Jagged red rocks jutted into the sky like fingertips, all formed in a wide circle that was too perfectly placed to be an accident.
The mountain range that had moments ago looked so small, now looked monstrous, swirls of red and purple rock just barely missing the underbelly of theStarfallas the pilots sent her down for landing.
Too quickly, it was over. Too quickly, they hovered above the sand. The viewport slid shut, and they were cast back into their metallic world, lit by the steady glow of the ship’s lights.
Karr swallowed a lump in his throat, realizing, suddenly, that this was the last exploratory landing he’d ever make with Cade.
It was not sadness. It wasrelief.As long as they finished the damned job and got Geisinger his Antheon. And put enough hope in the man to see that he’d deal with Jeb for good.
“Rock and roll, kid!” Jameson, the ship’s communications manager, shouted from Karr’s left. She was lean, mean muscle paired with a tiger’s smile. She patted Karr on the shoulder as he unbuckled himself and stood, his legs uneasy as ever on landing day. No one else could call himkidand get away with it. But Jameson was like an older sister to Karr, one of the few aboard the crew who’d joined at the start and never left. Some of his sketches even hung in her quarters. On holidays, she always gifted him flagons of foreign alcohol, and they drank together until the edges of the world blurred.
“Sky legs?” Jameson asked now, raising a triple-pierced brow as Karr paused to look at Cade. The Captain was normally the first to rise, but he hadn’t moved from his seat. He simply sat there, staring ahead at the closed viewport.
“You’ve got them, too,” Karr said with a grin, gently pushing Jameson sideways. She teetered a little, but he had a feeling she’d done it just to entertain him. She could destroy him in games of musclesandwit, and they both knew it. His smile softened. “But no, I’m good. Go ahead, Jameson. I’ll catch up.”
She shrugged, then followed the rest of the piloting crew out of the bridge, where they headed down to the loading dock to don their S2s.They’d need them, before they set foot on the poisonous planet.
Karr waited until the bridge emptied, then slid into the pilot’s seat next to Cade.
“Hey,” he said, nudging him. “You alright?”
Cade blinked, nodding as he seemed to come back down to earth. He was always stoic upon landing day, in the way that Karr imagined a surgeon might prepare themselves for surgery. Or a soldier might sit in silence before a battle that would surely bring death.
“We’ve spent a lifetime in this ship,” Cade said softly. “Our father—you may not remember the way he used to prepare for an expedition.”
“I remember,” Karr said.
He could picture it; their father, seated in the very same seat Cade was in now. Scrolling through a manifest with worn leather piloting gloves on. If he closed his eyes, Karr could still remember the smell of the leather. The squeak of it as his father flexed his fingertips and murmured softly to himself, going over notes, preparing to embark on another journey across alien soil. Their mother, with her ever-kind eyes, would stand behind him, humming as she stared out the viewport and admired the beauty of another place waiting to be explored.
“They respected every planet, saw them for the beauties that they were. They did their best to preserve them. To wander, but leave no trail. We’ve never honored that legacy, Karr. We steal things. We tear away a piece of every planet we ever visit. And today?”
Karr dared not speak. He placed his hand on the dash, where two sets of initials were carved.
MK. CK.
Myria and Charles Kingston.
“Today will be the last time we ever betray the Kingston name.”
With a sigh, Cade unbuckled himself and stood. His dark captain’s coat was ruffled from the buckles, and he smoothed it out across his chest, repeatedly, as if there were a wrinkle that just wouldn’t quit. When he was satisfied, he held out a hand for Karr to go ahead of him.
But Karr didn’t move.
“Cade.” He cocked his head. “You’re… bleeding.”
Cade frowned.
He looked down at his hand, where a smear of fresh blood stained his fingertips.
“Strange,” he said. He wiped the blood on his lapel.
“Did you cut yourself in the landing?”
It hadn’t been rocky. If anything, it hadn’t even felt like a landing at all, for how smoothly it went. Karr stepped forward, all formalities aside, to check his older brother for the source of the blood.
But Cade suddenly stepped away, waving him off. The strange sense of stoicity was gone, his captain’s smirk back on his face. “The future is out there, Karr. Let’s not keep it waiting.”
With that, he turned and marched out of the bridge without another glance back.
