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I shouldn’t have taken the job on this ship. I should have been back where I belonged, on Plunia, helping with the family business. I should have been there to help my mom fight off the attack and maybe save her life. But instead, I was here, chasing dreams that should have died a long time ago and pretending to be something I wasn’t.
I didn’t want to read the article. Not while Neptune was sitting in the chair next to me, studying my reaction. My life had been destroyed once thanks to space pirates. And now, they’d taken the one person who had gotten me through those troubling times. If pirates were onboard Moon Unit 5, I had no doubt I would kill them. My lifetime desire to work in security and the newfound credentials that made me look official were worth nothing.
Nothing.
“She wouldn’t have wanted you to give up this opportunity to be there with her,” Neptune said.
“You don’t know anything about my mother, and you don’t know anything about me.” My voice was detached and emotionless. I felt cold. I stood up straight and stared ahead, focusing on the wall at the end of the hallway. “Are we done here?”
“Stryker,” Neptune said. He put his hand on my arm. I looked down at it for a few seconds and then stepped away from him. The distance forced his hand to fall from my skin. I clenched my jaw so hard my teeth ground together. There was nothing inside of me. Not sadness, not anger, not fear. Just a black hole. I was alone now, alone in the universe with nobody on my side.
“Am I spending the night here or in my quarters?” I asked.
“You can go to your quarters.”
I nodded once and then turned around and left. My movements felt robotic, as though I’d been programmed to move the same way I’d programmed Cat. I must have activated the elevator and traveled the hallway to my door, but I didn’t remember doing any of it. I went inside and crawled under the temperature-sensitive blanket. I was cold. So cold. I curled up on my side with my knees up to my chest and my arms folded in front of me. My entire body shook with chills.
The temperature-sensitive blanket must have malfunctioned. Nothing I did made me warm. I stared at the wall in front of me. I didn’t want to close my eyes or fall asleep. I didn’t want to let time move forward. If I could stay awake, in the privacy of my room, I could pretend everything was the way it had been when I left Plunia.
***
I don’t know when sleep won the coin toss, but I woke the next morning to the sound of Cat meowing my alarm. I was roasting under several temperature-sensitive blankets and a pile of clothes. I pushed the layers off me and then yelled when I saw I had company.
Pika sat at my table. Her pointy ears jutted up on either side of her head, and her eyes were twice the size they’d been the day before.
I stared at her for a moment, not saying a word. At first, I just felt sleepy, like I’d taken medication that had left me groggy. The pile of clothes on top of me and the presence of Pika didn’t make sense.
And then, the horror came back to me. The news article about the space pirates. The destruction of Plunia. The death of my mother.
The sense of being completely alone.
I brushed at my shoulders, feeling like one of the heat-sensitive blankets was still there. It wasn’t. The weight was imaginary. I felt like I had the day my dad had been arrested and taken to Colony 13, only worse. Everyone would watch me, judge me, pity me. Somehow I had to find an inner strength to carry me beyond the gossip and criticism of the crew members and passengers and anybody else I’d encounter for the rest of my life. I had to turn off my emotions and use my Plunian mind to focus on facts: cold, hard facts. The opposite of emotion.
Fact: Two plus two equals four.
Fact: Red and yellow make orange.
Fact: People can’t be trusted.
I shifted my gaze from Pika to the mound of clothes piled on my bed. They were crew uniforms. “Why are there uniforms on my bed?” I asked.
“You were cold, and the temperature blankets weren’t warming you.”
“The blankets are standard issue. I only had one. Where did the rest come from?”
“I took one from the second navigation officer’s room.” Pika smiled a little. “Nobody thought to check his quarters after he died. That’s where I’ve been staying.”
Again, I wondered if I’d been foolishly accepting Pika’s innocent act. She knew her way around the ship without being noticed. She was smart enough to hole up in the quarters vacated by the deceased officer. But now, I didn’t care. Let someone else figure out what happened. I doubted anybody was going to risk their life trying to find out what happened to my mother.
“That explains one extra blanket, but not two. And since you’re a stowaway, you can’t tell me the third one is yours.”
“It belongs to the giant.”
“You stole Neptune’s blanket?”
“He gave it to me.”
I pushed the pile of gray uniforms to the floor and peeled off the top blanket. “Take it back,” I said. “I don’t need Neptune’s charity.”
As I held the blanket out toward Pika, I realized the pink alien was shivering. I didn’t know how she’d gotten into my quarters or the uniform ward that first day on the ship. I didn’t ask. She’d already demonstrated that she was able to get into places she probably shouldn’t have been. I walked across the room and draped the extra blanket over her narrow shoulders. The cloth immediately turned a soft orange shade as it adjusted to her Gremlon temperature. Her fists grabbed at the edges, and she wrapped it tight around her body. “Thank you,” she said in a little girl voice.
“You’re welcome.”
I picked up the uniform closest to me and started folding. It was a mindless task, the least important one I could choose. I needed something that required no thought. Hold the shirt to my chest. Fold each sleeve in: left one first and right one next. Raise the hem of the shirt to the shoulders so the shirt was folded over itself. Set it on the pile and move onto the next one. Neither Pika nor I spoke while I worked my way through the pile. When I finished, I had twelve gray tops and sixteen pairs of black trousers. I moved the piles from the bed to the table.
“Did you get any sleep last night?” I asked Pika.
She watched me with wide eyes but didn’t answer. I tipped my head toward the bed. “Go ahead and lay down. Nobody is going to come looking for you here either.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to return these uniforms to the inventory closet before anybody notices they’re missing.”
“Wait,” Pika said. She extended her closed fist out from under the blanket. “I’m not allowed to let you leave without these.”
I felt my forehead scrunch in confusion and held my hand out. Pika turned her fist sideways and opened her fingers. Three round white pills fell into my palm. Only one person had offered me oxygen tablets since being on board the ship. Only one person knew my oxygen canisters had been tampered with and filled with carbon monoxide. One person knew everything I knew: about what I’d figured out in engineering and what had happened to my home planet. One person who controlled my future.
“Pika, what can you tell me about the giant?”
Pika’s eyes widened. “I’m not allowed to talk about him.”
“He gave you these pills, didn’t he? He told you to come into my room and watch over me. Why? Does he know you’re a stowaway? Why is he okay with you being on the ship?”
Pika’s ears popped out on top of her head, and her body mass diminished. I hadn’t known Gremlons could change size at will, and I leaned forward to study her. “How’d you do that?”
“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.”
“You got smaller.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I saw you. Your ears popped up, and your body shrank. Why? And how?”
Slowly Pika’s ears retracted closer to her head. She pulled the heat-adjusting thermal blanket up to her neck. “The giant told me you were sick and I should give you those when you woke up so you could get better.”
“How did you get in here?”
“He let me in.”
“Neptune was in my room again?”
Pika’s looked scared. “He was worried about you. He said you were aloner than anybody else on the ship.”
I didn’t correct Pika or ask to hear the exact words Neptune had used because it didn’t matter. I was alone. In a ship of passengers who were having the time of their lives, I was without a single person I could trust.