And I did. I crushed one alien fleet after another while Kyler cheered for me in the background. For hours we laughed and shouted and victory-danced until both of us collapsed onto the sofa, too tired to move.
“That was a blast,” I said.
“Literally and figuratively,” Ky added. He turned on the lights, and we both squinted at the brightness.
“I had no idea gaming tech had come so far. I’ve been missing out.”
“Maybe once we get back to Earth, you can hang out for a while,” Kyler said. “You know, catch up with the times and all that.”
His voice was full of hope, but he didn’t know what he was talking about. Not that I blamed him. He was a human, sheltered since birth. He hadn’t lived my life. He couldn’t understand what it felt like to be an outsider. Hearing him talk reminded me that even though we both liked video games and old books, we had nothing in common. Nothing real, anyway.
“I heard your Council of Wanderers is meeting with the United Nations this week,” he went on. “They want the right to live on Earth. No more travel visas.”
I huffed a laugh. A travel visa was basically a permission slip to land on Earth and stay for a while, usually long enough to do business with some corporation or another. But anyone with a visa had to pay for every hour they spent on the ground. I doubted the government would give up that money. As for the Council, I wanted nothing to do with them. They would lock me away for life (or worse) if they could.
“Wanting and getting are two different things,” I said. A yawn took over. I hadn’t realized how sleepy I was. “Hey, can you show me which cabin is mine? I need to crash for a while. Blasting pirates and outrunning the law really takes it out of me, you know?”
“Yeah, I can imagine.” He stood up and pointed to a short hall on the other side of the room. “This way. After I find you a bed, I’ll work on finding us something to eat.”
As I followed him across the living room, I noticed a few homey touches I’d missed before. Fuzzy blankets were draped over seat backs. A potted plant with pink flowers in bloom stood brightly in the corner beneath the light of a single nourishing UV bulb. There was even a magnetic chessboard built into the coffee table. Someone had put a lot of care into making the room a place where people would want to hang out.
“Who decorated?” I asked. “Your mom?”
“I dunno,” Ky said with a shrug. “I never asked.”
For some reason, his answer made my face hot. What was his deal? He couldn’t be bothered to notice how nice his ship was? Or that he has parents to decorate it, I said to myself before I could block the thought. All of a sudden my pulse throbbed, and I found myself kicking the back of Ky’s booted heel.
I couldn’t believe I’d done that.
He stumbled and caught himself against the wall. When he turned to me with a frown, I had my apology ready. “Oops, sorry,” I said. “I get clumsy when I’m tired.”
“Yeah. No worries.” He side-eyed me for a second before thumbing at a closed metal door on the left. “You can sleep in my parents’ cabin. It’s the biggest room, plus it has its own bathroom.”
My anger dissolved at once, and I eagerly rubbed my palms together. I had spent so long sleeping in transport chairs or curled up in the corners of buildings that I’d almost forgotten what a real mattress felt like. And the master suite, too! I would sleep like royalty tonight.
But my shoulders sank when the cabin door slid open and the air from inside washed over me. There wasn’t anything wrong with the room. It was actually much nicer than I had expected, decked out with floor-to-ceiling storage drawers and a wall-size entertainment screen that faced a plush double bed. The problem was the smell of lavender face cream lingering in the air. Kyler’s mom must have used the lotion during her last trip—probably the Eterna Beauty brand, the kind that came in a tiny white jar with a silver lid.
I knew because my mom had used it, too.
An invisible fist tightened around my heart. Soon it was hard to breathe. I slammed the door shut so fast that Ky barely had time to yank his fingers out of the way. “I don’t want this room,” I snapped. “You take it.”
He blinked at me as if I’d grown horns and a tail. “Ooooooookay…”
I was in no mood to explain, so I shoved past him and charged toward the only other bedroom on the ship. It was half the size of the master suite with six bunks protruding from the walls. It looked like a prison cell and smelled like gym shoes and sweaty butt cracks.
“Perfect,” I said. “I’ll sleep here.”
Then I shut the door and tossed myself onto the nearest bunk, where I punched a pillow until the hot pressure of tears backed off my eyelids.
* * *
I don’t know how long I slept, but I must have really needed a nap, because I woke up with a pillowcase crease stamped in my cheek, soaked in a puddle of my own drool. That only happens when I sleep hard, like coma hard.
I yawned and stretched and sat up to look around, taking in some details I hadn’t noticed before. A poster hung on the ceiling of my bunk, a glossy photo of some roided-out athlete squashing a football between his hands as if he meant to pop it. If I leaned to the side, I could see posters tacked to the other bunk ceilings, too. Sports was a common theme. There was a zero-gravity soccer player turned upside down to kick a ball over the other team’s heads, a laser sharpshooter on Earth hitting a target on the moon, and a helmeted rodeo rider astride a mechanical bear.
A lot of jocks in this family.
Kyler didn’t strike me as the sporty type, so I kept scanning the posters to figure out which bunk was his. I narrowed it down to two beds: one bearing the image of a dog squeezing out a poo, and another bed that was neatly made, with holographic glow-in-the-dark stars and galaxies stuck to the ceiling in perfect arrangement.
Science geek, I reminded myself. The star bunk had to be Ky’s. It was all the way at the top with barely six inches of wiggle room between the mattress and the dome—clearly the least desirable spot, so either he’d drawn the short straw, or he was the weakest of the pack and his brothers had forced him up there. My money was on scenario number two. He seemed like a neat freak, too, which didn’t surprise me.
I stood up and peeked in the closet, where the smell of gym shoes was coming from. Someone had used a mechanic’s grease pencil to write Aystay outyay ofyay onner’sbay uffstay oryay ieday on the back wall near the storage drawers. That was weird, so I made a mental note to ask Ky what it meant. Four pairs of sneakers were tucked into elastic pockets on the wall, each of them large enough to house an ox. Based on that, I figured Kyler must be the baby of the family. I’d seen his boots. No way were any of these shoes his.
I poked around the storage drawers and found a picture of a shapely cheerleader, along with some holey underwear and unwashed socks—seriously, boys are so gross—but nothing to tell me anything I didn’t already know. And there was no evidence of a girl in the family. Mrs. Centaurus must feel so outnumbered.
The ghost of lavender crossed my nose, so I pushed Mrs. Centaurus out of my mind and quit snooping. I didn’t know why I’d bothered looking around in the first place. It wasn’t like I cared about these people.
My grumbling stomach forced me to leave the man-boy cave. But no sooner had I opened the door than I stopped short and took a backward step. A goofy-looking robot stood facing me, spooling and unspooling metal rope from his armholes as if he were nervous.
I clung to the doorway, unsure of what to do. I didn’t have a lot of experience with robots, but I knew enough not to trust them. The last time I’d let my guard down around a robot, it had held me prisoner for a month. (Long story.) But something in the way this model behaved, fidgeting and rocking from side to side, made him seem more afraid of me than I was of him. So I relaxed and took a forward step.
“Hi,” I told him. “What’s up?”
His digital eyes blinked at me, and he droned, “Hello, weirdo girl, oh crap, don’t call her that, Cabe, that’s not her real name!”
I scowled. It seemed Kyler had been telling tales about me.
“Weirdo girl, oh crap, don’t call her that, Cabe, that’s not her real name!” the robot repeated. “Your title is unusually long. Would you prefer an abbreviated—”
“Call me Fig.”
“Fig is not an abbreviation of your formal title.”
Rolling my eyes, I said, “Fine. Call me Weirdo.”
“Confirmed,” said the robot, Cabe, I assumed. He seemed relieved to have that formality out of the way, because he quit fidgeting with his cable. “I was instructed to watch your door until you awoke, and then escort you to Goosey.”
“Goosey?” My forehead wrinkled until I realized he meant Kyler, and then I let out a chuckle. I was sooooo going to give him heck for that nickname. Sweeping a hand toward the common room, I said, “Lead the way, Cable dude.”
As Cabe rolled ahead of me to the galley, I picked up the scents of garlic and tomato sauce in the air, and my stomach rumbled again. Pasta with marinara sauce was one of my favorites. It was a staple in space, along with chili, beans, rice, and protein cubes, all of which could be canned or dry-stored for years. There were no delivery restaurants in space, no corner markets where you could pop in and grab a frozen pizza if you forgot to cook dinner. Out here in the void, you either meal-planned before a voyage or you went hungry.
When I reached the galley, I found Kyler standing in front of a small two-burner stove, where a pot of boiling water sent steam swirling into the air. If nothing else, at least his parents had taught him how to cook. He didn’t seem to notice me, so I took in the galley, which only required a single glance. It was small, but it had all the essentials I would expect: an oven, a cooler, a metal sink, a picnic-style table with two long benches on either side for seating, a few cabinets, and some steel pans magnetized to the walls. There were no upgrades, but that was all right. I would rather have a battering-ram hull than a fancy kitchen any day.
“Hey, Goosey,” I said, smirking when Kyler flinched. “What’s cookin’?”
He didn’t turn around. Instead, he took a sudden interest in stirring the pot. “Penne and sauce. And don’t call me that.”
“Oh, I think it’s only fair, Goosey, considering the nickname I’m stuck with.”
He cringed. “Yeah, about that…”
I leaned against the doorway with my arms folded. I couldn’t wait to hear him explain his way out of this one.
“You did kind of freak out on me,” he said into the steam. Apparently that was as close to an apology as I was going to get. He pointed a ladle at Cabe and explained, “He’s quirky. I don’t have admin permission to change his settings.”
I shrugged. I supposed it wasn’t fair to hold a grudge against Kyler, considering I planned on swindling him out of his family’s ship. “Goosey and Weirdo,” I said, testing our names. They didn’t sound so bad. “At least we’re not boring.”
“Nothing about this trip has been boring.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” I said. “What’s with Aystay onner’sbay oryay blahtay, or whatever all that nonsense on your closet wall says?” I flapped a hand because I knew I wasn’t getting it right. “It means something, doesn’t it?”
Ky snickered. “It’s pig Latin. My little brother, Bonner, is a super freak when it comes to secret codes. He’s into all kinds of ciphers, but he taught us pig Latin because it’s the easiest. To change a word, you take the first set of consonants and move them to the end, then add ay. So happy would be appyhay. If a word starts with a vowel, you leave it the way it is and add yay at the end. So eat omelets would be eatyay omletsyay.” He lifted a shoulder. “Mostly we use it to talk smack around our parents.”
“What does the writing in the closet mean?”
“Stay out of Bonner’s stuff or die,” Kyler told me. “He doesn’t want us to know he keeps a picture of Lori Ann McCallum in his underwear drawer. As if we haven’t seen him making googly eyes at it ten times a day.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. That explained the cheerleader. “Sounds like he’s got it bad for the girl.”
“Yep, and no shot whatsoever.” Ky lifted his ladle thoughtfully. “Unless she likes the smell of methane. In which case, they’re a match made in heaven.”
“What about your other brothers?” I asked. “What are they like?”
“Duke is the oldest,” Kyler told me. “He eats, drinks, and breathes football. Then there are the twins, Devin and Rylan. They specialize in hacking and wisecracks.”
“Hacking?” I asked. That could be useful. “What kinds of things can they hack?”
“The usual stuff, like computer programs and electronics. And comms, too. Supposedly, if you link the yellow and purple wires before you send a transmission, you can listen in on the caller after you hang up.”
“How’s that possible?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It has something to do with controlling the other person’s mic, kind of how you can hack camera feeds and stuff like that.”
“Huh.” I tucked away that information for later. “So the twins have skills. What can Bonner do?”
“He’s the youngest,” Ky said. “Mostly he’s good at making trouble…and gas.”
“Wow. Sounds like a party.”
“If by party you mean torture, then yeah, it’s a party every day.”
“Goosey,” the robot Cabe piped up. “Galactic law requires the logging of all new passengers. Shall I add Weirdo as a guest, or as a permanent crew member?”
“Add her to the crew,” Kyler said.
“With which level of ship privileges?” Cabe asked.
“Uh, level two, I guess.”
Level two meant I could use the comm station and access every part of the ship except the navigation equipment and the pilot’s controls. “I won’t be able to fly the ship unless you give me level three or higher,” I pointed out. “I come in handy as a pilot.”
“Oh yeah,” Ky said. “Cabe, add her to the crew at level three.”
“Confirmed,” Cabe droned. “Weirdo is added with advanced crew privileges.”
What I chose not to mention—and what Kyler probably didn’t know—was that level-three crew privileges would also allow me to change the name on the ship’s registration. Which I planned to do the first chance I got. A small swelling of guilt needled my rib cage, but I pushed it away, reminding myself that Kyler’s family had plenty of money. Plus, the ship was probably insured for theft. They didn’t need it for survival. They would barely even miss it.
I didn’t want to make Ky suspicious, so I played it cool. At least until the robot wheeled around to face me with eyes that glowed red. Then I jumped back against the wall to put some distance between us.
“Scanning crew member Weirdo,” Cabe said, and after a pause, his tone went berserk. “Advanced radiation levels! Possible contamination detected!” His motor whirred, and a cable spewed toward me from his body. Instinctively, I covered my head, and the next thing I knew, I was trapped inside a dark bubble of metal rope.
I pounded my fists against the “wall” he’d created around me and yelled, “Let me out!” There was no way he heard me, though, because he was too busy shouting, “MORTAL DANGER!” over and over.
“Calm down,” I heard Kyler tell the robot. “She’s not contaminated. She developed a genetic mutation to adapt to radiation in space. That’s what you’re sensing.”
I couldn’t tell what was happening out there, but my heart went into overdrive, and I felt a burst of nervous energy that made me want to run. The space around me seemed like it was closing in, crushing me. I had to get out. Nothing else mattered.
With one shaky hand, I felt along the inside of my boot for the laser knife I kept hidden there. It was a P-class weapon, small but mighty, and more than powerful enough to slice through metal cables like butter. It wouldn’t hurt Cabe, at least not permanently. And it seemed like he had plenty more rope inside him to replace whatever I hacked off. So I flicked the laser
’s switch to maximum strength and unleashed the dragon.
What I didn’t count on was Cabe backing away from me at the exact same time.
Everything happened in a rush after that. The wall of cable dropped as my laser fired a beam of amplified heat across the room. With nothing to block it, the beam hit the stove, where it cut the pot of noodles in half and sent steaming pasta exploding into the air. I cringed, shielding myself from scalding water droplets, which must have caused my laser to cut a path through the ceiling. When I opened my eyes and finally released the trigger, air and steam from the ship’s oxygen system came spewing at me like an upside-down geyser.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
“The stove,” Kyler yelled, pointing and backing away from the bisected oven, which crackled and popped and spat sparks at us like a rabid animal threatening to attack. “I think it’s going to—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish. I knew what was happening. The laser had ignited the oven’s heating core, the second-most-likely cause of ship explosions, right behind igniting the fuel tank. Fed by oxygen leaking from the overhead pipes, the sparks bloomed into instant flames. I lunged for Kyler’s shirt and grabbed him as my feet took control and backed us the heck out of there.
My heart lurched as my boots stumbled to put more distance between us and the rising fire in the galley. Orange flames roared, licking their way up to the ventilation ducts and casting heat through the doorway. Smoke tinted the air, burning my eyes and blurring my vision. Alarms blared through the ceiling speakers, a piercing siren that muddled my head.
Instinct told me that no matter how far we retreated, it wouldn’t be far enough. I’d just begun to panic when Cabe’s outline appeared in the haze. He faced us for one brief moment, only long enough to seal the doorway with a wall of metal rope and trap himself inside the galley.
“Cabe!” shouted Kyler, but the robot couldn’t possibly hear him over the chaos.
I tugged Ky’s elbow toward the stairs and yelled, “Come on.” The safest place for us was near the exit hatch with our emergency helmets and thermal suits on. That way if the ship blew, we’d have a chance—however slim—of surviving long enough for someone to rescue us.
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