Liftoff

---
CHAPTER 5 — Liftoff
Arlo's ship wasn't silent.
Marek discovered this in the first minutes after takeoff, when the roar of the engines stabilized into a constant hum that vibrated in his teeth and settled somewhere behind his ears. It wasn't unpleasant. It was simply present, like the sound of rain on the farmhouse roof after weeks of drought.
The panoramic windows opened when Arlo touched a panel with his wrist.
Marek pressed his face to the glass.
Space wasn't what he had expected.
It wasn't the quiet darkness he had imagined while looking at the stars from the porch. It was deep. So deep that his eyes couldn't find where to stop. The stars didn't twinkle — he had read that in some book, but seeing it was different. They were there, fixed, like lights in an infinite room that no one had ever turned off.
"Sira?" he said quietly.
"Tell me."
"Is this another world?"
Sira looked at him from her seat. Her arms were crossed and she wore the expression of someone processing everything with her usual speed, but there was something in her eyes that Marek hadn't seen before. Not fear. The recognition that what lay before them was bigger than any list could contain.
"It's the same world," she said. "Just bigger than it seemed."
Marek didn't take his eyes off the stars.
Arlo was at the controls with the concentration of someone doing three things at once while pretending it was two. His fingers moved over the panels with a precision he didn't have in the lab — there he was chaotic, here he was a different version of himself.
"I can open the windows fully if you want," he said.
"Yes," Marek and Sira said at the same time.
The side panels expanded. Space rushed in all at once in its full dimension. Not through a small window, but from every side, as if the ship had disappeared and they were floating in the middle of nothing.
The Moon to the right. A purple sky mixed with deep black that had no equivalent in any color Marek had seen from Earth. The stars still and enormous and completely indifferent to the three ten-year-olds watching them from a square white ship built in a garden in Cromatica.
No one spoke for a moment.
It was Arlo who broke the silence.
"Technically," he said without turning around, "what you're seeing isn't exactly deep space yet. We're still within the solar system. Stellar density increases considerably when—"
"Arlo," Sira said.
"Yes?"
"Shut up for a moment."
Arlo closed his mouth.
The silence returned.
It lasted as long as it needed to.
Then Sira spoke.
"All right," she said. "Now let's focus."
Arlo closed the panoramic windows and accelerated toward the coordinates he had calculated during the weeks of construction.
Sira leaned over the navigation panel.
"How long until Zekra?"
"Hard to calculate precisely," Arlo said. "It depends on whether we encounter gravitational interference in the outer sectors of the system. Conservative estimate: several days."
"Days?"
"The ship is functional," Arlo said with the calm of someone defending something he knows is good even if it sounds bad. "It's not the fastest. It's the fastest I could build in three weeks with the available materials."
"No one asked you to build it in three weeks," Marek said.
"Someone did."
"I said there was no rush."
"You said, and I quote, 'finally' when I came to get you."
Marek opened his mouth. Closed it.
"That was about something else."
"Sure."
Sira looked at them both with the patience of someone who has accepted that this is part of the package.
"The suits," she said.
Arlo got up from the controls, activated the autopilot with a gesture that suggested he had done it many times even though this was technically the first, and went to the rear compartment.
He returned with three precisely folded suits.
He set them on the central table.
Marek looked at the first one. Dark blue. With a red K in the center of the chest. Visible reinforcement on the forearms and hands. The densest plates there than anywhere else on the suit.
He took it. Turned it. Looked at the reinforcements on the hands without saying anything.
Arlo pointed to the second. Pink with the red K. Thinner at the torso. With protection plates concentrated on the shoulders and knees, but the legs had more articulation, more range.
Sira examined it with the same attention she gave everything.
"Why more mobility in the legs?"
"Because when I observed how you move," Arlo said, "I noticed that your first instinct in a problem is to reposition before responding." A pause. "If that's what you do, the suit shouldn't hold you back."
Sira looked at him for a moment. Said nothing. But something in her expression shifted slightly.
Arlo pointed to the third. White with the red K. Notably lighter than the other two. With a series of internal pockets distributed across the torso and thighs.
"How many pockets does it have?" Marek asked.
"The necessary amount."
"What's the necessary amount?"
"More than you'd think are necessary and fewer than I'd think are necessary." Arlo folded the suit over his arm. "The point is to keep your hands free without losing access to tools."
Marek looked at his own suit. Then at Arlo.
"How long have you been observing us?"
Arlo looked at him.
"What do you mean?"
"The reinforcements on my hands. The mobility in Sira's legs. The pockets on yours." Marek held up the blue suit. "This isn't improvised in three weeks. You had to think about us specifically to design this."
Silence.
Arlo looked at him for a moment with that attention of his. The one that didn't disappear even when humor was layered on top.
"The anomaly detector from the eastern sector," he said finally.
Marek waited.
"It's been registering the same energy signature for six months," Arlo said. "Irregular at first. More consistent over time. Always in the same area. Always between sunset and nightfall." He paused. "I started observing because I couldn't identify the source. I kept observing because what I found was more interesting than anything else I had in the lab."
Marek said nothing.
"I'm not going to say it out loud," Arlo continued. "Not yet. When you want to talk about it, you tell me." A pause. "But the suits are designed for what I know. And what I know, I'm not going to ignore just because no one has confirmed it for me."
The space outside the ship remained exactly the same.
Still.
Immense.
Completely indifferent to what had just happened inside a square white ship moving slowly toward coordinates none of them had ever visited.
Marek looked at the blue suit in his hands.
The reinforcements on the hands.
The flexible joints in the shoulders.
He thought of three years of solitary practice in empty fields and nameless rivers. Thought of Sira saying "I saw what you did in the river." Thought of the detector blinking on Arlo's table.
"Put them on," Arlo said, returning to the controls. "We're going to be here for several days. Might as well be comfortable."
They put on the suits.
Marek stretched his arms. The reinforcement on his hands didn't weigh anything. It felt as if it had always been there.
---
END OF CHAPTER 5