If Wren was keeping secrets, it affected me the same as it affected him. Was there a reason he wanted me to forget about it?
“Do you have some kind of plan I need to know about?” I pressed.
He crunched his candy, sharp teeth grinding. “Not yet. Just know that I don’t fully trust her. I can’t say that I fully trust anyone. Except perhaps Elio.” He shrugged. “Hard not to.”
“You don’t trust me?” I asked, incredulous. “I’m Elio’s best friend.”
Anders’s eyes searched mine for a long moment, until I wanted to squirm beneath his dark gaze. He braced a hand on a pipe next to my head, leaning close, looming over me until his breath fanned across my cheeks. Now that I was really thinking about it, he didn’t have horrible eyes to look at. As far as eyes went, that is. They softened at the corners, and I felt a rush of heat flood my stomach, drowning the last little bit of sense that I had left. I was overcome with the alarming desire to do something really absurd. Something like maybe, possibly take a step closer …
But just as my legs inched forward, he stepped back. “I haven’t decided about you yet. I’ll see you in the morning, Cora.”
I watched him leave, passing beneath a row of flickering lights and cutting the corner at a brisk pace, away from the cabins and toward the cockpit. My gaze swung from the spot where he disappeared to the heavy metal door of Wren’s cabin. Back and forth. And then again.
Well. I had said I was a thief. So a thief I would be. If Teolia’s key really was in there, I would find it.
Wren hadn’t even bothered to lock her room. One quick wave of my hand in front of the motion sensor next to the doorframe, and I was in.
She had been right about the mess. Actually, mess was putting it mildly. A Wren tornado had blown through the tiny cabin, leaving behind strewn heaps of bedding and crumpled, dirty flight suits. I plucked an inside-out sock from on top of her desk lamp, then thought better and replaced it. She couldn’t notice that I’d been snooping.
Her cabin was nearly identical in size to mine, but the clutter made it feel even more cramped. With the floor covered in her clothes and shoes and undergarments, I had infinitely fewer places to stand.
While I contemplated how best to proceed, another one of Evelina’s lessons flashed in my mind unsolicited: clutter is a trap.
Everyone knew rooms were easier to ransack when they were clean. Everything could be easily returned to its rightful place. Messes were more specific. Controlled chaos. And the slob in question always knew if their possessions had been tampered with. They noticed if a pile of clothes suddenly moved two feet to the right. Or if a shoe had been turned ninety degrees in the other direction. Oftentimes the owner of the mess orchestrated it that way on purpose. It was their own cheap alarm system.
I picked my way through the clutter, holding out my arms for balance. Wren wasn’t as clever as she thought. The core of the mess centered around her bed, which jutted out from the wall instead of running parallel, like mine. I tiptoed between a pile of undershirts and a stack of old Earthan music records. Likely stolen, knowing the room’s owner.
Without displacing her possessions, I knelt at the foot of the bed, lifting first the sheets and then the mattress.
I had to give her points for creativity. She had ripped a hole in the box spring and buried the key and its case deep inside. Most people simply wedged the loot under the mattress and called it a day.
I plucked the box out, heart stalling when the bed squeaked. The key caught the light, winking at me through the glass lid. Hello, precious.
I knew I wouldn’t have much time. I quickly tiptoed back the way I had come, careful to leave everything undisturbed. The second my feet left the cabin floor and crossed into the corridor, I ran for the laboratory. All the scrap metal I’d collected would finally come in handy.
Bursting through the door, I snapped on a pair of goggles and fired up the blowtorch wedged under the workbench. I monitored the clock as I melted down the metal into approximately the same shape and weight as Teolia’s key, adding a mixture of dyes and acids found in the drawers to adjust the key to the correct color—the flawless pinkish-orange of sunset. I had no way to replicate the diamonds studding the length of the shaft, so I sliced up a few pieces of glass, hoping Wren would be too busy in the coming days to look close enough and notice the difference.
The numbers on the clock glowed a threatening red above the workbench. I’d been down here nearly an hour. Cursing, I tossed my supplies into a storage crate and hid them with a pile of corroded wires. Then I raced back to Wren’s cabin.
Please don’t be here. Please still be in the rec room. Because if she opened the door when I knocked, the only halfway decent excuse I could come up with for darkening her doorstep was, “Can I borrow a tampon?” and I really didn’t have the energy to go there tonight.
But the cabin was just as deserted (and messy) as before. I crept past her piles of clothes, around the stack of records, to the bed frame. I dropped my fake, manufactured key into the glass case and returned it to Wren’s box spring hiding spot, Teolia’s real key burning a hole in the breast pocket of my flight suit. In under a minute, I was in and out.
I entered my own cabin in another minute. Elio looked up from my bed, scooting over once I collapsed on the mattress with my boots still on. For some reason, my breaths were coming out in quick pants, even though I had been practically crawling while in Wren’s room. What in all the stars? I was a professional criminal; robbing an Earthan girl wasn’t supposed to make me nervous.
“Cora,” Elio chirped. He crawled up beside my head and poked me until I looked at him. “I do not see, nor do I smell, a milkshake.”
“Sorry.” I dipped my fingers into my pocket, brushing over Teolia’s key in all its luminescent glory. For Elio. I was doing this for Elio. “Next time I promise I won’t come back empty-handed.”
14
I slept until the early afternoon. After seven hours of cold sweats mixed with intermittent nightmares—during each of which I drowned in faster, more horrifying ways—I shrugged on a fresh flight suit and stumbled into the galley.
Wren stood purposefully when I walked in, as if she’d been waiting for me. My mouth went dry, positive she was about to demand to know who had torn through her room, but she didn’t give me any clue that she knew the real key was no longer in her possession. Instead she handed me a mug of coffee with a smile and loudly declared, “We’re taking a field trip.”
“Where?” Elio asked. He looked far more alert this morning, bouncing in his seat, blue eyes wide. I reminded myself to check his diagnostic scans later, but for now I relished his enthusiasm. For now, at least, he was okay.
Wren chugged her own mug of coffee, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “The Fuzzy Lizard.”
“Is that another Earthan food that’s bound to make me vomit?” Anders asked. He sat at the table, polishing his blaster with the sleeve of his flight suit. He caught my eye for a brief moment, then promptly arched his neck, hocked up a wad of phlegm, and spit it directly onto the barrel. Yum. He continued polishing, ignorant of our open-mouthed stares of revulsion.
“The Fuzzy Lizard,” Wren said, holding back a gag, “is a tavern on the Tunerth outpost near Mars. Tunerth’s a one-and-done kind of place. They sell groceries, toiletries, clothes—which I desperately need because the warden’s goons stole all of my good leather jackets when they first seized my ship, and if I have to keep wearing olive green”—she plucked the front of her flight suit—“then I’m going to barf. It clashes with my hair.”
“I think it looks fine,” I said, like I was an authority on fashion. Which I definitely wasn’t.
Wren rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t. But most importantly…” She smacked her hand on the table for emphasis. “They sell booze. And after the week we’ve had, I could use a friendly visit from my buddy Jack Daniels.”
“That’s not another treasure hunter you’re bringing onboard, is it?” I asked.
“If it is, I will shoot him dead. I hate competition,” Anders said, eyes glued to his blaster while he rewired something in the stock.
“Funny. Your creepy father said the same thing,” said Wren. “No, but come to think of it, I did date a guy named Jack once. We met at a shopping plaza on Mars. I stole his watch off his wrist and gave it to my dad as a birthday present.”
“And he dated you after that?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “He didn’t know. What do you think I am, an amateur?”
Anders looked up from the table. “An amateur, no. A not-nice person, yes.”
“Excuse me, I’m very nice!” she retorted. “My dad loves that watch. He said it was the best present he got all year, and until someone tells me that making him happy was wrong, I’m going to operate under the assumption that my methods were right.”
Anders harrumphed. “Like it was right for you to blow up a space station?”
“It got us this beautiful ship, didn’t it?”
“Your way of thinking is … very skewed.”
“Oh, boo-hoo.”
As entertaining as watching them argue was, I knew I needed to intervene. “Okay, okay. The Fuzzy Lizard?”
Wren hopped up onto the counter, crossing her legs like a pretzel. “We’re out of supplies. We still have two keys left to find. I guarantee the warden isn’t pleased—”
At that exact moment, one of the wires Anders was holding sparked and caught fire. Cursing, he put the small flame out with the dregs from his coffee, but not before he met my gaze and quirked a bushy eyebrow.
“You guarantee it, do you?” But his suspicious tone seemed to fly right over her head.
“It doesn’t take a genius. We’re five days into our two-week time limit and we haven’t made that much progress. After we leave Tunerth, we need to pick a new direction. The first two keys were on Jupiter and Cadrolla—Teolia’s favorite places. Those can’t be the only planets she loved. What about the planet Teolia? It was named after her.”
“But the treasure and all four keys were shipped far away from there ages ago,” I said. I swirled the last few drops of my coffee around in my mug, then gulped them down. “For all we know, the last two keys got sucked into a black hole.”
“That’s unlikely. But if it turns out we have to dive into one to save our souls, then trust me, I promise I’ll scrounge up the perfect outfit. Elio, any ideas?”
His ears drooped, and so did my adrenaline high. “In the time it took you to ask that, my internal interface scanned thirty-four million, eight hundred thousand, seventy-two net sites. I found nothing useful.”
“So we chart a course for Tunerth,” I said. “Figure out the rest as we go along. It’ll be good to get out into civilization anyway. Eavesdrop a bit. We might learn something helpful.” Because the alternative was to sit here and pore over more message boards on the net. I’d spent an hour looking through them before falling asleep this morning and all I’d managed to find was that Teolia’s favorite dessert was once rumored to be a coconut-covered eel. Apparently, it had been a delicacy on her planet hundreds of years ago. On Condor, eating eel often promised a one-way trip to the toilet.
Point was, I hadn’t figured out anything useful on my own. So, in true Saros family fashion, I needed to steal my information from someone else.
* * *
It didn’t take much to make Wren’s day. All I had to do was offer to sit in the cockpit with her as she prepared to jump the Starchaser into the wormhole connecting the edge of Cadrolla’s Whirlpool Galaxy to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and the Tunerth outpost. She was itching for a proper co-pilot, and I played my part well, fastening the thick straps of my harness over my shoulders before switching on the internal comm and requesting that everyone on the ship buckle up.
“Wormhole due to open in twenty seconds, according to this schedule.” Wren swiped her comm link, transferring the document to my own. I studied the timetable against the ancient analog clock that she had glued to the control panel in front of her seat. Another stolen item, no doubt.
“Engine valves open.” She tapped something on one of the many screens before her. “Igniting the thrusters.” She gripped her right hand around a wide lever parallel to her chair, her left hand edging the yaw mechanism two degrees portside.
“Go two more degrees,” I said, studying the blinking radar display in front of me.
Wren looked over. “You think?”
I gave her my best attempt at a lighthearted grin. “Why have a co-pilot if you aren’t going to listen to her?”
“Hmm … okay.” She made the adjustments with the yaw, the Starchaser turning just as the wormhole flickered to life on the radar. She tapped a series of multicolored pedals at her feet. The wormhole opened wide, a sea of light ready to swallow us whole.
Inertia slammed me against my harness as we zipped inside. The bridge of the wormhole lengthened, shortened, then spat us out, leaving me with a pounding headache. I moved to unlatch my harness after it was over, but Wren immediately shrieked and clenched her controls. Out of nowhere, the outermost edge of the Milky Way Galaxy’s asteroid belt appeared in our viewport. Cursing up a storm, Wren rolled us to our starboard side to avoid a collision.
“I swear the wormhole let me out in a different spot the last time I was here,” she grunted apologetically. The comm system exploded with a stream of irritated shouts from Anders, accompanied by a few nervous beeps from Elio. I tapped the control panel, silencing them both.
“Don’t be sorry,” I told her. “You’re good at this. Piloting.” And sure, I was trying to butter her up, but I did mean it. My pod ship was a breeze to fly compared to this beast.
Wren didn’t look over at me when she asked, “Good enough that your mother might want to hire a thief who can operate a charter ship?”
She was still angling for that? Stars above.
“I’m not sure you want that position, but yeah, I could put in a good word for you once all this is over.” Lies. Dirty, filthy lies. When this was over, I’d never see her again.
“Really? You’d do that for me?” In her excitement, she accidentally jerked the throttle, nearly knocking the ship into half a dozen asteroids.
“Of course.” I let my gaze fall to the radar display. Tunerth and the Fuzzy Lizard would be appearing in the viewport in under ten minutes, but that wasn’t what I was looking at. I was far more concerned with trying to make sense of Wren. Was this the reason she was acting so strange last night? Had she bragged about a fictitious conversation with the warden to impress me into giving her a glowing job referral? If so, it hadn’t worked. She hadn’t been the confident criminal I’d met in Ironside. She had seemed almost … shy.
Maybe grilling her about those birds had thrown her off her game. And that was yet another mystery I didn’t have time to solve.
“I wish I still had my thievery chest onboard,” Wren said. “The warden’s guards took it after they arrested me.”
“Your thievery chest? Is that like a shrine or something?”
She sighed. “Sort of. It was filled with bits and pieces of all the things I’ve stolen over the years. Money, jewelry, packs of gum…”
“Gum?”
“I was five,” she said with a shrug. “I didn’t have much to work with.”
“So it was like a résumé?”
“Basically.” She edged the ship around another cluster of asteroids, gently this time. “I always thought it might impress your mother.”
Not many things impressed Evelina, but I didn’t tell her that. Just one more person who was trying to appease the head of the Saros family. We were all groveling for the satisfaction of a boss who I knew would never reciprocate. She would take, take, take until she drained us dry. And we would let her. Because she held all the power.
“I’m compiling a new one,” Wren went on. “So far all that’s in it are a few old records and one of the shrunken heads from the warden’s office.”
&nb
sp; I shivered, remembering the jars lining his walls. “When did you take that?”
She beamed. Ah. There was the cockiness I’d missed from Ironside.
“When none of you were looking,” she said.
“Smooth.”
She pretended to preen. “I try. I just wish I had more things to put in it. You should’ve seen all the stuff that I used to have hidden in my cabin.”
“Oh.” I choked back a laugh while pretending to study the outpost that had just appeared as a tiny dot on the edge of the ship’s radar. “I can only imagine.”
She hummed in thought. “Elio said he doesn’t clean, correct?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just wondering…” She shot me another grin over the console between us. But for some reason this one seemed even cockier and far less friendly than the last. “I just noticed that my room seemed a little … tidier this morning.”
“Oh?” She was lying. I hadn’t moved a thing.
Had I?
My heart started to hammer. A sock. I’d touched a sock. But I put it back. There was no way she noticed.
Wren shrugged, engaging the landing gear as Tunerth’s outpost moved to take up the majority of our viewport. The first of two double doors in the protective dome surrounding the craggy moon slid back. The Starchaser entered, and Wren activated the comm to announce our identities to the control tower. After obtaining a landing clearance, she entered the second door into Tunerth’s atmosphere and got in line behind a boxy delivery ship, waiting for a fueling bay to open up.
“Maybe it was just my imagination,” she conceded innocently. I didn’t reply. I’d gone rigid in my seat, too preoccupied with all the mistakes I might have made that were shredding my nerves like tissue paper. “Maybe the lights are just brighter today and it looked tidier.” She reached over to give my arm a friendly squeeze. I swore her nails dug into my skin for a beat too long. “Never mind, Cora.”
The Good for Nothings Page 16