AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I followed Harb’k out to my shuttle.
Pip did not reply when I greeted him, and all I got from him was silence when I asked him to locate Haax’l’s shuttle.
The next hours passed slowly, but when the sky started to darken, his shuttle finally returned. I stood at Pip’s door and waited for Sam to step out. But she never did. Panic filled my chest. Where was she?
“Where is Sam?” I asked, marching toward the pair who were unloading some foraged machine parts from their shuttle.
Aanya held her middle finger up at me in a gesture I had come to recognize as an insult. She said nothing.
Haax’l took pity on me. “Relax. She’s safe. She went to stay with some friends.”
I tried to get him to say more, but that was all he was willing to tell me.
Frustrated, I stomped back into my shuttle, and I went to the wall panel which hid the storage cabinet I’d given Sam for her things and opened it. Usually, after a day of flying around, the contents would be a mess and Sam would spend every evening rearranging her things back into neat little piles. It was empty; all her things were gone.
There was no trace of her.Not a single pile of anything. Not even her scent that usually lingered in the air. She was gone.
It was three days before Pip would talk to me again. Harb’k tried to get me to go hunting with him, but I claimed weakness and told him I didn’t want to be a liability. It was only a half-lie.
Although Pip wouldn’t talk to me, he did let me fly him. I flew back up to the hunter group in Canada and watched the group, staying around the periphery, though I was sure they knew I was there since the shuttle was visible on the map. When I didn’t see Sam after two whole days, I flew down to check the Franklin settlement.
She had many friends there, and the settlement was large, with hundreds of people. It would be a good place to hide.
“She’s not here, dumbass.” Those were the first words Pip said to me in days. I don’t know where he’d been this whole time, but most of his consciousness wasn’t here on the ship, and I’d had to perform a lot of tasks manually. I hadn’t realized how much he helped me. It was like he knew me so well he could predict what I wanted to do next.
Even little things, like refilling my shuttle’s water tank, had been more difficult on my own. I’d gone over to the side of the shuttle and waited for the hatch to open automatically like it normally did, only to realize that I actually had to do that myself. I hadn’t realized Pip had been the one doing it for me the whole time.
“And she wasn’t with the guys in Canada either. If she was, do you think I’d have let you go there and storm in to take her away? You’d just mess things up even worse.”
“Where is she, then?”
“Because of your jackassery, they had all their shuttles keep that little bit of information from me so I couldn’t help you find her. I wasn’t going to, at least not for the first few days. You needed to learn your lesson. But now I’m sick of you moping around. I want to get out there and hunt some bugs. So I did a little bit of digging, and put a few pieces of the puzzle together, and I think I know where she is.”
Hope flared in my chest.
“But if I help you, you’re going to owe me for life, buddy.”
As if I didn’t already owe him everything.
Pip wasn’t finished though. “I want a new paint job. No, not a paint job, a whole new exterior. I look like shit! I didn’t realize it until we flew past a glass building. I want a makeover.”
“With only one mothership orbiting Earth, I’m not sure when we can go to get cosmetic work done.”
“I don’twantto go back up to a mothership, not after what happened last time. We’re going to get Sam to do it. And that’s why we’re going to go look for her right now.”
“It would help if you told me where she is.”
“She is on the mothership here on Earth, or at least I think she is. Some of hunters from the lost mothership regrouped there and are trying to make the stubborn thing work for them.
“The second they turned it back on, it started to plot a course to Planet 6947. They had to remove all its flight capabilities. They use it like a building now. Serves it right. That thing is ornery. Much worse than me.Andnot nearly as smart. I’d bet every single one of my circuits that Jask’l gave Sam a job working on it with him.”
Jask’l! That male had coveted Sam, and with her angry at me, he’d swooped in to steal her away. I’ll bet he promised her access to all the equipment on the motherships. My initial reaction was anger, red-hot, searing anger, but then it was replaced by the dull ache of disappointment.Iwas the one who’d told her to leave.
Jask’l hadn’t stolen her from me; I’d pushed her into his arms.
“You still haven’t asked how I found her.”
“You can tell me while we fly there.”
