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Even flying is born out of nothing. The first sky is inside you.
— Li-Young Lee, "One Heart,” in Book of My Nights
Our feet are planted in the real world, but we dance with angels and ghosts.
― John Cameron Mitchell
Aboard the Hyperion , there’s a moment of reprieve. The sun has gone down and it’ll be hours before the Sagamartha comes to retrieve them in the dawn light where she can dock, and all that haunts the ghost ship now are four underprepared adventurers who don’t yet know exactly what they’ve gotten into. The weight of their surroundings sits on them like a heavy cloak; everywhere Matt turns he sees ghosts at the edges of his vision, though he knows not to tell the others this. They’d write him off as superstitious or as having air sickness, neither of which would earn him the credibility he needs to keep Hal acting in line. The voices sound too similar to those that used to play from dark corners of the Aurora’s catwalks back in the first few years he flew with her, when he’d just gotten old enough to sit in the crow’s nest til dawn under shifting starry skies and over a sea of clouds and waves below. He lets the ghosts wander now without trying to catch their attention or pry into their existence like the old crew used to tell him to, knowing they’re just travelling the skies the same as he is. He used to wonder why they stuck around, just at the edge of his vision and out of reach, and whether he’d become one if he were to die on one of the many airships he travelled, but the thoughts had never done anything but worry him that his dad was tethered someplace he didn’t want to be, so he’d let them go.
Kate sits at the edge of a table in the mess hall, feet up on the bench. The entire cafeteria must’ve been dedicated to crew, big and close as it is to crew quarters. Matt can imagine the ghosts having breakfast here, some coming off of night shift and willing to spend another half an hour awake if it means getting to see their friends, others ready to start a day navigating or attending the passengers. What few wisps of ghosts Matt sees sit well away from her, now; Kate’s breathing is steady, an oxygen tank waiting by her feet should she need it, and the slight whistle of her lungs is enough to scare them off. Wandering the empty kitchen, Matt watches her with a wary eye, knowing she’s too stubborn to take oxygen with the morning so far away if she doesn’t absolutely need it.
His thoughts drift, as they’ve started to more recently in the evening into night, to the Aurora. It’s been nearly two years now since he’s walked her halls or heeded one of Captain Walker’s orders, since he’s talked with Chef Vlad about the night’s menu and which order to serve the entrees in according to Vlad’s meticulous planning. Two years of falling asleep in a dorm with too-high ceilings and a cracked window overlooking an underkept garden and slate blue London sky instead of the sea far enough below that it turns to glass in the evenings, clouds like wisps of smoke outside the window and Baz whisper-telling Matt stories of home and his family and his girlfriend from the lower bunk when they both couldn’t sleep and wanted another voice to tether them to the Aurora, too worried for once to float outside the Aurora’s walls in dreams.
Two years. He looks down at the high-altitude uniform covering his fingers as he runs his hands along a line of pots frozen together by a burst pipe in the ascension. The ship groans under its feet, changing wind channels by force, wind pummeling into the side of its hull audible even from the depths of the ship where he stands now. How everything has changed. He looks to Kate, staring determinedly at a spot on the wall with an expression that’s just absent enough for Matt to know she’s thinking of something in an entirely different dimension, probably of science and improbable life and what she’d do to find it. She and him in a strange situation neither could’ve quite predicted, despite having sought it out on their own terms. How nothing has ever been different before.
He finishes his loop of the kitchen—most of the drawers and cupboards are frozen shut, and those that do open only contain kitchenware supplies—and comes out past the counter separating the kitchen from the tables to sit next to Kate. She has her hands clasped tightly together in her lap, though the act won’t afford her any warmth through the layers of the leopard skin gloves she wears. For comfort, then. Matt listens to the creaking of the airship around them; he watches Kate’s breath crystallize before her mouth in a cloud of silver mist. He reaches gently toward her and takes her hand in his own. Kate to him seems to be one of his many ghosts, some days; she lives in a world he’s only ever visited by her own beckoning, and it isn’t one he thinks he could find on his own. She’s tangible, now, grip tight on his hand and circles beneath her eyes.
“Mr. Cruse,” she says in her quieter voice, the one she’d used when they first saw the cloud-cat and neither knew what they stood before. It’s decidedly careful, though light and quiet and teasing enough that they could each play the conversation off for a joke if they wanted to. Kate is good at that (though she’d claim otherwise), at letting people decide how to weigh her words when she isn’t entirely sure how to deal with them herself. She is a very decisive woman, and to hand over that decisiveness of tone is not an act she takes lightly. It isn’t a decision that applies to the huffy old geezers who call her a faux scientist and claim her work is disputable loudly enough that she often loses her positions for their complaints, but it applies to Matt, and people she loves. Matt knows he’s one and the same, though that word— love —holds a different weight for her than it does him. She looks at him sideways, humor lightning her eyes. “Are you holding my hand?”
Matt shrugs by way of response, after a light pause. Kate’s smile grows, radiant.
“Not entirely proper. Imagine if Marjorie were to see.” Right. After not even letting them dance together. Maybe this was a step more modest? He wasn’t sure what it would count as in her book.
“You can’t possibly consider yourself proper, Kate.”
She sits up straighter, pushing her shoulders back and lifting her chin. She fakes a gasp, free hand fluttering to cover her mouth in a sweeter version of the gasp Marjorie has so much practice in. “Mr. Cruse I am shocked at this! To insinuate such a thing—I should—” she frowns, caught up in her own words and too dazed to think straight enough to follow her train of thought.
“Whatever you’re going to say isn’t going to be proper, is it?”
“Why—” she dropped the expression with a pout. “Hm. Darn, you’re right. Maybe I’m not very good at this.” She opens her mouth to speak but struggles to, taking a breath and coming up empty. She coughs into her arm, paling, and doesn’t take the oxygen, though Matt nudges it toward her. After an almost-quiet moment filled with Kate’s wheezing breaths, this more tense than any Matt wishes to live, he reaches for the tank and takes a breath himself, then offers the mask to her. She takes it reluctantly; pink comes back into her cheeks with a few breaths.
They sit in silence as Kate steadies her breathing, each knowing their time exploring is coming to an end. Hal and Nadira will be going back to Grunel’s workshop, soon, and they’d all to spend no more than an hour looking around. Matt finds himself lingering, wanting to ask Kate something but not knowing how to phrase it.
She beats him to it, as she almost always does.
“What are you going to do? When you’re home?”
Matt pulls his feet up to the bench he sits on, resting his arm on his knees and drumming his fingers on the table, absentmindedly giving himself time to think. The leather on his gloves sticks nicely to the metal; he’d like to keep the pair for his future visits to the crow’s nest, if he ever has any.
“I’ll go back to the academy. Finish the semester, then I’ve got another assignment in the summer. Visit my mom and sister before then, if I have time.” Ignore the ghosts of the Aurora haunting him endlessly, wishing that he’d please come back, please come home, please fly again somewhere it was safe and warm and known. His ghosts loved familiarity, and the woman before him only ever spoke of what was new.
“And then?”
“And then…another semester. More flying.”
“More flying?”
He nods. Kate knows he loves flying more than most anything else, but she seems to find his answer lacking. She straightens, again, shoulders pushed back and face set like she does before she presents a new specimen to an obstute board.
“Come home with me. Meet my parents.”
“Your parents?”
“Well, it’s more just formality so they can get to know you after so long. They’re leaders in their fields, Matt—they’d love to meet someone who has flown as much as you have, and not to mention what I’ve told them about you. It’d be fun, and—”
“About me? Did you say fun?”
“Yes, about you—I didn’t discover the cloud-cat on my own, did I? They’d love to hear about it all from you—though not the pirates, remember they don’t know we dined with them—and you’d have a space in the house, there’s more than enough room even when Marjorie’s there—”
“Kate, I don’t—”
“It’s no trouble at all I promise and your sisters can come, too, though I know your mom has work—if she wants she can but I understand if not—”
“Kate.”
She fumbles for the mask and takes a breath. Her face is very flushed, now, pink and she’s breathing hard like she’s run across the field again at daybreak for her life.
“Matt, it’d be lovely. That house is a disaster and I don’t care for it, but with you there…it really would be wonderful. I have so much I want to show you.”
He looks down at his hands. Flying hands, Kate had told him, once, when she’d seen him sketching a neat line across a chart, and again when he’d steered them to shore. He doesn’t know what to do with them, now, suddenly unable to look Kate in the eyes. She sighs, barely giving him time to respond even if he had known the answer, and reaches out to him, palm up.
“Look, just think about it, okay? You don’t have to promise anything, but it would be nice, and…” she blushes. “I’d like it. It is a fine city, and I’d enjoy showing you around some day.”
“We don’t know what will be waiting for us when we get back.”
She raises one shoulder. “We’ve fought pirates, you and I. We can make it through a few dinners.”
“You know what I mean. Rath’s looking for the Hyperion , and we don’t even know if the Sagarmatha can carry her back.”
She huffs out annoyed breath and takes her hand back from Matt, hugging her arms to her stomach. “Never mind.”
“Kate, I didn’t say no, just that there’ll be more than we’re expecting. It might be a while.”
“But you’d come visit? After the semester is through?”
He finds himself smiling, even though she’d taken her hand back and her eyes are glassy with air sickness. “Isabel and Sylvia would like that.”
“I would, too.” She holds out her hand to him with a soft smile. Matt takes her hand and she shakes like she’s making an official business deal, color fading already from her face, but she beams that bright smile that he’s followed too many times to start counting now and it’s all worth it. It always is, with Kate.
“Excellent. Really, truly excellent.” She hops down from the table, careful enough to not start up another coughing fit. Her boots on the metal floor ring through the mess hall, echoing down from frozen spires of ice above and startling the ghosts out of their hiding places, back into the edges of his vision after fading during his and Kate’s conversation. She claps her hands together, shaking slightly from the cold.
“Ready to go?”
He takes one last look at the hall, wondering if he’ll ever find another airship quite like his first home, or one that he wouldn’t mind sailing for as many years as the sky will hold him. Kate stands by the door, oxygen tank loose in her hand, watching him study the ship. Matt goes to her, and when he closes the door behind him, he sends a quick prayer to the ghosts on the other side wishing for clear skies and gentle winds.