Jumping through hyperspace in a ship was nothing. The cockpit remained the same, even the view from the canopy was normally no more than a jiggling of lights as stars jolted like startled insects. Earlier that day, she had jumped from one cargo bay to another, but even that couldn’t compare—the environs of one locale and the next were too similar.

With the jump to Darrin, however, her senses were totally rocked. The dark, cool forest exploded into light and heat. A fully-lit hangar popped into being around her. Air kept warm against the vacuum of space could be felt through her flightsuit. It was like waking too fast from a deep dream. Anlyn’s eyes struggled to adjust.

Crouched down in front of her, she saw a blurry Edison. His visor was up, his eyes blinking rapidly. She nodded to let him know she was okay.

Edison moved to the side, and Anlyn saw a looming wall of thruster cones beyond him. It was Albert’s new ship, a replacement for the one she’d stolen what seemed like forever ago. It had five thrusters, which she immediately pegged as one of the Darrin II designs. Not quite Lady Liberty, but then business probably wasn’t going so well since Anlyn’s emancipation.

She sized the ship up as she and Edison stole around it and toward the entrance to Albert’s shop. They moved quietly and swiftly, or as much of the former as Edison could muster while Anlyn pushed her limits on the latter.

The door to the shop was unlocked, which meant Edison didn’t need to use his sword to cut their way inside. The door slid back noiselessly and Edison took the lead. And not just because of his bulk and the power of the strange weapon he carried, but because he had actually spent more time freely exploring the asteroid’s corridors than Anlyn ever had. In a few days of being Albert’s guest, he had been given access to the arms dealer’s house in a manner never extended to his slave of so many years.

They passed through the lobby and opened the door to the living quarters, which squeaked as it recessed into the jam. Edison glanced back, and Anlyn thought she could see his flightsuit rippling with nervous fur underneath. He shrugged, and they moved forward through the dimly lit hallway, past the kitchen, leaving the kid’s rooms behind.

They headed directly for the master bedroom.

••••

Albert woke with a start. Some noise—probably Luke rummaging in the kitchen—had disturbed his dreams. He listened to the sound of his wife breathing: deep, peaceful snuffles. He rolled over gently, pulled the covers up to his shoulder, and wiggled his face close to her hair to breathe in the calming scent of her shampoo.

Then the bedroom door opened, letting in a spill of light from the hallway. Must’ve been Jenni that woke him, having trouble sleeping again. With a deep sigh, Albert rolled to the other side, pulling back the comforter to let her in, resigned to an evening of no sleep, to another long night of bruised shins from her infernal, nocturnal, kicking—

The light in the hallway went out. Not out, exactly—it became blocked by something. Beneath Albert’s confused and sleepy surface thoughts, something triggered an alarm. Some part of him knew, from night after night of repetition, that the amount of light shielded didn’t match his little Jenni.

He reached for the lamp beside his bed, but the overhead light came on first.

And the thing from the hallway rumbled closer.

••••

The plan was to be generous, to give Albert the quick death he had done nothing to deserve. One shot from Anlyn’s gun to the chest, another to the head, nothing said to his wife. No kids would be involved if it could be helped. They would grab the forcefield controls, get the ship, and make it to the rendezvous point. Quick and uncomplicated.

Edison did his part, bursting through the door, hitting the lights, making sure the room was secure, then getting to one side so she would have a clear shot.

But the barrier between her pistol’s plasma and Albert’s heart wasn’t a physical one. That wasn’t what stopped her. The real barrier, one she didn’t foresee needing to overcome, was some internal system linked between her brain and the tendons in her finger. It wouldn’t allow the latter to constrict. Anlyn took several steps forward, as if proximity would help her overcome the paralysis, but it just made things worse. She thought it would be easy, that the years of abuse, pain, and torture would steer her toward release, but the opposite was true. Albert’s power over her came trembling back, reminding her how meek and subservient she had been.

Albert’s eyes, meanwhile, grew wide as the terror of recognition coursed through him. His wife rolled over, one hand patting him, wanting to know why the light was on.

Albert remained speechless, but Gladys didn’t. She squinted at the intruders, gasped, then yelped and covered her mouth in surprise.

“You—” Albert muttered.

Anlyn’s hand quivered. It was the same hand that had pulled so many other triggers, reducing man and machine to dust. It was once a hand infamous for its ability to kill, all at Albert’s whim.

But she couldn’t. Even as she focused on the years of starvation, of subsisting on a Wadi diet of nothing but water, she couldn’t. Anlyn tried to feel the shackle around her withering ankle, tried to see Albert for all he had done to her, but all she saw was an old man in bed with his wife and two burglars standing over them.

Her hand slid down. The gun pointed away from Albert’s chest.

Albert’s arm moved beneath the blanket, a small mound creeping toward his waist.

The first to utter something was Edison, just a grunt of alarm. His hand moved swiftly as Anlyn screamed for Albert to hold still. Gladys yelled “Wait!” her white and wrinkled hand extended out over her husband, fingers splayed, body begging.

Edison roared.

He swung his arm down, whizzing past Anlyn. There was a loud pop, a surge of electricity in the air that Anlyn could feel through her flightsuit. Edison flew back, grunting, the scent of charred fur coming from somewhere.

Gladys got hit by the surge as well. She flew from the bed with a yelp, taking the blanket with her.

That left Albert at the epicenter of the discharge, unmoving at first, his body exposed. He wore a set of pajamas Anlyn knew well, and she recognized the shimmer of his personal forcefield all along them, the glisten of hardened air and energy just like the barrier that gated his hangar bay.

Albert’s hand rested on his belt, on the device that controlled the fields. His other hand moved up and down, patting his stomach, almost as if looking for something he’d misplaced. He tried to sit up—and a strange groan leaked out of his lungs.

He collapsed back into his pillow.

Something in the air caught Anlyn’s attention. She saw it as Gladys began whimpering and sobbing. It was the handle of Edison’s sword, hovering in mid-air, the end of it pointing directly at Albert. Following the tip, Anlyn focused on Albert again and saw where he was patting himself. She watched blood ooze from a crack in his form and gather behind the shimmer along his body, pooling up inside the forcefield that was doing more to hold Albert together than it was to protect him.

Edison reached over the bed and pushed Albert’s trembling hands away. He deactivated the device on Albert’s waist. When the forcefield released his buckblade, the handle fell to the ground. Edison and Anlyn both jumped back from it, lest the invisible sword do something effortless and awful. On the other side of the bed, Gladys’s soft whimpers grew to wails as the thin line seeping blood around her husband’s waist opened like a purse.

Her wails blossomed to shrieks, then to mad screams. Gladys reached for her husband, ignoring Edison as he removed the device from Albert’s waist. She grabbed one of Albert’s hands and pulled it to her cheek, but the movement just made things worse.

Albert’s body yawned wide, spilling things. The mad screams turned to gagging noises and pants for air, to nausea and hyperventilation, to the sounds of primal fear and disgust.

Anlyn had hardly moved through it all. She watched in detached confusion, the gun in her hand still pointing somewhere between Albert and the floor.

“Vacate with haste,” Edison said, reaching down to scoop up his blade and turn it off.

“I—”

“We have to go,” he said in Drenard, pulling her toward the door.

Anlyn felt herself dragged back, away from the terrible scene, away from Albert’s wide and motionless eyes staring up at the ceiling. Terrifying shrieks and accusations lanced at her as she stumbled back, shuffling and transfixed and trying to come to her senses.

It only got worse in the hallway, where they ran into the kids. Luke and Jenni stumbled out of their rooms with sleepy eyes and frightened mouths to see what was wrong with their mother.

Edison shouldered them aside. Anlyn followed in his wake, the look on both of the kids’ faces seared into her memory as sudden recognition seized them, their young brains putting together the horrific sounds from the bedroom with the unexpected presence of their father’s former slave, running free.

Anlyn hurried after Edison. A dozen words of regret and apology choked up inside her, all crammed in her throat as they tried to swim past the labored gasps of air heading the other direction.

Out in the hangar bay, Edison found the ship unlocked, just as they’d expected. Not needing to cut their way inside meant they could finally remove their helmets. Anlyn popped hers off as she made her way to the cockpit. She finally managed to swallow down a gulp of air, her first in what felt like forever.

Edison brought up the ramp and got ready to lower the forcefield while Anlyn settled into the pilot’s seat, her body still quivering, her mind continuing to race over what had just happened.

Then she thought on what lay ahead of them, the mission to return to Lok and face the Bern, and she settled on an awful truth:

This had been the easy part.

30 · Lok

“Molly? Walter?”

Cat swept the portable spotlight across the edge of the clearing, looking for any sign of them. She’d found the jump platform where one of them had dropped it halfway back to the ship, but she could find no trace of where they’d gone to afterward. She played the light across the trees one more time, throwing shadows deep into the woods, then powered it down to save the battery. Returning to the platform, she disconnected the four wires and carried it back to the ship to share her lack of results with the others.

“Nothing?” Scottie asked.

Cat shook her head.

“Were they—?” Ryn made a rude gesture with his hands, which Cat broke up with a slap from hers.

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“How’dya know?” Scottie asked.

“Because we’ve had girl talks,” Cat said.

That was too much for the boys. They roared with laughter.

“You—” Scottie snorted. “Girl talks?”

More guffaws from both of them.

“You guys are assholes. I’m worried about our friends, and all you—”

“Hey, Cripple!”

Cat turned to see Ryke standing in the entrance of the cockpit. He waved her over with one hand, his other one tugging on his white beard. He was the only person who could, in some magical manner, call her “Cripple” in a way that sounded nice.

“Where’d you go?” she asked Ryke. “I thought you were gonna help me look for them.”

“I was. I mean, I am. Or I did.” He stepped to the side and ushered Cat into the pilot’s seat.

“There has to be some kind of mistake,” Parsona said through the radio.

Ryke waved Parsona off as if she could see him. He pointed to the SADAR screen in front of Cat.

“What is this?” Cat asked. “Signature traces?” She dialed out the range and got rid of two of the overlays. The controls were similar to ships she had run, but with way too many options and readouts for her to see past.

“Two jumps,” Ryke said, pointing. “Here and here. Both less than forty kilos. Both to roughly the same spot.”

“Is that a moon?”

“It’s that big ship up there.”

“Do what? Why would Molly jump there? I don’t understand.”

“She wouldn’t,” Parsona said.

Cat turned to Ryke. “Did you know about this? How did you think to look here?”

He gestured to the screen. “Because this is where I always look for people.” He said it with a hurt tone. “And plus, there was something about that boy—”

“You don’t trust him either?”

“I don’t know about that, only . . . he said we had twenty percent of our fuel in captivity.” Ryke held up his small reader. “I show nineteen point nine two eight.”

“So he rounded up?”

Ryke looked at her as if she’d gone mad, or had struck him with a physical blow. “You think he’s the sort to do that?” The whiskers above his lip flapped with a disgusted puff of breath.

Cat rolled her eyes. “Oh, gimme a break.”

“Molly hinted to me many times that Walter couldn’t be fully trusted,” Parsona told them.

“When was this?” Cat asked.

“Let me check our prior conversations . . . Forty seven times over the past four and a half weeks. Most recently, yesterday at eight thirty two. Another time earlier that morning at—”

“Okay, I get it,” Cat said. She looked to Ryke. “So, how do you read this?”

He leaned forward. “Two objects, less than forty kilos each—”

“No, not that. I mean, do you think the Palan is working for the Bern? Did he make a mistake? Is he looking for adventure, what?”

“Oh. Hmm. Hadn’t thought about that. I was just excited to have found them.”

“That’s not finding them.” Cat jabbed a finger at the SADAR. “That’s locating where they used to be!”