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What had happened to her ‘lofty plans’ was probably as obvious to High Mother as it was to anyone else, even though Quaia tried to hide it. And even though it had been sixty cycles or more (she’d lost count).
She was waiting. Waiting for a miracle that it was pretty obvious would never come. But she had no idea how to find Torian, and if she left this station like she’d planned, he would never be able to find her.
Not that she really believed anymore that he was ever going to come looking for her. It was clear that he wasn’t.
Unfortunately, while waiting, she’d burned through a lot of her money, and now she had to work for Farange in order to get back on her feet and buy fuel. Something she was rather decidedly failing to do, because she often drank or gambled her earnings away with the other pilots.
The life of a pilot wasn’t even appealing to her anymore. Nothing was. And if Torian never came back for her, she knew she’d have to just keep living, and leave here someday… but the will to do much of anything had been snuffed out the same day she’d faced reality: Torian probably wasn’t ever coming back.
She flipped switches carelessly, only paying half the attention she should to the safety checks. But Farange’s ships went through so many that it had always felt redundant. And it was hard to care: the only thing awaiting her was a life of loneliness and huge bar tabs. Like all these pilots, who she saw in a completely different light now.
High Mother was still smiling as she boarded her own shuttle, bound for a large light-speed cruiser that was too big to dock in their meager port. Quaia sighed. Maybe she just wasn’t cut out for civilization. What kind of world rewarded scheming bitches like High Mother with everything they wanted, and people like Quaia with a kick to the heart?
“Don’t fall out of an airlock or anything,” she called out to High Mother, as her capsule closed. “Or do,” she said to the silence, making sure to turn her head so High Mother couldn’t read her lips. “You’re probably too mean to die anyway.”
High Mother’s blood probably wouldn’t even boil in a vacuum.
“Do I have a connection yet, or what?” Quaia barked into the comms.
No one answered, but no one needed to, because her craft was already being tugged by a guidance drone. She waved at High Mother as she passed by the window of the shuttle.
At least that’d get her goat.
But the thrill was short-lived. As soon as Quaia was facing the exterior of the ship, the great black void she’d always hoped to escape to, her reality was back to being what it was: miserable. And lonely. Waiting for Torian, even though she knew better.
She punched in her coordinates and listlessly guided the ship to the launch springs. Even the thrill of flying meant nothing to her anymore; it was all just so rote.
And it wasn’t, she thought, as she was shot into space, what she really wanted in the end.
Flying a cargo ship solo gave her the one thing she really didn’t need: time to think about Torian, and all the reasons that he might not have come back for her. Even when she tried to harden her heart, it always came back to the same place.
She punched the coordinates into the ship’s computer and settled in. As long as nothing crazy happened, this was all she would have to do for the entire six-hour flight to the hyperspace portal. And then it was one quick jump to the trade station. She was really only needed to maneuver out and to land.
Her eyes felt heavy already. She regretted not taking Lathan up on his stimulants. She sighed and leaned back, trying to think of anything, anything at all to do to keep herself awake, and her mind off Torian.
She set her radio wave scanner to work: sometimes she could get a snippet of very old radio waves from distant planets. That could be pretty fun. She yawned as the scan began. Nothing was getting picked up.
Why did she feel so sleepy? She yawned again and checked behind her; she could always go back to the cargo section and rummage around for something interesting to do.
But she was pretty comfortable right here. And extremely sleepy.
She set a timer, just in case she fell asleep, which it was looking more and more like she’d do. And then she just closed her eyes for a second, planning to get them wet—they itched with fatigue.
CHAPTER 16
She dreamed of Torian, like she always did if she was lucky.
An alarm pierced her dream. First, it was incorporated, an annoying sound that kept getting louder as she tried to whisper to Torian in her dream. Then she spoke, and the alarm got louder, so she yelled, and the alarm got even louder.
Her eyes flew open. For a second, it was impossible to tell what was going on; the few distant stars that could be seen in the area streaked across her window like comets. Multiple alarms were actually sounding.
“Oh, Suns, Suns, what the—?” she shouted, her eyes scanning the control panels.
She was in a spin. How this had happened was a complete mystery, and she didn’t have time to figure out the why of it—why striking an object, which was the only reason she could think of for this kind of spin, wouldn’t have woken her up before the alarms.
“Okay,” she told herself. “You’re okay.” She disengaged autopilot and grasped the controls, calmly manipulating as she had been trained—and was very good at—getting out of a spin.
But the controls weren’t responding as they were supposed to.
