THE ASTRONAUT'S FORBIDDEN GIRL
Chapter Four: Partnered Trial
"Absolutely not," Kai said, loud enough that three separate Institute staffers turned to look at him, which was apparently rare enough to be its own small event. "Pair me with anyone else. I don't care who."
"The pairing algorithm doesn't take requests, Osei," said the woman running the briefing, unbothered by his tone in the specific way of someone who had clearly dealt with him before. "It's designed to force rivals into cooperation. That's the whole point of the Partnered Trial. If it paired you with someone you already liked, it would be testing nothing."
That was the moment Wren decided this was going to be a very long week. It had, in fairness, started that way three days earlier, when the pairing results were posted and her name appeared next to his on a board in front of the entire remaining field.
"I take it back," Kai said, catching up to her in the corridor afterward, uncharacteristically flustered in a way she found more satisfying than she probably should have. "This is somehow worse than the coolant sabotage."
"Careful. I might start thinking you like working with me."
"I would rather pilot blindfolded."
"That can probably be arranged."
He almost smiled at that, an actual crack in the composed exterior, gone as fast as it arrived, replaced by the focused, slightly wary look he'd been wearing around her since the match. "The Partnered Trial isn't a solo showcase. It's a coordinated obstacle course, split evenly between individual sections and sections that only clear if both pilots move in sync. If we don't trust each other's instincts inside the first thirty seconds, we fail as a unit, publicly, on a broadcast that both our sponsors are watching."
"So we'd better trust each other's instincts, then."
"That's easier to say than to do."
They spent the first two practice sessions proving him right. Wren's instincts said move first and adjust as she went; Kai's said calculate the full sequence before committing to any of it, and the gap between those two philosophies turned their first attempt at the synchronized obstacle course into what Doyle, watching from the sidelines, generously called an educational disaster.
"You flinched," Kai said afterward, not unkindly, just precisely, the way he seemed to say everything. "On the crossing beam. You had the trajectory. You flinched anyway."
"Because you froze for a full second recalculating something that didn't need recalculating, and I didn't know if you were going to move at all."
"I was accounting for load variance."
"I was accounting for you not falling off a beam."
He opened his mouth to argue, then visibly reconsidered, which she was learning was the closest thing to losing an argument that Kai Osei's pride would permit. "Fair," he said instead. "Try it again. This time, if I freeze, assume it's on purpose and move anyway. I'll adjust to whatever you commit to. I'm better at recalculating mid-motion than I like to admit."
"Was that a compliment?"
"It was an operational note."
"Felt like a compliment."
Selene watched the second attempt from the observation gallery above the course, arms crossed, expression unreadable behind the glass, and made a point of being gone by the time they climbed out of the harnesses. She had not spoken to Wren since the match, had barely acknowledged her existence in the corridors except for one cold, assessing glance that Wren still hadn't decided how to interpret. It should have felt like a small mercy. Instead it felt like waiting for a second sabotage attempt that hadn't landed yet.
"She's not going to just let this go," Wren said, nodding up at the now-empty gallery.
"No," Kai agreed. "She isn't. Selene doesn't lose well. She never has. It's the thing about her most people mistake for cruelty, when it's actually closer to panic that's been trained to look like control." He said it without much sympathy, but without much heat either, like a fact he'd simply had longer to sit with than most people had. "Watch your back around her. I mean that as a professional courtesy, not a declaration of loyalty."
"Noted."
The third attempt went better. The fourth was almost good. By the fifth, something had started clicking between them that Wren didn't entirely have words for, a rhythm where her improvisation gave him something concrete to calculate around instead of an infinite field of possibilities, and his precision gave her a fixed point to move against instead of guessing blind. It felt, she thought, uncomfortably like the way Junker's mismatched parts worked when she'd finally gotten the tuning right. Not identical pieces. Complementary ones.
"You're better at this than you let on in the registration line," Kai said, during a water break, watching her check Junker's temporary loaner rig with the same focused attention he gave everything.
"You're less insufferable than you let on in the registration line."
"I set a low bar. It wasn't difficult to clear."
"No argument there."
He laughed, actually laughed, a short surprised sound like it had escaped before he could stop it, and Wren felt her face go warmer than the exertion accounted for and decided very firmly not to examine that feeling further while there were three Institute cameras pointed in their general direction.
It was during the fifth session, in the quiet after Doyle called a break, that Kai brought up the thing Wren suspected he'd been building toward all week.
"I ran a search," he said, keeping his voice low even though no one else was close enough to hear. "On the fabrication signature Compliance flagged in your Frame. I have access to some internal Osei Dynetics archive records most people don't."
Wren went very still. "And?"
"There's a project designation in a decommissioned internal database from about fifteen years ago. Most of the file is redacted. What isn't redacted references a lattice fabrication method that matches, structurally, what Compliance found in your component." He said it carefully, like each word had been checked twice before he let it out. "The project was shut down. Officially, it never produced anything. I don't think that's true anymore."
"You're telling me your family's company built the thing living inside my Frame."
"I'm telling you my family's company might have built the thing living inside your Frame, fifteen years before you were old enough to build anything, and I don't know why or how a piece of a shut-down internal project ended up in a scrapyard in the Lower Ring." His jaw tightened, the same specific tension she'd seen in the prep bay the day before her first match. "I don't like what that implies. About the project. Or about my family."
"Why tell me at all? You could have kept this to yourself."
"Because you deserve to know what's inside your own machine," Kai said, "and because if I'm going to find out my family did something they shouldn't have, I would rather find it out standing next to someone who already survived one version of the consequences."
For a moment neither of them said anything, the obstacle course quiet around them, the rest of the Institute staff far enough away to give the moment a privacy neither of them had asked for and neither of them moved to end. It was Wren who broke it, because someone had to, and because standing that close to him for one second longer was starting to feel like its own kind of obstacle course.
"Well," she said. "Guess we'd better win this trial, then. Figure the rest out after."
"Agreed." He held out his hand, an oddly formal gesture after everything that had just passed between them, and when she shook it his grip was warmer than she expected and lingered half a second longer than a simple handshake required, long enough that both of them noticed it and neither of them mentioned it.
They cleared the full obstacle course on their sixth attempt, first pair in the Trial to do it without a single point deduction, and the moment the buzzer sounded in their favor, Wren caught Kai's eye across the field and found him already looking at her, something unguarded in his expression that vanished the instant he realized she'd seen it.
That evening, back in the cramped guest quarters the Institute had assigned her, Wren pulled up the file Kai had sent her, the redacted project designation glowing on her screen, and found exactly one line that hadn't been blacked out.
Subject designation: EMBER.
Beneath it, a single unredacted note, timestamped fifteen years ago: relocated to secondary containment, Lower Ring disposal contract, do not recover.
Wren read the line four times, and each time it told her the same impossible thing. Whatever the Institute's scans had found flickering inside Junker's housing had a name older than she was, had been declared dangerous enough to bury under a disposal contract instead of a decommission order, and had somehow ended up exactly where any responsible person would have made certain it could never be found again: in a scrapyard, in the Lower Ring, in a pile of parts nobody with real money had ever bothered to check twice.
She thought about her grandmother's rule, the one about taking things that exist and making them do something new, and wondered, for the first time since she'd started building Junker, whether some things were built to be found by exactly the kind of person nobody in power thought to watch.
She sent Kai one message before she made herself put the screen down and try, uselessly, to sleep.
Found the one line they didn't black out. We need to talk to Doyle. I don't think this was an accident, any of it. Not the disposal contract. Not the scrapyard. Not me finding it.
His reply came back faster than she expected, like he'd been waiting for exactly this.
Agreed. Tomorrow, before Compliance finishes their next round of testing. And Wren. Be careful who else you show that file to. If EMBER was worth burying this deep, someone out there still remembers exactly where they buried it.