Emilia
By the time Emilia was driving out to pick up Dyrk from school, with Mimi in tow, she was feeling calmer.
Focusing on the kids was easier than facing her feelings for the complicated man in his light-filled office.
When she pulled up in front of the school, Dyrk darted out from behind one of The Women statues and climbed in quickly, slamming the hatch closed behind him.
A group of boys hooted and laughed. She thought they were talking about Dyrk, until she realized they weren’t pointing at him, they were gesturing toward the gadabout.
Emilia resisted the impulse to get out of the car and yell at them, even if she didn’t completely disagree with them. It was still poor manners.
“How was your day?” she asked Dyrk.
“Can you please just drive?” he whispered miserably.
She pulled out, feeling bad for the kid.
“Hey, good news,” she told him as they headed for the village. “I talked to Mr. Grinks and your dad. We have permission to start a garden and we’re going to go buy some supplies right now.”
He perked up a little at that, though he didn’t say anything.
“We figured you would be hungry after school, so Mimi made you a snack,” she added.
Mimi excitedly unpacked the jam sandwich and honeyed milk she had prepared for her brother at home.
“Wow, thanks, Mimi,” Dyrk said, earning himself more angel points in Emilia’s heart.
She turned on a little music while he ate and was surprised to hear Mimi giggling.
“What is it?” Emilia asked her.
She exchanged a glance with Dyrk and they both giggled.
“Daddy doesn’t like this kind of music,” Mimi said. “He says it’s not good.”
“This is perfectly normal music,” Emilia retorted. “It’s darned good music. You guys never listened to The Zyxrian Fourth before?”
Mimi shook her head.
Emilia turned up the music and started dancing as much as the gadabout would allow, without taking her hands from the manual controls, in case she needed them.
The music was upbeat with a strong rhythm. A complicated rap in the foreground listed the singer’s grievances against an ex-boyfriend, who was not invited to her big party. In the background, an addictive violin and electric bassoon sample from the Inner Rings Symphony Orchestra’s live concert in the Asteroid Belt played on loop, with an old-fashioned rock band’s drum track behind it.
By the time they got to the store, the kids were dancing too, and howling with laughter at Emilia’s mediocre lip-synching skills.
“Now we can’t go into the store singing that song,” Emilia told them with a mock stern expression as she flipped the switch on the gadabout. “We can’t have them thinking we have a lot of crazy exes, or that we’re throwing a party in your giant house. Half the town will be trying to crash it.”
Mimi laughed, and Dyrk rolled his eyes, even though he was still smiling.
They all piled out of the gadabout and headed into the store.
Emilia had researched and found the place online. Then she had programmed the coordinates into the gadabout without another thought.
But now she was starting to wish she had staked it out ahead of time. The store was the size of a spacecraft hangar, and Dyrk’s sugar rush from the jam sandwich would only last so long.
“How may I assist you, Madam?” a service droid trilled as it sailed over to them.
“We are planning to start a garden,” Emilia told it, hoping it wasn’t programmed to upsell.