Chapter 7 #3
“Like I crawled out of a story someone else wrote,” I say, and my voice breaks exactly where it wants to. “Like my ribs have windows. Like I finally got the air I keep pretending I don’t need.”
“Good,” she says, and her grin gets quieter, more dangerous. “Now keep going.”
We settle into the lane that isn’t a lane, a thin seam smugglers and fools use when they don’t want to fill out paperwork.
CynJyn’s fingers dance over the console, strip-scrambling transponder chatter, feeding the nav a breadcrumb trail only a liar could love.
The cruiser purrs along, delighted to be doing something indecorous.
The ceremonial seat warmers try to make our sins cozy; I cut them off and laugh when CynJyn calls me cruel.
“Tell me a joke,” she says, shoving the bottle of neon poison into a cup holder like it’s a talisman. “Custom demands it.”
“Knock knock,” I say, deadpan.
“Who’s there?”
“Not me,” I say, and for once the joke is funny because it’s true. We laugh like kids who just jumped a fence and didn’t get caught. The laughter tastes like copper and sugar and a beginning.
“Run me through what you packed,” CynJyn says, more practical now, more pilot than priestess. “Food?”
“Two bars. The rehydrating kind that tries to be a cookie and fails.”
“Clothes?”
“Spare shirt.” I grimace. “The ridiculous top you bullied me into last month.”
“Now it’s a uniform,” she says. “Med kit?”
“Mini. If we get decapitated I can offer antiseptic.”
“Perfect,” she says, and pats my knee. “Rook’s Rest will fill the gaps. We’ll pick up credit chits from Lloyd’s cousin, trade a few favors, and nobody is gonna ask you your surname unless they’re trying to sell you a fake one.”
The comms panel emits a polite double chirp. It’s nothing—just a range-cross notification—but my shoulders jump anyway. CynJyn flips a switch, sends a square of our ID behind a veil, and we slide past the listening post like we’re smoke. My heartbeat goes back where it belongs.
We talk nonsense to keep it there. We list the worst sandwiches we’ve ever eaten.
We rank the house’s portraits by how likely they are to judge us in the afterlife.
We decide Boo Boo would absolutely pick a fight with a star if it looked at her wrong.
The ship purrs. The stars stare. Akura becomes a coin you could spend and regret later.
“Hey,” CynJyn says after a while, quieter, eyes on the bleed of starlight over the nacelle. “You okay?”
“I thought I’d be more guilty,” I admit, surprised to hear it. “I thought I’d be sicker. I thought I’d be more… small. I’m not. I feel—” I search for a word and come up with one I trust. “Loud.”
“Good,” she says. “Be loud. The universe can take it.”
“Do you think he’ll—” I start, then stop, then hate that I started at all.
“Stand,” she says, not looking at me. “And breathe like it hurts.”
“I hate that you’re right,” I say, and love her for it.
We drift a while inside that soft, impossible peace—a stolen cruiser, two girls who shouldn’t, a planet spinning itself smaller behind us.
The console glows in muted blues. The auto-starfield paints the canopy in curated constellations for important people who hate the real sky’s chaos; I kill it and let the real stars burn.
CynJyn hums a song that isn’t a song, just a thread of sound to stitch me to the moment.
Rook’s Rest looks like someone welded a city out of leftover arguments. Rusted ribs, patchwork plating, neon that flickers like it owes someone money. My palms sweat as we slide into the approach lane. I can taste hot metal through the vents and the old-socks funk of recycled air.
“Dock Control,” CynJyn hails, voice pitched to charming. “This is… ceremonial shuttle C-Three-Fancy requesting a sleepy berth with no questions and a working seal.”
Static crackles; a voice answers like it’s chewing gravel. “Identify.”
“Identifying as a girl with credits,” CynJyn says, winking at me. “And a very healthy respect for your fire suppression system.”
“Long day,” the voice sighs. “Make me believe you.”
“Sending a saints’ fee,” she sings, thumbing a transfer chip. “And a maintenance-tag request for a ship that absolutely isn’t here.”
A pause. “Received. Berth H-12. You saw nothing; I saw nothing. Try not to leak anything interesting.”
“We leak only charisma,” CynJyn replies. “H-12 it is.”
I angle us in. The berth yawns open like a tired mouth. Our borrowed peacock of a cruiser shimmies into shadow and settles with a low, contented purr. My heartbeat hasn’t learned the trick. It flutters against my ribs like a bird that wants a bigger sky.
“Hey,” CynJyn says, soft now, eyeing my white-knuckle grip on the yoke. “You good?”
“Define good,” I say. “If good is ‘operational and full of electricity,’ then yes.”
She laughs, unbuckles, and plants a quick kiss against my temple. “You are a menace, and I love you. Mask on. Hood up. We blend.”
We step down the ladder into a wind that smells like coolant and fried noodles and someone’s old pillow. A dockmaster in a patched pressure suit rounds the corner, four arms loaded with clipboards and a face tattoo that’s technically a map.
“You the maintenance crew?” he grunt-asks, squinting at our boots.
CynJyn smiles like sin in church. “We are the maintenance crew of your dreams.”
He grumbles. “Dreams don’t tip.”
“They do tonight.” She palms him a chip. “We also need the bay doors to forget this ship exists.”
“The doors don’t forget,” he says, but the chip vanishes. “They nap. Three hours, if the saints are bored.”
“Wake them only for fire,” she says. “And if anyone with a crest asks questions, tell them we left to buy better questions.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He jerks a thumb down a corridor that wheezes. “The Latch is that way. Don’t get married in it.”
“Perish the thought,” I mutter.
We head out, moving fast and casual. The station’s guts are noisy: clanking pipes, drones whining as they haul crates, vendors hawking cables and contraband apples, a preacher praising a saint I’ve never heard of with a megaphone that hates its job.
People flow around us, stitched together by bad decisions and mutual need.
The gravity sags then compensates, and my stomach does a little rollercoaster sigh.
CynJyn bumps my shoulder. “Head high. Look like you belong.”
“I’m trying to look like I owe rent,” I say.
“Perfect,” she says. “Now smell like it.”
“The Latch” is a cantina shackled to a view dome, its sign a busted hatch cover painted with a sloppily winking eye.
Inside, it’s a riot—Kilgari dockhands stacked two-deep at the bar; a trio of off-worlders playing a gambling game that involves throwing metal teeth; a couple in matching mechanics’ coveralls making out like they found god.
A greasy kitchen window belches steam that smells like spicy oil and regret.
Music thumps low from speakers taped to a cracked beam, the rhythm stitched from a dozen planets’ bad ideas.
“Bless this mess,” CynJyn declares, rubbing her hands. “We drink the neon; we make friends; we leave no forwarding address.”
I pull my hood further forward. “We fail to be seen.”
“We fail magnificently,” she agrees, already carving a path to the bar. “Two drinks that won’t kill us and one that might,” she tells the bartender, a scarred woman who registers us with one sharp glance and decides we can’t afford trouble.
“You like yours sweet or angry?” the bartender asks, slamming down cups that have known too many lips.
“Angry,” I say.
“Sweet-angry,” CynJyn says. “Like revenge with a sugar rim.”
The bartender grins despite herself. “I got just the poison.”
I feel eyes. Not the bar’s general curious once-over; this is a needle.
I shift my weight, scanning. A human with a bad haircut?
A Reezah with a throatscar? The mirror behind the bottles throws back a chaos of faces.
One catches, a beat too long. A man in a trader’s vest, jaw clenched, gaze stuck on my profile like gum on a shoe.
“Cyn,” I murmur without moving my lips, “we’ve got sticky.”
“Already?” she asks, then follows my flick of attention. “Relax. He looks like he’s judging everyone’s hair. And yours is objectively perfect.”
“He’s staring at the shape of my skull,” I say, swallowing foam that tastes like citrus and battery. “Cyn—”
“You’re on a rest station wearing a hood like a celebrity,” she says, bumping the rim of her cup to mine. “People stare. It’s a hobby. Drink.”
A Kilgari vendor with glitter-dusted horns shoulder-checks us with friendly malice. “Ladies,” she purrs, displaying four hands of bracelets. “You look like trouble and I’m thirsty. Drinking game?”
CynJyn lights up. “Yes. Rules?”
“Simple. We flip, we sip, we bluff. Loser buys a trinket. Winner gets to name the trinket something rude.”
“Gods,” I say. “That’s my religion.”
“Star,” CynJyn orders, already perched on a stool. “You relax. I’ll make a friend and a mistake.”
“I’m both,” the vendor promises, slapping down a stack of coin-flats. “Name’s Shash. What are we toasting?”
“Poor life choices,” CynJyn says.
“Bless,” Shash says. “Begin.”
They dive in, coins clacking, cups clinking, insults flying in two dialects.
CynJyn cheats with the grace of a saint; Shash pretends not to notice and cheats harder.
The bar laughs around them, a warm roil of noise that smells like frying and cheap cologne and old victories.
I take my drink and retreat toward the stairs, because my heart won’t stop tapping out a Morse code for run.
The upper deck is a metal balcony bolted to the wall, lined with rickety tables and a view down into the chaos.
A cracked viewport looks out on the docking ring and the star-prick black beyond.
I slide into a shadow where the light decides not to try and breathe until my shoulders stop trying to kiss my ears.
A server in a velvet jacket that’s seen better decades drops a dish of salty nuts and a water bulb onto my table without asking. “You look like you need these,” they say.
“I must have that face,” I say, sipping. The water tastes like it learned math in a pipe, but it’s cold.
“You’ve got the face of a girl doing calculus in a bar,” they say. “It’s ugly math. Ditch it. Look at the pretty sky.”
“I’m looking,” I lie, and then I actually look because the stars on this side of the dome are crisp, and far out a tug drifts past with a string of cargo like a slow dragon. “Thanks.”
They tip a finger-gun, already gone to scold a table of gamblers for staining the felt with someone’s sangria.
Below, CynJyn throws her head back and laughs; Shash slams her last coin down and howls accusation; the crowd hoots like it’s a moon festival.
I loosen a fraction. Maybe I’m being ridiculous.
Maybe the trader with the chewing-gum gaze was just bored.
Maybe the ping in the cruiser was a weather balloon with a law degree.
A couple slips into the seats two tables over, whispering in the language of people who’ve just decided to forgive each other. The music slouches into something slower. My drink warms. CynJyn catches my eye, salutes with a lime wedge, and bellows, “She’s finally smiling; someone memorialize it!”
“Delete it,” I mouth, but I’m grinning now and it feels like a stretch I needed.
The lights hiccup.
Just a twitch, a brown-out blink the station shrugs off twice a day, but my neck tightens anyway. The music stutters and resumes. Below, a bartender slaps the side of a flickering sign and it straightens like a child caught misbehaving.
“See?” I mutter to myself. “Paranoid.”
The lights hiccup again, bigger. A line of fixtures along the ceiling flutter like a flock deciding to turn. The bass in the speakers gutters; the cantina does that thing crowds do when a vibe changes: a collective inhale.
A low-frequency throb rolls through the floor. It’s not sound at first; it’s physical, a pulse in the bones, in the teeth, in the joints. The loose screws in the railing buzz. The water in my bulb shivers a tiny, perfect circle.
“What is that?” someone asks, too loud, too chipper.
“Generator test,” a voice calls optimistically.
“Generator my ass,” Shash growls, all four hands gone still. “That’s external.”
Another throb, stronger, and the old neon over the bar gives up the ghost in a crackle. The music dies trying to apologize. Somewhere down the corridor, a siren coughs and catches.
“Station alert,” a bored speaker says, trying to sound like it says this every day. “Remain calm and—”
The windows bloom red.
It starts as a smear—like a child has dragged a brush loaded with blood across the glass—and then the whole dome washes in it, a furious glow from beyond the docking ring. People stand mid-conversation, mid-drink, mid-lie. Someone knocks a stool over and no one laughs.
A kid near the rail says, “What’s that light?”
A miner at the bar answers with a word that arrives low and mean and undeniable: “Reapers.”
The cantina doesn’t scream. It compresses. Sound drops, then explodes—metal chairs scraping, boots on the deck, a dozen different prayers in a dozen different creeds, the bartender shouting for everyone to keep their heads while she kills the gas line in the kitchen.
CynJyn is suddenly at my elbow, breath fast, eyes wide and very, very awake. “We’re going.” Her hand clamps my wrist, hard. “Now.”
“What about—”
“The ship's hidden,” she snaps. “We get to it before the hidden stops mattering.”
The siren changes pitch, a long, low moan that gets under my skin and drags my nerves like a net. I catch another flash of the viewport and see shapes—far off, black against red, engines like coals in a forge, hungry and coming fast.
“Cyn,” I whisper, even though she’s right there, even though the word is useless. “Cyn—”
“Move,” she says, and the station agrees by tilting the lights to emergency red, washing every face into a horror version of itself.
She gets no argument from me.