Gavin’s eyes closed involuntarily as the voice struck his eardrums like a barrage of closed fists.
Only one person in his life could drag private humiliation into public execution before she even crossed the room. The shout had already done the damage. The squeak of Chuck Taylors only announced that the rest of her was coming to finish it.
He exhaled, opened his eyes, and turned almost in unison with Eyra.
Yves Saint Laurent Libre gave way to marijuana smoke and the pitiful attempt to bury it under Bath & Body Works Champagne Toast, completely erasing Eyra’s perfume from Gavin’s senses.
The insurgent tossed her backpack onto an empty stool hard enough to make the metal legs scrape against the floor, then she closed the remaining distance. The sound cut through the hum of the lab and made Gavin’s shoulders tense before he could stop them.
Her eyes moved from Gavin, to Eyra, to the prototype, then to the lingering pressure of Eyra’s body against his arm.
“Oh, absolutely not,” she yelled. “Get your hands off of him along with the rest of your Bride-of-Frankenstein body you bought piece by piece at the strip mall.”
Eyra raised her chin and produced a smile polished enough to look effortless.
“Hello, Pippi. My apologies… Miss Longstocking.”
“Don’t play with me. You know my name.”
“Ah, yes. Wrecking Ball Ronni.” Eyra let the nickname settle between them. “Destroying everything in your path and blaming everyone else for the mess.”
Ronni’s hands went to the ends of her two fiery red braids, tightening them as if she were preparing for battle.
“Don’t call me that.”
Then she turned to Gavin.
“Why do you entertain this phony-ass proper bitch?” Ronni stepped closer to Eyra. “Back away from my brother before I separate you from him and his fly spinner. I’m not going to tell you again.”
“It’s not a fly spinner.” Both Gavin and Eyra said in unison.
They looked at each other, both caught off guard by the shared correction. Whatever she saw between him and Eyra seemed to hurt worse than Eyra’s insult.
She tilted her head to the side, cracking her neck, then cracked her knuckles.
“Ronni, don’t start,” Gavin said. “It’s all good. Eyra was just leaving.”
“Oh, I haven’t started.” Ronni said, her eyes stayed locked on Eyra. “At least not yet.”
Eyra crossed her arms. “Your cartoonish appearance does not reinforce the tough-girl routine.”
“Shouldn’t you be downstairs with your boyfriend instead of up here pretending like you like my brother?”
The room went silent except for the spinning prototype.
Gavin stopped coding, his hands hovered over the keyboard.
“What?”
Ronni did not look away from Eyra. “Yeah, that’s right, your bleach blonde botched Brazilian butt Barbie, is still on her knees for that weak ass lacrosse player.”
Gavin turned toward Eyra slowly, as if the news had arrived in a language he did not understand.
“Eyra?”
She attacked before finding the right words.
“Gavin, she’s spiraling, She throws out these baseless claims whenever she thinks someone else has your attention.”
“You really know how to pick ’em, big bro.” Ronni gave a short, humorless laugh. “Look how desperate this plastic bimbo is. Every accusation is a confession with this one.”
Eyra’s thumb dragged once across the screen of her locked tablet, though she was not looking at it.
Ronni’s eyes snapped to the movement.
“And that doesn’t even make sense, dumb ass. He’s my brother. That’s disgusting.”
Still stunned, Gavin tilted his head slightly, as if looking at Eyra from a different angle might make the pieces align.
“So,” he said slowly, “you’re still with him?”
“Don’t listen to her, Gavin.” Eyra’s voice softened quickly. “He and I are through for good this time. There are just a few things I need to clear up before it’s official.”
A tear gathered at the corner of her eye, quick and convenient. Eyra lifted her hand to wipe it away, but Gavin reached the tear first, and wiped it away.
Ronni made a sound of disbelief.
“Oh my god. Now she’s crying.” Ronni shook her head. “Bro, I can’t believe you are buying her z-list acting.”
Gavin paused, then looked back and forth between the two of them, and stopped with his eyes fixed on Eyra, squinting with his head still tilted. Something about the timing, the tear, the shift in Eyra’s voice, and Ronni’s fury refused to settle into place.
“What?” Eyra donned a look of sadness, looking directly into Gavin’s eyes.
“You really are soulless.” Ronni flared her nostrils. “The wounded bird routine? Really?”
Gavin eased himself a few inches away from Eyra.
Eyra doubled down, deepening her pout.
“My G,” Ronni said, moving closer to him, “this is the oldest trick in the book. I know this one like the back of my hand. She wants control of your attention. Any guy that seems like he has something going on, she wants to have access to him. And she will do anything to get it.”
“What?” Gavin grimaced, reacting to the visual that he constructed of her words.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
He angled his head upward, searching for how the actions, words, and intent were supposed to fit together.
“Why would someone do that? It seems petty, and a waste of time. She would have to be—”
“You’re right.” Eyra said.
She pressed her chest against his, smiled seductively and reached for his chin and pulled his face back in alignment with hers until their eyes locked with each other.
“Nah,” Ronni stood firmly in front of him. “I’m not letting her do this to you.”
“Lil’ sis,” Gavin said, trying to calm her down.
“No. This is for your own good.”
“The fuck, Ronni.” Gavin’s restraint cracked. “You come in here uninvited and start shit for no reason. No one is doing anything to anybody that isn’t wanted.”
“I can see that you want some parts of her, already.” Ronni looked down at the bulge in his pants. “But I’ve known you for twenty years, and based on that, I know that you do not want any part of what she is really here for.”
“So you know what’s going on here?” Gavin folded his arms. “Then tell me, what is that I don’t want?”
“I’m glad you asked. That means a lot.” Ronni softened her tone. “But you need to trust me. The way everyone else thinks and looks at the world is much different from how you do. This is an area that you will probably never understand.”
“So I’m just devoid of comprehension?” Gavin took a deep breath and relaxed his arms. “Dad would not have liked how disrespectful you are now.”
He looked at Eyra as if confirmation might help. She only smiled in return.
Ronni filled the silence before it could turn against her.
“You missed dinner,” she said. “I was worried you hadn’t eaten.”
She pointed toward her backpack.
“So I brought you food.”
Gavin opened his mouth, but Ronni persisted before he could form a response.
“And you know what? You make me so mad sometimes. You don’t even care that I was worried. You’re up here doing God knows what with God knows who, ignoring my texts for six hours like I’m supposed to just know you’re okay.”
The lab went still with the suddenness of a system failure. Even the machines seemed to hesitate, their steady hum swallowed by the force of Ronni’s tirade.
Gavin’s sneer faded, and the tensions he carried dissipated, as if finally recognizing their familiarity relaxed him.
“You two sound alike.”
The words struck with surgical precision.
“What?” Eyra and Ronni said at the same time.
They scowled at each other, then turned away almost simultaneously.
Both angled their heads upward as if searching for answers.
“See.”
Gavin almost smiled, “I think I just solved the grand unified field theory.”
“Well, let’s dial up Neil deGrasse Tyson.” Ronni rolled her eyes, “I’m certain he’d be ecstatic.”
“I don’t sound like her?” Eyra blurted out.
“Earlier, you were talking just like her.” Gavin turned back to the XDE-1. Talking, but focused on his work. “Different words. Same structure. You both end with a volley of pointless and nonsensical statements.”
“How…” Eyra started to speak, then stopped.
To Gavin, numbers made sense. Equations made sense. Galactic spaceflight felt easier to solve than either of the two people standing behind him.
Eyra didn’t move.
Her eyes locked onto the side of Gavin’s face. Unblinking.
For the first time that evening, the polished certainty in her expression faltered.
“Move creep.” Ronni slid to Gavin’s right side, nudging Eyra out of the way with her hip and bringing her back to reality.
Ronni kept talking.
“Listen,” she said, lowering her voice, “I’m worried about you and the investor meeting tomorrow.
She took a brief pause looking at the side of his face as he typed on the keyboard. “Seriously, I want you to be successful, but what am I supposed to think? I come up here to check on you, and I find Buffy the Whoring Vampire trying to feed off your brilliance again. And somehow, it set me off. My bad, big bro.”
Gavin did not answer.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard, but they were not moving. His attention was firmly fixed on the telemetry dashboards as if he was looking at salvation itself. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
Eyra noticed, but Ronni kept mumbling in his ear. Gavin had checked out mentally and shrunk away from the entire situation.
Eyra did not need him to answer. His retreat was visible.
She picked up her tablet and purse with careful, polished movements. Then she circled around Ronni’s blockade, refusing to look like she had been forced anywhere.
“Careful, rookie.” Eyra’s venomous smirk softened as she stopped near Gavin’s left side. “Keep making him responsible for your chaotic emotions, and he’ll retreat to the quiet place I left in his mind.”
Ronni looked at Gavin whose fingers were banging away at the keyboard as if no one else existed.
“Too late,” she said sadly. “He’s already there.”
Eyra leaned closer to Gavin, lowering her voice until Ronni could hear the intimacy but not the words.
“Check your phone when you remember you own one,” she murmured. “I’ll stop by later. We can finish our conversation later tonight.”
He affirmed with a gentle nod. Then she brushed past him, close enough for her perfume to touch him one last time, and walked toward the portico without looking back.
Gavin’s phone vibrated on the workstation. Ronni saw it before he did.
“Nope.” She snatched it up.
“Ronni,” Gavin said, the last of his patience leaving his voice. “Give it here.”
She ignored him, typed in his passcode, and turned her shoulder to block him from reaching the phone.
Gavin went still. “How do you know my passcode?”
Ronni’s thumb stopped for half a second, then kept moving. “Because you use the same mix of six digits for everything, genius.”
“That does not make this okay.”
Her eyes scanned the message. The softness that had almost reached her face collapsed back into anger.
“Oh, hell no.”
Gavin stepped toward her. “Give me the phone.”
“She said she’s coming to your apartment tonight?” Ronni snapped, holding the phone away from him. “After all of that? After I just told you she has a boyfriend?”
“That is not your message to read.”
“Really? That’s all you have to say?”
“What else should I say? You’re not even addressing the real issue here.”
“Gavin, she’s not the girl for you. She’s nastier than you would believe.”
“Ronni, you need to stay out of my business.”
“No, She’s also fucking the quarterback on the football team. I don’t want her to give you an STI.”
“You act like I said I was going to do something with her.”
“You could have fooled me when I walked in here. You’re lucky I came when I did, or your junk would be burning a hole through your pants right now.”
“STIs don’t work like that.” Gavin grimaced, closed his eyes to catch his breath, “That’s not even the point.”
Then he reopened his eyes.
“Ronni.” His voice rose sharply. “You do not get to decide who I talk to, what I do, or who I let into my apartment.”
“I do when you’re being stupid.”
Gavin’s head jerked sideways then upward nearly simultaneously, like the sentence had entered his mind in the wrong language. “What? No. No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do, because apparently somebody has to have a functioning survival instinct in this family.”
“What, no! You obviously don’t have survival instincts, you just strolled into the most advanced research facility on campus, high out of your mind.”
“I do,” she said. “And clarification, I’m lifted, not high. There’s a difference.”
Gavin stared at her. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again. “No. No, that is a distinction without a difference.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Ronni shrugged, calm enough to make him angrier. “She ain’t going to your apartment. I’ll see to that.”
Gavin stared at her as the argument tangled faster than he could organize it. The hum of the containment rig pressed against his ears. The smell of Ronni’s weed clung to the lab, cutting through the sterile bite of electronics and warm metal.
“You broke into my phone,” he said slowly, “read my private message, and now you’re mad at me because of what you found after violating my privacy.”
Ronni lifted her chin. “I’m protecting you.”
“That is not protection. That’s some weird form of control.”
The words struck harder than he expected. Ronni’s hand tightened around the phone until the case creaked softly in her hand. For a second, she looked wounded. Then the wound armed itself.
“First of all, I’m not weird.” she said. “And control? Really? You think I’m trying to control you?”
Gavin dragged a hand down his face. “I didn’t say you were weird, I said your sense of control is weird.”
”Now who’s making distinctions, without a difference, Einstein.”
“What the fuck!” At each syllable, Gavin’s voice cracked through the lab so hard the next insult died in Ronni’s mouth. For once, she had no immediate answer.
“Every time I deal with you or Eyra, nothing makes sense. I say one thing, you both turn it into something else, and somehow I end up defending myself inside an argument I did not create and want no part of.”
“Don’t compare me with that trashy skank. We are not the same.”
Gavin turned back to the monitors and picked up where he left off.
Ronni’s grip tightened around the phone until the case creaked again and the corner of the screen protector snapped loose with a brittle click. It skittered across the workstation and dropped to the floor with a hollow plastic clack.
Ronni barely glanced at the damage before pressing forward, as if breaking his property was just another acceptable cost of protecting him.
“Don’t you turn your back on me.” Ronni snatched his protein bar from the workstation, unwrapped it, and took a loud bite, releasing the scent of cookies and cream into the air.
By the time the scent alerted Gavin, he realized that she had eaten the entire bar.
“What are you doing? You don’t even work out, and you just ate a PB&J, I smelled it on your breath.”
“Don’t worry about what I’m doing. Focus on your Dragon Spinner.” she said sarcastically.
“It doesn’t work like that, You’re just wasting my protein.”
“Boy, bye. That was nasty anyway.” She took the last bite, “How do you eat these things?”
Then grabbed his energy drink and drained the rest of it.
Gavin turned just enough to give her the side eye, then returned to his work.
“Well damn, it’s like that?” Ronni said, but Gavin didn’t respond.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a brown paper bag with tiny burn holes from fallen ash.
The repulsive mix of greasy fries and blunt smoke smacked Gavin in the face. She shoved the bag between him and the monitors, blocking his view.
Gavin said nothing. He crumpled it, threw it into the trash across the room, and turned back to the screen.
“You ungrateful motherfu—”
She stopped herself from finishing her last word.
He did not respond.
Ronni made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a screech, then shoved the back of his head hard enough to jolt him forward.
Gavin spun around.
“God damn it! Eyra, I’ve had it with you.”
Ronni recoiled as if the name had touched her.
“Eyra?” she whispered.
Gavin did not hear her. He was already too far into the argument to notice what he had said.
His voice drowned out the increased whir of the XDE-1.
“I’m trying to work. I have the most important meeting of my life tomorrow, and you storm in here high as a fucking kite with no regard for my boundaries. You took my time. You took my focus. You took my food. You took the last drop of my energy drink. Then you put your hands on me.”
The XDE-1 whirred louder, its frequency climbing until it nearly matched the tone of his voice.
“You are stripping the life out of my body with every nonsensical word. Please, Ronni. Just shut the fuck up.”
She looked ready to launch a full barrage, but stopped herself, a few tears slowly streamed down her cheek. Her thumb slid slowly across the edge of his phone checking for damage.
“Gavin,” she said, quieter now, “maybe you should check the equation running through your mind.”
“What are you talking about?”
She tossed the phone onto the workstation. It slid across the surface and struck his keyboard hard enough to rattle the keys.
“If your math keeps breaking the same way, maybe the problem isn’t the variables.”
Gavin tilted his head. For once, Ronni had said something that did not scatter his thoughts. It arranged them.
She pointed at him. “The only constant in this equation is you.”
For once, Ronni’s words did not add noise. They created correlation in the chaos. Gavin stood motionless, staring past Ronni as his mind began parsing through the truth within the message. He replayed Eyra’s accusations, Ronni’s intrusion, his own silence, his own avoidance, his lack of control. For the first time all night, the pattern did not point away from him.
Ronni lowered herself to the floor beside her backpack. The tile squeaked under her sneakers as she settled in, unwrapped a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and took an angry bite. The sweet smell of peanut butter mixed with the skunky bite of weed as she started rolling a blunt directly in front of a no-smoking sign.
Silence stretched between them, broken only by Ronni chewing, paper crinkling in her lap, and the steady pulse of the containment rig.
“Yes,” Gavin turned to Ronni, “That is correct.”
Then the stabilization alert sounded.
Telemetry shifted into alignment across every sensor.
Gavin turned toward the monitors and reviewed the results. He verified the numbers three times.
The stabilization was verified.
While they were arguing, the Xulu Dragonfly Engine had been levitating for a full three minutes.
The green lift-stabilization indicator flickered on, confirming his analysis.
Still chewing, Ronni looked up from the floor.
“Is it supposed to do that?” The sticky sweetness of peanut butter leapt from her words.
Gavin’s eyes narrowed as the XDE-1 began to glow.
“Something fixed the equilibrium.” Gavin said.
“It’s got that glow like Bruce Leroy,” Ronni laughed, “You know from ‘The Last Dragon’.”
The inner discs spun in perfect silence now, faster than the sensors should have been able to track. Symbols appeared on the monitor again, threading themselves between lines of code like they had been waiting for the right moment to surface.
The planetarium projector clicked once more. The unknown constellations vanished from the inner dome, but now they illuminated the true night sky beyond the open roof, highlighting that same green-and-gold planet in the far cosmic distance.
Ronni’s voice softened. “Gavin…”
He did not answer.
His reflection stared back from the glass of the test cage, but his eyes were no longer their normal amber. A ring of violet and gold light flowed through his irises like electrical waves caught in a storm. Then the whites of his eyes faded to black.
The atmosphere inside the planetarium shifted. The air at the center of the lab pressed against Gavin’s face, hot and charged, as if the room had developed its own electromagnetic weather.
Ronni’s pungent marijuana smoke surrendered to a scent she could not place. Ozone cut through the lab, sharp enough to leave the hint of metal on her tongue. A warmer scent followed, coppery and non-terrestrial, as if the electricity was not only moving through the machine but through Gavin himself.
Fear hollowed the weight from Ronni’s body.
For the first time since entering the lab, she felt small. Her anger vanished, stripped away by the shock moving through her body as she stared at the creature wearing her brother’s face. She tried to say his name again, but it came out broken.
“Gavin…”
He turned toward her.
The fear in her voice reached him before the fear on her face did. Gavin scanned her for injury, blood, burns, anything his mind could categorize or understand. But there was no wound. No smoke rising from her skin. No logical source for the terror in her eyes.
Then he smelled it too.
The same charged-metal scent coming from the center of the room. Ozone. Copper. Heat radiating from a cylindrical vein of still air.
Behind him, papers whipped through the room. Glass tubes crashed and shattered across the floor. The wind pouring through the open dome circled the lab with enough force to shove chairs out of place and drag loose equipment across the tile.
But the space between Gavin and Ronni stayed unnaturally still.
Gavin knew this scent. He had smelled it three years ago during his first successful lift test.
Then light sprang from her eyes. A ring of red and blue wove through her emerald irises like river water catching fire, and the whites of her eyes faded to black.
This was new. This was not the echo of something Gavin had seen before. His thoughts lost their sequence. Every explanation in his mind collapsed at once. Whatever was happening to him was happening to her too.
“Ronni,” he said, his voice barely holding together. “Don’t move.”
The prototype levitated two feet above its docking station, internal discs spinning in perfect harmony, holding its position with impossible precision.
A soft vibration began emanating through the science building. Then it grew stronger, second by second, until the entire building began to tremble.
The error code from the last failed attempt returned, but not as an error. It stretched across the screen, longer than before, arranging itself into a pattern.
3C6O9N12F15I18R21M_2P3R5I7M11E_13Q17U29A23N29T31U37M_ 41S43T47A53T61E_67T71R73A79N83S89L97O101C103A107T109I113O137N