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 beenasked. 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 theStarfarer, 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,deepache in my middle that wanted to take a ship and justgo. Everywhere—anywhere. But what about Dad? What about theStarfarer? 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 choosehome? 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’tgive 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—“anacademyof 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 camefrom 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.”
