Tessa

She heard him, despite his best efforts. Stars, he really was giving it his best. She heard the rustle of his sheets as he tossed them aside, then a slow, deliberate crossing of the floor and ascent of the mattress. He wiggled under her sheet. She did not respond. He thought she was sleeping, and she wanted to see where that would lead. With what must’ve been agonising self-control, Ky lay alongside her, touching but only barely, silent except for his breathing. He held himself with a two-year-old version of stillness – a tortured rigidity that gave way to a stray twitch and wiggle every few seconds or so.

He was trying – trying very hard – to snuggle without waking her up.

Tessa scooped the kid up and covered his tangled scalp with kisses.

‘You ’wake!’ he squealed.

‘Yes, buddy,’ she said between one kiss and another. ‘I’ve been awake a while.’

‘Good morning!’

‘Good morning, Ky.’ She waved at the bedside lamp, and a soft glow spread through the room. Ky’s hair was a portrait of chaos, and deep pillow lines crossed one of his chubby cheeks. Tessa sat up with her boy in her arms and caught a glimpse of herself in the wall mirror. Her hair and face weren’t in much better shape than his, and she didn’t have the free pass of toddlerhood. But who cared, at this hour? Certainly not her son, who had inserted a finger a worrying ways into his ear canal.

‘Mama, no breakfast,’ Ky said. He raised his voice in a shout: ‘No breakfast!’

‘Shh,’ Tessa whispered, pulling his twisting hand away from his head. ‘We don’t want to wake everybody up. Okay? Can you be quiet? Can you whisper?’

‘Yes.’ Ky’s whisper could’ve been heard from the opposite side of the room, but it was an improvement.

‘Do you want to go see the stars?’

‘No.’

Everything was no these days. He’d put precisely zero effort behind this particular one, so Tessa paid it no mind. ‘I think you do. Let’s go see the stars.’

Ever-growing boy on her hip, Tessa walked into the living room. A few nightlights and the emergency arrow pierced the darkness, but otherwise, it was pitch dark. She could hear Pop snoring, and nothing from Aya’s room. Good. Tessa tiptoed forward, anticipating the couch, the table, the— ‘Motherf—’ Tessa hissed, and swallowed the rest in a muffled groan. She hadn’t anticipated the stray toy that had found its way into the bare sole of her foot.

‘Shh!’ Ky breathed loudly. ‘Quiet!’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Tessa said. Smartass, she thought.

She reached the ring of tiny floor lights that marked the edge of the shaft down to the family cupola. She’d thought, once, that the reason homes had cupolas in common spaces was because the architects had tried to parcel out window resources as economically as they could. That was true, but only the half of it. Apparently, the shared portal was an intentional design. Her ancestors had worried that if people could lock themselves away and look outside in solitude, they’d lose a few screws. They’d get scared, lose hope. It was a mixed bag, the view of the open. Breathtaking beauty and existential dread all mixed together. Far easier to focus on the former and avoid the latter, the thinking went, if you sat at the window with friends ready to hold your hand or listen or just share company with. That, Tessa thought dryly, or you’d go buggy as a group. Either way, you weren’t alone.

Her eyes adjusted to the negligible light. She opened the railing gate, sat on the bench with kid firmly in grasp, and pushed the down button. Home slid away, and for a second or two, the only sounds were the pulley turning and her son sucking his fingers. Then: a rushing, strangled roar behind thick walls. ‘Ky, can you tell me what that sound is?’

‘Don’ know.’

‘Yes, you do. What goes through the deck under ours?’

Even in the dim, Tessa could see her son’s blank stare.

‘Water,’ she said. ‘Remember? All the water we use goes through big pipes in the floor.’ She’d save filtration tanks and settlement ponds for another year.

‘Can have cookie?’

Tessa looked forward to the day when linear conversations became a thing. ‘Not for breakfast.’

‘What ’bout . . . what ’bout cookie to lunch?’

‘Maybe if you’re good this morning, Grandpa will give you a cookie at lunch.’

Ky looked around as the background noise changed. ‘Where water?’

So he was paying attention. ‘It’s up above us now. We’re about to stop.’

‘Oh boy, get ready!’ he said.

‘Get ready,’ Tessa said with a laugh. ‘Aaaaand – stop!’

The bench settled into place. At their feet was a shallow window sticking into the empty space outside. It was different than the one her family’d had when she was a kid. They’d had one of the old ones then, polygonal in shape, made of thick glass as old as the Fleet itself, the view cut in segments by thick metal frames. Ashby had bought them one of the nice new plex ones after his first tunnelling gig – no angles, no inner frame. He was always doing stuff like that. She’d once worried that he was treating them at the expense of getting things for himself, but once he’d bought his own ship, she didn’t feel as bad about it. She was just glad he kept them in mind.