Chapter 8

Reaper tried to show Pie how to use shadow powers.

They stood in a scrap of shade cast by a rib of rock, the planet’s amber light pooled everywhere else. Pie held herself like a problem waiting for a solution: feet squared, jaw tight, eyes narrowing at the horizon as if a checklist might materialize there. Reaper watched her with the patience of a Baraka checking out a book from a library.

“Don’t reach,” Reaper ushered. “Wait.”

“For what?” Pie squinted.

“For the silence that comes before a step.” Reaper lifted her hand, palm down, “Feel the pressure in your ribs. Match it. Then let your weight fall into this.”

Pie tried to copy the angle, the breath, the micro-settle. Her shoulders did what shoulders do when someone is trying to imitate finesse: they locked. She exhaled hard, drawing diagrams in her mind.

“It’s not a rigid recipe.”

Pie tried again. Again the air did nothing. It was like trying to hum a note she couldn’t hear. Every iteration made the motion more brittle.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘wait,’” Pie said finally, scraping hair off her damp forehead. “Waiting is not actionable. You say ‘feel the pressure,’ but there isn’t a gauge.”-

“I know.” Reaper’s voice had no mockery in it. “You have to let it change you.”

Pie stared at her own borrowed hands. “I optimize systems. Systems shouldn’t change me. I change them.” She tried one more time, jaw set. The ground remained the ground.

Pie blew out a frustrated breath. “Ok, let’s have you give building a shot, then.”

Reaper raised an eyebrow at the pioneer’s attention span, then unlatched the build gun from her borrowed toolbelt. Reaper held the build gun like a weapon, then realized it wasn’t one, then held it like maybe it was a creature. Pie tried not to smile.

“Okay,” Pie said, adopting her training voice. “Iron. We’ll do something simple. There’s a pure node north by those spires. We need a miner, a portable generator, and a belt. First we scan… no, not like that… here.” Pie reached, then remembered the equipment only responded to Reaper’s hands… Her old hands. She moved her hand back, gestured instead. “Point there. Tap… that.”

Reaper did. The heads-up snapped into existence, alien to her eyes: iconography without a grammar. She squinted at the glyphs, trying to understand their intention. “These aren’t labeled.”

“They’re standard.”

“Standard to who?” she asked, indignant already.

“Me,” Pie admitted, then caught herself. “Anyway, let’s follow the ping to the nearest site.”

At the resource node, there was even less progress, “Look, set the miner… There. Yes. No. Rotate. No. Rotate the other— Okay. Good. Power next. Fuel. Now belt from here to…”

Reaper obeyed with the concentration of someone defusing a bomb. A miner thunked into place like a stubby altar. The generator whined. A belt waited, patient and brown. For two whole minutes they both felt competent.

Then, trying to scroll to “belt,” Reaper flicked a nameless red hexagon and the miner evaporated.

They stared at the suddenly empty node. A perfect circular sadness remained: bolt holes, scuffed dirt, a crevice shaped like a machine.

“You dismantled it,” Pie said, voice dragging through sand, with the dry humor of a listless reptile.

“I did not.” Reaper clutched the gun to her chest, as if that would persuade reality back into being. “The buttons aren’t labeled.”

“You pressed the large red button.”

“How is that ‘dismantle’?”

“It’s red…”

“Big red buttons almost beg to be pressed.” Reaper’s hackles rose.

Pie put her palm on her forehead, very slowly, as if trying to massage a better outcome into existence. “Give me the gun.”

Reaper offered it. Pie took it. She aimed at the empty spot. The gun hummed with quiet contempt. It did not respond.

“It only likes you,” Pie muttered.

“It likes the pockets,” Reaper said, glancing at the interdimensional seams threaded into her waistband. She felt suddenly protective of the impossible weight there.

Pie handed the gun back, sweetly. “Press the symbol that means ‘not destroy.’”

Reaper narrowed her eyes at the HUD. “Mockery is not pedagogy.”

“Neither is guessing.”

“What do your words mean when there are no words?” Reaper asked, but she tried again anyway, slow and deliberate. The miner shivered back into being on the second try. She didn’t celebrate. She kept her chin tilted like a dare. “See? Competence.”

“Temporary,” Pie said. “Let’s… take a break.”

They cut through grass that rose to Reaper’s knees and Pie’s hips, the blades bending then righting in their wake. The world didn’t seem to mind their incompetence. It had too many other lifeforms to keep track of. In a shallow swale, the strange birds sat in the green like ornaments, bodies compact, strange beaks lifted open to the sky. The inside of their mouths were decorated like flowers, four petal tongues open toward sunlight. Reaper slowed, arrested by the sight.

Something orange moved beyond the birds, low and cautious. The lizard doggo nosed up from between the ferns, head tilting, eyes bright with hesitance. It saw them and froze, then crept forward on soft feet.

“Don’t chase,” Reaper said. She crouched, letting her center of gravity say what her hands did not. From the pocket seam, she slipped a handful of paleberries into her palm.

The doggo sniffed the air, made a sound like a question. It took one step, then another. Reaper extended her hand, palm open, the berries a gesture of good faith. The doggo’s tongue was surprisingly careful as it plucked the fruit away. Reaper stroked the crown of its head with two fingers. The creature’s eyes closed to slits. Her chest ached with a kind of soft victory she hadn’t felt since before the ash.

Pie came forward, smaller now by more than a head, curiosity and bravery fighting in her borrowed face. She reached to pet and the doggo flicked its frill wide, shying back as if from a sudden shadow.

“She scares you,” Reaper said gently to the doggo, though the words were for Pie.

Pie withdrew her hand and pretended to examine the sky. “It’s because I’m… pointy,” she said, and Reaper could hear the little crack in the joke.

Reaper poured a few paleberries into Pie’s cupped hands. “Your hands tell it things.”

“What things?”

“That you want it to be something for you. Try wanting nothing. Hold the berries like it’s okay if it never takes them.”

Pie breathed, this time not as an optimization but as an apology. She crouched, hands loose, eyes soft. The doggo approached on a diagonal, wary. It sniffed Pie’s palm, flinched, returned. On the third pass it took a berry and snapped its eyes to her face as if reading. Pie didn’t move. The doggo crept closer, shoulders unwinding, and pressed its warm head into Pie’s offered knuckles.

“There,” Reaper said, and felt a sigil under her shirt answer like a small animal stirring. This body was branded with the mark as well?

By late afternoon, the heat had given itself to a low breeze. They returned to the miner and managed, between Reaper’s patient literalism and Pie’s patient exasperation, to make it persist. The belt ran like a lazy river. The storage container accepted its first raw ingots with a dignified clunk.

On the way back, Reaper lost them both in a splay of ferns near a rock that had decided to look like a sleeping animal. She doubled back to find Pie tucked in the shade, small limbs folded around the lizard doggo. The creature had settled half on her lap, one clawed paw draped over her arm with the imperious entitlement of a cat who has decided you are a pillow. Pie’s face, which used to be Reaper’s dainty features, had dropped its familiar grimace. She looked like she was finally able to sleep for the first time.

Reaper watched for a minute, for the space of several wind-bent grasses. She had thought the Pioneer could not love an alien creature, not really. Maybe could feed, could catalog, but not give over that hot, undefended part. She had been wrong. Or Pie had changed. Or both.

The smile came without her permission.

A violet glow appeared on both of them now… warmed, not hot, not command, just an acknowledgment. The air around them collected itself, the way it does when someone starts to sing and hasn’t yet made a sound.

“COMPATIBLE MUSIC. We are writing new symphonies.