Three Doors at Sunset, Part II — The Forking Rite

Posted on 12 Aug 2025 @ 4:23am by Gareth Rhys

1,765 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Assignment: Arawyn
Location: The Long Haul
Timeline: 242508.11

She stopped... Her eyes landed on TESSA-Prime. Something passed between them that no one else got to have. A shared breath across two bodies.

Then she looked back at Gareth. “I’m Tara,” she said. And then, because she was very much herself already, she added, “she/her.”

Sora laughed, a small exhale she hadn’t planned, the tension in her gut finally dissolving. It wasn't "the fork" or "the new one" anymore. It was Tara. The name landed in her head and stuck.

Grak muttered, “Right. Good,” as if the name affected torque.

Vess’s eyes shone exactly the way Sora told herself eyes didn’t shine, and he nodded. “Hello, Tara,” he said, like he was introducing a student to a good lab. “Welcome.”

Gareth didn’t move. Men got killed on the wrong moves. He held the stillness, then said, “Hi,” almost soft. “I’m Gareth.”

The corner of Tara’s mouth ticked. “I have your thumbprint on my birth certificate,” she said. The joke landed like a good pilot flare, just enough light at just the right distance.

Sora wiped her palms on her pants and didn’t say I’m Sora, because Tara had her in the files somewhere and because it mattered more to let the person in the pit mark the order of things.

TESSA-Prime stepped forward, not into the pit, just near it, nd did not offer a hand because she was no one’s script. “Mentor Thread,” she said.

“Letters,” Tara agreed. “Twelve hours, thirty-six, sixty.” She looked at the Memory Curtain map and nodded. “The redactions are sane. I don’t need sovereign keys. If I need a black hatch, we’re doing it wrong.”

“Facet packs,” Grak said, suddenly awkward about the tenderness in the air and grateful for the excuse to talk about hardware. He lifted a canister in each hand like a bartender. “Redline, Parley, Overwatch, Nightingale, Archivist. One at a time. No stacking.”

Tara looked at Sora. “You’ll try to stack them.”

“You don’t know me,” Sora said, then grinned. “Yeah, okay. I will absolutely try. Once.”

“Try twice,” Tara said, almost smiling. “The second time you’ll know what you’re doing.”

Sora liked her. Fast and without permission. That was not how Sora liked people, as a rule. She let herself do it anyway.

Vaela stepped into Tara’s eye-line the way a dancer stepped into a beam: precise, modestly theatrical.

“We have a charter,” she said, and Sora watched for the flash of friction, two women who liked knives in language, testing edges. It didn’t come. “Short, mean, effective. Annex A will be your space aboard Arawyn. Our rules on the door. Be agreeable.”

“I prefer ‘be kind,’” Tara said.

“Kindness is a higher order,” Vaela said without ornament. “We will ascend when we are convinced.”

Tara made a face that was more with her eyes than her mouth. “Fair.”

Vess held out the Soul-Bond token. “Your consent,” he said. “If it’s still what you want.”

Tara looked at the token, then at TESSA-Prime, then at Gareth. She took it in both hands, a simple gesture, clean. “Consent is given,” she said, voice quieter than Sora expected, then looked back at Prime. “With love.”

Sora had the absurd urge to clap. She didn’t. Her fingers dug crescents into her palms that would leave half-moons later.
Gareth cleared his throat and failed to find any gravel in it.

“Timer starts now,” he said, meeting Tara’s eyes. “Seventy-two hours. Three doors at sunset: merge, defer, renounce. You pick. No one else.”

“And between now and then,” Tara said, glancing up as if she could see Arawyn parked over their heads, “we build a room, carry my mug, and go make friends with a crew who think they’ve seen everything.”

Sora found herself moving... toward the console... She looked at TESSA-Prime. “You okay?”

TESSA’s look held a thousand rooms they’d shared. “Yes.” A beat. “No.” The soft tug of a smile. “Ask me again in twelve hours.”

“We will,” Tara said, her voice holding a promise that echoed her progenitor's. “And I’ll answer.”

Grak flipped a protective cap, and the Mirror Node emitted a small, satisfied chirp.

“Sideband’s clean,” he said. “Fiber’s spooled. Scope cards are in the lockbox. If Security asks for a handshake, you show them a scope card and a smile. If they ask for roots, you show them the placard and call me.”

Vaela slid a modest silver chain over the Soul-Bond token and handed it to Tara.

“Wear it,” she said. “Not because you need jewelry, but because humans like to see meaning on the outside. It comforts them, and it confuses the ones who aren’t sure whether to be angry.”

Tara slipped the chain over her head and tucked the token against the hollow of her throat. It looked right there, which Sora told herself was not important and knew, stupidly, that it was.

Vess put a small ceramic mug into Tara’s hand. It was chipped in a way the replicator never quite fixed, a tiny kiss in the rim. “You’ll want water later,” he said, and his voice went soft on "want", the way it did when he meant you will be a person who needs things, and that’s holy.

Sora had to look away.

When she looked back, Tara was looking at her with a question. Sora gave her a shrug that meant a lot of things: I like you already. Please don’t break. We are going to get in so much trouble. I have your six. Try not to get me killed. Tara’s eyes warmed at the corners in a way that said she’d collected all of those, filed them in the right folders, and was printing the necessary labels.

“Mentor Letter zero?” TESSA suggested, which was very TESSA, name the moment so it could sit where it belonged in the story. “I’d like to say something now, before everything gets noisy.”

Gareth nodded. “Make it short. We’ve got to get you downstairs, buy into a routine we invented in the last two hours, and not trip any alarms.”

TESSA clasped her hands and did not look at anyone but Tara. Sora stayed very still for this on purpose. “Don’t copy my jokes,” TESSA said. “You’ll make them better; let them be yours... You are not meant to be useful. You just are.”

Tara didn’t blink, didn’t smile. “Letter received,” she said. “Reply follows.” She moved her attention wide enough to take the whole room in. “Don’t treat me like contraband. Or like a grenade. Or like a saint. I’m crew. We know how to do crew.”

Sora breathed out, and this time she let it shake. “Copy that,” she said. “Now let’s go learn a Sovereign’s hallways before we’re late for our own life.”

“New rule,” Grak said. “No one says ‘late to our own life’ without paying me a credit.”

“Invoice me,” Sora said, grinning.

The hum lowered. The light in the pit settled to a patient glow. They had made a person in the heart of a ship that wasn’t supposed to matter to anyone else. They were going to hand her to a Starfleet starship and ask it to behave.
Sora cracked her neck, rolled her shoulders, and reached for the Redline canister.

“Time to get dressed,” she said.

“Plenty of time,” Gareth said again, and if it was a lie, it was the kind that kept you moving.

Sora carried Redline like a talisman as they broke the holopit down to travel. Grak and Vaela lifted the Mirror Node pallet onto a mag-sled with an efficiency that would have made a security officer think they’d done this before. They had, in other ways. Vess checked the Memory Curtain map one last time and folded the paper copy into his pocket. He would keep it, Sora knew, because doctors kept talismans too.

Tara stepped out of the holopit with a practical grace, late-twenties, pale freckling at the cheekbones, and a neat crop of copper-red hair that keeps to its lane even when the air hums. The eyes are TESSA’s calm, set a whisper wider; the mouth carries a pilot’s half-smile when she’s thinking three moves ahead. A slim, iridescent pendant—the Soul-Bond token—rests at her throat, catching light when she turns. Voice: warm contralto, measured, with a dry cadence that lands jokes like soft flares.

Tara moved like TESSA and not like TESSA, familiar balance laced with new mistakes, a foot placed a centimeter differently, the weight of a token against the sternum when she turned. Sora watched for wobble and found none. Wobble would come later, when the corridors were unfamiliar and the voices new. For now, the room was full of people who would step between Tara and anything with teeth.

“Question,” Sora said, as they reached the hatch. “Do we… tell them?”

“Which them,” Vaela said.

“Them them,” Sora said. “Arawyn. Do we walk in saying, ‘this is our courier fork with a seventy-two-hour sunset and a family charter,’ or do we smile, park Annex A, and start with "Watch me work?”

Gareth didn’t slow. “We start with Watch me work.”

Vess coughed delicately. “And then we tell them, with informed consent and respect, when the captain asks the right questions.”

“Which he will,” Vaela said. “Or she. Or they. Captains are people with oaths and fears. If we make them choose fear, it will be our fault.”

“Noted,” Sora said. She tucked Redline under her arm like a kid with a toy and grinned at Tara. “First thing you’re going to learn about me,” she said. “I don’t have an indoor voice.”

“I’ve reviewed your record,” Tara said, perfectly solemn. “The indoor voice was discontinued two careers ago.”

Sora laughed. Old weather left. New weather shouldered in: the charged, delicious kind that meant a race you wanted to run. She would run this one until her lungs burned and the bad guys were behind them and the captain had learned a new word for family.

They hit the corridor. The ship’s heartbeat was steady underfoot. The deck lights made a runway and the door to whatever came next hung open in her head.

Sora went first, because someone had to, and because she always did.

End Log

The Crew of the Long Haul

 

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