Shoot the Moon by Isa Arsén

Author:Isa Arsén [Arsén, Isa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I stopped in Norm’s office first thing the next morning back at the Center. He opened the door at my knock and beamed at me.

“You’re feeling better!”

“Can you stay late tonight?”

Norm toasted me wryly with his coffee cup. “And good morning to you, too. What is it, more navigation updates?”

I tossed my head a little and shrugged. “Something like that.”

With a touch of sneaking suspicion in the angle of it, Norm leaned against the doorjamb. He crossed one toe over his other ankle. “What do you mean?”

Glancing briefly around the hallway, ensuring it was all clear, I leaned in to murmur at his chin. “There’s an anomaly in the power racks.”

Norm’s mouth tipped up gently at one side. “What,” he whispered back, “like one of ’em’s broken?”

“There’s a wormhole.”

Norm leaned back to level a look at me. “What?”

“There’s a wormhole,” I said tightly, “in the last aisle of the programming suite.”

I watched Norm’s expression go through several angles of amusement and disbelief until it settled into a stunned sort of intrigue. “You’re serious,” he said, and didn’t take his eyes off me through a slow sip of coffee.

“Stay late and I’ll show you,” I said. I took a step back and fussed at my collar.

Norm furrowed his brow. “This isn’t you hallucinating from a staggering lack of sleep?”

“This is the entire reason I haven’t been getting any sleep.”

Gnawing on his lip, Norm’s gaze narrowed. I knew that expression. I had given it to every physics exam I had ever taken: a heady mixture of awe and horror.

Or maybe it was adoration.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll meet you back there at eight.”

I nodded. “Good. Great . . . thank you.”

“Have a good day, Annie,” Norm murmured, leaning in close in a fond mimicry of my own low tone. His door shut with a soft click. I realized belatedly that I was blushing.

The programming suite felt overfull during the workday now, as though we were going to spook some delicate, unseen creature hiding in the power racks with our work on the launch. My awareness that something else outside of time might pop into existence and blip right back away again before I had a chance to notice still weighed heavily on my attention span.

“Back to rights then?” Ros asked as I came in.

“Caught up on sleep, yeah. Thanks again.”

Ros made a passing joke that I didn’t quite catch as I managed to avoid looking in the direction of the blank tile.

Two mouths. One throat. A rigid body. I thought of trees falling in the forest with nobody around to hear them. Whenever I wasn’t looking at it, what was it doing? Why trinkets from my mother’s rose garden?

By eight o’clock the Center had slowly, slowly emptied of its swarm. Norm took his sweet time coming down—I was starting to think he had just left me to my harebrained bullshit, and I was almost ready to just get to testing on my own before I heard the distant creak of his office door.

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