“If it were your own mothers,” the prince said to everyone in the ballroom, “your own fathers, your own siblings, your own children, if you would have a kingdom bar their doors to your own in their hour of need”—he seemed to eye each of them at once—“then please”—he gestured as though to offer the floor—“let us hear your objections.”
My breath caught.
His words were as neatly forged as the gold of a crown.
The guests, with their damask and wine, stood silent.
The pride on the king and queen’s faces brightened the glow in the hall.
The prince looked to me.
Go, he mouthed without sound.
Thank you, I said just as silently.
Relief and sadness crowded my heart. I had done what I thought myself too small to dare. But to this young man I had danced with, this young man who had stirred in me the slightest measure of how my mother Alicia looked at my mother Lydia, I would never again be seen as anything but la campesina. I was nothing more than the simple country girl who had snuck into the palace for an audience with his mother and father.
He would never know me, and I would never know him, beyond tonight.
I shored up the crack in my heart. I let myself sink into the knowledge that I would forever be grateful to the prince, from this moment and into the years after he was crowned in his father’s place.
Guards led me to the stable. Grooms lent me boots for riding. They showed me to a mare who let me approach her in a way that spoke of her tameness, but who breathed in a way that signaled how ready she was to run.
A pair of heavily gloved hands helped me up into the embossed saddle.
I looked to the groom to say my thanks.
A familiar face caught me, along with the green smell of campanilla vines.
He wore the plain trousers and tunic of a rider, his chest bound underneath.
The prince set a hand on the mare’s haunch. She turned her head as though greeting him.
His eyes shone in the dark.
“If you’ll let me go with you…,” he said.
The glint to him was different than by the ballroom’s candlelight. Here, in the blue dark, it was more pain than mischief.
“I know it’s your home.” He cleared his throat, as though the words came hard. “But they’re my family too. All those like us, we belong to each other.”
My own throat clenched.
I lifted his hand to my mouth, pressing my lips to his fingers, the closest to a yes I could manage.
He understood, giving me a slight nod as he pulled himself onto a gray stallion.
And we rode out into the dark, toward everyone we called our own.
If I could do one thing over—if I had one opportunity to correct a mistake or right a wrong or fix a problem—I would ask Nana Gbemi if fufu should be pinched off or twisted off. She’d taught me the recipe on my seventeenth birthday. The best going-away/birthday gift I’d ever received, since she holds on to recipes like she used to hold on to my ears when I got in trouble.
“Kweku?” A gentle clap on the shoulder accompanied the question. “You all right?”
I shook myself out of my memories. The ship’s ancient lift groaned to a halt at the Science and Research module. This was my stop. I smiled wearily at the older boy staring at me with concern.
“Tired, Tomas. Tired. Reran those numbers for the colony food budget. Took way too long.” A yawn split my words as if to punctuate my point. “Need to check on the babies before I crash—if I can get in my office. The door’s been acting up.”
Tomas flashed his trademark grin—all gold teeth and dimples framed by a smooth brown face. He gestured at the lift. “Good luck, bro. This whole ship’s been acting up. I’d help, but Hustlin’ Harry wants another run-through on the drop-ship landing.”
Harold Bolaji, our leader and mentor, and the ship’s captain, earned his nickname when he famously worked three straight shifts trying to retrofit the ship’s filtration system with “improved adsorption purifiers.” Rumor has it he hated the lingering odors after the cafeteria’s Fish Frydays.
“Again?” I asked.
Tomas nodded. “He wants to be absolutely certain the ‘process proceeds propitiously,’ or whatever he says.”
“I guess. Don’t pull an all-nighter—we need you for loading tomorrow.”
“If Harry doesn’t want to do another inventory count, sure. Otherwise—” He shrugged, the universal sign for Harry’s going to be Harry, then changed topics. “How’s Nana?”
I tensed. At first, I thought he meant my grandmother, but then my shoulders relaxed. No one knew how the unofficial name for my project first came about. One day it slipped into a conversation, it felt right, and so it stayed.
“Fine. Should be ready once we touch down.”
“Glad to hear it. I—”
“Tomas, Harry.” The hail came through fuzzy and distorted on the general line. Tomas sighed and fiddled with the old comm system clipped to his belt. I snorted, and the older boy glared at me as he played with the dials. Eventually he got the system working and cleared his throat.
“Tomas here.”
“Run-through’s in ten. You see Kweku?”
Tomas glanced up at me. “Not since this morning.”
I mouthed Thank you, and he rolled his eyes.
“Well, if you do, tell him I need those numbers run again—they’re too high. And tell him to come to the run-through once he’s done.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Roger. Tomas out.” A frown crossed his face as he disconnected. Tomas patted his pocket, then reached in and pulled out a thin, twisted piece of metal. “Here.”
“What’s this?”
“Your door isn’t the only one acting up. Francis and I had to break into our room a few days ago. Papi taught me how to make these when I was little. ‘Papi’s Last Resort,’ he called them.”
I took the lockpick and grinned. Tomas’s grandfather was nothing if not a scourge on the elderly community he stayed in. The thought of the tiny old man clothed in nothing but a too-short bathrobe playing cat burglar pulled a chuckle from me. Tomas grinned. No doubt the same image played in his mind, but too quickly my grin faded and I sighed.
“He would’ve loved the colony. My nana too. The real Nana,” I added for clarification. I fiddled with the lockpick. “Do you ever—”