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A week later, Mayu’s hairtie snapped into three dismal pieces. It just went to show the importance of foresight, she thought. There’d been so much to take care of back at the settlement that she hadn’t had the chance to thin out her hair to a manageable volume, and now she was paying the price. You never knew what would crack under added strain; that was why they’d been taught to watch for stress fractures, cleavage points, natural instabilities. It was far too much trouble to knot it back together, and structurally unsound besides, so she drew the elastic around itself and tucked it into her track jacket pocket.
“Well, that’s unfortunate!” Mayu said, gathering her hair up in a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck, and releasing it again. “I didn’t think I’d need to bring a spare hair elastic, of all things. How shortsighted of me! Don’t tell Koruri, I’m supposed to be the responsible one.”
The line of Ryo’s mouth drew taut, but he bent his head back over the tear in his backpack he was mending, said nothing.
“I guess I’ll just have to leave it out like you do,” she continued.
“You don’t have to say it like that,” Ryo said, garroting the ends of the thread. “What’s wrong with my hair?”
Mayu hummed and banked the fire. They packed up camp and kept moving across the exposed bedrock, a crumbling large-grained limestone she’d taken samples of last night. She shielded her eyes and peered at the horizon, then behind them, at the bluish smudge of the mountains receding into the distance. Presumably they were heading towards the ocean; she sometimes imagined she could smell the salt on the wind, though she had no way of knowing for sure. Neither she nor Ryo had any wind class experience.
The sky gleamed a perfect pale blue overhead, shot through with veins of white. Once, on an overnight soil class field trip, she’d picked up an unremarkable calcite chunk as part of the geographical survey. When she chiselled it apart she’d found an array of glittering crystals inside, strontium sulfate, the barest hint of blue, precisely the same shade as the sky above her. It was unexpectedly beautiful. She hadn’t thought the future could be this beautiful. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Ryo keeping pace by her elbow, familiar and inscrutable. They might have been on an extended field trip themselves; some sort of metaphorically resonant extra credit study on managing fires on different terrain, perhaps. She didn’t look at him.
Around midday, they paused for a quick meal of dried fruit and a handful of nuts that tasted vaguely like bread, the way everything here veered close to but never quite reached familiarity. “We should probably think of a cover story in case we come across anyone else, you know how civilians are,” Ryo said, which was such a reasonable thing to suggest that Mayu blinked and waited a few moments for the punchline.
“That’s—an excellent idea, actually,” she said, when it became clear Ryo was not being facetious. “Do you think we should pretend to be together? It’d make the most sense to the civilian mind, we can say we’re on a, like, ‘honeymoon’, is that what they call it. Don’t worry, I’ve had plenty of experience in this field. I kissed a boy while he was dying, you know.”
Ryo scoffed. “Please, I’m the one with the actual girlfriend? I know what to do in a relationship? I can act like a significant other—”
“What, you mean you can steal an egg and give it to me—”
“—things like sharing personal space and—that was one time—”
“—or loiter in fields as Koruri walks around the corner, I guess that’s a skill.” Mayu lifted the coil of hair off the back of her neck, flinching as the breeze brushed over the heated skin there. She hadn’t left her hair out like this since she was eight for good reason. “Anyway, it’ll be a good test of our—cohesion as a unit. We are a team, I mean.”
“Well, yeah,” Ryo said. “We’re us. Of course we’re better than a civilian… whatever.” He glanced at her sideways. “What do civilians even do on these… honeymoons?”
“They go into seclusion for a few weeks to test compatibility under high pressure conditions, and probably regret joining their life to someone whose cells were not curated in the petri dish adjacent to their own. It doesn’t count as growing up together if that didn’t happen. But we won’t have that problem, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“Like you said, we’re just—better. It’s not surprising that we can beat the civilians at their own game.”
They walked a little further down the limestone outcrop and stopped for the night in the shelter of an overhang Mayu checked for stress fractures, cleavage points, natural instabilities, and deemed appropriately structurally sound. Somehow Ryo’s hair had escaped the day unscathed, while Mayu felt an entire forest floor’s worth of detritus had lodged in hers, though they hadn’t even walked through anything that could be classified as dense vegetation. She plucked a small twig out of her fringe and pretended to inspect it.
“I’m not sure that copying your hairstyle was the right thing to do,” she said, shaking loose a few curls of bark.
“Yeah, like, that’s why it’s my hairstyle, obviously it’s not gonna work on just anyone.”
“Excuse me, I taught you everything you know? Without my patient tutelage Nijiko would have kicked you out of your own dorm room back when we were twelve.” Mayu riffled her fingers through her fringe to dislodge the leaves caught in the strands.
Ryo clicked his tongue, a thoroughly un-Ryo-like gesture he must have picked up from her. “I’ll do it,” he said. She smiled, but turned her back to him obligingly.
Ryo threaded his fingers through her hair and began to move them outwards in slow, sure strokes, disentangling the debris, working the knots loose, carding her hair back from her temples. The gentle pressure was too much. Heat pricked at her eyes. Mayu moved away from Ryo to face him.
“Wow, Ryo! You really are—”
“If you say ‘good with your fingers’, I’m gonna—”
Mayu patted his cheek. “Practice for when we pretend to be married,” she said. He slitted his eyes at her and sneered, an expression that was so wholly Nijiko Mayu’s breath stuttered in her chest. Again, she thought he would say something, and again, he didn’t.
Ryo drew out the drawstring cord from his track jacket hood and fastened the ends together. It was true, she supposed: he was good with his fingers. He’d always had a knack for the delicacies of knotwork. He had the right hands for it. The fine motor control of a firearms prodigy turned to such a mundanity; she would have laughed at the sight had they been anywhere else. “Oh, Ryo,” she said.
“Don’t you ‘oh, Ryo’ me,” he muttered, swivelling her back around. He sectioned out her hair and began to braid it together. He’d picked this up from her, too. She had a sudden, absurd vision of Ryo plaiting his own hair at night to maintain its studiously tousled appearance.
The wind was picking up, a bristling chill that skimmed over her bare skin. She shivered, thought about heat retention techniques. She didn’t move closer to Ryo, though he was practically geysering warmth.
“Was it the right…” she whispered. “No. Of course it was. But do you think—do you think they’ll ever—”
Her whole body was shaking now, the wind she couldn’t read sweeping through her, over her, chiselling her apart. Weathering her into the shape of the new world. The unsteady, cracked-open geode of the sky above them, vast and glittering and more beautiful than she’d ever thought possible.
Ryo put a hand on her arm. “Don’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think so.”
They were nearing the ocean, after all. She could taste salt on her lips. Strand by strand, Ryo wove her back together, tied her off with the loop of elastic from his jacket, and when he turned her by the shoulders to face him once more, her cheeks were dry.