A figure emerged around a corner up ahead. “Ah, you must be the cooks. The crew will be thrilled they don’t have to rely on my skills in the kitchen anymore.” A stocky black man with a wide, friendly smile thrust a hand toward Randolph then me. “Or lack thereof. Welcome aboard the Vicio. I’m Captain Glenn.”
His handshake matched the confident spark in his brown eyes and the set of his broad shoulders. I squeezed with as much force as I could with my dainty non-boy hands. As soon as he released me, I jammed the fingers of one hand back into my pocket to hide them and hid the other behind my back with my suitcase. I’d completely forgotten to cover them up with gloves, and there weren’t any in Franco’s coat.
“Randolph here,” my ‘father’ said, then rested a hand on my shoulder. “And this is my son and apprentice, James.”
I tried not to wince at the sound of my new name while I silently thanked Randolph for his smooth delivery. Uncle or not, he and Moon shared a similar talent.
“Randolph. James,” Captain Glenn murmured, seeming to file our names away for easy access. “Let me show you around the Vicio.”
“Would you like us to show you our identification cards and run us through your security system first?” Randolph asked.
Captain Glenn laughed, a deep, jovial sound that reminded me of the imaginary guy in the red suit the people on Mayvel were so obsessed with this time of year. “We’re going into deep space to one of Jupiter’s moons, so I hope you’re armed with something. As long as you feed my crew and keep them happy, I really don’t care who you are. Now, come this way and…” He started down the remaining length of the entryway, the rest of his sentence bouncing behind him and losing itself in our trio of loud footfalls. A wide grin stretched his mouth when he turned back around, but I’d completely missed the joke. Randolph, who walked a little in front of me, chuckled enough for the both of us.
I patted my fake identification card in my pocket, just in case the captain changed his mind. Did he really expect us to be armed? He knew more about deep space than I did since he’d most likely been there before, but I had to wonder yet again if I’d just doomed myself to certain death by stepping aboard this ship.
Just outside the inner door, Captain Glenn hovered his thumb over a flashing green light on a control panel. “This button closes this door first, and then there’s a ten second delay between it and the outer one closing. Our engineer rigged it that way for when we deliver our livestock. It will keep them together in case one leaves the herd and it gets left behind. We had a hell of a time getting the teralinguas on this ship, so bottlenecking them out should help us some. I’ll show you them sometime if you’re interested, and you can see how much they keep us on our toes. Anyway, once you push that button, it falls fast.” He pressed it, and the door swooshed closed behind us, sealing us in, and sucking the air from my lungs at the same time.
I loosened my coat zipper to draw in a wobbly breath. Ten seconds later, the outer door crashed closed, and I knew from my experience on the Nebulous it would take a special call to the pilot to open both of them again. My heart roared too late through my head on repeat, so I focused with all my might on what the captain was saying.
“… I mean? Wouldn’t want you to get squished on your first day here, would we?” he said with a laugh and clapped me on the back hard enough to rattle my teeth. I fought the urge to rub my stinging shoulder because I didn’t think a fourteen-year-old boy would do that. Instead, I shrugged off his man paw and stepped forward to pretend fascination with the ship, though there wasn’t much to be impressed with.
The only ship I’d ever been on for any length of time was the Nebulous, and its double-layered hull, thick carpets, and padded walls insulated it from the frigid temperatures in space. Not the case with the Vicio. It was downright chilly.
Two similar looking corridors forked off from the one we stood in and turned somewhere unseen into an L shape. Captain Glenn led us toward the right with hesitant steps, and his large shoulders bunched around his neck, almost as if he expected the floor to drop from beneath him at any second. Strange that a seemingly confident captain would walk through his own ship like that.
As we went, I stitched a map through my head, using the squares of the periodic table as my grid. That was how I remembered every nook and cranny aboard the Nebulous. I started at iron because I always started at iron, and we went past three identical doors I mentally marked as cobalt, nickel, and copper.
“I think you’ll find our kitchen and pantry well-stocked,” Captain Glenn said and stopped in front of the fourth door: zinc. “The pantry is in stasis to preserve the food, and the temperature outside the ship helps with that, of course. The heating unit is running full-blast, but in an old ship with little insulation, that doesn’t make a lick of difference. The crew seems to have gotten used to the cold though.”
And so should we. I pressed the sides of my elbows into my ribs to contain my body heat, certain that my lips would soon match the color of Jezebel’s claws. Sure, I might lose a few fingers and toes to hypothermia, but I’d get used to it. Losing some appendages was nothing compared to losing my sister, though. I’d just have to suffer through it.
Captain Glenn pulled at the lever and the door swept open. He stood there a moment, blinking, while he clenched and unclenched his fists before he finally stepped inside.
I followed Randolph into a well-lit, small but cozy dining area. A large wooden table with deep cracks stretching from one knot hole to the next took up most of the room. Six straight-backed chairs sat around it, a few of their legs slanting at such odd angles, it seemed kind of dangerous for anyone to actually sit in them. On the wall to the right, someone had stuck a poster of a well-endowed woman dressed in nothing but space-blown hair and a smirk. She carried a blue planet swirling with clouds in her palm against the backdrop of millions of glittering stars.
Randolph cleared his throat and ticked his gaze at me like he thought I might be offended. As both a nineteen-year-old woman and a fourteen-year-old boy, I wasn’t. But as a boy, maybe I should have some kind of reaction. I settled on tilting my head at the poster with wide eyes, feigning memorization of the woman’s curves, and nodding my approval. Randolph, on the other hand, frowned and looked away.
“Ah, yes, that’s Esmerelda the Space Vixen. Sorry if it offends, but a few of the men love her nightly show.” He shrugged and shook his head at Randolph. “She’s too skinny, I think. Anyway…” he said and nodded at some double doors diagonal to the naked wall vixen. “Kitchen’s through here.”
A large stove and a sink cramped one side of the room while floor to ceiling cabinets crowded the other. A small table took up the middle. Randolph and I would practically be working on top of each other. Great.
Captain Glenn pointed to another door in the back with a blue light seeping from underneath it. “A previous chef set up a mattress beside the stasis pantry back there. I guess he didn’t like being too far from the food. Someone can take that if you want since there’s a toilet back there, too. Otherwise there are sleeping quarters next door. We operate on the Ring Guild’s standard of time, so breakfast is at six, lunch is at twelve, and dinner’s typically at six, but it doesn’t have to be anything spectacular tonight since you’ve only just got here. Take some time to get settled in.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Randolph said. “This will do just fine.”
“If you have any questions, please,” Captain Glenn said while throwing a wink and a smile over his shoulder. “Ask someone else. I’ll tell the pilot to get us in the air.” The double doors flapped closed behind him.
I willed him to hurry. We were already almost a week behind Ellison. Hopefully this ship could travel faster than her cruiser. If so, we’d be in deep space in three or four days. Could she hang on that long, wherever she was? I had to believe she hadn’t already let go.
Randolph’s friendly demeanor seemed to have walked out with the captain when he turned to me in horror. “Six o’clock,” he
hissed. “We only have one hour and forty-five minutes to get dinner ready. Quick, get a base for stew on the stove.”
I stood frozen, very near literally, while I tried to figure out what language he was speaking.
Realization seemed to brighten his cheeks while he watched me suspended in action. “Tell me you know how to cook,” he said, his voice a low warning.
“I know how to cook?”
His eyes narrowed. “Tell me the truth.”
“I’ve never cooked a day in my life.” I twitched my lips to the side to give him what I hoped was an apologetic, yet enchanting, smile. “I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen the inside of a ship’s kitchen.”
“Great boogly bags,” he said and dropped his head back to stare at the titanium ceiling, mouth open, shoulders drooped. “Moon Dragon told me you were training under the best chef on Mayvel.”
The ship gave a giant lurch that sped my heart into double-time. We were moving, closer and closer to deep space and Ellison. The thought filled me with so much hope I grinned up at Randolph.
“Now I’m training under the best chef on Mayvel.”
“It’s standard protocol to go to chef’s apprentice training before actually apprenticing with a chef,” he said, his voice rising. He rooted around in a drawer until he snatched a long handle with a flat end full of holes and wiggled it in front of my face. “Apprentice training is where they teach you what a spatula is.”
I took the thing from him and stood so my nose almost touched his ruddy one. “I could recite all one hundred forty-eight elements and their properties at the age of seven. How hard can cooking be, really?”
Holy Feozva, I wished I could’ve crammed those words back down my throat. Randolph kept barking at me to peel the potatoes and carrots so fast, the end result looked like a butchering inside a broken appearance modification booth. My chopping skills made him drop whatever dead thing he carried to the boiling pot and come running over to yell something about me killing myself.
With a deep, angry red flush creeping up over his face and a strip of white outlining his pressed lips, he set down several spices from his loaded arms next to the stew. “Use your Mind-I to find a recipe for heatherberry shortcake.” He grimaced at the word recipe like he thought it just as vulgar as Lady Esmeralda, the Space Vixen. “It’s simple. I think even you can handle it.”
“I don’t have a Mind-I.”
“I thought all young people had a Mind-I,” he said between slurps of stew.
“I’m not all young people. Mind-I’s have to be inserted into your brain, and I already have enough chaos up there.”
Randolph narrowed his eyes for a long moment, possibly deciding how serious I was about my mental state, then finally said with a shrug, “I don’t have a Mind-I either. They’re pointless inventions for people with pointless lives who like to make public every mundane thought they have. No thank you, I say.”
I nodded. Those were my thoughts exactly. And maybe it was the color fading from his cheeks or the wonderful smell that came from that pot or the fact we were finally moving toward Ellison, but I didn’t think he would say anything to the captain about my lack of cooking skills. I could’ve been dead wrong, but it seemed like we were on the same wavelength.
“Heatherberry shortcake, you said?” At his nod, I bit back a smile and pulled out my phone to text Moon Dragon’s not-so-pointless Mind-I. I kind of wished I did have one because my regular phone would be useless once we travelled out of local space.
I’m trying to decide if your “uncle” is related to Satan.
Moon’s text back was instantaneous, like she’d been waiting.
MD: Be nice.
I’m trying. He wasn’t happy when he found out I didn’t know what a spatula was.
MD: Spatula?
Exactly. Do you know a recipe for heatherberry shortcake? I’m too busy trying not to chop my fingers off to find one I might not mess up.
MD: I’ll find one and link it to you.
Seconds later, a recipe with step-by-step instructions and pictures showed up in my inbox.
You’re a goddess.
MD: I know. Jezebel misses you.
At the mention of her name, a sharp pain stabbed through my heart. Poor, sweet Jezebel. Hopefully Moon wouldn’t be too busy with her and Franco’s sexanigans to cheer Jezebel on during her victory lap around the ceiling.
Give her a squeeze for me.
MD: Done. Be safe.
I put my phone on the table and busied myself searching through the large pantry for ingredients, comparing pictures to the food labels under the eerie, bluish stasis light. In the kitchen again, I got to work, measuring and mixing under Randolph’s watchful eyes. All my worries about Ellison kept biting at my feet, forcing me to move, wanting me to do something. And I finally was. The ship was hurtling toward her, and the only thing to pass the time was to throw myself into this small task.
It required deep concentration, similar to when I melted down iron into bite-sized pieces, and maybe because of that sameness, it helped ease some of my helplessness.
In the middle of cracking open the second egg since I’d completely mangled the first, the double doors burst open. I jumped, and when I did, a string of gooey yolk flew back on my sweatshirt.
The captain looked around the kitchen, the whites of his eyes blazing around his dark irises. His wide chest hitched with every quick breath, like he’d been running. “Everything okay in here?”
Randolph glanced at me, his forehead puckered. “Yes…”
“Good… I thought I… Good.” Captain Glenn nodded as he took in the steaming pot and the mess of ingredients covering the counters, table, and me. “There’s a telecom in the dining room if you need anything.”
With the shift of light when we’d been in the dim hallway to the brightness in here, I finally saw him straight on. The deep blue pockets under his eyes sagged into his cheeks and pulled his whole face into a tired frown. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, but it was more than just exhaustion I saw there. While smoothing his hands down his coat, he offered a smile that looked more like a grimace and backed out again before I had a chance to pinpoint what it was.
Randolph scratched the end of a spoon over a furrowed, bushy eyebrow. Steam from the pot curled the ends of his hair over his ears, which made it look like it sprouted from inside. “I once knew a captain who wore some of his own toes around his neck for good luck. Space travel does strange things to people sometimes. Anyway, I turned the oven on for you. You’re welcome.”
“Thank you, oh great boogly bags,” I muttered. He must’ve heard me because he threw back his head and laughed at the ceiling. His hand disappeared inside his vest and emerged with a silver flask. So that was what was making his spirits bright. As if he’d read my mind, he began to hum the Christmas carol.
I focused on the piece of egg shell swimming in the bowl and finally used the edge of a spatula—that’s what it was for!—to get most of it out. Some lucky soul may find the rest of it. Once I’d scooped the mixture into a pan, a blast of hot air hit my face as I opened the oven door and shoved the pan inside. I was tempted to climb in after it to bring feeling back to my fingers and toes, but a cooked Absidy, James, whatever, probably wasn’t on Randolph’s menu.
When I finished beating some heavy cream into perfect peaks, Randolph slammed a bowl of plump red heatherberries onto the table. “Watch and learn.” With a small knife, he sliced through one with a shaky yet precise hand. “See? There’s no need to kill it when you’re cutting because it’s already dead.”
I held out my hand and wiggled my fingers for the knife. His eyebrows climbed up his forehead when he handed it to me, like a cynical kind of dare. I bent over the table to stare down that heatherberry, steadied my numb hand, and sliced one up in flawlessly even pieces.
“Better,” he said and heaved a sigh that burned alcoholic fumes up my nose. “But now we won’t be able to eat for another two years at the rate yo
u’re going. Tell you what, I’ll finish this, you set the table and promise to practice.”
“Fair enough.” In the dining room, I spread the dishes out around the table but stopped a plate mid-clatter when I thought I heard something.
A scream? A drawn out deep one that peppered my skin with more goose bumps. I shot around the table and into the hallway. A bone-deep shiver rattled through my body. The tip of my nose iced over, and I swore my fingers creaked over frozen joints when I balled them into my pockets.
The light at the end of the hallway hung crooked and swung back and forth, pulsing bursts of light onto one wall with a faint buzzing noise. Leaping shadows painted the walls on either side of it until they faded into gloomy darkness. All the other lights in the hallway had gone out.
A familiar dread trickled into my stomach and quickened my breaths. But it was just an old ship, and old ships fell apart sometimes. Screaming sounds could be the result of a reluctant engine. It could be cold because we were leaving Mayvel’s atmosphere. No worries. I had enough to last a lifetime, anyway.
“Hello?” Unease laced through the word and carried it to the end of the hallway and back again. If no one answered, then it had to be the engine. Several heartbeats later, I slipped back into the dining room.
Randolph crashed through the double doors, an obvious sway in his step. “Are you timing your shor’bread or do you ‘spect me to do everything?”
“Ah, shit.” I nearly mowed him down in my haste to get to the kitchen. He snapped a towel in my face when I pulled open the oven door, and I took it to rescue the singed-around-the-edges shortcake.
Sail (Haunted Stars Book 1) Page 5