Nine Pockets
Yara held the touch board with both hands and pushed off gently from her bunk. It was a square of quilt, stitched into nine pockets, and five of them were full. A disc of cork. A curl of copper wire. A knot of blue string. A chip of bone-smooth plastic. A scrap of wool. River turned slowly through the air beside her, tail out straight, whiskers catching the light. "Four left," Yara said. She had made a rule for herself: she had to know each thing by touch before she let herself look at it. "Close your eyes and just feel it," she told River, and River shut their eyes and held out one small paw, waiting.
They drifted down the long corridor, where the hum of the station came up through the walls like a cat leaning on a door. In the stowage bay, Yara opened the bin of odd ends and pushed her hand in without looking. Cold metal. A loop of tape. Then something that bristled. She drew out the frayed tail of a rope, stiff and splayed, each thread going its own way. It scratched her palm in a friendly sort of way. River sniffed it, tapped it twice, and let it spin. Yara worked it into the sixth pocket and pressed the flap shut. "That one is loud," she said. "You can hear it with your fingers."
The greenhouse was warm, and the lamps in it were the colour of afternoon. Yara moved between the trays with her eyes half closed, brushing leaves as she went. Ridges. Waxy. A stem with a seam down it. Then her fingers found something so soft she stopped moving altogether. The leaf was pale green and covered in fine hairs, like the underside of a moth's wing. One old leaf had already come away at the base, so she took that one. River pressed their cheek against it, then their nose, then their cheek again. Seven pockets full. Yara held the board at arm's length and looked at the two flat empty squares left at the bottom.
Near the water recycler there was a panel that had come loose in the spring, and nobody had got around to it. Behind it lay a sheet of gold insulation, crinkled everywhere, thin as a wing. Yara worked a corner free with her thumbnail. It crackled. It crackled when she barely touched it, and it crackled when she let it go, and River's ears went up at the sound. She folded a small square of it and slid it into the eighth pocket, where it sat gleaming like something folded by a beetle. Eight. She counted them twice with her eyes shut, left to right, and each one came up right under her fingers before she reached the hole at the end.
After that, nothing was new. She touched the ladder rungs and they were ribbed, and she already had ribbed. She touched the mesh over the vent, the strap of her bunk, the round rim of the window, the wall, the floor that was also a wall if you turned. All of it she had. River watched her drift with the board held against her chest and the last pocket gaping open like a small mouth. "Close your eyes and just feel it," Yara said to herself, more quietly this time. She shut them. Hum, warm air, her own hair floating up past her ear. Nothing under her hands she had not already kept.
River made a noise then, low and interested, and swam back toward the galley. At the drinking spout a bead of water had got loose and hung there, wobbling, big as a plum and perfectly round. River bumped it with their nose. It shivered, stretched, and pulled itself back into a ball. Yara laughed and put out one finger. The skin of the water pushed back before it gave. It was cool and it was tight and it was nothing at all like the wool or the wire or the gold. She cupped her hands around it without closing them. "That's the one," she said. "That is absolutely the one."
She found a clear seed pouch in the greenhouse drawer, the soft kind that squashed, and River herded the bead along the corridor with careful nose-taps the whole way, never once popping it. Yara caught it in the pouch and rolled the seal shut. It sagged in her hand. It slid and slumped and came back. She fitted it into the ninth pocket and laid the board flat on her knees. Then she shut her eyes and went along the row with one finger. Cork, wire, string, plastic, wool, rope, leaf, gold, water. River's whiskers arrived at the end of the row too, which was not a pocket, but counted anyway.
Yara hooked her ankle under the bunk strap by the round window and held the board against her chest. Earth was going by below, blue and slow, with a white wing of weather over the middle of it. River settled into the crook of her arm, heavy as a folded coat. "Close your eyes and just feel it," Yara said, and this time neither of them opened them again. Her thumb moved over the leaf, then the wool, then stopped. The glass grew a small grey bloom of fog where she breathed, and faded, and bloomed again. River breathed. Yara breathed. The station hummed on around them, keeping time, letting them go slowly to sleep.