets, salvaging the Garage, and reading contracts, to say nothing of debriefing Colonel Truman and the rest of the city officials on the termination of the Ranger program and the final defeat of the computer virus that nearly killed them all. Standing side by side or sitting across from one another, they’ve not needed to use one another’s names. A simple tap on the table or the thud of a stack of papers on a desk have been enough to get the other’s attention if need be.
But now and again, they’ll be sitting at the counter in the Garage, sipping coffee or hot chocolate, or they’ll go out for a walk, like today, and they’ll need to break the silence with the gentle sounds of their names. His is simple, at least. He’s known it his whole life. But he doesn’t know what hers is, exactly, so he still resorts to ‘Doc’ or ‘Doc K.’ It doesn’t feel entirely right, but what else is there to do? And more importantly, she doesn’t seem to mind, and lately he’s been learning to think before he speaks where other people’s feelings are concerned.
“Yeah?” he asks, coming to stand beside her. They are at the bottom of a little hill dotted by trees, where people of all ages play games or have picnics or lie in the sun. He glances at her in time to see her bite her lips and frown.
Turning to look at him, she says, “Call me K.”
For a moment, he can’t find his voice. Then he nods, smiling. “Sure. Whatever you want me to call you, I’ll—”
“I don’t know my name,” she interrupts, answering the unspoken question with half a smile. He can’t tell if she’s amused or throwing on a mask, but he doesn’t cut in when she continues. “I don’t remember it. K is as close to one as I’ll ever have now, so—” Shrugging, she looks forward again.
“You can pick one,” he says, and he almost curses himself for it when her head snaps in his direction. The exasperated frown is very Dr. K, very mentor, very Ranger Operator Series Green, do not touch anything in this room without my express permission, and do not bring popcorn in here again.
“Pick one?”
“Yeah. Any name at all. Maybe—the name of a scientist you really admire, or—or someone from a comic book or a TV show. Or…” He shrugs. “I used to listen to the nurses talk about it whenever an unnamed baby came to the orphanage. N-Not that—you’re— Not that that would be bad, of course, not at all, but just—”
“I understand what you mean,” she tells him, and she furrows her brow again, her gaze on something ahead of them that he cannot see—possibilities, perhaps. Probabilities. Equations that lead to the perfect solution. It’s almost like when he scans a table full of ingredients and decides, in a few seconds, what to use in what proportions to make exactly what he wants.
Finally, she shrugs and meets his eyes again. “K is fine. It’s who I’ve been all these years. It’s the name of the person who almost destroyed the world, and somehow managed to help save it.”
“Somehow?” He chuckles. “Without you—”
“Let’s not enter into a discussion about the myriad possible outcomes of what this world would be like today if I had never been part of it.”
“Right,” he murmurs. “Sorry. I didn’t—” He shakes his head. “Sorry, K.”
Smiling, she touches his hand. It’s tentative, a big step for her, he knows, the girl who brought ruin on the world and became the woman who created the technology to save it. She’s more than that, though, always has been. She’s an adult who never got to be a child, whose life was stolen from her by the greedy and power-hungry, a prodigy exploited but not broken. She’s the strongest, smartest, bravest person he has ever met.
He slides his fingers between hers and gives them a gentle squeeze.
“I believe the mail has arrived at the undestroyed part of the Garage by now,” she says.
He nods, and they begin walking again.
*
When the other cartel members talked about relationships of a more than friendly nature, they always discussed their partner’s sexual prowess, or their own, or the combined awesomeness of them and their partner together. Ziggy learned early enough what to say to appear to be like them, and to exaggerate his purported pursuits, but in truth, he hadn’t seen the appeal beyond latent curiosity. A year of fighting attack bots and Grinders proved a lot more interesting, and saving the world with the team brought him more satisfaction than anything else ever possibly could—and he was willing to bet on that.
He isn’t sure there’s a name for what he has with K, but it’s certainly not what the members of the Scorpion Cartel discussed. There’s a lot more silence between them, which is harder than anything in the world for him. One month into their school’s first session, he gets to all but perform for his students, and they love it, and the cavernous kitchen classroom fills with the sounds of laughter and delight, the smell of freshly-cooked meals and desserts. Then, when they’ve all gone home, it’s so quiet he can hear his own heartbeat, and from across the hall comes the sound of K’s biofield physics classroom door shutting.
Dinner is easy on class days because he always cooks a demo meal, and whatever the students haven’t eaten is more than enough for K and him to share when they’ve gone back home. He gives her a smile, saying nothing as he sets a bowl before her with a flourish, her quiet laugh all the thanks he needs. Taking the seat across from her, he eats, and he wants to tell her stories about the kids or the day’s kitchen disaster. Sometimes he does, and she seems not to mind, but other times, he thinks all she needs is silence, so he gives it to her.
He can’t remember anymore when they started to share a room, much less a bed. It’s not a nightly occurrence, though the nights apart have nothing to do with the old hostility she bore towards him. Now it’s more about paperwork and deadlines, syllabi, grades, and projects for the upcoming week.
And then, of course, are the times when she dreams.
He’s no stranger to nightmares. When he was little, he used to dream about his parents being killed in horrible ways, or abandoning him for the tiniest mistakes on his part, or becoming monsters out to eat him and the other children alive. He would wake up trembling, face bathed in tears. Sometimes those dreams come back to him, but he wakes less shaken now, a seasoned fighter, a young man who is no longer alone.
K tenses in her sleep when she’s reliving any number of dreadful things, and she wakes with a quiet, deep, shuddering gasp. Then, without so much as a word, she climbs out of bed and heads into the half-rebuilt lab. He doesn’t follow, doesn’t even go to the door to watch her disappear down the hall, and on the night she stops when she’s grasped the doorknob, he doesn’t have to wonder anymore.
The sky is starting to turn grey, and what little illumination the pre-dawn glow affords them is enough for Ziggy to see the slouch in her usually squared shoulders, the messy black hair that is otherwise always combed to perfection now that she’s found someone to cut it for her. He wants to go and hold her close and say the things that will make Venjix and Alphabet Soup stop haunting her, but he knows better than that. No one who has seen as much as their team has will ever forget, and she has seen even more.
“What techniques do you utilize to reduce your agitation when your dreams wake you?” she asks. “Mine are clearly ineffective.”
Sitting up, he shrugs, even though she is still facing the door. “I, uh, have a drink of water. The sky—I look at the sky. Sometimes I just roll over and think of something nice.”
“Like what?”
He bites his lips, rubbing one of his eyes. “When I finally passed my road test. Well, that’s… not the happiest thing ever, but I passed, so—” He stops himself before he mentions the cartel. “Sometimes I pretend my parents are alive. I make up memories: boating in the harbor, getting ice cream on my birthday, stuff like that.”
K draws back her hand and looks over her shoulder. It’s hard to tell in the dark of the room, but it looks like she’s squinting. “That sounds sad,” she says, her voice low and rough with tears.
“It’s better than the nightmares.”
She sniffs, and he fights back the impulse to go to her. Better to let her decide how much she wants in this give and take, and to let her know he does not see her as some wounded bird.
“I want to forget,” she says, gaze downcast as she turns to face him, “without forgetting. I have to remember, because it can’t happen again.”
“You’re not the only one who remembers it.” Gem and Gemma still remember, possibly even better than she does, being older and an entirely different kind of tormented. He can’t imagine what they live with, but he knows how they deal: by acting like the children they were never allowed to be. “And—I can’t forget that I was involved with organized crime. How many people’s lives did I help ruin?”
Shaking her head, she sits on the bed again, drawing her legs up and wrapping her arms about them. She takes a slow, deep breath, and heaves a sigh that seems to have weighed tons inside her lungs. “I am somewhat recovered already,” she says. “Thank you.”
With the pale glow of morning behind him, she can’t see his face, but he smiles anyway. In his adult life, he’s never had anyone to talk to in the middle of the night. Mafia men didn’t care about things like feelings and dead mommy and daddy and the entire world is ending.
He lies back down, and maybe now, the first rays of morning sunlight illuminate the tiny grin on his face. “Any time.”
*
At night, the dome is programmed to show them the night sky as it would be seen outside. The threat of invasion is gone now, but until Corinth military are assured that a wide enough perimeter is safe, they maintain steady power to the shield. Besides, the world’s weather patterns are still in recovery, and who knows what chemicals or toxins natural rain may bring?
On the roof, Ziggy lies back on the king-size comforter he bought today after class precisely for this occasion. K claims to know her night sky, and he intends to verify that.
“Allow me to remind you that I have been working with advanced mathematical calculations and the complexities of biofield physics since I was a child,” she tells him, arching both eyebrows at him in the few seconds before she lies next to him. “Learning the constellations in the night sky is as simple to me as calculus.”
“I’m going to pretend I know enough calculus to be amused.” He rolls his eyes and gives a good-natured laugh as he slides an arm about her shoulders. She draws a little closer in response. “What’s above us right now?”
“I see Taurus.” After a pause, she adds, “And the Pleiades. If I observe that particular star cluster out of the corner of my eye, I can count at least five of its seven optically brightest stars.”
“Okay, lucky guess.”
“Guess? Hardly. Did you even know the Pleiades cluster is composed of more than seven stars?”
“Of course I did!” His stargazing skills had made him a fair few friends at the orphanage, including the attendants. “Okay, I thought it was seven, but I definitely knew it was more than five.”
They do this for what feels like hours. Ziggy pretends he’s seen a shooting star now and again, but K is too astute and observant to fall for his old “you must have blinked and missed it” trick. He’d tried that on a friend once, just to cheer them up. He still isn’t sure they’d really believed it, but all they’d needed was a chance to make a wish.
“What would you wish for?” he asks K. This is dangerous territory, he knows, but maybe she’s started to embrace the idea of a world beyond that which she knew.
She is quiet for a few seconds, frowning up at the programmed stars. He is about to apologize when she answers, “I’d like for all of us to be together again. The team, that is. I’d like to know how Summer, Dillon, and Tenaya are doing. I’d like them all to see how well our school is doing.”
He thinks, I’d like for them to see how happy you seem lately, but he doesn’t say it. Still, he can’t look away from her, so different from the stoic, serious mentor she had been. If this is the best his life will ever get, then he is the luckiest person alive, the one who gets to stand by her side every day as they build a new life in a renascent world.
Turning to face him, she holds his gaze for a silent moment. “What would you wish for?”
He smiles. “Nothing, I guess. Well—nothing really possible. I wish my parents could be here, but I know—or, I feel they are. Somewhere, they know everything is okay. But as for things I can actually get?” He shrugs. “Just to see everyone again, like you said.”
“Your parents—” She stops, pressing her lips together. “They do live on in you. They’ve left part of themselves in you, a whole history.”
“Maybe they’re in the biofield.”
“I suppose that’s possible. It would be a more probable reality than the notion of another realm of existence.”
“Isn’t that what the biofield is?”
“That isn’t entirely untrue,” she concedes. “I apologize. I didn’t intend to make light of something so serious.”
“It’s fine,” he tells her, and he means it. He looks up at the sky, sighing. “Anyway, you proved me wrong. You know your constellations. I admit defeat.”
“I also admit defeat.”
He meets her smirk with a frown.
“I no longer dislike you.”
The memory comes to him easily, of the day he had insisted they could be friends and she had told him they would not because she didn’t like him. It fills him with a laughter that spills over at once, soft and sweet like the breeze coming in from the harbor.
“Good to hear,” he says and looks up at the Pleiades, indirectly. They are not wish-granters like shooting stars, and they’re only a projection, so he doesn’t ask them for a gift, only thanks them for the one they’ve given him anyway, the one he’s still not certain he deserves.
Glancing over, he sees K shut her eyes and bask in the artificial moonlight.
Smiling, he does the same.