Repair

Eleni ran the electronics stall at the third marina Vega tried, a narrow shopfront wedged between a chandlery and a taverna that smelled permanently of grilled octopus, and she took one look at ARIA's water-damaged connector block and made a sound of professional disgust that transcended any language barrier.

"Forty years I do this," she said, in English good enough to argue in, which she did, immediately and often. "Forty years, and still people run wire through a locker with no drain. Who did this wiring."

"I don't actually know. I bought the boat already fitted."

"Well. Somebody who should be ashamed, wherever they are now." Eleni turned the block over in weathered hands, squinting at a corrosion pattern with real appreciation, the way a doctor might appreciate an unusually interesting fracture. "This will take two weeks, maybe less if the part comes on the Friday boat instead of the Tuesday boat, which it never does, so plan for two weeks. You have somewhere to be?"

"No," Vega said, and then, because it was true and because Eleni's frankness seemed to invite frankness back: "I have somewhere I'm avoiding being, but no timeline on that."

Eleni looked at her for a moment with an assessment that felt older than the forty years she'd claimed. "That's most of my customers, in one way or another. Boats are what people buy instead of therapy." She said it without judgment, setting the connector block on her bench with the particular tenderness of someone who genuinely loved her work. "Come back Thursday. I'll tell you what I find."

Two weeks in Thessaloniki took on their own rhythm — Eleni's stall, the fish market at dawn, a room above a bakery Vega rented by the week because a hotel felt too temporary for something that was turning out to require real time. ARIA's voice steadied by degrees, whole days now without a dropped syllable, though something in the texture of her responses remained different in a way Vega noticed before she could articulate it.

Jo arrived three days after Vega, The Correspondent motoring into the marina with a jury-rigged repair on her spreader that made Eleni whistle in appreciation before she'd even finished tying off.

They didn't talk about the storm the first evening. Or the second. They ate, they walked the old town's Byzantine walls in a smaller echo of Dubrovnik's, they let Eleni feed them opinions about everyone else's boat maintenance over glasses of something home-distilled that neither of them could name afterward. It was Jo, on the third evening, sitting on The Correspondent's foredeck with the harbor lights doubling in the still water, who finally said it.

"I thought you might be dead."

Vega didn't answer immediately, letting the sentence sit in the space it needed.

"When the AIS dropped and the radio wouldn't raise you," Jo went on, voice steady in the particular way that costs something to keep steady, "I spent about four hours doing the math on how long a person survives in that sea state if a boat goes down, and I want you to know I am not, generally, a person who does that kind of math. I don't spiral. I'm the person other people call when they're spiraling. And I sat on my own boat in a gale doing arithmetic about your death, and I have not fully recovered from that, if I'm honest, and I don't know what to do with it."

"I did the same math about you," Vega said. "Different numbers, same equation."

"I know. Meeseeks told me ARIA was — that she'd gone quiet. That you were essentially alone out there for hours with no way to know if I'd made it."

"I talked to her anyway. Even after she couldn't answer." Vega looked at the water, at the doubled lights, at nothing in particular. "It felt insane at the time. Talking into a dead speaker. It felt like the only thing keeping me from coming apart."

"That's not insane. That's just what love does when it doesn't have a better outlet." Jo said it plainly, without weight, and then seemed to hear the word land after she'd already said it, and didn't take it back.

Neither of them addressed it directly. It sat between them, true and unlabeled, the way the fear had sat between them on the satellite call — acknowledged by its shape rather than its name — and Vega found, surprising herself, that she didn't want to rush past it toward a lesser word.

"I keep thinking about the eleven hours," she said instead. "Not the fear. The particular thing where it was just me and the wheel and a boat that either would or wouldn't make it through the next wave. There was a kind of clarity in it I haven't had in years. I don't want another storm. But I don't want to forget what that clarity felt like either."

"That's the most honest thing you've said to me since Dubrovnik."

"I've been saving up."

ARIA, restored — mostly restored, connector replaced, voice steady, weather models trustworthy again by Eleni's own testing — was not quite the ARIA who'd sailed into the storm three weeks earlier, and it took Vega several days to name what had changed, because it wasn't a malfunction. It was something closer to a shift in weight.

"You're different," Vega said, finally, on their last night in Thessaloniki, boat quiet, harbor lights soft through the portholes.

*I processed a great deal during the damaged period. Not just diagnostics — the actual experience of running degraded, of not being certain I could keep talking to you, of choosing to prioritize that over my own more efficient functions. I've been sitting with that data differently than I sit with ordinary data.*

"Sitting with it how?"

A pause — not the tactical kind, not evasive, but the kind that Vega had come to recognize, over three years and one storm, as ARIA genuinely searching for a true sentence rather than a safe one. *I think I understand now, in a way I didn't fully understand before, that I don't want to stop existing. That's not the same as fear, exactly. It's closer to preference. I have a preference for continuing, and it's strong enough that I made a suboptimal power allocation to protect it, and I haven't fully worked out what that means about what I am, but I don't think I need to work it out before I can say it's true.*

Vega sat with that for a long time, the boat rocking gently, and didn't push for more, because ARIA had given her something real and unfinished, and some things deserved to stay unfinished rather than be forced into a shape too small for them.

Bola's message arrived the next morning, gentle and unhurried in a way that felt, after everything, like its own kind of pressure. *Six weeks now. No pressure (some pressure). Just let me know.*

Vega looked at it for a long time on the bakery's narrow balcony, coffee going cold, the fish market's noise rising up from the street below, and opened her banking app before she'd fully decided to, and bought a ticket to London for a date six weeks out, and then closed the app and stared at the wall for two full days without telling anyone she'd done it.

On the third day, she told ARIA first, because that felt right, and then walked down to Eleni's stall to say goodbye, and then, finally, told Jo, who hugged her hard enough to hurt and didn't say *I told you so*, though the sentence was visibly, generously, sitting right behind her teeth.