Sabrina
Rubbingmy brow with my right hand, unbuckling my straps with the other, I cough up what feels like a whole lung. But hell, after that wild landing, I almost can’t believe I'm still alive.
The ship is still, and as I bow out of my seat and my knees hit the floor, Tata comes over and grabs my shoulder. “You okay?”
I nod weakly, hacking out, “Yeah. I’m fine.” Shaken, suffocating, but unhurt. “You?” I peer up at her through the smoke.
Her thick black hair was in a ponytail at her shoulder but most of it is now frizzy and tangled down her back. “I’ll be okay,” she says, forcing a rattled smile, then offers me a hand and helps me to my feet.
“Everyone okay?” Weston asks from the cockpit, materializing with Annora under his arm. She leans into him, and I see a big bruise forming on her brow.
“Yeah.” Tata and I nod at him.
“Fine,” Mickie groans from somewhere in the back. He doesn’t sound fine.
“Blat?” Weston calls past us and out toward Mickie’s voice, into the smoke-clouded back of the ship’s bridge.
The dense fog is too thick to peer through. Weston hands Annora off to Tata and pushes past me, heading into it. “Blat, you okay?” he calls again.
I follow him into the gray murk, lifting my shirt simultaneously to cover my nose. Looking around, from what I can see, besides a few plates of metal from the walls and a pile of open drawers and papers, the interior of the ship appears okay.
“Shit,” Weston says as he kneels on the floor ahead of me, waving away the haze.
Blat’s body emerges, and my heart sinks.
Weston swears as he searches for Blat’s pulse, going quiet and holding his fingers to his thick neck. Minutes seem to pass as I wait for him to say something. I sense the rest of the crew gather behind me and hold back a curse, refusing to let myself get emotional all of a sudden. It wouldn’t do anyone any good. And Annora already has emotions covered anyway.
Finally, Weston looks back at us with a raw grief in his eyes. “He’s gone.”
“No…” Annora whispers to my right.
I turn away from her, not wanting her to see my face.
“We’ll put his body in the cold storage down below until we know what to do with him. Poor lug. He was one of the good ones. Mickie, help me,” Weston huffs, threading his fingers through his wavy brown hair.
Blat dying… Well, it sucks. I was closer to Blat than anyone else here, except maybe Tata, and that’s saying a lot. Idon’t get close to anyone. But he was my partner. I might be strong and wily and able to hold my own, but Blat always kept me safe, watching my back, using his large size to intimidate others away from me.
It was also a lot easier not to see me coming when Blat was provoking all the attention.
I’m going to miss him.
I avert my eyes as Weston and Mickie pick up his body and move him out of the bridge. Taking a minute to collect myself, I quietly head back to my station for the water and meds under my seat. No one yet speaks on the predicament we now face. No one is ready for that, all doing the same as me, heads down, afraid to look at the windows in case the smoke has cleared enough to see out of them.
I push Blat’s death out of my thoughts. It wouldn’t be good for me to dwell when we’re far from safe. We may have survived the skies, but we’ve got a lot more ahead of us if we ever want to get home.
The ship’s vents turn on. I uncap and take a long drink of water from my bottle as I wait for the smoke to clear, and I can breathe without coughing again.
Weston and Mickie return from below a minute later, coughing themselves but looking okay.
“How is it down there?” I ask.
“Except for some overheating in the micro reactors, the ship will be fine,” Weston says.
“What do we do now?” Annora is the first one to ask what no one wants to address. Tata, in the meantime, dabs her brow with an antiseptic cloth, cleaning up the little bit of blood along her hairline. “We should contact Mr. Whicker.”
“We’ll do that next, but first we need to see how badly the shipis damaged outside. We’ll need to fix it for a return trip home.”
“Trip home? Do you think that’s still possible?” Tata asks. “All of our resources are gone!”
