Free Edge of Dark by Brenda Cooper Page B

really did need to get her another tongat.
    He paused the playback and glanced down, spotting Nona at the base of the falls. He wished he’d gone with her. Surely it would have been more pleasant than watching the video. She’d be pretty with her face and hair full of spray-diamonds.
    â€œBack to it, Cricket.” He didn’t want to tell the machine to play, but he forced himself to give the command. So many things started happening on the screen at once that he could barely follow them all. “There go the lights from the station. Maybe on purpose? And there’s a ton of ships coming off the big one, or at least a lot of little lights. And now they’re going off and it’s all dark but we know people are targeting each other and shooting and dying.”
    Cricket leaned into him and put her head on his shoulder.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    NONA
    Nona stood in front of the waterfall, the noise and rush of it singing in her bones. The air smelled of water, a hundred times more potent and cleaner than working in the greenhouses on the station. Droplets of spray wet her face and hands and clothes. A cool breeze touched her cheeks and fluffed the edges of her hair. She picked out the sweet scent of spring flowers. Even the crushed grass beneath her feet had its own smell. A small white butterfly danced around her for a few moments and moved on.
    Life surrounded her, an infinite habitat bubble. She lifted her arms toward the falls and flung them wide.
    She stood there forever and a moment, as if the flow of time didn’t matter and couldn’t matter in the face of such a thing as a waterfall.
    The sky had stunned her. The water overtook her, dizzied her, enchanted her. “Thank you, dad,” she whispered.
    Climbing back up the hill taxed her thighs so the muscles burned every time she lifted her foot. She stopped from time to time to take photos of plants.
    She fell twice on the way back up the water-splashed path. By the time she arrived back at the skimmer she wore mud on one knee and the opposite elbow, and she’d managed to put a streak of it on her cheek, which she left there. It felt like being smeared with the raw power of Lym.
    Cricket seemed to think more of her than she had before, the appraisal in her steady gaze a tiny bit less judgmental. But Charlie looked disturbed, his jaw tight and his eyes dark and angry. “Did I take too long?” she asked him.
    He blinked and his face changed to a mask of control. “No. I’m sorry. It’s something else.”
    She wanted to ask, but he seemed like the kind of man who offered himself more easily if you didn’t push. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The falls. Lym.”
    He smiled briefly, his mood only partly broken. “I can show you even prettier places here. Some where there won’t be so many people.”
    â€œThere were hardly any here.”
    He gave her a look that disagreed.
    â€œOn a station, every public place is so close that people touch on accident. We smell each other’s breath and perfume and sweat. Even walking from place to place there’s people in front and behind and maybe on either side.”
    â€œI’d hate that,” he said.
    â€œI bet you would.”
    â€œAre you willing to go where there’s no one but us?” he asked.
    â€œOf course.” She felt awed by the waterfall and opened by the planet, almost flayed. This might be the perfect time to let Onor and Marcelle’s ashes go. “Can you find a place with water above a falls?”
    â€œThis falls?”
    â€œIs there a place that’s even more empty?” She had never been in a place without other humans, and suddenly she craved it.
    â€œStrap in,” Charlie said. He stood up, still keeping himself between her and Cricket. He felt cold and distant.
    They flew in silence for twenty minutes, until she had to say something. “Your mood. It’s