Pendt put her hand on the wall and felt the quiet rumble of the structural integrity generators. They, like all the rest of the station’s life support, were tied to the Brannicks, making them lord and master of everyone and everything on board. Pendt didn’t imagine she would ever come to their attention. She had no lord or master now and didn’t plan to ever again.
There were a few details to work out, of course. She would have to find a job and a place to live. She wanted to be independent of the Harland, and she had to bet on them leaving before they missed her. Once they were gone, there was no way her aunt would expend fuel to come back for a useless member of the crew. The neglect that had caused her so much pain as a child worked to her advantage now. She just needed to stay away long enough for them to go, and then she would be free. Surely someone on this station would have need of a cook. Pendt looked down at her bare arms. It didn’t seem likely anyone would hire her for her sense of fashion.
The colonnade seethed around her and she moved along with the flow of the crowd. There were shops selling everything Pendt could imagine and more than a few things she couldn’t. She’d never seen so many things before in her entire life. The Harland’s sharp austerity seemed colder than ever. This was probably the reason her aunt forbade anyone from leaving the ship the rare times the Harland was docked somewhere. Her aunt walked a hard line and forced everyone to walk it with her. She said it was necessary for space, which was dark and death and completely unforgiving, but Pendt was starting to wonder if maybe she just hoarded her family as much as she hoarded their calories.
Speaking of calories. It was time she found some, before she started to feel light-headed. She hadn’t done this much æther work on purpose in her entire life, and she had no idea what the aftereffects were going to be.
She picked the establishment playing the loudest music, because it made her stomach rumble with something other than hunger, and she found that she liked the sensation quite a bit. She observed, circling the dance floor like a cat, as people at tables drank brightly coloured concoctions that smoked or bubbled or frothed, or sometimes did all three at once. Placed along the bar at regular intervals were tiny dishes filled with round tabs that Pendt thought might be edible. Her suspicions were confirmed when she saw a woman with spacer-short hair and a bright red bodysuit take a handful of them, and eat them all at once.
Pendt’s mouth watered. She didn’t even care what they tasted like. She had never seen anyone eat anything so carelessly, ever. Even when her brothers tormented her by flaunting their larger portions of food in her face, there was a sense of desperation, of gratefulness, to their behaviour. To eat and not care who was watching or how much you chewed or how many calories were left for others was a dream. Brannick Station was some kind of paradise.
Pendt slid up to the end of the bar, hoping to avoid the server’s notice for as long as possible, and helped herself to one of the tabs. It was salty, but more than edible, and Pendt took a handful to put in her pockets in case the servers chased her out when they realized she didn’t have any money. These would give her enough calories to hold on until she found a more reliable source. A little voice whispered that she could change back, if she wanted. That it wasn’t too late, and she could go home, but she didn’t listen. Home was behind her now. She was never going back to the Harland again. She ate four more of the tabs in a single mouthful, breaking them with her teeth and dragging the sharp edges along her tongue.
She was so focused on the little cup and the balls that she didn’t notice the two figures that came to sit beside her until they were perched on the stools. They didn’t flank her, so she didn’t panic entirely, but they definitely noticed her, and Pendt didn’t like what followed when people noticed her, particularly when she was eating. They were between her and the main exit, but she thought that she could lose them on the dance floor, if she needed to. She was smaller than they were, and had spent a lot of time moving through small spaces. She took a quick glance sideways to get a better look at them.
One of the figures had an open face—the sort of mark that her aunt liked to trade with—and was already smiling, half lost in the music. It was striking, to see someone so relaxed. Pendt didn’t think she had ever been that comfortable in her life, let alone in a crowd. A part of her ached, wondering what her life would have been like if she hadn’t always been so afraid. She was going to change that now too.
The other boy was all lines and angles, his nose like the prow of a grounding-ship and his face shaped to cut through atmosphere with no resistance. He had the face of someone who was listened to, but unlike her brothers, he didn’t seem made cruel by it. Neither of them looked to be much older than Pendt’s seventeen years, and she hadn’t made herself look older when she changed, so maybe they just thought she would be good company. For some reason.
The first boy was looking straight at her, the way her aunt did when she was about to administer a judgement. Pendt was no stranger to direct confrontation; it just always went badly for her. She braced herself for something terrible, but when the second boy spoke, his words held none of the venom she was so used to taking.
“Now tell me,” he drawled, helping himself to the tabs Pendt had left in the cup, “what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“HIGH, HIGH HOPES FOR A LIVING”
As dying breaths go, the Stavenger Empire had a good one. They made sure they didn’t go into the dark alone. Unwilling to cede power, even in death, the Stavengers took a large portion of the galaxy with them when they went, and made life challenging for all those who remained.
The empire used up the last of their grain-mages by making æther locks. Each station was locked to the genetic code of the station’s ruling family and controlled by the Y chromosome. If either code or chromosome was ever absent from the station, all functions ceased. It wasn’t just that the Nets and Wells wouldn’t work, the lights and the air recyclers and the heaters would cease to function too. To leave a station un-ruled was to kill it. The rebel leaders could no longer command from the front, and their sons’ every breath was the future of the station’s entire population.
* * *
• • •
The stations had been almost entirely united. The leaders of each family rallied their people to battle, and the people were willing to fight for them. No one could have anticipated the deterioration of the æther, and even after magic became unreliable, no one imagined the Stavengers would sacrifice so much for control they had already lost.
Records were essentially unobtainable, given the distance and political situation, but scholars on Katla Station estimated that more than a thousand gene-mages, called grain-mages by the Stavengers, would have been needed to make the gene-locks. Part of this was because it was a huge and intricate piece of magic. The other part was that they had to do it simultaneously for six different targets: Brannick, Enragon, Katla, Skúvoy, Hoy, Ninienne.