Chapter Eight The Son
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Son
I stared.
There was a young man at the top of the docking ramp, a duffel slung over his broad shoulder. His honey-brown hair was pushed back, curling chaotically at the ends, framing a sharp face and sharper hazel eyes. The same eyes I had.
Eyes inherited from our mom.
The world blurred around me, like I was on a ship kicking into hyperdrive.
“Val?” I choked.
Suddenly I wasn’t staring at a familiar stranger framed in the open ramp of the Starfarer; I was three years in the past on the night he’d left, sitting at that cramped little scratch table in the galley, arguing with him while the rest of the ship slept.
I always lied that I didn’t remember what the argument was about, but of course I did.
I had nightmares about it, because what if I was the reason he left?
We’d been drinking tea late that night, our throats scratchy from our recent tour visit to Hoth, back when Dad deemed Hoth moderately safe (or as safe as an icy-tundra-covered planet in the Outer Rim could be), before the First Order had swooped in.
The cup warmed my frigid fingertips. I remembered that the most, how the cup felt searingly hot, like a brand.
Val had sneezed and sniffed, rubbing his nose on the sleeve of his uniform coat.
The entire ship had been in a somber mood since returning from Hoth.
Most tours went off without a hitch. We’d land planetside, show where the Rebel Alliance took a stand against the Empire during the Battle of Hoth, and return.
It had been a bloody battle, one the rebels had lost, so it was already a hard tour stop.
Still, even without knowing any of that, the remains of Echo Base and the wreckage of Imperial walkers across the tundra made the experience solemn. The tours usually didn’t get close to the wreckage—most everything had been picked through, anyway—but that day had been different.
For one, the tour had a group of younger men who had been troublemakers the entire trip, so when Dad found them unaccounted for back on the Starfarer, along with Val, he immediately figured out where they’d gone.
“You could have said no,” I’d finally said, breaking the silence. Looking back on it, I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth at all. “You didn’t have to take them to the ruins.”
“I wanted to see them, too,” he had replied.
Once Val had returned to the ship with the lander and guests, Dad immediately snatched back the master key he’d given Val just two months before.
They had a long talk in his office, and I heard some of the words that were shouted, because ships made of metal carried voices well.
Val was going to take over the Starfarer.
He was going to be captain one day—that was always the plan—so Dad always put more pressure on him.
Val was fiddling with his fingernails. There was still grime under them from exploring the ruins. “You can’t say you aren’t a little curious what’s out there.”
No, actually, I wasn’t. “Dad said they’re graves. We don’t mess with graves.”
Val rolled his eyes. “Nothing was in there.”
“You went inside one? Val—”
“Why not? As I said, nothing was inside. It was picked clean. Probably by some damn scavengers or something.”
I studied him quietly. My fingertips were warm on my cup, and I absently traced my thumbs around the lip of it.
“Don’t give me that look,” he said. “I know you think all his rules are stupid, too. ‘Don’t touch anything, don’t move it, keep everything exactly as it is.’ ” He rolled his eyes. “As if the rest of the galaxy does that.”
“He just thinks things need to be preserved—”
“The galaxy is changing, Arie,” he interrupted. He’d just turned eighteen two months earlier, and the itch to break things and smear his name across the galaxy had grown so big, he could barely contain it anymore. “If we don’t change with it, we’ll be relics, too.”
“Is that what those weirdos told you on the way down to that Imperial walker?” I asked. “To get you to play along?”
He narrowed his eyes. “They said you wouldn’t get it.”
“They said?” I echoed, eyebrows high. “You talked about me?”
“They asked what you thought about it all.”
“Did you tell them that I thought it was reckless?”
He shook his head. “Sure, it was a bad decision to take them down there, okay? Of course it was. But I wanted to see it, too. You can only experience so much by looking out of a viewport, you know. It’s like Dad wants to put himself in a bubble and trap us there, too.
” As he said it, I could see the realization begin to flicker across his face.
“This ship’s a cage, Arie. Can’t you see it? ”
“It’s home,” I insisted.
“It’s a prison,” he snapped, “and I’m done telling other people’s stories.”
“So you want to run away to be in one,” I said. My voice was cold, much like my tea was becoming.
He raised his gaze to mine and held it. There was a defiant gleam in his eyes.
“I want to do something with my life,” he said, seeming to give in to the idea that had wormed into his brain and was now growing, feasting on all the what-ifs the galaxy had to offer.
“There’s stuff happening out there in the Unknown Regions.
There’re sightings of stormtroopers more and more often.
There’re cities getting taken over. The war’s not over, no matter what anyone thinks.
No matter what Dad thinks. I can do something, Arie. I want to do something.”
“But what about Dad?” And me? I wanted to add, but pursed my lips together so I didn’t, afraid the admission would make me feel small.
He turned his head away, quiet. Then he said, “You’ll be here.”
And that was what made me angry. That he knew he could leave, because I wouldn’t—even if I wanted to. I had to stay, because Dad would be alone otherwise. Val knew he’d trap me here if he left, just like he was afraid of being trapped himself.
Heat flickered in my middle. I clutched my cup tightly. “Fine,” I snapped. “Go. Do your thing. Whatever! We’ll be fine without you.”
“Arie—”
I shoved myself to my feet. My untouched tea sloshed over the lip, but it was cold as I left the galley.
That was the last thing I had ever said to him.
No goodbye.
No “I love you.”
Just…Go. We’ll be fine without you.
And we were fine; we would be fine, but…
That didn’t mean I felt any less guilty for being the reason he’d left in the first place. Maybe if I hadn’t picked a fight, hadn’t planted that idea in his head, he’d have cooled off and stayed. It was my fault, I thought.
Just like Mom.
But…
But here Valor was, like he’d just popped out for an errand and come back. And for a second, I could trick myself into believing that he had. That I was still that naive fifteen-year-old with my nose buried in serials and my eyes turned to the stars, and I ached for that girl.
He grinned in that sheepish way of his that I remembered too fondly, though it looked different on his grown face, so changed from the boy who’d fled three years ago.
If it wasn’t for the tilt at the corner of his mouth, I wasn’t sure I could convince myself that it really was him.
He’d grown into his once-awkward height, almost as broad as Dad now.
There was a new scar over his left eyebrow, and his skin was a bit darker from some distant planet’s hard sun, his freckles deep like ink.
I stood there with my mouth agape. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Hey, snotface,” he greeted, that familiar grin curling higher into a smile, and it was so familiar that my heart leapt into my throat. The brief shimmer of anger in my belly gave way to joy.
My datapad slid from my hands and clattered to the deck. “It’s you.”
He grinned, lowering the duffel bag slung over his shoulder to the floor of the ship. “Surprise!”
I—I’d imagined what I would do if I saw him again. In some of my dreams I ran up to him and hugged him tightly, and he smelled exactly the way he always had—like transistor oil and slightly burnt exhaust.
In those dreams, I cried into his jacket, big gulping sobs I didn’t even know I’d had in me, trapped down in my belly like a dormant scream. And it just made him hold on tighter. Like Mom used to.
“Hey, hey,” he whispered soothingly in those dreams, rubbing circles on my back, “no need for the moisture farm. I’ve come back.”
In other dreams, I punched him so hard he went back in time to the day he’d left, and decided never to leave at all.
But as it stood, I didn’t do either.
I just…stared.
I didn’t even hear the lift ding until Dad called, “Daughter? The sensor says the ramp’s still open. Is everything…?” His voice trailed off as he recognized the man opposite me. He blinked in the bright orange light of the setting sun, as if he didn’t quite believe his eyes.
Valor turned to him with that same smile. I wondered how long he’d had to practice it in the mirror. “Hey, old man.”
Unlike me, Dad didn’t just stare. “Valor?” he whispered, and lurched past me to grab my brother by the shoulders.
“Val?” he kept repeating as if he couldn’t believe it.
Hansifred Quay was an emotional man. He put his heart on his sleeve, and it was one of the many things I loved about him.
Another was his hugs—like the one he drew Valor into.
Encompassing and warm and tight. It was the kind of hug that made you feel grounded and loved.
The kind of hug that made wampas melt—made everything melt, really.
Even Valor.
“You’re home!” Dad cried, releasing him, tears running freely down his cheeks. “You’re home!”
“Yeah,” Val replied, his eyes bright with tears. “Sorry it took so long.”