8 To Go Alone
To Go Alone
The day her father left was an abscess in her memory, a wound of broken promises.
When she thought of it, she recalled her ten-year-old self in perfect painful clarity: a skinny, knobby-kneed na?ve little girl who’d been brought up sheltered by the privilege of her father’s station.
A girl who didn’t realize that, without his protection, she was nothing.
Innis Ialan hadn’t come to the shuttle zone to see him off.
She must’ve known. Understood what Temmi and Ollie hadn’t: that if their father had wanted to take them with him, he could’ve.
He could’ve married their mother. Could’ve paid the fees and filed the forms to have Temmi and Ollie claimed as his. He chose to leave them behind.
Ollie, two years younger, had clung to their father’s legs, weeping desperate tears. But Temmi had been stronger, had been stoic. She’d wanted to make her father proud, even then. Even as he was abandoning her.
And then there’d been Scot.
Scot, who’d used Temmi to get himself to a better world. She hadn’t seen him off. But, just like her father, he’d never come back.
Now it was Temmi’s turn.
To keep her identity secret, her farewell was private.
She’d be announced with the other twenty-three contestants in two weeks’ time.
Which was how long it took to travel the distance, using jumpgates, from X72 to Expan Proper.
Filming was set to begin the morning after their arrival. Time was in short supply.
Other than Kalvin and a slew of imperial guards, the only people in attendance were Ollie, her mother, and X72’s governor.
Temmi found she had no idea how to say goodbye. Leaving X72 was all she’d ever wanted. But she’d never thought to go like this.
To go alone.
The governor cleared his throat, speaking first. “Miss Ialan, you take with you the hopes of your people. Understand that this isn’t a game.
There are others I would’ve chosen for this task.
You represent more than yourself. You represent all of X72.
All of the X-er System with its eleven inhabited territories.
As the first X-er to be granted a galactic spotlight, everything you do, every word you say will reflect on our people, for good or ill.
I beg of you that it be for good. That through your diplomatic efforts, our planet may gain a voice in the highest echelons of the empire, that our lives and our loved ones’ lives may improve because of the work you do. Please, I entreat of you—do it well.”
Well , shit. Temmi hadn’t fully considered what going on the show meant beyond the reality dating aspect and the prospect of two million credits.
But the governor had a point; this was an opportunity to give her planet a voice, to win the people that lived there, people like her mother and brother and Gareth, people like the women she’d known in prison, like the X-ers barely surviving in the Graveyard, more resources from the empire.
That was a task she wasn’t worthy to accomplish, one she wasn’t prepared to face.
And, if she was being entirely, brutally honest, a task she didn’t want.
She had the sudden, uncanny sense that she was in way over her head.
The governor withdrew a small, unadorned metal box from his pocket.
As he handed it to Temmi, he clicked it open.
Inside was a neck lace, the chain made of fine silver links, bearing a black-and-crimson rock no larger than a thumbnail, smoldering like an ember.
It took Temmi a moment to realize what she’d been given.
Orrist basalt. The prize of the X System.
To touch the ore to one’s skin was to expose oneself to life-threatening vascular issues, depending on the orrist’s viability.
Hundreds of people died every day to test that viability.
A single ounce of orrist basalt was worth more than a star cruiser, more than a small space station, certainly more than Temmi’s life.
For her to possess some was a crime. It was a heavily regulated imperial substance, the last known deposits in the galaxy found only in the X System—without it, or with it in the wrong hands, the empire would lose its monopoly on galactic travel, would lose access to five of its seven solar systems. Orrist basalt was the reason the empire was an empire at all.
She looked up at the governor, feeling her mouth drop open. “I can’t— This is dangerous—illegal.” She tried to shove the necklace’s box back into the governor’s hands.
He firmly pressed the box back into her grasp and closed her hands around it.
“The ore is encased in a protective polymer sheath, rendering it no more dangerous than a blunted knife. Wear it between layers of clothing. To remember the silent power of faraway places. To remember for whom you do this work.”
He retreated before she could protest a second time. Nervously, she clicked the necklace’s box closed and shoved it inside her jumpsuit pocket. She then turned to her family.
Her mother pulled the oxygen mask off her nose and mouth.
Disease and alcohol and a lifetime of poverty had prematurely aged her.
Turned her into an old woman when she was yet young.
She reached up a hand, still strong, always strong, no matter how sick she got, a hand that knew how to work without complaint, had taught Temmi how to work (though she’d never been quite so good at the “without complaint” part).
Almost too tenderly, her mother brushed at the wild tangles of Temmi’s hair.
Even before their father left, Innis Ialan had never been a woman of many words. A quiet, unobtrusive presence, almost always. It made what she had to say precious and important. So, when she spoke now, her X-er words a pained rasp, Temmi listened.
“I have always known you would leave,” she said, and it was not something she had ever said before.
“I have wanted that for you, even while I have dreaded it for me. That is the burden of a parent. But you are a child of two places. Restless in a way I cannot understand. Since your father left”—Temmi could count on zero hands how many times her mother had mentioned her father, because that’s how many times it had happened—“you’ve had eyes only for what lies beyond the sky.
If it were my choice, I would beg you not to go.
Tell you that this is home. But it isn’t home for you the way it is for me.
I’ve always seen that. And you haven’t been much for listening, anyway.
So, I ask only this: promise you’ll come back to me? ”
“I will, ami ,” Temmi whispered, which, when translated into Expanese, meant my history, my blood. Her throat had gone thick with tears she didn’t want to shed, and when her mother pulled her into a rare embrace, Temmi experienced the briefest, most childlike moment, where she was afraid to let go.
Ollie was next. He’d been through it all alongside Temmi. Their father leaving, the subsequent years of hunger and instability, her arrest, the Graveyard, Scot’s betrayal, the accident at the plant.
Ollie, more than X72, was her home.
“You’d think I was being conscripted into the Fleet with how much you’re blubbering,” Temmi said with a sniff.
He snorted, wiping his eyes. “You think this is for you? Allergies.”
“You don’t have allergies.”
“I’m disabled; you’re not allowed to question me.” But his eyes were shining. Iridescent brown, like Temmi’s own. “You’ll say hi to Spie from me?”
“I wish you could come, Oll.”
“And Nix. I can’t believe this is actually happening. You better have some stories for me when you come home. I’m gonna need every sordid detail. I don’t even care that you’re my sister.”
Temmi laughed and batted him on his good arm. “No promises.”
He didn’t embrace her. That had never been their way. “If you embarrass me, I’ll claim I never knew you.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less.” Temmi blinked back another rush of tears, her throat closing up.
How was it that when the time came to say all the things she wanted to say, she found her voice lacking?
How to tell her brother everything he meant to her?
How to explain that she was doing this for him?
For their mom? That she knew she’d fucked everything up for them when she was fifteen and that she desperately wanted to make it better—that nothing else mattered.
But the only words she found herself able to latch onto were “Don’t be an ass while I’m gone. ”
“I’m more worried about you being an ass while you’re gone.”
She laughed, then faced down the open podship where Kalvin awaited her.
Once inside, she buckled into a small pull-down seat.
Her family slowly disappeared as the podship’s door rolled closed.
The engine flared to life, the podship’s walls vibrating all around her.
She closed her eyes as it shot skyward, tearing free of X72’s oppressive atmosphere, and finally let her tears fall silently.