The week keeps her busy. She's starting to get used to the Garrison. She remembers to answer to Pidge when the instructor calls roll, catches up on most of her reading at least enough to fake her way through class, and stops worrying about using the bathroom. (The men's rooms are universally revolting, but absolutely no one notices or cares if she uses a stall.) The guys in her dorm have given up on socializing with her, which is just as well. She hadn't realized how alike she and Matt looked until she cut her hair. No one seems to have made the connection, but she's not interested in tempting fate. Classes have picked up in earnest, and between her two labs, she's stretched thin. They're supposed to be assigned to flight teams later in the semester, and although that's where she needs to be, it'll be two more people she has to dodge and she's already sure it's going to be a problem.
Her mother must have filed a police report by now. She's officially a missing person. She tries not to think about that too much.
She distracts herself with plans for receiver testing, trying to figure out if she needs to bring anything extra if whatever location Keith has in mind doesn't work out. She also spends a not-insignificant amount of time trying to figure out what that sound was. She's never spent time in nature that she didn't have to, but she's lived by the Garrison all her life and she's never heard anything like it. She trawls through meteorology articles and bottom-of-the-barrel internet forums, but none of the spooky desert noises she digs up seem to match. Keith had acted like it was a regular occurrence.
He'd definitely been surprised she'd heard it.
There's maybe a lot to unpack there, and she's not remotely qualified to do it. But it's a weird, uncanny sound, and if she'd heard it by herself out in the middle of the desert, she's not sure she'd think it was anything but her mind playing tricks on her either. Dehydration, or sunstroke, or just lack of sleep, maybe. If someone else heard it afterwards, she might be surprised too.
When Saturday comes around, she signs out a bike again and makes the trip down to the dusty commuter parking lot at the edge of town, her chest tight with anticipation. At first, she doesn't see Keith, and her stomach hollows out, wondering if he's decided not to show up. But she drives to the far end of the lot and finally spies him leaning up against an older model red and white bike, tapping his fingers on the helmet resting on the seat. Once he notices her, he straightens up and raises a hand. She lets out a breath and eases the bike forward.
He eyes her hands on the bike's handlebars and frowns. "You okay to go on the highway?"
It strikes her that if he knows she's Matt's sister, he might realize she's not supposed to have a license for at least another year. "I did fine last time," she snaps.
He shrugs and reaches for his helmet. "It's not far."
He pulls the helmet on and she follows him out of the lot. There's not much traffic this early, but Keith keeps to a suspiciously moderate pace for someone with honors scores on the fighter track, and she works up some justified irritation at the thought that he might be doing it for her benefit. Eventually, they turn off onto a lonely exit that peters out into a dirt road, and then no road at all. The landscape all looks the same to her, but Keith seems to know where he's going, and soon she spots a structure in the distance, a dark spot up on top of a scrubby little hill. Keith makes for it, and a couple of minutes later they pull up in front of it.
It's a rundown shack, with no sign of any other buildings to explain its presence. She can see cheap paper blinds in the windows, and a spot on the roof that's been clumsily patched. There's a neat row of rocks lined up on the front step, and she catches the white flash of fossil shell in the ones closest. It doesn't look like a utility shed or an outbuilding. It looks like a place someone lives.
Keith dismounts, and after a moment, she does too. He shifts awkwardly on his feet. "I figured maybe you could use the porch. If you need more open space, there's kind of a hill over that way," he jerks his thumb out to the desert, "but if you take the porch, at least you get some shade."
She hesitates for a moment. She wants to ask what this place is, if he lives here, but she can guess it probably won't go over well. It feels a little like she's intruding, but he's invited her here and she can already see the heat haze starting to shimmer over the flat ground. "I'll take the porch."
Keith, to her surprise, cracks a shy, rusty smile. "Good choice." He blinks and gives a slight shake of his head, as if he's surprised himself as well.
She unpacks her gear from the saddlebags and starts setting up. Keith helps, surprising her again. She's not sure what she'd expected - maybe for him to quietly vanish off into the desert - but he helps her carry everything over to the front of the shack and connects the cables she tells him to. When it's done, she sits on the shaded edge of the porch and watches the first blips of calibration data come in while the receiver aligns to its new coordinates. Keith hovers behind her for a few seconds, an uneasy presence at her back, before awkwardly sitting down on the porch as well, a little ways apart from her.
"You said you didn't think Kerberos was pilot error," he says finally, with no preamble.
She lets out a breath. "They didn't tell us anything until two days after the landing. Why wait if it was a crash?" She swallows. "I found the log for the first day. They were collecting samples. They had to have landed."
There's a quiet inhale from where Keith is sitting very still at her side. "'Found?'" he says after a moment.
She stares hard at the calibration data, the words jammed under her tongue. It's not a story she's told anyone else. "I snuck into the Garrison so I could get on the network. Got caught and they threw me out." She draws her knees up and clutches them tight to her chest. The rest comes out in a rush, halfway without her meaning to say it. "Enrolled as a cadet. Pidge. No one's figured it out yet."
She waits anxiously in the silence that follows, cold despite the desert heat. It's much more than she'd planned to tell him.
"…Should I call you Pidge?" Keith says hesitantly.
It bleeds the tension right out of her, and she rests her forehead on her knees against an ugly snort of laughter. The corners of her eyes are a little wet, and she's not sure why. "Pidge is fine." She surreptitiously scrubs her eyes across her sleeve and the rest of it comes pouring out. "There was more on Kerberos in there. They're hiding something. I'm going to get back in, and this time they're not going to catch me." She inhales and gestures at the receiver. "But I can't just wait, so-"
Keith blinks. "Kerberos' black box signal." He frowns, twitches his shoulders like a chill's run up his spine.
She blinks too, a little startled that he's made the connection. Though maybe it makes sense - he'd been in his last year as a cadet before he'd left the Garrison. Just short of starting to fly real vehicles. "Yeah."
He's quiet for a minute. "If you find it, I can help you figure it out." He glances away, thumb running restlessly back and forth over his knuckles. "I flew the sim for the landing a couple of times. Shiro snuck me in."
"Was he your brother?" she asks, before she can stop herself.
His shoulders hunch and his face does something complicated. "No."
She winces and stares down at the ground. "Sorry."
After a second, his posture loosens. "It's okay."
She bites her lip, thinking. She could figure out a lot from a black box record herself, but someone who's actually trained for flight, who knows what a Kerberos landing is supposed to look like, could see a lot more. "It's. Um. It's definitely very illegal. Not listening to the signal, but cracking the encryption. And stealing files off the Garrison network. Just so we're clear."
Keith snorts. "I guessed."
"Okay." She and her new accomplice sit there quietly for a minute while the alignment finishes. "You don't think it was pilot error either," she ventures.
Keith gives a small shake of his head. "No. Shiro was really good. The landing procedure's mostly automated. There's no atmosphere to screw you up. He wouldn't make that kind of mistake." His jaw sets stubbornly. "I know that-"
"It doesn't sound stupid," she bites out, and pauses, surprised at her own outburst. She shakes her head clear and takes a breath. "I mean, you knew him, right?"
There's a beat of quiet and she watches as the stiff line of Keith's back slowly slackens. "Yeah," he says.
The receiver beeps to let her know it's finished aligning. Keith looks on for a few minutes while she sets up the gain and filter settings for the next tuning cycle before clearing his throat.
"You, uh. Want a glass of water?"
She blinks. It's dry and hot, and she realizes suddenly that it's already been a couple of hours since they met up at the commuter lot. "Yeah. Thanks."
He stands and goes to the door, digs in his pocket a minute for the key. He opens it, and she has a quick view of a tiny, dim room crowded with a futon and a low cinderblock table. She's struck by an intense feeling of déjà vu, a sense that if she walked in after him every lump in the futon would be familiar and she'd be able to name the books piled on the floor without looking. She looks away, unnerved, and focuses on her tuning algorithm.
The door creaks open again and the porch thunks hollowly as Keith sets a mug down beside her.
"Thanks."
He grunts an acknowledgment and sits back down in his spot. Neither of them say anything for a bit. Pidge sips her water and plugs in her next set of parameters. Keith alternately watches her and stares out into the desert. It should be uncomfortable, but somehow it isn't. She kicks off the tuning cycle and glances over to him, the mug clasped between her hands.
"Are you going to tell me what that sound last week was?"
He doesn't visibly shift, but something about his posture goes still and wary. The fingers of the hand she can see tap slowly on the porch's edge. For a minute, she thinks he might not answer, but then his fingers still. "I'm not sure what it is." He hesitates. "I've been calling it the Knell."
She coughs out half a laugh. "Seriously?"
He scowls. "I had to call it something."
"It's just so dramatic."
"You have anything better?"
She snorts. "No. Fair." She kicks a leg over the edge of the porch and leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees. "Does it happen a lot out here?"
"Every few days." He pauses and his shoulders hunch a little. "Been hearing it ever since Kerberos."
"Huh." She can see why he's reluctant to admit that.
"I'm not sure it really is a sound," he says quietly, staring out into the desert. "I've heard it in town a few times. No one else seems to notice."
She blinks and assesses that. Her thoughts go back to the way he'd put a hand to his chest, like he could feel something ringing through it. "Are you proposing that it's a… I dunno, a-" she grimaces "-vibe?"
He winces almost imperceptibly.
She turns the thought over, thinks back to what she remembers about the Knell. There'd been an unreal quality to its length and pitch, something wrong about its echo. Or maybe its lack of echo, she realizes with a start. Maybe it only reads as a sound because that's the closest thing her brain can supply. She shivers, but a thrill of excitement runs up her spine.
"Maybe you're right," she says. "It's definitely not just you hearing it, though. Or feeling it, I guess."
He makes an indistinct humming noise, shoulders relaxing. She thinks that's the end of it, but he surprises her. "There's a direction to it," he offers, and waves a hand towards the horizon. "It's coming from somewhere over there."
"Really?" She squints, but it looks exactly like every other piece of the horizon.
"I've been trying to find it."
"Can I help?" The words jump out without her meaning them to.
His eyes dart over to her. After a second, he shrugs and his lips twitch. "Sure. You're stuck hearing it too."
It belatedly strikes her that she's just committed them to meeting up again, but she finds she doesn't really mind. "Thanks," she says after a minute. "For letting me come out here."
Keith's face goes blank and startled before settling into determined lines. When he speaks, his voice is quiet and rough. "I want to know what happened to Kerberos. What happened to Shiro. Come out here whenever you like."
She bites her lip for a second, and then sticks her hand out. "Partners?"
Keith stares at it a moment. His expression eases and his hand briefly clasps hers. "Yeah."