Rebel emblem with 'I love you' and 'I know' lettering

"It won't hold."

"It will if you stop distracting me."

She sat on a crate of ration paste and watched him work, the way she had watched him for six years, since the night the salvage tug Marrow Keel was boarded at the edge of the Hessen belt and they came out of the lock with nothing but their boots and each other's names. He was not a man who said things. He said "Hm" and "Pass the flux" and once, after a fight over a navigation chart, "Don't be stupid." Orla had decided somewhere around the fourth year that she could live with that. She had painted the rebel mark on the bulkhead beside the hatch herself, badly, and he had told her it looked like a sleeping bird. It was still there.

The inspectors came in at twenty-eight minutes. Their scanner chirped over the coolant line, hesitated, and went quiet. "Sealed," Dask said, wiping his hands on a rag that only made them worse. Orla tapped the mark twice with one knuckle, the old signal between them, and kept her face blank while the inspectors signed the manifest and left. When the hatch hissed shut she turned to him and said, the way she always did when the ship drifted away from anything solid, "I love you."

"I know," said Dask, and she threw a ration pouch at his head.

Later, when the tug was running dark through the belt and the only light came from the instrument panels, she found a new line scratched into the paint under the mark, in his careful capitals. It was not a confession. It was not a poem. It said I KNOW, and he had gone over the letters twice so that they stood out clean and black, the way he did everything he meant to keep.