Leo realized his mistake as soon as he said it, Us. Because they hadn’t all been left behind. Leo was standing right here. He had gotten out. Just like Gareth promised.
At least this way I’ll know.
Warm tears coursed down both cheeks. He knew they were all watching but he didn’t care.
“Does he have to do that? It’s making me uncomfortable,” Skits asked.
The sound of Kat’s mechanical hand smacking the robot’s steel plating echoed through the cockpit, followed by a heavy silence. Leo kept his head down, afraid to look at them. At least until he heard Baz’s voice again.
“We can’t be sure what happened to your ship or your brother. But . . . there might be a way we can find your dad.”
Leo brushed a tear-smeared cheek against one of the Queleti’s many sleeves. “What?”
“Your father. If he was taken by the Djarik, then there’s probably some record of him in their military database. We could find out where he’s being held. We’d have to hack into it, of course.”
Leo was confused, unsure why the notorious Bastian Black was helping him again.
“You can do that?”
“We can’t,” Baz said. “But there are a couple of guys on Vestra who can.” The captain glanced knowingly at Kat. After a second she threw her hands up in revolt.
“Please, no, Baz. Not them.”
“If anyone can worm their way into the Djarik security system, it’s those two.”
“Yeah, but they’re just so . . . And the one with his . . . you know . . . sitting right there . . . in the thing . . .” Kat shuddered. “It creeps me out just thinking about it.”
Leo sniffed, pulled his borrowed robe tighter around him. “You think they could do it? You think these guys can really find my dad?”
“I don’t know,” Baz said. “I imagine Djarik network defenses are pretty strong. And there is also the question of payment.”
“How much?” Boo asked.
Leo thought of the pentars probably still sitting in the pocket of the captain’s jacket. Leo didn’t have a pentar to his name. If he did, he would have tried to bribe Bastian Black the moment they met.
Apparently it didn’t matter.
“With these two it’s not always about the money. Their forms of acceptable currency are a little more specific. But I think I might have something to persuade them.”
“And what do you get out of it?” Leo wanted to know.
“I’m still just trying to settle up,” Baz said. “I told you I’d try to get you back to your family.”
Leo kept his eyes on the captain. It was a trick his father used against him all the time growing up: just keep staring and the truth wriggles its way to the surface.
“Okay, maybe that’s not all of it,” Baz admitted. “Those fighters were waiting for something. Maybe even for us. That complicates things a little. Contrary to what recent events might suggest, I don’t enjoy being shot at, but if I’m going to be shot at, I’d at least like to know why. This way maybe we can both get some answers.”
Except even if Leo got the answer to his question—whether his father was still alive and where he was taken—it would only lead to an even bigger one.
How could Leo possibly get him back?
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
—Matthew 6:21 (King James Version)
One Man’s Trash
LEO’S DAD TAUGHT HIM ALMOST EVERYTHING HE knew about the universe. The advantage—or disadvantage—of having one of the world’s foremost astrophysicists (among other things) as your father. Dr. Calvin Fender informed his son about planetary bodies and black holes and dark matter and interstellar travel, bought him a high-powered telescope with a digital projector, made him memorize the constellations and their major stars. He talked fast when he lectured, like a kid recounting the scenes from his favorite movie, arms flailing to imitate orbits and explosions and comets streaking across the sky.
The only thing he didn’t teach Leo was how big the universe was, though he certainly tried. He spoke of superclusters and galactic groups. He showed Leo the numbers. Ninety-three billion light-years across (at least what they could see of it), each light-year approximately six trillion miles. “It’s so much bigger than you can even imagine,” Leo’s father told him. And because he said so, and he was the expert, Leo didn’t even try.
So it fell to Leo’s mother to teach him about the size of the universe. She did so one morning while his father was in the study and his brother was still asleep. She was making pumpkin pancakes—a delicacy given the recent scarcity of pumpkin around the world, another casualty of an environment increasingly thrown out of whack.
Seven-year-old Leo sat on the counter next to her while she cooked, helping to sprinkle the chocolate chips into the batter as it sizzled. They reminded him of the stars decorating the night sky, the ones only his father could name.
“You know, when I was born, we had only landed on the Moon,” she said to him. “We hadn’t even set foot on Mars. We weren’t even close. Now Mars has its own Hyatt.” She laughed. Leo’s mother had a strange laugh, the kind that suggests a great deal of effort, like it just took too long to surface and came out at half steam. “Of course we had some help.”
She meant the Aykari. The ones who made human hotels on distant worlds possible. Not just with their faster-than-light travel, though that was the key, but also gravity stabilization, water and oxygen reclamation, terraforming technology—everything humanity needed to fulfill its dream of planting a Starbucks on every rock it could land on. There was a Starbucks inside the Martian Hyatt lobby, or so the commercials said.
“In the past few years I’ve seen people go places my parents could only dream about. I’ve seen pics and vids of planets I never even knew existed. Your father says it’s just the tip of the iceberg. He tells me all the time how amazing it is, and I’m sure he’s right, but you know what? I think it doesn’t matter how far you go or how many planets you see—everything that actually matters is right here.” She pointed to Leo’s head. “And right here.” She pointed to his heart. “Your universe never needs to be any bigger than that if you don’t want it to be. Okay?”
Leo nodded and asked if he could add more chocolate chips. Just as he reached his hand into the bag, he heard an explosion in the distance, felt the house give a little shudder, the glasses in the sink clinking together.
“It’s okay,” his mother assured him. “Just the excavation teams clearing away the mountain to get at more V. Nothing to worry about.”
Yet she stared out the window for a moment, spatula hanging by her side until Leo pointed at the pancakes in need of flipping.
Grace Fender smiled.
“Why don’t you go see if it woke up your brother. Tell him breakfast is almost ready.”
Leo hopped off the counter, the corners of his mouth smeared from sampling the chocolate chips, thinking about what his mother had said, about his head and his heart, and how they could contain an entire universe between them. But mostly he was thinking about how good those pancakes were going to taste.
Six weeks later, the Fenders drove out to L.A. to visit Leo’s aunt.
His shirt had been burned to ashes, and Boo wanted his robe back, so Leo needed a new one. Preferably one with long sleeves.
“It’s cold on Vestra,” Baz warned him. “It’s the wind that gets you.” But only one person on board the Icarus wore anything close to Leo’s size.
Kat led him back to the bunks and rooted around in her storage compartment for something suitable. All her clothes looked roughly the same, Leo noted: rugged pants with extra pockets stitched in and plain, military-style shirts with tears or old stains in various places. She handed him one of these, made out of a thick gray fabric. A rust-colored spot bloomed on the shoulder.
“You don’t have one that doesn’t have bloodstains, do you?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not my blood.”
Leo wasn’t sure that made him feel any better, but he put it on anyway.
“Here—” Kat handed Leo a leather jacket, cracked and faded but surprisingly bloodstain free. “I wore this back when I was picking pockets. It won’t stop an energy blast, but it should break the wind.”
Leo slipped into the jacket. The sleeves were a little long, but it would do. “Thanks,” he said.
“It looks good on you. Now you don’t look like some spoiled, fresh-faced Coalition poster boy who’s never taken a punch in his life. Honestly, if I’d seen you walking around Andural when I was growing up, I would have robbed you in a heartbeat.”
Leo didn’t mind his Coalition clothes, and it was true what she said about never having taken a punch. But he had been shot at now, at least—thanks in part to her.
“So you don’t like them either?” Leo said.
“Your clothes?”
“The Coalition.” Not that that should come as a surprise. But it was different hearing Boo say it. He wasn’t human. Maybe the Aykari hadn’t saved his planet like they saved Earth.
“You shouldn’t take it personally. I don’t really like anyone,” Kat said. “But if we are being honest, no, the Coalition aren’t high on my list.”
“But they’re the good guys,” Leo protested. “They’re trying to bring an end to the war. They just want peace and order and unity.” He realized he was starting to sound like his father. Or a recruitment commercial.
“Both sides are trying to end the war, Leo. It’s called winning. And who’s to say the peace and order imposed by the Aykari and the Coalition is going to be any better than what we have now?”
“It will certainly be better than what the Djarik would do!”
“Yeah,” Kat muttered. “Not a huge fan of them either.”
Leo realized there was no point in arguing. He and Kat were both human, but they were coming from different places. The little bunk room got quiet, Leo staring at the first officer’s meager pile of clothes. This was probably everything she owned, right here. A fire had taken her parents. A man named Nero had taken her arm. He was sure she’d probably lost more along the way.
Then again, maybe they weren’t that different.
As if she could hear his thoughts, Kat leaned over to catch Leo’s eye. “Listen, I’m sorry about your brother,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “If we’d have known . . .”
“Then what?” Leo said, suddenly angry. “He could have saved them, you know. When he had the chance. Maybe not all of them, but a lot.” As many as he could fit into the Icarus, at least. Including Gareth.
“We’re pirates, Leo. In case you haven’t noticed, we have our own concerns. We aren’t really in the business of saving people.”
Of course. Except Leo knew that wasn’t exactly true. Kat had once been living in the streets of a run-down former mining colony. No family. No home. Until a man named Bastian Black came around and offered her a place on his crew.
“He saved you,” Leo said.
Katarina Corea opened her mouth, then snapped it back shut. She shook her head. “I earn my keep,” she said. She held up her hand. “And I’ve paid my dues.”
“Did you find something?”
Leo swiveled to see the captain leaning in the doorway.
“Hey. I remember that jacket,” he added. “You were wearing that when you tried to pick my pockets.”
“I actually did pick your pockets,” Kat reminded him. “You just didn’t have anything in them worth taking.”
Baz grunted, then motioned to Leo. “If you’re finished playing dress up, come with me. I’ve got something I think you might be interested in.”
Leo glanced anxiously at Kat. He pictured airlocks. He pictured sluglike Snids. No matter what he imagined, it wasn’t good.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “He probably just wants to show you his buried treasure.”
As Leo followed the captain out of the room, Kat called after him. “And be careful with that jacket. I want it back when this is all over.”
Leo wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by this. But he assured her she could have all of her clothes back. Hopefully without any new bloodstains.
Buried treasure.
Leo thought that was just a myth, something made up in movies and books, along with talking parrots and walking the plank. Real pirates didn’t bury their treasure, they spent it as fast as they could. That’s what he thought. Then again, it was possible he didn’t know everything there was to know about pirates. Before he stowed away aboard the Icarus, he didn’t know they wore flip-flops and ate gyurt and played antiquated rock music too loud, though maybe he could have guessed the last one.
Moving along the corridor, Leo caught a glimpse of his reflection in the Icarus’s narrow viewport. The jacket did look kind of good on him. The rest of him looked like hell.
“I’m showing this to you because I think you’ll appreciate it,” Baz said as he motioned Leo into his quarters, the smallest room on the ship, barely big enough to hold a bunk and a hook for the pirate’s holster.
Tucked underneath the bunk sat a trunk much like the one Kat had pulled clothes from. Baz typed a code into the digital lock—2-6-E-4-U. Make that one more thing Leo knew about Baz: he was the kind of guy who used the same password for everything. The trunk hissed open.
For a moment—less than a second—Leo expected gold. Or jewels. Blood-colored rubies and glittering emeralds. But he quickly realized how stupid that was. Those things had value only on one tiny little rock in the galaxy, as far as he knew, to a species that still got giddy about things just because they sparkled. But there were no doubloons or diamonds in Baz’s chest. There was just stuff. Old stuff.
Earth stuff.
“This is everything I managed to bring with me, plus a few things I’ve managed to scavenge along the way.”
Leo flashed back to the image of his father telling him to go and pack. The peculiars and the particulars. This was Baz’s version of the backpack from home.
“Kat doesn’t get it. She doesn’t remember much of her childhood before she left. And Boo—to him Earth is just another dot on the galactic map.”
The Earth clearly wasn’t just another dot to Black, Leo thought, or else he wouldn’t have a trunk full of treasures like this. And he wouldn’t be showing it to Leo.
Which meant he obviously cared about something. Leo wasn’t sure what to do with that news.
The captain started riffling through the trunk’s contents, looking for something specific or just browsing. Leo could identify most everything in the trunk. There were a few books, actual book books made of paper and glue, their pages yellow and crisp. Leo scanned the titles. All Quiet on the Western Front. A Wizard of Earthsea. Watchmen. Leo hadn’t heard of any of them, but seeing them in all of their bound glory put a lump in his throat. The last time Leo had journeyed through a book with paper pages had been in his bed years ago—with his mother curled up beside him, reading out loud.
“Here. Check this out.” Baz pulled out a clear plastic rectangle with a picture inside—some kind of fiery red dinosaur looking just a little ticked off. “Charizard. First edition holographic. My grandfather used to collect these when he was a kid.”
“I used to collect seashells,” Leo said.
He didn’t mention how he collected them with his mother. How she always managed to find the best ones. How he’d brought his favorites with him when he left Earth, keeping them on a shelf by his bunk on board the Beagle.
How those same shells were now just space dust floating in the darkness.
The captain dropped the flaming dinosaur back into the chest. He picked up a baseball.
“Surely you know what this is,” Black said.
“Yeah. I know what a baseball is,” Leo confirmed. He pictured his backyard with its long grass. His father on the deck, reading by the light of the ships overhead, Gareth tossing pop-ups with the glow-in-the-dark ball because the high ones were Leo’s favo
rite to catch. “My dad used to take us to Rockies games sometimes. What does this say?” He pointed to the signature scrawled across the leather.
“Miguel Ramos. 2046. That was the year he hit eighty home runs.”
“Wait, so is this . . .”
“No,” Baz said. “That’s not the one that broke the record. Just a foul I caught. But he still signed it after the game so I held on to it.”
Leo twisted the ball over and over in his hands, the hide scuffed, starting to split at the seam. He brought it to his nose and took a deep breath. He could almost smell the popcorn. He placed the baseball gently back in the trunk and watched Baz continue to sift. He caught a cover of Time magazine from 2044, famously sporting the iconic photo of an Aykari cruiser hovering over the Manhattan skyline, THEY’RE HERE in big white letters. There was a motley-colored cube with a couple of stickers peeling off and a ball cap with the Superman logo stitched into it. Leo recognized Superman at least. He’d seen Superman Reborn at least seven times with Gareth.
This was all Baz’s stuff, specific to him, and yet everything in here brought memories of home. Leo’s home. His own personal universe.
“Ah. Here we go.”
Baz brought out a thin cardboard square that had been buried near the bottom. It showed a picture of a man outside an apartment building at night, standing next to a pile of cardboard boxes. Leo had never heard of anyone named David Bowie or Ziggy Stardust. “What is it?”
“It’s called vinyl,” Baz said, a touch of reverence in his voice. “Back in the dark ages, records like this were the only way you could listen to music. They disappeared for a while, then came back, then disappeared again, which makes this”—he held up the square of cardboard proudly—“an exceptionally rare artifact. Hopefully rare enough to get us some information.”
There was that word again. Not you. Us.
“You think these guys—the ones you told me about—you think they will help us”—Leo stopped, corrected himself—“help me for that?”
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