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“It relieves stress… I may have been slightly over-exuberant, but still. Both of us are fine.” He’d needed the movement. The pain. Between that acid room on the pirate’s ship and being confined to the asteroid, he needed to keep moving or—
“You need toheal, Cal.” She paused and he braced himself for a scolding. Yes, she would be right, but knowing something didn’t always translate to acting on it.
“What happens when you hold still for more than a week?” she asked.
He blinked. “What? I don’t…”
“Never?”
“I don’t stay in one place for that long. I can’t with so many pirates out there.”
“What if there were no pirates?”
What a ludicrous, impossible question. “There are always pirates, Lucca.”
It hadn’t always been like that. Humans had come along and demonstrated that social rules were merely suggestions. It had changed everything. In a span of days, they’d unraveled thousands of years of peace.
“I’m asking hypothetically—if all the pirates decided to not be pirates because you made them see the light,” she asked.
Caligher’s face pinched in confusion. “There are human ships to worry about. There’s something large out there that we can’t find.” And… this wasn’t the talk he wanted to have with her.
“Humans bother you when you’re holding still? What did they do to you, Cal?” Her tone was quiet enough to make all other noise fade away. She sounded so heartbreakingly sorry.
So theyweregoing to discuss it now. Caligher accepted it with a deep breath, and let the words flow out as they would. “I had this friend I used to fly with, a researcher from Erulea,” he started, thinking of his lost friend Baade.
“What happened?”
“An archaic spaceship came from the other end of the river. They didn’t have jump points of their own, so they’d frozen themselves and flown through a hole in space, knowing it might kill them. The pods they arrived in were like molting tubes.”
“Molting tubes?”
He paused, tail coiling at the tip. “Was that a question?”
“Sorry…” she said with an audible grimace.
For a moment, his thoughts snagged there like he was missing something important—and something he was too inebriated to catch onto. It spun by him in a blur. This was a thought for later.
“Our envoys defrosted them, figured out how to communicate, and equipped them with jump points. They used that to return to their home planet.Earth.”
The name of the planet was an undignified grunt in his throat.Urth.Barely even a language.
He wondered whether she knew this.
Sheshouldhave known—becauseeveryoneknew, even as far as the exoplanets. One could feel the collective grief in the currents woven through their orbit. It was a silent, electric outcry.
He had her attention but he couldn’t determine what was going through her head. Maybe shecouldn’tfeel what he felt.
“I never met that round of humans,” he continued, listening closely to each disruption in her breath, “but those first few years were good. Those humans were peaceful, collaborative, and advanced in ways we had never seen, but primitive in others. It was a fascinating situation. They were almost just like us.”
Lucca’s throat worked on a hard swallow before she cleared it. “So what went wrong?”
It was as if she’d been stuffed into a time capsule for her entire life. That…undefinable sense… was the root of the mystery. What was Lucca keeping to herself?
He had hunches, but…
He didn’t like them.
“Humans returned, but they were different. One crashed on Sanmantia while we were grounded there and we let her live on the ship we left in.”
