Embrace the Fall (Part 5)

What the heck is that supposed to mean?

It had been a couple of hours since Elliso had hit me with the most baffling question of all time, and I still hadn’t managed to figure out what he’d meant.

Where had I gotten the idea that I needed to fall in love with Nelle? Coming from someone who had been talking at me about common sense, that sure was rich. How about, “I got it from having a basic understanding of how romantic relationships function”? How about that, eh, Elliso?

Actually, the more I thought about our conversation, the more confused I got. It hadn’t even been just his final question. From the start, he’d acted as if the idea of me falling in love with Nelle was a ridiculous concept. He’d even said he thought I was going to confess to her after the shopping trip, and then laughed his head off when I’d said I had to fall in love first.

It was like he thought I was overthinking the whole thing and missing something hilariously obvious in the process.

I let out an exasperated sigh as I made my way up the wide, slowly spiraling ramp toward the observation zone. Along either side of the black carbon pathway, yellowish strips of light ran in parallel like the aisle lighting in an airplane. From somewhere distant, I could hear the calm drone of an artificial waterfall. I was nearly to the tops of the trees, their thick branches blocking any view that might trigger my fear of heights. 

This had been my favorite part of the GPSS since the first time I’d visited. Located near the hospitality quarter holding our residence pods, the Arboretum was a wholly impractical thing to exist in a space station. A vast circular forest with a generous selection of water features at the ground level, its defining feature was the gently inclined ramp I now walked, which wound slowly upwards between the trees.

If you thought about it, it was a pretty silly route to create to the observation zone—earthy, natural, and completely unlike the alien experience that awaited at the top.

Unfortunately, my preoccupation with Elliso’s question meant I wasn’t enjoying the solitary walk as much as I usually did. That had been true of everything since Nelle had emerged from the med bay a few minutes after Elliso left, ankle bound in tan athletic-style wrapping and crutches under her arms.

“Sorry,” I had said after completely missing the first thing she’d said. “Come again?”

“I asked if you could hold my shoe.”

“Your… shoe?”

Only then had my useless brain processed that she was awkwardly holding out one of her shoes, which wouldn’t fit over her wrapped ankle, while trying to stay steady on the crutches. I took the shoe.

“I thought it was only a minor sprain. Why crutches?”

“The doctor said they’re just to be safe, so I don’t make it worse.” She smiled wryly, waggling the injured limb at me. “And since we’re going straight to the wind farm from here, I’m going to be a good patient.”

“As if you wouldn’t be otherwise.”

“You never know. Maybe my stubborn personality will make me try to walk around without them until my ankle’s so bad you have to carry me everywhere piggyback.”

“Please spare my poor back.”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”

After that, I’d walked side by side with Nelle as we made our way to the restaurant district, slid into the booth with the others, and later returned to our respective residence pods.

All the way, Elliso’s question had pulled my thoughts to it with the unrelenting gravity of a black hole.

I finally reached the platform that held the grav lift to the observation zone and stopped, forcing those thoughts away to focus on the real reason I’d come here. The lift operator, a middle-aged man in a crisp black uniform, sat reading an old-school paperback book. His eyes flicked up to me as I stood there, then went back to the pages when I made no motion toward the lift’s door.

I stared at the ascending tube, following it as far as I could.

They used to say there’s no up in space, but that was before artificial gravity panels gave humans a steady illusion of “ground” while out in the expanse of the galaxy. I clung to that manufactured sensation of familiar firmness whenever I was on the GPSS.

And yet, here I was, preparing to defy my own instincts by going to the observation zone.

I swallowed hard, then stepped forward. The lift operator’s eyes came up again from his book, and he stood, moving to the control panel.

“Taking the lift to the observation zone? You’ll have the place to yourself.”

“Yeah.”

“Enjoy. I always like it this time of night.”

Night on the GPSS was as fabricated as gravity, a simulation created by dimmer lighting and reduced opacity on the banks of windows that let the blackness of space encroach into the metal-and-glass donut humanity had constructed for itself above the atmosphere. And yet, as fake as it was, it was perhaps the station’s biggest attraction.

The operator pressed a button, and the lift door slid open. I sank onto the bench that encircled the perimeter of the lift, gritting my teeth against the oncoming push away from the comfortable fiction of artificial ground. I felt it in my stomach, the sinking feeling of going “up,” and closed my eyes.

A calm chime sounded a few minutes later.

“Please use the handrails when exiting,” a soothing male voice instructed.

I was pretty sure the designers—and certainly not the safety inspectors—hadn’t intended for anyone to exit the lift with eyes shut. But with no one around to see, I felt for the handrails and pulled myself out of the lift and onto the platform of the observation zone. As soon as the lift door slid together behind me, I felt one side of the zone’s gravity panel activate, holding me to the floor.

For a moment, I remained still, clutching the rails. Then, I blew out a breath and opened my eyes.

The moon greeted me, light streaming through the curved oxyglass ceiling of the orb that was the observation zone.

Really, “zone” wasn’t the right word for a structure so small. The entire thing was no wider across than a classroom at school, a perfect, gravitationally isolated sphere bisected by a clear floor that slowly flipped end over end, taking anyone on it from my current view to the one I had really come to see.

The view of the planet from which I’d come. The view that, if I looked down, already waited for me.

When I was in fourth grade, a year after I became Nelle’s ambassador, our class had taken a field trip to the GPSS and come up to the observation zone. It was here, seeing the planet beneath my feet, that I’d had my first acrophobic episode. I’d puked, dizzy and terrified and unable to understand what was happening to me, just that seeing the distant land and sea made me feel like I was going to die.

Nelle had been right by me. She’d rode back with me to the med bay, saying she’d already seen plenty of space from her home planet. It had been her idea to pretend I’d had food poisoning when I told her I was afraid that my sudden fear of heights would get me made fun of by the other kids.

That’s when she’d given her royal promise to hide my secret.

I didn’t know if coming back up here was going to help me get over my fear of heights. Probably, all that was going to happen was that I was going to see the far-distant ground and collapse to my hands and knees and have to crawl to the emergency button to get someone to take me down.

But I felt like I had to try.

Nelle’s injury. Elliso’s question. The fact that I still hadn’t fallen in love. The years of exasperating, uncomfortable, irrational hidden fear; the years of trying not to fall in love. The golden bingo ball in my hand; the title “Ambassador.”

All of them swirled around me like a galaxy of things I understood only in parts.

I wanted to at least try to change something on my own.

That’s why I’d come up here.

I watched the moon inch along overhead, the deep darkness of space gradually replacing it in my view. Leaning against railing behind my back, I waited—for my evolution or my shame, I didn’t know.

The final crescent had almost vanished when the chime sounded.

“New visitor arrival imminent. Please hold on to the handrails; platform returning to lift position.”

I groaned, gripping the rail so the sensors could determine that I was secure and release the gravity. The floor churned back to accommodate whoever had happened to decide to visit the GPSS’ least popular attraction on the same night I was trying to confront my demons.

The chime sounded again, and the lift door parted to allow its solitary passenger into the observation zone.

A passenger I knew.