But this is all speculation. Kane doesn’tknowanything for sure.
I open my mouth to object but he beats me to it.
“I don’t know what happened,” Kane says. “But I know you. And no matter how hard you tried to pull away from us, to keep your distance, you would never have left us behind. You were scared of being hurt, but you’re not a coward.” He finishes wrapping and tapes the end in place.
“But—”
He pushes back to look at me. “If you can’t trust yourself, can you trust me?” he asks, his gaze meeting mine without hesitation.
I freeze, but he doesn’t back down, just watches me steadily, waiting.
“Yes,” I manage, my voice creaky with the effort.
“Good. Then maybe you can put energy toward figuring out how we’re going to survive this and you can tell me everything I don’t remember while we’re at it.” He offers his hand to help me sit up.
I take it, the warmth and responsive pressure of his fingers against mine, such a contrast to hours earlier that I don’t want to let go.
So I don’t.
Kane glances down at our interlocked hands but says nothing. A faint smile, however, curves his mouth.
“I can tell you what I remember,” I say, trying to ignore the heat in my face. “But I don’t have any grand plans for escape.”
“You’ll think of something,” he says calmly.
I roll my eyes. “This might be a little beyond me. We can’t fix the engine without parts that are currently in a million little pieces somewhere back there.” I gesture vaguely in the direction of theAurora. “No one knows where we are. Verux assumes we’re dead, which is probably a good thing. Someone may eventually come check out the explosion, but we have no way of communicating our location to ask for help. And we’ve got nothing to…” I pause, my gaze falling on the tipped-over emergency beacon.
The one Voller had insisted on pulling in and having Lourdes deactivate so no one else could track the signal to theAurora’s location. The one Nysus insisted on as a keepsake. The one that’s still in perfect condition amidst the hunks of marble around it.
I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say reluctantly. “I have one idea.”
EPILOGUE
TWO YEARS LATER
Epicurean Space Yards, New Smyrna Beach, Florida
“Nothing like that new ‘old ship’ smell.” Kane wrinkles his nose as he climbs the metal ramp, his footsteps clanking.
I frown at him as he passes me at the top of the ramp and then crosses the threshold into the ship.
“The T-176 model is a classic,” I call after him. That’s what the sales guy said, anyway. “It might be alittleolder.” Point in fact, my “new” ship is alotolder. It’s been around a decade and a half longer than I have. Not quite senior citizen status, but maybe closer than either of us would like to admit. “But it’s built to last.”
Thick, durable hull. Huge cargo bay. Oversized crew quarters from when trips were longer and slower. It would cost me a small fortune to charge her for a long trip, but I’m not planning any of those. Never again.
Plus, theCharlotteis a revamped CitiFutura product—part of their transport class—which I have considerably more faith in these days. Though making sure the remote kill switch had been deactivated was job one.
Yeah, she’s got a few scrapes and dents. I reach out and rub my finger along a lengthy scratch down the side of the hull; it leaves the impression a newbie pilot might have gotten confused between port and starboard at some point in the past, to the detriment of any nearby stationary objects.
But that’s all superficial. She’s sturdy. Reliable. And sure, occasionally she smells of overheating metal and burning dust, but that’ll work its way out eventually. Maybe. But even if it doesn’t, that’s okay. It reminds me of home. Which it now is. I’ve been living here for the last six weeks, gettingCharlotteready for her new life. And mine.
This ship, named for my mother, is central to my plan. It’s one of the only major purchases I’ve made with my share of the salvage claim that Verux was forced to pay when Kane and I returned, back when Verux still thought they could buy their way out of the bad press, spin our survival as a miracle rather than an unhappy accident.
The salvagers who’d picked up our message on the emergency beacon had been more than happy to bring us aboard and let us post our story to the Forum and newsfeeds. In exchange for payment, of course. We gave them the only thing we had—the LINA. She wasn’t technically ours to give, but in that situation, the salvagers weren’t all that picky and neither were we.
It was, in the end, a version of the plan we’d had from the beginning. We had proof. The pieces of the Tratorelli sculptures worked nearly as well as the whole ones might have. And the blast that took out theAuroraalso knocked out a decent portion of the commweb, backing up our story. Not to mention, Verux had made plenty of enemies who were willing to believe the worst of them. The plan just hadn’t played out exactly the way we’d anticipated on that first day. And with fewer of us to reap the benefits.
In my case, those benefits included my own transport ship, my own transport business. LINA Shipping Co. LSC. It doesn’t come close to making up for what we lost. Who we lost. But I’m trying to make it count.
