Chapter Twenty-Four The Inheritance #2
I glanced at him while picking up my wrappers. “Why?”
He thumbed back to the alcove beside the storage crates, blankets, and a spare power cell, where the single cot sat with a single threadbare pillow.
“Ah,” I replied, nodding knowingly. “That would be a problem.”
Sian rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I guess, if push came to shove, I could be the big spoon….”
N2-0, in the corner of the shuttle, flicked out their small blowtorch. They gave a dangerous bloop.
He raised his hands in surrender. “I was joking!”
Veebee stared at him, unwavering. “So was Entoo,” she deadpanned as she laid down a sabacc card without even looking at it.
I rolled my eyes. Why did they have to be so dramatic? I’d rather sleep inside a sarlacc gut anyway, even though my ears felt hot just thinking about lying anywhere with him for any amount of time.
But if push came to shove…would I really mind it that much?
After we switched to the final stretch of travel, Sian began pacing the length of the main hold, blowing into his hands and rubbing at his arms as if he was cold.
It had gotten a little chilly, but I was used to it by now.
The Starfarer was always a bit drafty, so my fingertips were always cold.
He finally resorted to popping open the storage crates in the back and rifling through them for a blanket, which he wrapped himself up in warmly.
It was coarse and dusty-smelling, but he didn’t seem to care as he bundled himself tight.
“Cold?” I asked rhetorically.
“Oh, no. I’m pleasantly warm now.” He pulled the blanket around himself tighter for emphasis, looking like a snowy head of hair in a cocoon of starchy beige.
Veebee said, “You should see my poor pantry. He basically made himself a nest in there.” She’d lost her sabacc game and was currently cleaning up the mess from knocking all the cards on the floor.
It was a bit hard to do with one arm. I’d tried to solder it back on with the engineering kit I’d found in the supplies, but the tools were too big.
So instead, she’d tied a rope to her dislocated arm’s wrist and shoulder insert, and wore it cross-body like a pack.
Sian clicked his tongue in admonishment. “Vee, I thought you promised not to say anything? You know a nest costs extra for a stowaway.”
I snorted. “We charge by the meter of blanket.”
He jabbed a finger at me. “See? I can’t even afford to be a stowaway,” he lamented as he sank to the floor in a cross-legged position, blanket puddling around him, watching as Veebee shuffled to a seat against one of the outer bulkheads and started straightening out the card deck quietly.
Sian turned to me again and asked, “Where would you go? If you could go anywhere in the galaxy?”
Surprised at the question, I turned around in my chair in the cockpit, where I’d taken my post for the last leg of the journey. You never knew what could go wrong. “Anywhere?”
“Anywhere,” he confirmed.
That was a loaded question, one I’d thought about a thousand times but could only count a handful of times I’d actually been asked. No one really thinks to ask that of people who work on tour ships.
I thought about the beautiful planets I’d seen from the viewports of the Starfarer, the stories from all the tourists who’d come through its doors, the languages, the foods…
. Apart from the handful of planets I’d visited over and over and over again, everything I knew about the galaxy I knew from stories.
I knew them, but I hadn’t experienced them.
Lived them.
And whenever I thought about those far-flung places, something in my bones spurred me on with the wanderlust of a people who had ferried themselves across uncharted space. And when the galaxy was this wide, and space this quiet, I could hear them calling.
“Everywhere,” I decided, answering the same way I had when I was little, because truly nothing had changed.
It was the easiest answer and a terribly vague one, but I really meant it.
I turned my chair back to look at the swirling blue of hyperspace, each light a place, an adventure. “I want to see it all.”
“That would be quite impossible,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I know,” I agreed, watching the tunnel. “But I’d like to try.”
There was a map of stars in my blood, just waiting for me to unfurl it.
I knew I never could, even though I had this deep, deep ache in my middle that wanted to take a ship and just go. Everywhere—anywhere. But what about Dad? What about the Starfarer? The family business? I couldn’t abandon it all.
Not like Val had.
So I ignored that deep ache. It’d go away.
It always did.
“Where would you go?” I asked to distract myself, pushing the pain down. I turned back around to him, away from the swirl of hyperspace.
He was quiet for a long moment, his impossibly black eyes studying me. Finally, he closed them and said, “Home.”
It was such a simple answer, I marveled at it with a smile. Of all the places—he’d choose home? It must have been quite the place. “And where’s home?”
He opened his eyes again, black expanses of galaxy staring back at me. “It doesn’t exist anymore.”
The grin on my face dropped immediately.
He turned away self-consciously and said, “Don’t give me that look.
You wanted the truth. It’s just gone.” He pulled the blanket tighter around himself, as if he wanted to keep out more than just the cold.
“I don’t remember where I was born, and when I was four I was torn away from my parents and sent to a”—he paused to search for the right word—“an academy of sorts. With a bunch of other kids kidnapped from their families.”
“What kind of academy was it?”
“The shitty kind,” he replied nonchalantly, and busied himself picking at a thread on the blanket.
“I hated it. Spent ten years there, and then I saw an opening and ran away when I was fourteen. I lived off stealing creds on a station for, stars, three days? Before the place tracked me down. I wasn’t going back, though.
I’d sooner die, and I made it everyone’s problem.
Then my mentor stepped up and said I was her apprentice, and that they had the wrong boy.
” He smiled as he said it, as if it was a fond memory.
“I’d picked her pockets the first day I arrived at the station, and she had been keeping an eye on me ever since. ”
“So they just…let you go?”
He scoffed. “No. We made a break for it and managed to escape, and I went back to Bakura to find my parents—that’s where my mentor said I probably came from—but…
” He shook his head. “I never found them. Maybe I didn’t come from Bakura.
Maybe I came from somewhere else, so I searched everywhere.
Places so muggy you can cut the air with a knife, and continents overrun with vermin and people and flesh-eating plants.
Old temples and city slums and spaceports ruled by pirates.
Would you believe me if I said I’ve even been to the edges of Wild Space, where it’s impossible to sleep because you are so afraid of what lurks in the darkness between the stars?
So I know for certain that it doesn’t exist.” He shrugged.
“Not anymore, anyway. But…while on your ship, I got to see what it looks like when someone does have a home, and people who love them. That was nice.” And he smiled at that, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“For a few days, I could pretend I belonged somewhere.”
I couldn’t imagine what it felt like—being unmoored, adrift in the galaxy without anyone to pull you back to port.
But…
“I think you’re wrong,” I said.
He looked amused. “About which part? About home not existing or…?”
“That you don’t belong anywhere,” I replied. When he looked at me in confusion, I made sure the ship was on autopilot again and sat down beside him, our legs brushing as I pulled mine cross-legged, too. “You do.”
“That’s very kind of you to say, Starlight.”
“Despite what you think, I’m not saying it to be kind, Sian.
” I hesitantly reached up to brush his silver-white hair out of his eyes.
There was the discoloration of a burn along his hairline, and other remnants of old wounds—a ropy scar on the side of his neck, another on his ear, probably others all along his torso and arms, playing the same melody as the moon-kissed freckles across his cheeks.
“My dad always told me, after Mom died, that you’re made of everyone you meet, and everything you go through.
It all becomes a part of you. The bad things, the good ones, the ones you can’t remember…
” My fingers gently brushed the ropy scar on the side of his neck. “You carry home wherever you go.”
He shivered under my touch, my words settling on him in a way that made him inhale a heavy breath. His jaw trembled, and then he grabbed my hand that had traced his scar and kissed my knuckles. “How do you do it?” he murmured to them.
I blinked. “Do what?”
“Say the exact thing I need to hear.”
I laughed, suddenly very self-conscious, and pulled my hand away. “Oh, I absolutely don’t. You’re just easy to talk to.”
He slid a sly look my way. “Because I’m so charming?”
“Well…”
His eyebrows jerked up. “I’m not charming?”
I huffed, rubbing the hand he had kissed, because it tingled where his lips had touched my skin, and my heart still fluttered from the contact. “Being charming has nothing to do with it.”
“So I am charming.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re impossible.”
“You don’t mind it,” he admonished warmly as I forced myself to my feet again and returned to the pilot’s chair. I was glad, at least, that he couldn’t see how flustered I felt, my heart stuttering for the first time in—well…
Ever, really.
Because no—no, I didn’t mind it at all.
From her perch in the corner of the main hold, as she finished straightening the cards, Veebee said to her partner, “You’re right, this is better than that holonet drama.”
“Bleep-boop.”
I threw them a murderous glare.
Wordlessly, Veebee turned her back to me, then asked Entoo if they’d fancy another game.