Marion’s gaze moved sluggishly across the paper, weighed on by the first signs of fatigue. He sighed, resting his head with a hand on his temple. Just three nights into Vigil and the low-light strain was already impeding his productivity; not long ago he might have worked straight through the season, with only the biting wind outdoors to remind him of the long dark. The corrective eyeglasses he’d so reluctantly incorporated into his workflow seemed less a crutch and more an ankleweight, his dependence growing by the day. He loathed the thought of those wires permanently affixed to his face, like retrofitting machinery past its service lifetime. Raising his head again, he moved to adjust his electric desk lamp. Defeat.
Relaxing his eyes, he returned to the document at hand. Figures leapt off the page in the warm light, documenting the assembly process for the rockbreakers’ new end effector. The powder-driven chisel was proving difficult to reinforce against fatigue; this latest revision in the design would hold up well, but introduced significantly more complexity for the crews meant to deploy it in situ. Even he would have lost track of the version number, were it not printed in block letters in the corner of the page. He knew, of course, that all this iteration was necessary, critical; still, he’d be glad to see the final revision shipped.
As he compared an older version against his present charge, the secondary articulation point caught his attention. That joint had seen more significant improvement than any other part of the assembly. Only minor adjustments to the arrangement of these components had been made, but the result had almost totally resolved the risks associated with this joint. It was elegant work; the kind so characteristic of her.
That subtle weight had returned to his chest. Noira had been a truly remarkable asset on his team. She had taken his direction and magnified it, exceeding his expectations for any of his engineers, let alone a junior trainee. This was the quality of work that his division had needed to leap ahead of schedule; the entire program benefitted from a mechanic of her caliber. In return, it was clear that she was flourishing in this environment as well. He had seen such growth from her in such a short few months that nothing could have possibly tempered his expectations for her future.
He sighed again, sitting back from his work. The howling Orine winds scattered icy flurries across the window of his office. She had been impressionable, as she always was. Tanura was such a novelty to her. He had offered his best guidance, knowing the kinds of influences that lay beyond the company district, the cacophony of voices that could lead her naivety astray. It was just what he had been afraid of, with Noira so vulnerable after the accident. The last thing she needed were the insidious seeds of distrust; distrust in the company, and in him. He remembered her face vividly, tormented by fear, confusion…and betrayal.
As it had then, the memory pierced deeper than he cared to acknowledge. It hadn’t been the same helplessness he’d seen in the accident; there was another, more sinister component. All her anxieties had become twisted into a vicious anger, directed towards the company which had provided so much for her, had housed and fed her to a standard of living far beyond what he knew she’d left behind. An anger directed at himself, who had moved mountains to take her under his wing, to provide her with every ounce of instruction and mentorship he could, to help her blossom into the accomplished engineer he knew she could become. All of his efforts had been cast aside, burned down and replaced with this tangle of confused morals she had found in the rakish halls of Tanura.
The ice continued to fall, born from the depths of Vigil, coating every surface in its brittle sheen. Before him, the document lay still, bare. He felt his own deep-seated chagrin creeping in from the corners of the room.
Surely there was some way he might have acted differently. Perhaps he had been overly stern; she had felt stifled, it seemed, unable to meet him where he stood. His unwavering ethic had certainly incited this response before. Elias had been much the same. Marion’s commitment to his craft, the insatiable desire to improve, to push his own boundaries, had been unpalatable for his partner – former, he reminded himself. Time and again he had grappled with this snare, how the pursuit of his own fulfillment could nevertheless drive others away, as it had Elias, and Noira.
Marion closed his eyes, listening to the clattering of the tempest. He would complete no more work tonight. At length, he tucked the document into his case, standing blearily from his desk. At the touch of his finger, the electric lamp went out with a crackle.
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