Backdated to October 1st
1037 Words

She checks on the meadow, because Babylon won’t stop telling her about it. Mistral is not underwhelmed. She has seen her crater in the depths of Mercury’s long night, the valley floor covered in snow drifts. Its starkness is impressive then - its beauty is impressive now. Flowers and sprays of long grass have sprung up, reaching to at least her waist. Mendel bounds ahead of her, his head cresting the plants with every leap.

After a moment, she hears a splash. A lake has formed over her labyrinth’s skylight, framed at its far end by the ruins of an ancient castle. It is crystal clear - she can see the glowing flowers in the atrium refracted through the water.

“Mendel,” she says, fixing her dog with a look. “You are going to stink.”

He does not seem to grasp her critique. Mistral pries of her boots and cuffs up her pants, and the water is cool and goes up to her knees. “Okay,” she says. Mendel circles her, barking uproariously, and then tears off through the shallow water. A different Mistral, a girl who never had a mountain come crashing down on her, would have followed.

This Mistral looked down at her feet and exhaled. She wasn’t going to allow herself any more self pity than that. “Mendel,” she called, and her dog was at her side in seconds. “Let’s go back inside, boy.”

Mendel rejoins her, bounding up onto the bank and shaking water from his coat. He falls into step beside her, walking so close that Mistral would worry she might trip if he were any other dog. But Mendel is… Mendel. Fanatically devoted to her wellbeing. And a total slut for milkbones.

They head back down to the lab and she goes back to work tinkering with her database interface - it’s almost done, she thinks. She’s about ready to begin field testing and, assuming that goes well, can begin a staggered rollout…. soon. Maybe by year’s end. That seems like as good a deadline for herself as any. She has no doubts she can meet it - this should have been finished months ago. She’s just being slow.

Babylon shows up about an hour later, having called ahead when he reached his wonder. Mendel meets him at the elevator, circling his legs, tail sweeping back and forth with destructive force (Babylon always brings treats - today is no exception).

“You’re going to make him fat,” says Mistral.

“He’s looking lean,” replies Babylon. “Nice day out.”

“Yes,” agrees Mistral. “I went up to the lake for a bit. Mendel went swimming. Does he stink?”

“Not particularly.” Babylon holds up a bag of carry-out. “Stopped by that vegan place you like.”

Mistral pats the workbench next to her, and Babylon gets to work unpacking the food. “You said you needed the lab for something?” she asked, reaching for the rice. Babylon pauses in shoveling tofu onto his plate.

“Need to recalibrate the alethiometer. Did you know that Ganymede’s a princess?”

Mistral nods. “Got into a bit of a mess on the subway,” she says. “She was there with all her bows and frills… and feathers. Seems a bit unwieldy and inconvenient, to be honest. I spent the whole fight slipping around unnoticed, so I suppose I should thank her - she was an excellent distraction.”

“Anyway,” says Babylon, “I need to swap out the main disk. Change out the partitions, put her symbol on it. Shouldn’t take long.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a symbol for it.”

Babylon has a philosophical look on his face. “Too many more royals, and I’m going to run out of space on the disk,” he said.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” says Mistral, deliberately flubbing the metaphor. Babylon laughs around a mouthful of vegetables. They finish up with the food, and Mistral packs up the leftovers and sticks them in her minifridge - slowly but surely, she’s making her wonder into a fully habitable home.

When she turns back to him, Babylon has his alethiometer out on the counter and is disassembling it was a screwdriver. “You could have waited for me,” says Mistral.

“Nah,” says Babylon. “I want to learn how to do this myself. I lose street cred if I don’t know how to maintain my own gear.”

“Boys and their toys.” Mistral leaves him to it, and by the time she returns with a stack of blank disks, he has the whole thing carefully laid out on the workbench.

“It’s a beautiful piece of tech,” says Babylon.

“I know,” says Mistral. “I made it.” Altered it, really. It had been a compass before. The casing was old, the workings were new. Asimov would have been the moon kingdom’s greatest inventor if she hadn’t been sent to earth as a teenager (Mistral didn’t know what had happened from there - didn’t want to know. She’d been a young girl a thousand years ago, abandoned on a planet that she didn’t know the first thing about, hidden right under the Negaverse’s nose. Mistral was her own descendant, so clearly things had worked out okay, but it was still… weird. And depressing.)
They run disks through the embosser until Babylon finds a layout he’s happy with, and under Mistral’s watchful eye, he puts the alethiometer back together again. It correctly identifies them both as belonging to Mercury, so she figures it’s back to working order and Babylon agrees. “Text me when you get back to Earth,” he says.

“Arkady around?” asks Mistral.

“Left for Avalon yesterday.”

She smirks. “You’re just here because you’re lonely.”

“Guilty as charged,” says Babylon, stepping into the elevator. “See you later.”

He’s gone. Mistral turns around to face her desk again, and Mendel flops down across her feet. She picks up the chivalridex from the workbench and slips it around her forearm - all of its rough edges are gone. It’s a beautiful piece of engineering, one that Asimov would be proud to call her knighthood project.

She runs her hands over the interface, and the holographic display springs to life, data spooling out at her fingertips.

“It’s ready,” she says to her dog. “Now I just have to convince everyone to trust me again.”