The Garrison empties out on the weekends. Cadets whose families are local go home, and those whose families aren't head out to the town. Katie - Pidge - bullies the sergeant in the garage into letting her check out a bike. He definitely doesn't believe she's sixteen, but that's what her ID says, so she signs the checkout list and the waiver, crams her backpack full of radio equipment into the saddlebags, and inches her way out the facility gates.
(Pidge has a license. Katie doesn't. Katie has a few hours worth of stolen joyrides with Matt in the passenger's seat, ready to take over if she lost control. She's terrified the whole ride.)
She heads out to the desert, to the dusty service road off the highway that cuts right up to a high outcropping, far enough out from town to lose most of the local interference. She pulls the bike off the side, grabs her backpack, and starts walking. She sets up in the highest place she can get, and spends the new few hours tuning the gain and filtering, trying to clean up the spectrum enough to pick out clear signals on the Garrison bands.
There's a scrape behind her. "What are you doing here?"
She jumps and curses as she nearly overbalances her computer. She manages to right it, and turns around, heart still pounding.
The stranger's maybe a few years older than her, with a long, sharp face and a shock of messy dark hair. He's squatting at the other end of the outcropping, squinting at her equipment, one of the dingy orange and khaki shirts the Garrison hands out as casual wear tied around his waist.
"I'm testing something," she says. "What are you doing here?"
He frowns. "I'm from around here. This is private property."
"Oh." She deflates.
His eyes flick again to her equipment. "You can finish up, but find somewhere else next time."
"Fine. Thanks."
He nods and wanders off into the scrub without another word. Katie - Pidge - watches him go, brows raised.
When she gets back that night, she looks up those coordinates on the city property map. They are definitely not private property.
That gets her curious (and honestly, a little pissed) and she goes digging for information on her visitor. At first she thinks he must be another cadet, but a quick perusal of the student directory doesn't turn anything up. She's nothing if not thorough though, and it takes only a little poking around to track down the previous year's directory, still alive on the student intranet but not publicly linked. This strikes the jackpot and she gets a name to go with the face.
She quickly learns that Keith Kogane had been a cadet on the fighter track up until the last year. He has honors scores in the first semester, but not the second, and he's on the list of scholarship recipients. Nothing sticks out and she's about to give it up as a waste of time when she finds his name in a photo caption for the student newsletter. It's the night before the Kerberos launch. Not the public media circus, but the private event for official personnel and crew invitees only. She might even have been in the room when it was taken.
The photographer's focus is on Takashi Shirogane, the pilot. She had met Shiro a few times and liked him. He'd seemed kind and steady, and intelligent in an unassuming way. Matt had talked about him a lot, and he'd been a perennial character in her father's work stories. In the photo, he's looking away from the camera, saying something to Keith, just barely in-frame. Keith's smiling back at him, an easy, open expression that makes him look like a completely different person. She wonders briefly what their relationship is. Cousins? Half-brothers, maybe?
It sinks her mood like a stone, sours her indignation into a heavy knot of guilt and grief rolling around in her gut. She can't think of him as just some jerk out in the desert now. He's someone else left behind by Kerberos, with no good answers for what happened. She wonders if he believes the official line about pilot error. If he blames Shiro for the mission's failure.
She's lost her taste for snooping. She kills the search and shuts the computer down.
The rest of the week passes in a disorienting rush. She burns brain cycles and hours trying to remember where all her classes are and cramming all the material that she's supposed to have studied but hasn't. In class, she sits in the back of the lecture halls and avoids the eyes of the instructors. On her downtime, she dodges the boys in her dorm and watches the bathroom like a hawk so she can use it when it's unoccupied. She eats the crappy cafeteria food alone in a seat at the end of the hall and at night she curls up into the corner of her bunk and wonders if her mom's okay.
And in between all of it, she turns the problem of Keith Kogane over and over, like picking at a scab.
He shouldn't even be a problem. She doesn't know him. She doesn't owe him anything. He's made it clear that he wants to be left alone and the easiest thing is to do just that.
But she keeps thinking about that photo. Whoever Takashi Shirogane was to him, he's gone now. She knows the Kerberos lander didn't crash. He should know it too.
The decision she makes in the end probably isn't the smart one, but it might be moot anyways. The only contact information she can find for him leads straight back to the Garrison dorms. Maybe she could dig up something more with a more aggressive approach, but she's not willing to call attention to herself by poking around in those kinds of databases. Eventually, without any other leads to go on, she decides on returning to the same place the next weekend.
It's easy enough to find the same outcropping and set up her equipment, and she buries herself in tuning the low frequency filtering algorithms. She keeps an eye out this time, but he still manages to surprise her.
"I thought I told you not to come back." He's in nearly the same spot as last time. He's wearing bike gloves and a black t-shirt, which is a weird choice for the weather, but he doesn't seem bothered.
"It's not private property. I checked." He scowls, and she continues before he can say anything. "You're Keith Kogane, right?"
There's a little silence, and he shifts on his feet like he's thinking about about making another exit, but eventually he answers. "Kogane." He pronounces it with three syllables. "What about it?"
She fumbles a little bit. "You knew Takashi Shirogane, right? The Kerberos pilot?"
Instantly, his expression slams shut. "I'm not answering questions about Shiro." He turns to go.
She gets up in a rush and nearly overbalances her computer again. "No, wait-"
He whips back around. "Look, I don't care if you're just curious or you don't mean anything by it. Shiro had nothing to do with what happened to Kerberos. Just mind your own business and-"
He cuts off abruptly, his expression going sharp and distant, and for an instant she's genuinely worried that he's having a seizure or something.
Then she hears it.
It's a low rumbling like thunder, but she looks up and finds the sky clear. There's a pitch to it, an even rise and fall like a voice. Keith puts his hand to his chest, like he can feel it vibrating through his breastbone, and rocks subtly on his feet, his head tilted to the side. It goes on for maybe ten seconds before slowly dying away, leaving her gaping at the cloudless sky.
"What was that?"
Keith freezes for a second. His hand drops from his chest and he pins a careful, assessing stare on her. "You heard that?"
There are a lot of implications in that question, but she's not about to analyze them now. "Yeah, I heard it. What was it?"
He watches her quietly for a long moment. "Who are you, anyways?"
She scowls in frustration. She really, really wants to push for an answer, but it feels like he's about two seconds away from deciding it's not worth it and walking off again. "Katie. Katie Holt," she says after a moment, and sets her jaw. "My dad and brother were on Kerberos. I don't think it was pilot error."
"Oh." His shoulders unhitch and he blinks. "You're Matt's sister."
Hearing Matt's name said so casually, as if he might be just out of sight somewhere, raises a lump in her throat. "Did you know him?"
He shakes his head. "Not really. I met him a couple of times." He hesitates. "Did you know Shiro?"
"A little. Sometimes he came over for dinner. I heard a lot about him from Matt and my dad."
They're both quiet for a minute, and then Keith shifts and cranes his head to look at her equipment. "What is all that?"
"It's for radio transmissions." She bites her lip and eyes him a second before continuing in a rush. "It should be able to pick up signals coming from out in the Kuiper belt. I'm still tuning it, but if there's anything still transmitting on Kerberos, I'll be able to hear it."
Keith's eyes snap back to her. He's quiet for a minute, and she starts to worry that she's made a mistake. But finally, he frowns and looks back at her. "You're bringing it out here, what, to cut down on the interference?"
She lets out the breath she's been holding. "Yeah."
"It's not… a great spot," he says slowly. "It's visible from the highway. Sometimes people call the cops if they see you out here."
She looks down. "Oh."
Keith shifts uncomfortably on his heels. "I know a better place," he says at last. "If you want."
She considers it. Heading out into the desert with a stranger who seems to spend his weekends lurking in the middle of nowhere is arguably not a great life choice. But she wants to know what that sound was, and Keith feels… weirdly trustworthy, in a way she can't quite pin down.
And he's someone else who lost someone on Kerberos. Someone else who knows there's something wrong about the official report.
"All right," she says.