Bram shoved a last mouthful of bread toward his face and started programming the beverage machine for coffee. Might be nice to take it outside and watch the other side of the crevasse brighten, and the sun set the clouds to glowing. Gael’s reaction the previous morning had given him a new appreciation for the way a day started.
A sharp cry burst his bubble. Bram put a hand to either side of the coffee maker, heart picking a ridiculous tempo, and listened. Would he hear the rooster all the way down here? Nope, and a second cry came from somewhere inside. Bram followed it toward the other side of the kitchen before he’d even thought about it, and was halfway down the hall when there was another yell, this one louder than the others.
He strode to the shadowed doorway at the end, and touched the stone surround.
“I didn’t! I didn’t! No!” Gael’s voice, panicked and full of pain.
Bram was about to step inside when Aavi started making shushing noises.
“Shh. Shh. I know. I know you couldn’t. Gael! I know. I saw you. I saw you there and I knew you couldn’t have done it. Shh. Don’t cry. Please? Shh.”
A quiet sob filtered through the door.
Standing there, separated from the drama by a convenient turn of stone, Bram drew in a shallow breath. What was his role here? Did he know Gael well enough to go in, or would that be intrusive? And what hadn’t Gael done? Did Aavi know, or were her words a rote incantation, spoken to bring her brother out of his nightmare?
Bram took a step back. He didn’t know Gael well enough. Not yet. It would be naïve of him to have expected Gael to be as uncomplicated as his profile. The reality was going to take some getting used to, though.
Returning to the kitchen, Bram picked up his coffee and took it out onto the lower terrace. He’d missed the turn from dawn to day. The sun was mostly up, making the clouds glow. Still, he stood there, soaking up the last quiet hour he might have until Aavi talked them into next week. He was back in the kitchen washing out his mug when Gael and Aavi emerged from the hallway.
“Good morning!” Aavi bounced on her toes.
“Mornin’.” Damn she was cute. “You two sleep okay?” Bram turned away to give the mug another rinse before he could search Gael’s face for traces of the nightmare. If their positions were reversed, he’d appreciate a little nonscrutiny.
Aavi answered for both of them. “Yes. Where’s your room?”
Was this a trick question?
Bram jerked his chin toward the HV room. “Behind there.” He chanced a look at the pair. Aavi was as bright as a seam of gold, and Gael did appear more rested than he had last night. So that was something. “I’ve got plans for another couple rooms down the hall where you are now. I can get started on one pretty soon for you, if you want a room each.”
“I want to stay with Gael until you two get married.”
Bram concentrated on not choking on air while Gael blushed a deep scarlet that looked downright painful.
“Might be a bit, sweetheart. Gael and I, we need to get to know each other some.”
She squeezed Gael’s hand. “Okay. I’ll keep him until then.”
Bram’s heart might have melted, just a bit. Then a bit more at the tiny uptick at the corners of Gael’s mouth. A smile.
“So what all would you two like to do today?”
“I want to see everything!” Aavi started bouncing again.
Gael’s smile was still narrow, but the same interest brightened his eyes. So Bram showed them everything they hadn’t seen the day before.
Aavi liked the animals most. Bram didn’t have many—he was only one man and machines were better at tending crops than livestock. He had gin hens and red-tailed rabbits, both hardier species imported from a desert-type colony. The hens were smaller than the plump chickens he’d grown up with, and the rabbits were long and thin. So far, they’d adjusted well, though. He’d been thinking about trying a goat, but shipping one to the far corner of the galaxy cost about the same as one Gael Sonnen, so he might have to wait a while on that, or at least until he identified the mineral deposit down in the crevasse.
“What’s this one’s name?” Aavi asked, poking a finger through a ventilation hole in the plassex front of the hen house.
“She doesn’t have a name.” Bram waved her back. “Watch out, she might—”
Aavi retrieved her finger with a cry and immediately stuck it into her mouth. “Why don’t any of them have names?” she asked around it.
Because they’re hens didn’t seem like the right answer.
“Probably because we might eat them,” Gael provided. “I wouldn’t want to eat someone I’d been introduced to.” And damn if his expression didn’t indicate that might have been a distinct possibility on Zhemosen. Someone needed to update the Galactipedia entries on that place. Expose the dark underpinnings of the City Without End.
Aavi was clearly waiting for him to explain the hen situation.
“I only eat the old ones,” Bram said. “The ones that don’t lay anymore.”
Aavi’s crystal-blue eyes widened with horror. “You can’t eat Caroline!” Caroline? “Or Martha, or Trixie, or . . .”
He was never going to eat roast hen again, was he?
Aavi also named the rabbits—Bram didn’t have the heart to tell her he ate rabbit a lot more often than he did hen—and wanted to know where the cows were.
“I don’t have cows. Not enough land to support them. I think a fellow over in Landing Crevasse is trying some out.”
“Then were does your milk come from?”
He took them on a tour of the soybean field and explained all the ways soybeans figured into his life.
Gael showed a lot of interest in the crops. He asked about every single variety, nodding at the answers as though memorizing the details. They were over in the strawberry patch when Gael picked a caterpillar off a leaf and held it up. “Do you harvest these too?”
Aavi made a choking noise. “I am not going to eat bugs.”
Bram smiled. “No. I, er, throw them away for the most part.” Over the side of the terrace and into the poison mists below.
Gael studied the caterpillar with a pensive frown. “But you could eat them, right?”
“Sure.”
Aavi ran off yelling, only to stop and coo at the small flower garden Bram had arranged around the base of a wind turbine.
By the end of the day, Bram felt pretty comfortable in the knowledge that Gael understood the basics of the farm. Aavi, while sometimes frivolous—which seemed appropriate for her age—was enthusiastic about helping where she could. The pair cooked dinner again, which consisted of the same meal as the night before retrieved from cold storage and reheated. Except for the custard. Gael made that fresh.
Aavi didn’t fall asleep at the table, though she talked just as much. Afterward she excused herself, saying she wanted to shower before bed. Gael started clearing things away and Bram stood to help. He hadn’t ordered himself up a companion just to watch him cook and clean. Bram took a stack of bowls out of Gael’s hands and carried them over to the sink. The autochef spat out food on edible plates. They tasted like moldy paper, but apparently delivered all the nutrients a body could want in an approximate thirty-hour period. Bram wasn’t a fan, even though food cooked on an actual range required actual dishes. He opened the faucet and ran a little water.
“Where does the water come from?” Gael asked. He’d hardly spoken through dinner, and his question caught Bram in the middle of a daydream—or more a musing about how nice it was to have company for such a mundane task as doing the dishes.
“A couple places. There’s water at the bottom of the crevasse. It’s pretty toxic, like everything down there, but easily filtered. Pumping it up is the expensive part. I’m pulling water from a side fissure about halfway down. That’s what I use for the farm between storms.”
“Storms?”
“It rains a couple times a month. We’re ’bout due for one.”
“It hardly ever rained in Zhemosen.”
Of course not. Damned city was the eleventh circle of hell or something.
“Well don’t go standing out in it here unless the rain is heavy enough to leave dents in the ground. Then you might just want to watch your head. It’s the light rain and mist you want to steer clear of. Mostly comes up out of the canyon and it’ll peel the skin off your back.”
Gael’s eyes widened.
“I’ve also got a cloud garden,” Bram said, trying for a distraction.
“Cloud garden?”
“A couple of kilometers up the canyon. I’ve got a small terrace in the clouds. A hobby crop or two and a water collection set up. That’s what we use here in the house for showers and such. We reuse it a couple times, then it goes out to the farm.”
Bram could see Gael figuring out the various cycles. He liked that Gael took the time to consider things. Meant they had more in common than had immediately been apparent.
“Gael!” Aavi called from the end of the hallway. “Can you come here?”
With an apologetic smile, Gael disappeared only to return a moment later with Aavi wrapped in a towel. “She has no other clothes.”
Of course she didn’t.
Bram went to see what he could find in his closet and ended up standing there, staring at a stack of old coveralls until the brown and gold blurred into a shade similar to Gael’s skin. He was an odd color. Pale, but not fair complexioned like Bram and Aavi. It was as though he’d been designed to live beneath the sun and then denied it—which was basically true. What would the skin below his simple tunic-style shirts look like? Paler or darker? Did he have curly hair on his chest? Lower?
He’d gotten to laying an apparently naked Gael out on his bed, and wondering how Gael’s callused fingers would feel against his back, when he realized that he was still standing in his closet. Fantasizing. Not that there was anything wrong with that. He hadn’t brought Gael out here on a whim.
Gael had sure turned up with one, though. A vivacious and talkative whim that needed something other than a towel to wear.
Bram grabbed a stack of old T-shirts and, as an afterthought, some of the more beaten-up coveralls from his mining days. Maybe Aavi could cut the sleeves off and wear them like a dress or something.
Or something.
Hell, he’d hoped to have a few years to consider dressing a child. A few years to get ready for all that came with the family he so desperately wanted. What was that old saying about being careful with wishes? Heh. He’d sailed right past that one.