Chapter 1
Dani
Mythumbhoveredoverthe submit button on the recruitment ad I’d stared at for hours.
Nanny needed. Remote location. Room, board, and passage off-world included. Experience preferred, but not required. Immediate start. Inquire within.
The words glowed against the cracked screen of my data pad, casting blue light across the closet I called a bedroom. Outside my window, a circular piece of reinforced glass about the size of my head, the towers of New York City-7 stretched beyond view into the smog-choked sky. Somewhere on the ground level, seventeen floors below, the street markets rang closing bells, their noise dimming to a bearable rumble. Unlike the market, the surveillance drones never stopped their patrol patterns, their red eyes blinking through the haze like mechanical stars.
How much longer could I live here? Every breath felt suffocating, and had for years.
“Danielle?” My mother’s voice reached me through the thin walls. “Have you reviewed the contract details?” She cracked the door open. “The Fitzsimmons family expects an answer by Friday.”
My stomach clenched. Of course she’d mention the stupid contract. Unbeknownst to me, my parents negotiated a marriage arrangement with Anthony Louis Fitzsimmons’s family as if I were cargo instead of their daughter. My father used the term ‘advancing age’ and found who he thought was an appropriate suitor for me. Heir to the Fitzsimmons pharmaceutical dynasty, Anthony Louis, as he preferred to be called, was twice my age and possessed all the warmth and charm of a tax audit. I’d met him once, and in that single meeting, he’d looked through me, not at me, as if he were planning how I’d fit into his life like a decorative object he could rearrange at will.
“I’m reviewing them,” I called back, which wasn’t a lie, more of an omission of facts. I was reviewing my options, and they all felt like variations of the same cage.
Except this one. A strange little ad appeared in my feed three days ago, bounced through encrypted networks that technically weren’t legal but that everyone used anyway. Off-world. The words alone made my heart race. I’d never been beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Few people in my economic bracket left. Space travel was for those with extreme wealth, the corporate elite, and the military. It wasn’t for girls from mid-tier housing blocks with liberal arts degrees that qualified them for menial jobs, which, in our society, meant nothing.
But a nanny position with room and board included?
I bit my lip hard enough to hurt and opened the application form, smiling at the first line.
Name.Easy enough.Danielle Slater, I typed.
Age. Twenty-six.
Relevant experience?
My cursor blinked, the red appearing to glare at me in accusation. Whatever I put down would be a lie, or a dramatic stretching of the truth. Thanks to my position as a citizen in the lower end of the middle-class, I had the fortunate experience to babysit twice in my life. Once for a neighbor when I was fourteen, which ended with the kid crying and me calling his mother home early. The second time was for a cousin’s toddler. They’d bitten me hard enough to leave a scar. Growing up as the sole child of my parents, I had no experience navigating sibling relationships, and I had no maternal instincts that I’d ever discovered. I leaned back and tried to remember any childhood memories involving dolls or pretending to parent.
This ad was my only shot at escape that didn’t involve Anthony Louis’s icy hands, and the even colder contract.
Five years of childcare experience, I typed; the lie formed easier than I expected.Specializing in infants and early development. References available upon request.I could probably find a friend or two to fudge a reference if push came to shove.
My hands shook as I filled in the rest of the application. The education and health records were easy to answer and upload, but it took me four tries to take a profile photo where I looked both competent and approachable. The background check would show nothing interesting. I was what my friends called a ‘goody-goody.’ I never even received so much as a parking violation. To the world, I was invisible and unremarkable. No one ever looked at me twice. Maybe my anonymity would work in my favor.
I hit submit before I could talk myself out of it.
The confirmation screen appeared immediately. Application received. If selected, we will contact you via your preferred method within 24 hours.
Twenty-four hours.
If I could talk my mother into giving me a bit more time, I had maybe forty-eight hours before my parents expected my signature on the marriage contract.Sure. No pressure.
I shut down the data pad and pressed it against my chest, closing my eyes. “Please,” I whispered to whatever gods or algorithms might be listening. “Please let this work.”
That night, long after our traditional family dinner, I brushed my teeth, changed into comfortable pajamas, and crawled under the covers of my childhood bed. It took forever to fall asleep, and when my eyes finally grew heavy, I dozed fitfully; dreaming of red drone eyes that followed me through endless gray corridors, of Anthony Louis’s thin smile, of my mother’s disappointed face when I failed to meet another expectation. My data pad chimed at 3 AM, I jolted awake so fast I had to grab onto the headboard to keep from falling off my narrow bed.
Application approved. Passage secured on transport shuttle TSD-222, departing Terminal 9, 0700 hours. Bring essentials only. Your employer will provide anything else you need. Luggage allowance: 20kg. Congratulations and welcome to your new position.
I got the job!Tomorrow. As in, less than twenty-seven hours from now.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I read the message three more times, searching for the catch, the fine print; the reveal that this was some kind of scam or worse. The attachment included legitimate transport credentials, encoded with security markers I recognized from news broadcasts.This was real.This was a real shuttle to a real off-world location.
The destination line read:Frontier Colony 8-Beta.
I’d never heard of it, but that didn’t surprise me. My knowledge of off-Earth places was minimal. I grabbed my data pad with trembling fingers and searched for the colonyname. Results were sparse. Frontier Colony 8 was a newer settlement, established only fifteen years ago, located in what the map designated as “remote territory” in the Outer Rim. Population: approximately 50,000. Species diversity: high. Primary industries: mining, agriculture, trading hub.
