And I know that’s cliché.
But I also know it’s true.
The job offer comes on a slow Thursday, just after Ripley shoves a stuffed toy into the drainage chute and laughs like a villain.
It pings on my private terminal. The one I swore I’d never reactivate. The one with two-factor authentication tied to a dead alias and a ghost server in the Khorin Drift.
It’s fromNovaCast.
The biggest media syndicate in the quadrant.
I don’t recognize the name of the recruiter, but the message is sharp, direct, and absolutely my style.
We’ve reviewed your legacy portfolio. You’re exactly the kind of voice we need for a limited-run documentary series.
High-profile, exclusive access. Remote. Minimal travel. Subject: Galactic Gladiators.
You’ll have full creative control. Five weeks. Six-figure contract. Safe.
I reread the message three times.
Ripley’s hanging upside-down on the arm of the couch, chewing on the edge of a datapad that she definitely wasn’t supposed to touch.
“You ever heard of NovaCast?” I ask her.
“Mama,” she says solemnly, “I licked the drone.”
“…What?”
She grins. “It tasted like sky.”
I sit on the porch that night, watching the firelights rise over the hill line—tiny glowing bugs that float up from the grass and hover like stardust—and think about who I used to be.
Rhea Hart.
Journalist.
Fighter.
Breaker of truths and bringer of chaos.
She’s still in here. Rusted, dulled, buried beneath motherhood and false names and a kind of domesticity I never thought I’d wear so well.
But she’s restless.
And this job?
It smells like freedom.
I take the contract.
NovaCast dispatches a courier drone with the new credentials. My cover is clean. Untraceable. Even Dowron’s old eyes wouldn’t find me in this identity.
Ripley doesn’t understand, not really. She knows we’re going somewhere new, just for a little while. She’s excited. She packs three stuffed animals and a rock she insists is magic and tells me, “We’re adventurers now.”
I tell her we always were.
The transport takes us to Gheldor Prime—a planet that’s ninety-five percent arena, five percent overpriced beverages.
