Chapter 1
Jalina
The charcoal stick snapped between my fingers.
I stared at the broken pieces in my palm, then at the half-finished sketch in my notebook, Dana in her ceremonial wrappings, Er'dox's massive hand cradling hers with impossible gentleness. The celebration hall stretched behind them in my drawing, filled with Zandovians and the handful of humans who'd become our makeshift family aboard Mothership.
Six months since we'd been rescued from that hell planet. Six months since Dana had pulled us through survival by sheer force of will and engineering brilliance. And now she was bonded.Married, in human terms, though the Zandovian ceremony involved bio-synchronized vows I still didn't fully understand.
I was happy for her. I was.
The ache in my chest was just homesickness. Had to be.
"Jalina, you're going to wear through the paper if you keep erasing that same line." Bea's voice cut through my thoughts, clinical and precise as a scalpel. She sat across the table in our shared quarters, reviewing medical files on her datapad with the same intensity she'd brought to every trauma case she'd handled on Earth.
I looked down. My thumb had smudged the charcoal line I'd been perfecting, the exact angle of Dana's smile, genuine joy mixed with something deeper. Security. Belonging.
"It's not right yet," I muttered, reaching for a fresh stick from my rapidly depleting supply.
"It's the fourth version you've drawn tonight." Elena appeared from the sleeping alcove, her wild curly hair even more chaotic than usual. Our electrical systems specialist moved through the quarters like a caffeinated hummingbird, all kinetic energy barely contained in her compact frame. "Dana's ceremony was beautiful. Your sketch is beautiful. You're stalling."
"I'm not?—"
"You've been sketching Dana and Er'dox for three hours." Bea closed her datapad with a decisive snap. "Which you do when you're processing something you don't want to talk about."
I adjusted my glasses, a nervous habit that had gotten worse since we'd been stranded in an alien galaxy. The frames were Earth-made, one of the few personal items I'd managed to grab before our escape pod had crashed. Every time I pushed them up my nose, I remembered the optometrist's office in Seattle, the rain against the windows, the barista who always drew hearts in my latte foam.
All of it impossibly far away. Or maybe impossibly destroyed, we still didn't know what had happened to the rest of Liberty after the wormhole tore our colony ship apart.
"I'm fine," I said, adding shadow to Er'dox's bronze skin in the drawing. The geometric patterns on Zandovian bodies were endlessly fascinating, traditional markings that told stories I was only beginning to understand. "Just... thinking about the ceremony. The vows they exchanged."
"About how Dana's building a life here while you're still designing one that might never exist?" Elena dropped ontothe sleeping platform beside me, close enough that I caught the scent of ozone that always clung to her after a shift in Engineering. "We all feel it, Jalina. That weird guilt about adapting too well."
Bea's gray-blue eyes fixed on me with an uncomfortable perception. "You're afraid that being happy means you've given up on going home."
Trust Bea to cut straight to the infected tissue.
"Earth might not even exist anymore," I said quietly. "That wormhole, we have no idea if it just displaced us or if it destroyed something. And here I am, sketching alien weddings and worrying about ceiling heights in hypothetical expansion projects."
"Hypothetical?" Bea's eyebrow arched. "Captain Tor'van reassigned you to Operations two months ago specifically because your design skills are needed. That's not hypothetical."
No. It wasn't.
Two months ago, I'd been working in Medical with Zorn. Gentle, patient Zorn who'd treated our injuries with such care after the rescue. I'd been organizing supply storage, trying to make myself useful while nursing an architecture degree that seemed utterly pointless light-years from any human settlement.
Then Captain Tor'van had summoned me to his office.
I remembered the walk there, convinced I was being fired from my menial job. The Captain was imposing even by Zandovian standards, nine feet of scarred silver skin and cybernetic enhancements, a living reminder that space was hostile and survival wasn't guaranteed.
Instead, he'd asked about my background. Listened as I stumbled through an explanation of urban planning, settlement design, the beautiful blueprints I'd drawn for humanity'sexpansion into the stars. Blueprints that would never be built now.
"We're expanding Mothership's habitation sectors," he'd said in that gravelly voice, his cybernetic eye whirring as it focused on me. "Zor'go needs someone who understands how beingslive, not just how structures stand. You'll report to Operations tomorrow."
Just like that, my entire purpose had shifted.
Working with Zor'go was complicated.
The Head of Mothership Operations and City Planning was brilliant. Visionary. And completely terrifying in a way that had nothing to do with his eight-and-a-half-foot height or the crystalline blue markings that shimmered across his silver-gray skin when he was deep in concentration.
