I nodded, taking a deep breath before easing my legs over the edge of the bed and pushing myself carefully up. I felt okay, if a little unsteady, but I knew I’d better get to that report as soon as possible. The sooner I turned that in, the sooner I could turn in, too.
“Go on,” Jo said, apparently reading my mind, “before he comes in here and tells you to report in person.”
“Good idea.” The last thing I needed was to have to try and remember all the details of our mission in the face of his unwavering disapproval.
I started for the door, then paused. Her voice had been a lot quieter than usual; kind of listless, and she’d seemed pale and exhausted. “You need anything?” I asked her. She looked surprised, then shook her head. “Just…more sleep. I’m fine.”
I stepped out and headed to my quarters, inwardly marveling at how she always seemed shocked when I was nice to her. Granted, we’d never really gotten along, but we hadn’t exactly not, either. At least, not since I’d told her to stop being a jerk to me. Maybe that had something to do with it.
The halls were empty as I made my way to my room. What time was it, anyway? I glanced at my watch; three A.M. No wonder everything was quiet.
Standing inside my quarters, I noticed something was odd, though it took me a moment to put my finger on it. There was nothing really wrong, just…
The room was empty. No Hue and no Acacia.
I hadn’t even realized I’d been expecting to find her there until I hadn’t. Truthfully, I’d mostly forgotten about her since I’d had to focus on the mission…but now, alone in my dark, silent room, I was surprised at how disappointed I was. Where was she? Had she gotten her own room? Had she left Base Town?
That last thought almost sent me back out the door, but I stopped myself before I’d even started to turn around. “Don’t be ridiculous, Joey,” I muttered out loud—and slapped my hand against my forehead in frustration upon realizing that I’d called myself “Joey.” No wonder it was proving impossible to get other people to think of me as “Joe”; I couldn’t even remember to think of myself that way.
“Write your report and go to bed,” I told myself, half expecting someone to answer me. My room remained silent, so I went over to my desk and settled down in front of my computer, which was really more of a glorified typewriter. Forget computer games or the internet—this thing was fast as a nanopod, but it didn’t do anything other than type and print.
“Mission 2 to Earth F delta ninety-eight to the sixth,” I muttered at I typed. “Joe Harker.” I looked at my name for a moment, then added a y. Then I deleted it. Then I erased the whole thing and wrote Joseph. Nice and neutral. After all, the Old Man had introduced himself to me as Joe Harker, and there was no sense in getting confusing.
I stared at the blank screen for a moment, then started to type.
The only thing more infuriating than playing second fiddle to the new kid on campus was when you’d rescued the new kid and gotten no credit for it. Not only was Joaquim the new Hero of Base Town, he was arguably the coolest version of me I’d ever met, and he knew it. He was taking to the whole thing with an unruffled calm that was confounding at the best of times, and made me want to toss him into the Hazard Zone with high percentage variables and no weapon every time he retold the tale of how he’d saved Jo.
Of course, he was only retelling the story because his fellow Walkers asked him to. He would never think of bragging or talking himself up. He let everyone else do that for him.
Now, it’s not like I was ever the big man on campus. I had been shunned for a lot of my first few months, and even after I had single-handedly rescued my team from the clutches of HEX and helped them destroy a siege ship that would have made Darth Vader cry for his mommy, I’d gotten nothing more than the satisfaction of having people occasionally sit next to me in the mess or nod when I passed them in the hall. Surely no one had asked me to tell my story over and over again.
What made it worse was that while he was being congratulated for saving Jo and making it back on his own, I was being crucified for losing the shield disk.
I’d finished my report early that morning and left my room to drop it by the Old Man’s office, after I’d made sure I didn’t have any key-shaped imprints on my face. Falling asleep at your keyboard (“waffle-facing,” we called it) was considered a newbie incident, and the last thing I wanted was someone teasing me about it this morning. I’d had enough of teasing the day before.
I hadn’t even made it to the mess hall before Jernan, the quartermaster, found me. He proceeded to give me a ten-minute dressing-down about the importance of equipment and keeping it clean, working, and most of all, here. Trying to explain that it had been to save Jo—and the new Walker—was in vain.
After becoming the new poster boy for what not to do on a mission, I sat down with my breakfast. There was no wrong way to eat breakfast, and Altiverse help anyone who tried to tell me otherwise.
“Ew, grits. Who eats that?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. No matter where I went, Acacia “not Casey” Jones was there to throw a wrench into my well-oiled nerves.
I turned with a ready retort, only to have it die as she sat down next to me with her own bowl of grits. She winked, and I couldn’t help a slight smile in return, my attention going immediately back to my breakfast. I was suddenly a lot less glad to see her this morning than I would’ve been last night.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s been a day.”
“It’s not even nine yet.”
“Well, my day didn’t end until about four A.M. yesterday, and I got up at six. So it’s still a day, as far as I’m concerned.”
“You’re grumpy when you don’t sleep,” she teased, and I couldn’t help feeling a little under fire.
“What do you want me to say?” I guess my voice was more snappish than I meant it to be, because the way she spat out her reply might as well have been a slap to the face.
“I don’t care what you say, but stop saying it like I’m the bad guy.”