I set my alarm for 0400 — two hours before Dove’s scheduled departure for the Veridian supply run. The Rolling Pin’s cargo bay has that storage compartment behind the secondary coolant housing. I measured myself against it last week. Perfect fit, as long as I don’t need to stretch my legs for the first hour.
Papa predicted six months. Dove predicted three weeks.
They forgot to predict that three weeks was exactly enough time for me to getgoodat this.
The cargo bay smells like engine coolant and Dove’s emergency snack stash — dried fruit and something spicy that makes my nose itch. I’ve been wedged behind the coolant housing for two hours and eleven minutes, breathing shallow, markings dark, data pad brightness set to minimum.
My legs fell asleep forty minutes ago. My left foot has graduated from tingling to what I’m fairly certain is a medical condition.
The engine vibrations changed twelve minutes ago — the deep hum that means hyperspace transit. We’re past the point where Dove can turn around without wasting half her fuel reserves. I calculated this. Pickles helped, though he claimed he was “merely providing educational context regarding hyperspace fuel consumption ratios” and “any application of this data to stowaway logistics is purely the responsibility of the end user.”
I’m about to emerge — triumphant, victorious, legendary — when my soil jar rolls off my rucksack and across the cargo bay floor with a sound like a very incriminating marble.
Silence.
Then footsteps. Quick ones. The cargo bay door hisses open and light floods in, and I squint up at Dove, who’s standing in the doorway with her scanner in one hand and an expression I’ve never seen on her face before.
“TAVIA?!”
“Surprise?” I try.
She’s across the cargo bay in three strides, hands on my shoulders, scanning me with her eyes the way Pickles scans for hull damage — fast and thorough and slightly panicked.
“Are you hurt? How long have you been in here? Pickles, did youknowabout this?”
“I neither confirm nor deny awareness of unauthorized biological signatures in the cargo bay. I will note that my sensor protocols prioritize threats to ship integrity, and the small person does not qualify as a threat. Merely as an irregularity.”
“An IRREGULARITY?”
“I prefer the term ‘supervisory cargo,’” I say, climbing out from behind the coolant housing. My legs buckle. I catch myself on a supply crate. “I’m here in a supervisory capacity. To observe courier operations. For science.”
Dove stares at me. Her face does approximately nine things in three seconds — terror cycling to relief cycling to fury cycling to something that looks suspiciously like trying not to laugh.
Then she turns to the comm panel and opens a channel to the station. Because of course she does. Because Dove knows that Papa’s biology tracks her heartbeat through the claiming bond, and right now her heart is hammering, and three systems away my father is probably already staring at the long-range sensors wondering why his bond-mate’s cardiac rhythm spiked.
Papa’s face fills the screen in four seconds. His markings are flaring danger-bright.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Pickles, report —”
“Nobody’s hurt.” Dove steps aside so the camera catches me, standing in the cargo bay with my rucksack at my feet and my markings doing a complicated guilt-excitement pattern I can’t control. “But we have a passenger.”
Papa goes very still.
“Hi, Papa.”
“Before you say anything,” Dove adds, “she brought clothes this time. And a toothbrush. And a genuinely impressive atmospheric sensor she built from your spare parts.”
“My preparation score is at least a six,” I say.
“Four point three,” Pickles says.
“Five.”
Papa closes his eyes. His jaw works. When he opens his eyes, the fury has softened to the exasperated-proud blend I know so well — the one that means I’ve done something simultaneously terrible and impressive, and he can’t decide which response to lead with.
“Tavia Storm. You stowed away. On a courier vessel.”
“In a supervisory capacity.”
