“Next!” The guard says. “Come on. The gate is about to close.”
I grab Dox’s hand and square my shoulders. “Ready?” I ask.
“No,” she chokes and squeezes my hand tighter to let me know she’s ready anyway.
I take a deep breath and shift my weight?—
“Hey! The timer is about to run out!” Someone in the crowd shouts, and suddenly, the two of us are jostled and shoved to the side and the crowd begins to swarm.
“Get back!” the Luxe guard snarls, drawing a large sword he begins to swing at the converging Wastrels.
Their desperation makes them careless and a few of them take the blade across the chest. A frenzy begins.
“The gate!” I shout, trying to drag Dox toward it. “We gotta get through the gate!”
I start to drag Dox through the stampede of people, watching as they overcome the guards and start spilling through. I’ve seen what happens when the gate closes while people are still going through. I’ve seen the bodies.
“V!” Dox shouts. “We’re not gonna make it!”
“We’re gonna make it!” I snarl, dragging her through the swarm. The strain on my hand starts to pull and fear fills me. “Hold on!”
“Vesper!” she screams, her fingers slipping.
“Hold on!” I scream again, terrified, reaching back with my other arm and grabbing her wrist. Something pops and she screams.
“Enough!” the guards shout, slamming some sort of power into the crowd that throws them backward. The crowd screams, too many people on the ground as they get trampled, but no one stops. Stopping means failure. Stopping means being stuck in Dross for another month.
My fingers slip and I get a good look at Dox’s face as she seems to realize it the same time as I do. “No!” I cry, just as our hands are separated.
I’m swept into the crowd swarming toward the gate. Dox is swept in the other direction.
“Vesper!” she screams, reaching for me, as she’s thrown backward. “Vesper!”
“Dox!” I scream, as Orion grins from the mass of writhing people.
Time slows as I fall backward. The sound of the gate starting to crackle and fizz makes my head hurt.
“Vesper!” Dox screams again, reaching for me, trying to scramble over the crowd and dive in after me. “Vesper!”
I can’t move. I can’t fight it as I’m swept toward the gate, as it crackles around the mass of bodies I’m trapped in. I see Dox’s panicked face, her hands outstretched to mine, too far to ever hope to make it into the gate in time.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this isn’t what I think it is. Maybe she’ll be right behind me.
“Dox!” I scream one last time, just as I crash into the swirling blue of the Harrow Gate.
Her face disappears along with the only place I’ve ever known.
CHAPTER6
VESPER
When I was barely fifteen, I briefly became a Spine Jacker. I was lean and small, and that meant I could fit into a lot of places others couldn’t. There were narrow crevices I could shimmy into and find components no one else had ever reached before. I became popular fast and it was an easy enough way to earn some credits and Harrow Bars. While Dox was focused mainly on deliveries at the time, I was—at least I thought I was—making a killing. For the better part of a month, we weren’t hungry at all. I remember thinking that we were winning, that we were doing something right.
And then I slipped on a ledge fourteen stories above the concrete and jagged metal.
I’d pushed myself and gone higher in an abandoned sector where the metal was more decayed. The dwarf star at our center degrades things faster the higher you go, and I’d gone higher than most were willing to go in the sector. I knew the good stuff was up there, stuff that would feed us for a year, so I climbed and climbed until my arms were shaking. I shimmied out on the ledge, my toes balancing on a beam too narrow for my frayed shoes. I reached for a hand hold and missed.
As I fell, I hit sharp edges and rusted metal. Luckily, there were things to hit that slowed my decent so I hadn’t broken anything, but with each hit, I’d been given a new wound. My arms hit a particularly large metal point and my skin was sheared right off along my forearm about an inch wide and a foot long. The burning had made me scream, but the pain kept me curled in the fetal position for a week while it attempted to heal. We’d used our last credits to buy medicine that made it hurt worse, but kept me from getting a nasty case of Wire Bite. The scar is raised on my forearm now, a reminder to never step higher before I’m ready—and sometimes not at all—but I still remember the way it had felt to have my skin flayed off.
