“Excuse me,” I murmured, and fled the main chamber as quickly as I could.
Dad called out after me, but I didn’t stop. Daaric alleviated the tension by joking that I didn’t like to cry in front of strangers, which was true. I didn’t remember getting to the lift. I didn’t remember taking it down.
I didn’t remember anything until I arrived at the door to my room, fumbling for the key in my pocket, but I couldn’t get it out.
So I just shoved the box against the keypad.
It unlocked with ableep—
Just as a large crash came from the galley. An intruder? A guest? And I remembered with a bolt of dread—
The stowaway.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Stowaway
The moment I rounded into the galley, I found what had caused the crash: an overturned shelf, spilling pots, pans, and spices all over the floor. There was a pot boiling on the nanowave stove, giving off a fatty, salty scent, mingling with the yeasty sweetness of something that VB-35 was baking in the oven to serve for breakfast tomorrow morning.
No Sian, though. That was worrying. Where had he disappeared to after our dance?
I righted the shelf and had started to clean up the mess when something sneezed under the cooler. Curious, I bent down to look.
Two wide yellow eyes blinked back.
My tension melted into annoyance. “Lemme guess, this is your mess?”
In reply, the creature hissed.
“Yes, yes, you’re very fierce. Hungry?” I added, pushing myself to my feet, and rifled through the cooler fora bit of bone meat Veebee used for stock. I squatted back down and offered it to her.
Noola sniffed, unsure.
I set the snack down in front of her to let her get to it in her own time. “I won’t space you.”
Noola looked at the meat like it was a trap.
“I won’t poison you, either.”
The creature decided I was telling the truth—or maybe she was just more hungry than suspicious—and eased out, ears forward, to shove the snack into her mouth whole.
I scrubbed behind her head, and she purred. “Now, where’s your owner?”
I checked the pantry, half expecting to see him squeezed between a large sack of topatos and Batuuan clementines, but regrettably no one was there.
Noola chirped, so I asked her, “Where’s he staying?”
Her ears pinwheeled to me before she sat back on her haunches and looked toward the corner of the galley on the other side of the scratch table. Right, the preserved goods pantry. Veebee didn’t use it often, aside for storing sacks of grain and some freeze-dried jerkies. I went over and pressed the button to open the door. It creaked open.
Most of the grain and jerky had been pushed to the back of the storage room, and a makeshift hammock thatlooked like one of the tarps we used to cover our supplies in the hangar was slung across the length of the space. His gray jacket was hung on a nail protruding from one of the metal shelves, and his boots slouched by the door. Noola had gathered root vegetable peels Veebee dropped from the cutting board and bits of cloth, making a little nest for herself beneath the hammock.
They’d certainly moved in, hadn’t they.
I fingered the hole in his jacket from the blaster on Coruscant, thinking that I could darn that pretty quickly with some thread, but on closer inspection the entire piece of clothing was worse for wear. There was another hole in the sleeve and faded blaster marks on the opposite shoulder, which was threadbare and dusty.
“Who is he?” I asked Noola, just as the door to the galley opened.
Sian stepped inside with a towel draped over his shoulders, wearing clean trousers and a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal rather indecent forearms. The attire looked very much like his clothes when we’d met. I guessed he’d worn the seasonal uniform while his own clothes were in the wash. His hair stuck up at odd angles, darker when damp, and droplets of water still clung to the tips from his shower. With the grime of Coruscant washed away, he looked like a new man. Not respectable, but I didn’t think I would like him that way—
