Divorce Court

Yan was inconsolable on her bed, laying facedown on her pillow with her shoes still on her feet, dangling off the edge. The afternoon sun streamed in through the window and lit a warm square on her back. She lay there for what felt like an eternity, until her sobs subsided into messy tears, and those receded into mere hiccoughs, and even that slowed to the occasional sniffle.

In reality, she probably hadn't been laying there for very long. The door to her apartment opened with a bang, revealing Sylva bearing a fancy coffee in each hand and a bag of pastries held in her teeth. Sylva must have heard Yan's prolonged sniffle, because she came into Yan's room and flopped down on the bed, stepping lightly over the few discarded pairs of pants and shirts on the floor.

"Fucked it up that bad, hunh?" Sylva said, sounding altogether too pleased. "I got you a coffee in celebration."

Yan could barely bring herself to roll over and sit up. She was a pathetic sight, with tear streaked face and puffy red eyes.

"Xenobio it is, then," Sylva said gamely. She handed Yan the iced coffee, and Yan wordlessly pressed the cold cup to her eyes, as if it could stop the horrible aggravated feeling they had.

The pastry bag turned out to contain chocolate chip cookies, the big good ones from the expensive bakery on campus, and Yan nibbled her way through one of them and downed half of her coffee before she could string a coherent sentence together. Sylva wrapped her arm around Yan's back and rested her head on her shoulder, and they both leaned back against the headboard of the bed, getting cookie crumbs all over Yan's blue bedspread.

"You gonna tell me what happened?" Sylva asked finally.

Yan recounted the whole story then, stumbling over the words but feeling better as she got it out of her. When she got to the part about thanking First Sandreas for dinner, she actually laughed. "I don't know why I thought that I needed to say that. He was so confused." A chuckle and a sniffle.

"Did he look like he didn't want you as an apprentice?"

"I wouldn't want me as an apprentice after I made myself look like such an idiot."

Sylva bit her lip, then poked Yan in the side. "I'm not saying this for my benefit, because I want you to take the xenobio job, but I think you're being hard on yourself for no reason."

Yan frowned, not speaking.

"He clearly wants you," Sylva continued. "Fuck, Yan, he let you into his head. That has to be more vulnerable for him than it is for you, even if you accidentally, you know, did that. He wanted you to trust him. I don't think you had to do anything to win him over."

"Why though?" Yan asked. It was the question that kept tumbling around and around in her mind. She had done nothing but make bad impression after bad impression on Sandreas.

Sylva shrugged. "You said there were two others? Who were they? Maybe there's some similarities."

"Sid Welslak and Kino Mejia." Sylva made a face, a not very pleasant one. "What?" Yan asked.

"Yeah, you have absolutely nothing in common with those weirdos."

"You don't have to be mean," Yan said. "They're fine."

"High praise. A ringing endorsement." Sylva frowned.

"What?"

"Well, if that's who you're competing with, then no wonder First Sandreas wants you."

Yan disentangled herself from Sylva's arm. "I don't understand the issue you have with them. It's not like they ever did anything to you."

Sylva huffed but didn't respond. Yan rolled her eyes. At least dealing with Sylva's fresh bad mood had distracted her slightly from her own misery. Yan pulled her phone out of her pocket and pulled up the Academy student directory.

"What are you doing?" Sylva asked, trying to lean over to see the screen, but Yan held the phone out of Sylva's view until she had finished what she was doing, which was looking up the phone numbers of Kino and Sid and sending them a message. Once that was done, she dropped her phone on her lap, and Sylva immediately picked it up to investigate.

"You're really going to talk to them?" Sylva asked, reading the group text Yan had just sent.

"I should. I think."

Sylva dropped the phone as if it were a live insect when it buzzed in reply. Sid had responded, saying that he could meet whenever.

"If you take the apprenticeship, they'll be your competition. If you don't, they're just weird. I don't know what you'll get out of talking to them." Yan didn't have the strength to try to convince Sylva to have less of a sudden grudge against Kino and Sid, so she just shook her head.

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Yan met Kino and Sid that night on the back lawn outside the library. It was a meeting place that Sid had suggested, though Yan didn't know what particular import it carried for him. It was a nice spot, at the top of the huge hill with the library lit at their backs, looking out over the last vestiges of city. The city lights ended abruptly in thick forest about ten kilometers distant from where they sat, just at the edge of their visibility now. It was a clear night, not foggy, with a mild chilly breeze that pushed thin clouds across the sky, casting the scene into bursts of shadow when one of them scuttled in front of the large full moon.

Sid was already waiting for Yan when she arrived, stretched out on the grass with his eyes closed. The slope of the hill was steep enough that Sid seemed almost vertical. Yan sat down next to him. When he didn't move, she realized it was because he could neither see nor hear her approach. She agonized for half a second about what to do, then ended up gently shaking his shoulder.

He sat up with a wide grin and waved hello, then held up one finger, indicating that she should wait for a second. She waited, unsure of what she was waiting for, but then she felt him use the power, holding out his hand and squinting his eyes, until a glowing ball of air formed, intensely hot, which he 'tossed' up above them. It was a simple trick for creating light, though really only good for use in places where nothing was liable to catch fire.

"What did you think of your interview?" he signed, then fingerspelled 'interview' when Yan looked confused.

She shook her head. "I did bad."

Sid raised an eyebrow. "Did he take back his offer?"

"No." She pulled the card that had his number written on it out of her pocket, flipped it over in her hands a few times. She narrowed her eyes at Sid, and her fingers felt clumsy as she signed, "What other offers do you have?"

He shrugged as he answered. "Fleet. Some architect." Again, he needed to fingerspell.

"I got the Academy." She knew the sign for that, at least, steepling her hands together, then opening them like a book. "And..." She gave up and spelled xenobiology.

The sign, as Sid repeated it to her, were the signs for space and life, up at the forehead.

"Are you going to go with First Sandreas?" Yan asked.

Before Sid could respond, Kino appeared in Yan's peripheral vision, coming over the top of the hill and sitting down in front of them. She was out of uniform, not wearing her Academy cassock, just a tank top and long pants. It had been a pleasant spring day, but Yan found it hard to imagine that Kino wasn't cold.

"Glad you could come," Yan said aloud. "We were just talking about our interviews."

Kino nodded. "I'm going to take his offer," she said, her voice peculiarly monotone.

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"Oh," Yan said, rather startled.

"You could have teased us with that information," Sid said, speaking aloud for the first time. He had a low voice, and he spoke slowly but clearly.

"Why?" Kino asked. "It's not a secret. I already told First Sandreas yes."

"After the interview?" Yan clarified.

"While I was with him."

"You weren't worried about coming off as overeager?" Sid asked.

"I had no other offers," Kino said.

"Really?" Yan asked, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice, even though it was probably rude.

Kino stared at her, her dark eyes piercing. She wasn't quite looking in Yan's eyes, but Yan found it a studying gaze nonetheless. "If I have one offer that I can live with, it's no different than having seven."

Sid's hands flashed, a quick movement that Yan caught only the tail end of. "Crazy," he signed.

Kino narrowed her eyes at him, and Sid smiled broadly. Yan could tell that the relationship between the two of them was not off to a good start. Maybe Sylva was right, but, no, she couldn't think like that. Sid seemed nice, and Kino seemed intense, but not necessarily in a bad way.

"What about you?" Yan signed. "Will you take it?"

"What are you saying to him?" Kino asked.

"Just asking if he was going to take the offer."

"Of course," Sid signed. "It's not a choice."

Sid had expressed the exact feeling that Yan had, but didn't want to put into words. She didn't want to admit at all that it was true. She was standing at a crossroads, xenobiology on one hand, the whole of the Empire on the other. There was no way she could take the xenobiology road without living the rest of her life consumed with curiosity about what would have happened should she have picked the other path.

She saw where the xenobio path led: the map was as clear as any starchart. She would take the job, gain experience, do well as she always had, perhaps be assigned to starting some new colony, terraforming or studying the life there. She could rise through the ranks, maybe to even the heights of being the leader of a colony herself. It would be a full life, and all that she had imagined for herself up to now, but it was a life that she could imagine in its entirety.

Why had she been interested in xenobiology in the first place? Because of that moment, wondrous and divine, when she had first learned about all the teeming life that inhabited planets. She had been filled with a burning curiosity, a desire to connect with the vastness of life outside the well worn and comfortable hallways of her family's starship.

She couldn't turn away from that. She knew it in her heart. Sandreas clearly understood as well. Though he hadn't put it into words, in their shared mind space, he had communicated to her succinctly that he was willing to provide guidance (stability and direction, she thought) in the wide and open future, terrifying and too bright.

Her reverie was interrupted when Kino turned to her and asked. "And you? Will you take the apprenticeship?"

She felt like she was on a knife edge. "Should I?" She kept asking this question, as if anyone could answer it but herself.

Kino stared at her with an intensity, an almost angry one, that made Yan flinch back. When Kino spoke, she quoted the theology. "Can you bear the weight and remain an upright man?"

The damp grass stabbed into the palms of Yan's hands, and she looked away from Kino, out over the buildings of Yora, and up at the starry sky. She could have quoted the theology right back, but she didn't. "I hope so," she said.

Kino nodded, then stood, dusting her pants off. "I hope so, too."

"You're leaving already?" For some reason, Yan had expected this conversation to go on much longer, for them all to get to know each other. But Kino seemed unwilling to engage in anything but the most direct communication of information. That having been accomplished, she wanted to leave on her own business.

"I'll be around," Kino said, and then was off, loping down the side of the hill towards Yora proper, her braids flapping behind her head.

Sid stood as well, watching her go, before signing to Yan, "We will have an interesting time." He helped her to her feet before she could answer, almost sending them both tumbling down the hill. Yan's legs had fallen asleep, causing her to wobble as she stood.

"Will we work well together?" she asked.

"You and me?" Sid grinned again and winked. "Sure. I like you. We can be friends."

"And Kino?"

"I only like people who sign."

Yan laughed and shook her head, unable to tell how much Sid was kidding. Kino was a tiny dot at the bottom of the hill now, so Yan and Sid began their walk back together through campus, with Sid's ball of light hovering obediently over their heads, casting dual shadows whenever they passed through the glow of a streetlamp along the path.

"Doing anything this break?" Yan asked.

"Going home to visit family." He launched into a description of his family, one that included so much vocabulary that Yan didn't know that she could barely follow it. She learned that he had a younger sister (named in his story only with a sign for apple circled round his face) and an older brother ('dirt' in one hand, 'foot' in the other, tapped together over his chest), but that was the extent of the information that she gleaned from his telling. He lived on a farm on Galena, but Yan didn't have much farm-related sign. She made a mental note to practice sign vocabulary on the Dreams over the summer. It might be difficult, since everyone there also only had general and technical vocabulary for spacewalks, but she could find some educational videos, maybe. It would give her something to do.

"What are you called?" Yan asked. "Just so I know."

He grinned his wide grin once again-- it seemed to be a perpetual feature of his face, but Yan couldn't say she minded it. He slowly made the sign for 'egg' and knocked it hard against his own bald head.

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Packing up the apartment that she shared with Sylva turned out to be an unexpectedly trying thing to do. It wasn't that Yan had much in the way of belongings, but Sylva was in a terrible funk, and trying to pry apart their shared possessions was an unpleasant negotiation.

"It's like we're getting divorced," Yan joked while pulling mugs out of the kitchen cabinet and trying to decide whose box of kitchenware each would go in. While Yan held up a mug covered with leaping frogs and tried to remember who had originally purchased it, Sylva scowled at the ground.

"I wanted you to live with me," she said.

"I know. I can't, though," Yan said. She decided that she probably liked frogs more than Sylva did, so the mug ended up in her own box. "First Sandreas is providing me an apartment."

"You could have said no." And Yan could have said no to the apprenticeship as a whole, which was really what Sylva was frustrated about. But she hadn't. She had sent First Sandreas a message saying that she would take the apprenticeship, and the next day a package full of notes about where she would be living, and her new documentation as an employee of the Imperial government, and all kinds of other important papers had arrived at her doorstep. It had been accompanied by a new cassock and cape, blood red like the one she had seen First Sandreas wear, but shorter and far less impressive. Still, it was made out of a fabric that was nicer than any of her well worn Academy uniforms. Things moved fast in Sandreas's camp, apparently.

Yan didn't respond to Sylva's aggravation, just continued splitting the mugs. Maybe she should just give them all to Sylva. The note had said that her new place would be furnished. But the objects that she had collected over the years seemed hopelessly nostalgic to her; parting with them would have felt too much like cutting ties with this segment of her life.

"Are you looking forward to going back on the Dreams ?" Yan asked, attempting to break the tension. Since Sylva had been easily able to rent an apartment on the outskirts of the city, she would be able to spend her summer break with Yan aboard her family's ship.

"It beats spending the summer with my family," she grumbled, but was still clearly glad to be coming. "I guess I should be happy I get to monopolize your time for a bit longer, before you spend all your time being important, and stuff."

Yan sighed. "We're not going to be that far away from each other. You can come see me literally whenever. And I'll text you, I promise." She opened the fridge and started examining condiments there, then decided that they should probably all be thrown out. She tossed them one by one into the garbage, correcting their course with a nudge from the power when her throws went wide. "And I guess I should warn you, I don't know how much time we'll even be able to spend together when we're on the Dreams . Captain Pellon said that I could try my hand at being a navigator, so I'll be on the bridge most of the time."

"As long as you still let me stay in your room."

Yan laughed. "Of course. I'm not going to kick you out."

"I can't believe we're really graduating." Sylva stared out of the open window, down towards the courtyard. The bright new spring leaves of the trees rustled gently in the wind, and the smell of fresh cut grass filled their apartment.

"Can't stop getting older, I guess."

"Yeah." Sylva dropped a stack of textbooks on the floor with a thud, having pulled them off the bookshelf. "Do you want any of these, or are we donating them?"

"Donate." Thick xenobiology coursebooks were useless to Yan now. How strange it seemed, that the course of her life could be diverted in an instant, and all the hours she had put into study had been for nothing. Well, perhaps not nothing.

Sylva began peeling posters off the walls, once the books were sorted, rolling them all into tubes and taping them shut. The apartment they had been living in for years felt more like a stranger's place with every passing second. It twisted Yan's heart. As she dumped out the kitchen junk drawer to sort through it on the table, she had an idea. A thick permanent marker had been in the drawer, and she twirled it around in her fingers before walking over to the shared living room closet. Sylva watched her curiously.

"What are you doing? I already cleaned that," Sylva said.

"I know." Yan's voice was muffled as she looked around the interior of the closet, a weird, skinny thing that went deep into the wall. Sylva came around behind her, wedging herself past the clothing bar with some difficulty, now blocking Yan's exit.

Yan had already uncapped the marker, and she was considering the best place to leave her mark. She glanced back at Sylva. "Here okay?"

Sylva rolled her eyes. "I'm sure the next students in here will love that we're scribbling all over their closet."

"They won't care." Yan wrote her name in neat block letters on the wall, then handed the marker to Sylva, who had to press herself quite hard against Yan in order to reach this deep part of the closet. Rather less gracefully, Sylva added '+ Sylva Calor' and the year.

"Perfect," Yan said.

Sylva seemed frozen, staring at it for a long moment in the dim light of the closet. Yan didn't try to move, even though Sylva's elbow was digging uncomfortably into her stomach. After a second, Yan became aware that Sylva was crying, or at least breathing very strangely.

"Hey, it's okay," Yan said, awkwardly trying to pat Sylva's shoulder.

Sylva turned around in the closet, wrapping her arms around Yan's midsection and burying her head in Yan's shoulder. Yan stood stiffly until she remembered how her arms were supposed to go, and she hugged Sylva back, rocking gently side to side in the closet.

"Shh," Yan said. "It's fine-- I'm not going anywhere-- it's okay." These platitudes failed to comfort Sylva, though, and she held on to Yan as though she were drowning.