Bit by bit, I carve away the last remains of yesterday’s stress, yesterday’s fear, yesterday’s sheer, manic focus on staying alive. Bit by bit, I pull myself back together until my reflection could be the same one I saw every morning in the dorm bathroom mirrors.
I try to smile, but it doesn’t quite reach my eyes. I look haunted—which I suppose is fair enough. The past three days have been dragging back from the grave the part of me I tried my best to kill. I can’t deny that I still thrill over mentions of suited knights and valiant deeds in the name of the Archon Empire. The promise of heroics turned Seely from a war orphan to a would-be murderer to ashes. And now here I am, clocking in heroic act after heroic act—all for the sake of the Umber Crown and everything it represents.
I’m starting to tear down the middle, and I’m scared shitless of what it could do to me.
When I finally step into the crew cabin, Gal’s sitting in my bunk. Well, to be fair, we never explicitly said whose bunk was whose, but he’s taken the top bunk in every dorm room we’ve ever slept in. He has the decency to look guilty when he sees me at the door. His hands fall away from the datapad in his lap.
“What are you writing?” I ask, moving for the drawers built into the wall. Gal’s already taken the liberty of unpacking both our bags, emptying our clothes into the drawers and folding them neatly. He does this every damn time we go somewhere new—says it helps settle his nerves.
“Right now?” Gal sighs. “A list of people who’ve tried to kill me and why.”
“Am I on it?”
Gal bares his teeth. “I suppose I should count the drop from the window.”
“And the flying—don’t forget the flying.” I towel away the last of the shower’s dampness and pull on fresh clothes.
When I turn around, Gal’s got his lips pursed. “The system governor’s the biggest threat at the moment.”
“Not the potential Archon uprising?”
He waves a hand. “They have no power—only people. And probably not many, at that.” Those words sting and relieve in equal measure, but I try not to let the former show. “Berr sys-Tosa has dreadnoughts at his command. To make it to the interior, we’ll have to go through Tosa System again, and if he triangulates our vector, there’s no way we clear it without getting scooped up.”
His fingertips twitch over the datapad’s screen, pulling up a galactic map. The star systems glitter as he scales them, and even from a distance, I recognize the layout of the Umber interior. The origin of the map, where the three major axes defining its space intersect, points squarely at Acua, the shining star at the heart of the empire’s capital system. Lucia orbits it, marked by a brassy sigil that signifies the home of the Imperial Seat.
Gal drops a marker on his homeworld and pulls back, collapsing the system until he’s considering the vast dark between the stars. He zooms out farther to find the shining mark of Tosa nestled at the center of the other former Archon systems down the galactic arm. Then farther still, until he finds us, hauling ass in the opposite direction, toward the distant reaches of Corinth. His expression goes taut.
I clear my throat. “So we ditch the Beamer in Corinth…”
Gal nods. “We need a different ship. Maybe we can cut some sort of deal for this one—but the sale of a stolen military vehicle is going to raise some red flags, so we have to be prepared to book it right away. Tosa’s going to be watching for it. We need…I dunno, a plan. Something more concrete than switching ships and going back the way we came.” He looks up, noticing the way I’ve frozen against the drawers. Wordlessly, he pats the blanket next to him.
“You’ve got two days to worry yourself into something more concrete,” I mutter, collapsing on the bed. At least he’s thinking about plans now and not leaving them up to me. I thought I’d gotten enough rest dozing in the pilot’s seat, but the mattress beneath me is telling me I was so, so wrong. I close my eyes, my brain already racing toward unconsciousness. Distantly, I feel Gal roll back and hear the clatter of him tossing the datapad aside.
“Ettian?” he asks, before I can go completely.
“Mhm?”
“I should have said it already, but…thank you.”
Those two words and the reverent way he whispers them are the last things I grasp before the emptiness of sleep takes over.
CHAPTER 8
THE NEXT TWO days pass far too slowly.
On every other interstellar voyage I’ve made, I was part of a larger crew—usually a pack of cadets on a training mission or a retreat or a brief period of leave. No matter the destination, the journey was never dull.
But aboard the Ruttin’ Hell, our options are limited. There’s always sleeping—I’m grateful for that. At the academy, we rose with the sun and our assignments kept us up late into the night. Over the two days of travel, I’m catching up on two and a half years of sleep, making full use of the galactic standard’s extra hour. When we’re not sleeping, we spend most of our time planning our approach to Delos, a borderworld on the Corinthian fringe, and plotting how we’ll make berth in a foreign empire without incurring suspicion.
When we’re not doing that, we’re bored. I try my best to avoid thinking of some ways we could relieve our boredom, ways that take advantage of the fact that for now we’re two nobodies, the only life forms for a million miles, wrapped in the silence of the void. No leering fellow cadets, no warnings about fraternization, no fear of destroying our friendship and continuing to share a room in the aftermath.
Keep it together, I think over and over. I try my damnedest to distract myself, but entertainment on the ship is limited to the saccharine pop library Gal’s downloaded onto his datapad and a few stuffy war novels I checked out on mine—all recommended to me by officers and all barely more than jingoistic Umber propaganda written by ex-soldiers. It’s not enough to keep my mind away from where it can’t help straying. There are far greater things at stake than my own heart, and letting it into the mess of what’s happening is asking for trouble.
But Gal keeps sleeping in my bed.
Neither of us acknowledge the second bunk above our heads. We barely acknowledge each other, apart from quick apologies if, gods forbid, one of us bumps into the other. We sleep back-to-back, still and tense, and act like nothing’s happening.
Confront him, half of me insists. Because when all of this is over, he’s either dead or a prince, and he’ll have nothing to do with you then. But it’s hard to let go of a fear you’ve nurtured for so long.
And I don’t even know how long I’ve been afraid of this. There was no moment of sudden clarity. No clouds parting, no sunbeam shining down at the right moment. No single gaze that pierced me through the chest. It was more like a pot set on a low heat, coming to boil. A gradual acknowledgment that yes, this could be an option.