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“Yeah. Thought so.”

Randall made a suspicious choking noise behind her. Ignoring him, she moved on.

By the fourth stall, she had most of what she needed packed into a battered utility crate. She dropped a spare coolant hose, two extra pressure sensors, and a reel of decent wiring on the top.

Randall looked down into the crate. “Do you need all that?”

“Yeah.”

“But you already have the parts we need for the faults.”

“Exactly.”

He looked down at her, tilting his head in curiosity. “So why all this?”

She pushed the crate into his broad chest. “Because the second we clear station supply range, something else will start playing silly fuckers, and we’ll be glad we have it.”

She’d worked on too many old LR-721 class ships to get caught out. The fuckers behaved right up until there was no easy replacement part within a hundred light-years, then suddenly discovered ten new and exciting ways to fall apart.

Not this time.

The next supplier had proper door-release kits and a selection of conduit shields that didn’t look as though they’d crumble if somebody breathed on them wrong.

She stopped there long enough to haggle the price down to something less insulting. Then the merchant tried to sell her a service contract.

She laughed. “Yeah, right. I’m taking this onto a colony charter. If it breaks, I’ll be six months from anybody you could send to fix it.”

She paid and loaded the last of the supplies into the crate, then turned and looked for Rann. He was standing beside a clothing stall two units down, a small pile of folded shirts tucked beneath one arm as he looked through a rack of work pants.

She stood and watched him. He was taller than almost everybody around him, broader too, even with the slight hunch he seemed to have adopted since they’d left the ship. She frowned. The hunch made him look like a man trying not to be noticed. Which, with a body like that, was not going especially well.

He pulled a dark shirt from the rack and held it up against himself. The garment looked small in his hands. His cap shadowed most of his face, but she caught the line of his jaw when he tipped his head down.

He was much too big for a human pilot.

What if he wasn’t human?

She stared at him for a second, then snorted and shook her head.

Jesus Christ, she really was losing it. Not every tall, broad-shouldered person was a bloody alien, for heaven’s sake. Some men were just built like brick shithouses.

Besides, station security would have picked him up if he was, wouldn’t they?

The only aliens allowed in human-held space were Latharian Imperial warriors on official business, or species cleared for Devan Station. But they were not on Devan Station. They were on a commercial transfer hub so far from anywhere important it had probably been built because somebody lost a bet.

Rann was human. A human behaving a little suspiciously, perhaps. But still human.

He moved on from clothes to a stall selling personal supplies. She pretended to inspect a pack of emergency thermal blankets while keeping half an eye on him.

A washkit. Underwear. Then he added a cheap jacket that would last approximately three weeks before he was trying to mend it with tape… if he was lucky.

Her eyebrow climbed higher.

That wasn’t normal shopping for someone about to take a charter-pilot job. A pilot came aboard with a bag. Maybe a spare jacket and snacks they liked.

But Rann was stocking up like he’d arrived on station with nothing but the clothes on his back. She flicked a glance over his too-short coveralls. Yeah… Considering the state of those, that might actually be true.

He brought the armful over to the counter, setting it down. She looked down at the crate by her boots, then back at him as he paid with a swipe of his wrist. Must have a credit chip bracelet or something.