Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Author:Lily Brooks-Dalton
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

THE STRENGTHENING DAWN light beyond her curtain pulled her out of her dreams, but it had been only a few hours since she’d gone to bed. She closed her eyes, ignoring her alarm, and when she opened them again it was almost 1100. As she wriggled into her jumpsuit and braided her hair she’d already begun thinking, planning a mount for the replacement antenna. Harper was sitting at the long table with a set of Aether’s blueprints laid out in front of him and a cup of instant coffee. He didn’t look up as she slid onto the bench beside him.

“Morning,” she said brightly. The lids of his eyes were puffy, their rims red. He kept his gaze down. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked.

He seemed startled. “Hm? Oh, no, I guess not. Preoccupied.”

She looked more closely at the blueprints and saw that he had begun marking them up with notes for the spacewalks. “Who will walk? Have you decided yet?”

Harper sighed and ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “It has to be you,” he said slowly, letting his hands drop into his lap, “and it has to be Devi.”

Sully nodded. There was something strange in his body language, something reluctant. Did he think she wouldn’t want to walk? Or was he worried about Devi? She waited to see if he would add anything, and after a moment he did.

“I’m not sure Devi’s up for this—emotionally. But I’m also not sure Thebes will be able to improvise out there as well as she can. I’ve been going over it for hours. It has to be Devi.”

“She can handle it,” Sully said, but when she looked at the helpless expression on Harper’s face she suddenly shared his doubt. She thought of Devi’s nightmares, of her recent failings as a caretaker of the ship. She’d never seen Harper look so uncertain, and it frightened her. He was their commander, after all. “I’ll be there with her, we’ll have you and Thebes talking us through it. This will be fine, Harper. We can do it. You should get some rest, you look ragged.”

He laughed. “An understatement, I’m sure.”

Sully had an urge to reach out and smooth down the lick of hair that stood straight up from the crown of his head, as she might’ve done for Lucy, but she didn’t. “It is. I order you to sleep for a few hours. We have time, don’t burn yourself out on this.”

Harper nodded. “I know, I just—I’m worried about…” He looked at her for a long moment and then let his gaze drop. She waited, but this time he didn’t finish his sentence.

Sully reached out and squeezed his shoulder and then stuffed her hand into the pocket of her jumpsuit, as if to stop herself from touching him again. “I’m worried too, but she’s smarter than you and me put together. If she can’t do this, no one can.” She said it lightly, but Harper wasn’t smiling.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what worries me.

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