Chapter 6

That night was the worst night Jonesy could remember.

And she’d had some doozies.

She cried herself to sleep in the observation bubble. Then she had nightmares of Captain Norcross stalking her through the hideout’s corridors, calling for her to come out as he followed the sound of her dad’s Ailon terminal getting message after message from Rook that everything was her fault, her fault, HER FAULT, until she woke up screaming.

Then she remembered she was completely alone on Canary Station, and Norcross had kidnapped her friends because she was a Fluxer, which was even worse than the nightmares, so she ended up crying herself back to sleep, where the dream Norcross was waiting.

Over and over. All night.

She probably would have done it all day, too, except early the next morning she woke up too hungry to think of anything but eating something before her stomach ate her.

She’d never been so hungry in her life. She climbed back down to the galley, found the egg breakfast in the autocooker’s menu, and jabbed the SERVE SIZE+ button until it ran out of sizes. Then she ordered two.

The autocooker was already running before she realized it would be the weird-tasting standard egg breakfast recipe instead of Eva’s improved version, and she wasn’t sure she’d seen anybody, even Hunter, finish the biggest size of anything. Not even cake.

But her stomach didn’t care. Her stomach made noises like a small, grumpy monster in a drainpipe until the plates popped out steaming. So she went out to the mess, sat on the floor, and ate both plates completely clean.

“Oof,” she said afterward. She felt like she’d eaten enough for the whole crew. Then she burped and felt a lot better. Maybe that was why Hunter did it all the time.

She pushed away her plates and looked around the empty mess in despair. Right about now, Rook would have stood up and said it was time to roll, and everybody would have started their chores.

So that was what she did. She picked up the dishes scattered all over the mess because that was her after-breakfast job.

But the mess and galley were still trashed, so she did all the other jobs, too. She ran the dishes through the Nutro-Rekovr machine for Paris, dumped its catch bin into the hydroponics fermenter for Khouri, reloaded the autocooker for Ryba, wiped down the counters for Kenzie, and put all the chairs back a bit crooked for the little kids. She got the floor wand from the utility closet and swiped the whole mess shiny-clean, even under Davenport Jr.’s seat, for Sean.

Doing all the jobs took her a while, but she didn’t stop until she’d put everything back to normal. Everything except Hunter’s huge steel dining table, anyway.

Jonesy stared at the upside-down table for a while, trying not to cry. Then, because nobody was there to help, she tried to turn it back over by herself, but she couldn’t budge it.

“Just go back,” she hissed as she strained at it. “It’s not right yet!”

She strained some more, and suddenly she could see those gates inside her again.

“No!” she yelped. “Go away! I don’t want you! He’ll know!”

Jonesy backed away from the table, staring at her hands in wide-eyed terror. They weren’t glowing. She ran into the dark utility closet and checked again, but they still weren’t.

Heart racing, she ran to the ladder and scrambled up to the observation bubble as fast as she could climb. Her dad’s terminal was still facedown on the floor where she’d thrown it last night. She made herself pick it up and almost kissed the screen in relief when she saw just the same two messages as before.

She waited a few minutes, but no third message showed up. So just seeing the gates wasn’t enough. That was good to know.

She wished she knew what was sending the messages, though. Since her dad’s terminal was getting them, her best guess was that at least part of her parents’ old lab was still floating around Amberius someplace with a backup generator running, and—unless Fluxers just happened to do things their old equipment could detect—this was what they’d been secretly studying all along.

It would have been easy to take that the wrong way, because her mom and dad were hyperspatial physicists who’d said they worked on top secret contracts they couldn’t tell her about, no matter how she’d begged, and they’d never once mentioned gates or glowing hands or anything that might have helped make this less scary, or make any sense at all.

Jonesy could recognize a recipe for a bad day when she saw one, though, so she took it the good way instead, because it also meant Norcross might not be the only one with answers.

The important thing was that detectors like that existed. So Norcross probably had his own, and that was how he’d known to come looking for her.

Except, she wondered, why had he known the first time, when he’d probably been a long way from Noraza, but not the second time, when his ship was right outside? She couldn’t figure that one out, unless detecting Fluxing was easier than telling exactly where it came from.

She wished she knew for sure. She hated not knowing the rules. It made her feel like she might get in trouble any second. And she especially hated getting in trouble, even when trouble didn’t arrive in a scary gray ship and come knocking with a squad of marines.

So she watched outside for a little longer, just in case, but the gray ship never showed up. Everything out there looked the same as yesterday.

Jonesy started crying again.

Her friends hadn’t done anything. She had. She was the Fluxer. She didn’t even know what that meant, but because of it she’d gotten all her friends in huge trouble on accident. Then she’d used it to hide because she’d been too scared to do anything else. She felt like the worst friend ever.

Now they were gone.

And she was probably the only person in the whole galaxy who knew Norcross had them.

Jonesy sat and watched Amberius’s yellow clouds and white storms while she thought.

“I won’t get rescued,” she finally said, “no matter how long I wait.

“That’s what Rook said, and Rook’s almost always right,” she said.

“That’s what Captain Norcross said, too,” she said. “He was a bad guy, but he didn’t seem like a liar.”

Jonesy sniffed and wiped her nose on her arm. “And I have to be grown up about this,” she added, and sighed, because she still didn’t have any clue what she should do next.

She thought back to what Rook had shouted about ghosts. That had been weird enough to make her wonder if he’d been trying to tell her something. She knew he’d called her a ghost to protect her, but there’d never been a Steve in the crew, never mind in the observation bubble.

Jeff, on the other hand, had been part of the crew, and B24 had been his room. She hadn’t heard Rook talk about him in a long time, or call him a ghost, ever. Although the ghost part did sort of make sense.

“Any ideas, Steve?” she asked the empty observation bubble. “I need to get off this station, okay? Rook had a plan, I think, but I don’t know what.”

She couldn’t help giggling a little. “Well, yeah, I could get Captain Norcross to rescue me anytime, but that’s a terrible plan. Come on, Steve. I’ll bet Rook told you everything.”

She sat there a while longer, listening to the air system blowing air around the hideout and keeping it clean enough to breathe. She supposed its job had just gotten a lot easier, with nobody left to take care of but her. The scrubbers probably wouldn’t need purging again until next Christmas.

“Look, if I don’t get out of here, I can’t find help for my friends. I know you’d be stuck here alone if I left, but too bad. You have to be grown up about this, too.”

She stuck out her tongue. “Fine. If you want to give me the silent treatment, maybe I should go talk to Jeff instead, huh?”

She sighed. “Yeah, okay, I’m done. I know you’re not there, Steve. There never was a Steve. And Jeff hasn’t—”

Jonesy stopped talking, thought, then jumped up.

“I need to check something,” she said, stuffing her dad’s terminal into her backpack and slipping it on. She got a few rungs down the ladder, stopped, and poked her head back into the observation bubble.

“Thanks.”

Cabin B24 was back in the far corner of the hideout, down a narrow corridor between storage rooms full of wrecked autodocs and clinical equipment Nikita and Terry had been slowly cannibalizing for parts over the last three years. Jonesy hadn’t gone back there in a while (and never alone, before now), but the corridor’s faint, greasy smell of burnt electronics and congealed chemicals still gave her the shivers.

She found B24’s door blown halfway open, which explained the BOOM yesterday while the gray drones were searching for her. That made one less thing for her to do—she’d expected to find it locked—but she still hesitated uneasily before looking in.

Because there was a reason they didn’t talk about Jeff.

Jeff Harper had been a little younger than Rook, but a lot bigger and stronger. And unlike everybody else—even Hunter—Jeff hadn’t liked Rook being in charge. Jeff had wanted to be in charge himself. He kept making everybody vote on it, but within two weeks of the gray ship’s attack he was losing eighteen to one every single time.

Two weeks had been plenty of time for everyone to figure out what Jeff was like. He loved making the little kids cry with awful stories about stuff like crazy security drones hiding in the bathroom. He never shared anything he found unless it was useless or broken. And right from the beginning, when they were all working themselves sick to turn the clinic into a safe hideout, he’d argued way more than he’d helped. Especially with Rook. Then one day Rook finally asked Jeff if he could just be quiet for like ten minutes, and Jeff shoved Rook into a corner and yelled MAKE ME, so Rook did. And he did it so hard that Jeff couldn’t talk, or even stand up, for half an hour. After that Jeff stopped even pretending to help and spent most of his time in his cabin or out in the station in Hunter’s spacesuit, which he never asked to borrow.

Life in the hideout was a lot nicer after that, so nobody complained (except Hunter, about his spacesuit). And everything seemed fine until the morning Jeff didn’t come to breakfast.

They checked his cabin and everywhere else, but Jeff wasn’t anywhere in the hideout—and neither was a lot of other stuff. He’d stolen Rook’s tools, Hunter’s spacesuit, and even Jonesy’s Pegasus terminal, along with most of the air filters and all the gel bottles and powder inserts the autocooker needed to make food.

Rook didn’t turn red or throw things or shout when he got angry. Instead, he got quiet, and his face got hard, and then, if he saw anything to do, he went and did it. That morning his face had looked hard enough to stop a bullet when he’d told Eva to take everyone except Fred, Hunter, Ryosuke, and Meg to the infirmary and lock the door.

By dinnertime, when Jonesy and the other kids got to come out again, the only thing still missing was Jeff. Everything else was piled up in the mess, ready to put away. The older kids hadn’t explained where they’d found it, or why they’d all looked so scared and shaken, or why Hunter’s nose was broken and Rook’s arm was in a sling.

At the time, Jonesy had been nine years old, and she and the other little kids had been too happy to get their stuff back to care what the big kids weren’t saying. And they especially hadn’t felt sorry nobody could find Jeff. Jonesy had almost stopped having nightmares about him by the time last summer when Rook finally sat them all down for the real story—that he and the others had gone after Jeff so they could lock him up, but instead of coming quietly he’d tried to slice off Rook’s arm with the plasma cutter, and—well, Rook had glossed over the rest. Jeff was dead, he’d said, and the details weren’t important.

Maybe Rook thought so, but Jonesy didn’t. Not when she was standing outside cabin B24. Because one of those details was where Jeff was. She’d always assumed they’d thrown him out an airlock, like the colonial sheriffs in her dad’s action shows did when Justice Had to Be Served and They Were the Only Law Round These Parts.

Except Rook had said Jeff under the bunk in B24, so now she was wondering.

It wasn’t like she’d never seen dead people out in the station, but they made her nightmares even worse, and Jeff had messed up her nightmares almost as badly when he was alive.

“I have to be grown up about this,” she said. “I can trust Rook. Come on.”

She took a deep breath and looked inside. Apart from Jeff’s old desk, chair, bunk, and the lingering stink of the door’s scorched paint, the cabin was empty.

She hoisted herself through the wrecked door and peered under the bunk. Thankfully, Jeff wasn’t there. Nothing was. Nothing but a hole in the floor.

Jonesy dragged the bunk aside. The hole looked like it had been cut with Hunter’s rig, but not recently. At the bottom, past blackened layers of decking, insulation, and sliced-off pipes and wire bundles, she could see a tiny room with a round hatch in the floor.

The hatch must have come from somewhere else, because someone had bolted its frame to the deck and spliced its power hookup into a nearby jack, then gone around it with spray-sealant until it looked like the hole in a chocolate-frosted donut. It was marked EMERGENCY DOCKING AIRLOCK in red stenciled letters, and its status screen said UMBILICAL LOCKED in green.

The fuzz on the backs of Jonesy’s arms got all prickly.

She climbed carefully through the hole and down a ladder propped up beneath it. The room at the bottom must have been a storage closet, once. The original door was welded shut, and its lock screen showed a red PRESSURE LOSS warning, but the round floor hatch’s screen was green. And even if that didn’t make sense, she knew it meant she could go through it right now without a spacesuit.

She crossed her fingers on both hands. “A way to get rescued,” she whispered. “Please, please be a way to get rescued.”

She opened the hatch and looked down into space—through the clear shell of a docking umbilical.

She couldn’t see where it went, but a docking umbilical wasn’t much more than a super-tough plastic tube with a docking ring on either end, so she knew it wouldn’t be full of air unless it went somewhere.

So she pulled herself into it to find out where.

She floated down and down, using the umbilical’s occasional handhold rings to propel herself. It didn’t have gravity like the hideout because that took field plates and a floor to put them in, so at first she felt like she’d fallen headfirst from the station. Then she flipped everything in her brain so she was gliding away from the hideout instead, safe and level, high above a blasted landscape of shattered ceramic and jagged metal where another big chunk of station had been sheared away from the one she lived in.

The umbilical swayed with slow crinkling noises as she followed it farther and farther from the hideout. Its plastic shell was peppered with cone-shaped dimples like it had been out here for a while, which made her wonder if leaving docking umbilicals out in space for a long time was okay. Her guess was no. Technically that made using the umbilical a stupid idea, but since it wasn’t leaking, she decided it was probably okay enough. Okay enough was the best you could say for most of the hideout, and she’d lived with that for three years.

She couldn’t tell where the umbilical was headed until she’d followed it almost all the way to the bottom of the station, where it curved over to another hatch. She had no idea what was down here. Rook never sent anyone this far down for salvage. The hatch’s readout was glowing green, though, so she cranked it open and climbed through.

The place inside was dark, but it had air and heat and gravity, like the hideout.

The lights noticed her and turned on.

She was in a small hangar. And so was a small ship.