“MILO? CAN YOU HEAR ME? Come in, please?”

Lina Graf’s landspeeder kicked up marsh water as it sped across the swamp. Skim-snakes the color of rainbows burst from the heavy canopy above, spooked by the engine. Through gaps in the branches, Lina could see that the sky was darkening, the emerging stars obscured by thick clouds.

“Mistress Lina,” came a clipped voice beside her. “Your parents won’t be happy if you and your brother are still out after nightfall.”

“I know,” Lina snapped back, trying not to take her frustration out on CR-8R, the family’s droid. She thumbed the comlink on the landspeeder’s steering column. “Milo, where are you?”

There was no response. Lina threw the landspeeder around a vine-covered tree, nearly sending CR-8R tumbling from the ramshackle craft.

“Careful, Mistress Lina!”

“I’ve told you a hundred times, Crater. Lose the ‘mistress.’ It’s just Lina.”

“Yes, Mistress Lina.”

There was no point arguing with CR-8R, especially when she had a missing brother to find.

Beep-beep-beep.

A tiny red light blinked on the dashboard’s locator screen. A smile spread across Lina’s face. “There you are.”

It was a homing beacon, transmitting from Milo’s speeder bike. He’d complained when their mom fitted it, but she’d insisted for good reason. Nine-year-old Milo was always running off. It wasn’t that he was particularly rebellious, but he had definitely inherited their parents’ natural curiosity.

Auric and Rhyssa Graf were interplanetary explorers, cartographers who’d spent the past fifteen years producing maps of Wild Space, an unknown cluster of star systems on the very edge of the Galactic Rim. It was the only life Lina and Milo had ever known. They had been born on the Grafs’ starship, the Whisper Bird, and had been growing up exploring strange worlds ever since. Lina wouldn’t have it any other way, but could do without having to search for her younger brother every five minutes. It was always the same. They’d make planetfall and Milo would be off, hoping to discover a new species and become famous. His expeditions usually ended up with sprained limbs and a lecture from Dad—although they knew he was secretly proud of his kids’ misadventures.

But this trip was different. They’d brought the Whisper Bird down to this seemingly insignificant planetoid and set up camp in the middle of a vast rock-lined plain.

“You two, stay close to camp,” Auric Graf had said. “There’s a storm brewing and I don’t want to have to chase after you when it hits.”

Milo had disappeared almost immediately, and Lina received an urgent holo-message just a few hours later:

“Need your help. Come to the swamp, now!”

But where in the swamp? According to the Bird’s first sensor sweep, the marsh fields were huge, covering at least two-thirds of the planet’s surface. This was typical of Milo—to get so excited that he forgot to give basic information, like where he was!

“Mistress Lina, the signal….”

“I see it, Crater,” Lina replied, watching the red dot trace across the screen. “Almost there.”

Ahead, the landspeeder’s floodlight glinted off metal. Lina slowed, bringing the craft to a halt.

Milo’s speeder bike lay on its side in shallow water.

“Well, that’s not going to help the paintwork,” CR-8R scolded as Lina leapt from her seat and splashed over to the abandoned speeder. She tried the bike’s controls. They were dead, no power at all. What had happened here? Had Milo crashed?

“Master Milo,” CR-8R called out. “Where are you?”

“Crater, shhh!” Lina hissed. “This place could be crawling with razor-boars.”

“Well, excuse me for trying to locate your wayward brother,” CR-8R replied haughtily. “I just assumed that’s why you dragged me out into this abominable swamp. For all we know, Master Milo is up to his neck in a sink-bog.”

“And if we’re lucky we’ll lose you in one, too,” Lina muttered under her breath.

She didn’t mean it, of course. CR-8R had been around Lina’s entire life. He was one of her mom’s pet projects, a crazy mash-up of a droid constructed from a dozen different models. His base had been a probe droid, and it still had four manipulator arms that twitched as CR-8R hovered out of the landspeeder. His upper body was made up of a medical droid’s waist welded to the torso of an astromech.

Not even his arms matched. The left was taken from an obsolete DUM-series, while the right was the shining silver limb of a protocol droid, but with interchangeable tool attachments instead of a hand.

Lina had no idea where Mom had found CR-8R’s mournful chrome head but knew that it was packed with information—most of it useless. For a brain, Rhyssa had used a protocol droid’s processor unit, meaning that CR-8R had a tendency to be prim, proper, and more than a little irritable at times. The patchwork droid had their best interests at heart. That didn’t make him any less annoying though.

Lina righted the speeder bike. “He can’t have gone far.” She reached into the tool belt she kept slung around her waist and found a small cylindrical comlink.

“Milo,” she said into the device. “We’ve found your speeder, but where are you?”

The only answer was a scream from beyond the trees.

“Milo!” Lina yelled, running through the dense foliage. Filthy water splashed up her legs, reeking like rotten rikknit eggs. She didn’t care. Her brother was in trouble. Her brother was….

Laughing?

In the clearing in front of her, Milo was wallowing around in a huge sludgy puddle, covered from head to toe in dark crimson mud.

“Milo?” she asked, feeling her temper flare. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Milo looked over at her, his muck-covered face splitting into a toothy grin.

“I almost had it, Sis!”

Lina’s heart sank. “Had what?”

Milo grabbed his long wooden staff and struggled to his feet. His face was the picture of excitement. “It was like a Sullustan ash-rabbit, but huge, with a ridge of spines—”

“Your message said you needed help,” Lina interrupted icily.

“I do,” he replied, looking confused. “To catch the ash-rabbit.”

“I thought you were in trouble!”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because, 99.998 percent of the time, you are!” CR-8R said, hovering into the clearing.

“Oh, no,” moaned Milo, “why did you have to bring Crater? He’ll definitely tell Mom and Dad.”

“Engaging lecture mode,” announced CR-8R, drawing another groan from Lina’s brother. “Master Milo, your parents specifically requested—”

Before CR-8R could finish, a small creature landed on top of his polished head. It had floppy ears and gangly arms that wrapped around the droid’s face. CR-8R cried out in alarm while both Lina and Milo snorted with laughter.

“I knew I would hate this place,” the droid complained, swatting at the creature with his manipulator arms. “What is it? A sludge salamander? A horned billipede?”

“There’s no need to get your processors in a twist.” Lina giggled, then tried to pull a serious face. “Morq, leave Crater alone. You know he hates when you jump on him.”

The creature looked at the children with small orange eyes and cackled with glee. Morq was the family pet, a mischievous Kowakian monkey-lizard and the bane of CR-8R’s existence.

“It’s that no-good animal of yours?” CR-8R spluttered. “I should have known from the stench!”

“You don’t have any smell receptors,” Lina said as Morq danced a jig on the droid’s head.

“Which shows just how bad the thing reeks!” CR-8R insisted, firing a sudden spark from the electroshock prod attached to one of his many manipulator arms. The discharge hit Morq in the rear and, with a wail, the monkey-lizard bounded off CR-8R’s head to scurry back up a tree.

Lina sighed. “Good going, Crater. Now we’ll never get him down again.”

“Serves the beast right,” CR-8R murmured.

Lina shook her head, trying not to grin. Someone had to behave like a responsible adult.

“Okay, let’s get Milo’s bike onto the back of the landspeeder—”

“There it is!” shouted Milo, running from the clearing before Lina could stop him.

“Milo, come back!”

“It’s the ash-rabbit, Lina,” he called over his shoulder. “Come on!”

Rolling her eyes, Lina raced after her brother. “Just once, he’ll do what I say. Just once.”

But this was not going to be that day. She found Milo crouched behind a moss-covered rock. On the other side sat a small purple creature eating a marsh-fruit.

“That’s the ash-rabbit?” Lina said, dropping down beside her brother. “I thought you said it was huge?”

“Well, huge-ish,” admitted Milo, “and you’ll scare it away if you crash around like a happabore.”

Milo raised his arm toward the rabbit, and Lina saw that he was wearing their dad’s wrist-mounted net launcher. Auric Graf sometimes used the net gun to snare alien creatures. Like most of Dad’s field equipment, Milo wasn’t supposed to touch it, let alone take it from the camp.

“You’re trying to catch it?” she asked.

“Of course I am. How else are we going to study the thing?”

“Holographs? Bioscans? Like a normal person!”

“Nah,” said Milo, preparing to fire. “Nothing like getting up close and personal with nature.”

Lina watched as her brother lined up the shot but never saw him fire the net. Something snagged the back of her tunic and she was dragged into the air.