Chapter 11

An hour later, Jonesy and Cass were in hyperspace.

It felt like the longest hour in the world, but Cass had to find an outbound ship big enough to cover the jump-to-hyperspace part of their getaway. She gave Jonesy a handful of protein bars to tide her over, then strapped into the pilot’s seat, where she watched the scanners and clicked through transponder data for ages before a ship she liked—a bulk superfreighter covered in containers like a half-mile-long corncob—finally left Lumen Station’s docks. Only then did she retract her ship’s disguise and take the flight sticks.

Jonesy watched in spellbound silence as her sister eased them away from the asteroid and snuck up on the departing superfreighter, nudging and tugging the controls until her ship was riding just a few feet from the bigger ship’s shell of containers. She armed the hyperdrive and let her flight computer take over from there. It timed their jump for the same instant as the superfreighter’s.

“And that,” Cass said, “is how you get out of a system without anybody knowing. Now, I don’t know about you, but my stomach’s taking hostages. You ready for a proper meal?”

“Yeah,” Jonesy said. “Maybe two.” Even after the protein bars, she was so hungry she could hardly think of anything she wanted to ask Cass besides how soon they could eat. Cass got her ship’s little autocooker started and showed Jonesy around while they waited.

Cass had named her ship the Jinx. Unlike its plain black outside, the Jinx’s inside was decorated with bold, wild designs in bone white and deep blue—painted, as it turned out, by Cass herself, because she’d gotten to help design and even chip in a little with building it.

Cass was proud of her ship in every way, except she said it had turned out more cramped than she’d expected. Jonesy would have said cozy, but she also wasn’t as tall as Cass, and the Jinx did seem pretty small inside for its size. Cass said that was just what happened when you crammed fast and sneaky into the same ship design and wanted to land it on planets. It helped that almost every inch of every wall hid a storage locker, so at least the ship wasn’t ankle-deep in Cass’s stuff like her old bedroom on Canary.

Because the Jinx was so small, the grand tour only took a few minutes. The cockpit was roomy, with huge windows, though it only had one seat. Then came Cass’s cabin, a second cabin with four bunks, and a tiny lavatory, where Cass got them both some UnBoom pills from a well-stocked medicine cabinet to get the ringing out of their ears. Past that was an open dining compartment, followed by the airlock, and lastly a little cargo compartment, empty except for a punching bag and some unmarked shipping crates.

“Sorry if everything’s a bit on the dirty side,” Cass said after showing Jonesy the cargo compartment. “I’ve got cleaning bots, but they’re annoying, so I don’t let them out much.”

“I don’t mind,” Jonesy said. “Cleaning bots scare me anyway.”

“What? Since when?”

“They all had the bugs—viruses, I mean—back on Canary. They didn’t clean stuff anymore, and—and—”

Jonesy hesitated, because now she was remembering one of the worst parts (besides Jeff) of the early days in the hideout—lying awake at night, listening to bugged cleaning bots scuttling behind the walls on sticky gecko feet. The cleaning bots were brightly colored and too rubbery-soft to hurt you, but the bugged ones had acted like wild animals, and you never knew when one might jump out at you from behind a panel, screeching as loud as the bugs could make it screech.

“And we had to get rid of them,” she finished. “Well, the older kids did. Mostly Jeff.”

Hunting down bugged cleaning bots was actually the only useful contribution she could remember Jeff making without an argument—although he’d been in it for the fun of squishing them with the big titanium crowbar he’d liked to carry around. She shuddered a little.

“Gotcha,” Cass said, with a forced-looking smile. “Well, mine don’t have bugs, but I won’t let them out without warning you first. And hey, there’s our food,” she added as the autocooker dinged in the dining compartment. “Come on!”

The Jinx’s clock said it was midmorning, so Cass had ordered them both huge breakfast platters. Jonesy was still on Canary time and felt like she should be sitting down to dinner, but she was too hungry to care. They both cleared their plates without saying a word.

Jonesy felt perfectly stuffed when she’d finished, but Cass returned to the autocooker and filled a pitcher with some kind of thick gray-green smoothie. Jonesy wrinkled her nose and asked what was in it. “Everything,” Cass replied, and drank down the whole pitcher in about a minute.

Jonesy watched and yawned hugely without meaning to. Cass caught it and yawned back. “Long day, huh?” she asked. “Mind if I shower real quick?”

Jonesy shook her head. “You do sort of smell like the inside of a spacesuit, actually.”

“That’s the smell of hard work, kiddo. Anyway, so do you.”

Jonesy tucked her nose into her armpit. “Oh, gross,” she said. “That never used to happen.” She caught Cass staring at her with a weird smile, like Cass couldn’t decide if Jonesy’s armpit was funny or sad. “What?”

“Just can’t believe how much you’ve grown. What are you now, ten? Eleven?”

“Eleven. And you’re nineteen, because we’re eight years apart but you never remember.”

“You’re right, I never do. So, were there any older girls with you on Canary?”

“Yeah, Eva. And Meg, too, and Nikita and Terry.”

“They ever talk to you about anything like, um”—Cass pointed to her armpit—“anything like this stuff?”

Jonesy frowned. “No. Like what?”

“Oh, man,” Cass said as she got up and headed to the lavatory. “Nothing you need to worry about yet. I’ve got deodorant you can borrow for your pits.”

“Cass, wait,” Jonesy demanded, following. “Stuff like what?”

Cass shut the door in front of her. “Oh, you know,” she said from inside. “Stuff like bras. And boys. You want to talk about that stuff right now?”

“Gross,” Jonesy muttered. “No,” she told Cass.

“Good.”

Jonesy heard the shower capsule open and shut. “Can I wash in the sink?” she called.

“Sure,” Cass called back, so Jonesy let herself in. “If you want the shower after me, though, that’s totally fine. Don’t worry about, like, rationing water or anything.”

“I wasn’t,” Jonesy said. “I missed you,” she added. “A lot.”

“I missed you more.”

Jonesy finished washing up first and went back outside to wait. “So what happened to you and Mom and Dad?” she asked when she heard the water turn off. “And how’d you even get a ship?”

“Which do you want me to answer first?” Cass asked behind the door.

“Sorry, um—wait, wait. No, first I want to know about Fluxing! And how you did all that cool stuff. And why your eyes glow!”

Cass opened the door and stepped out, still toweling her bushy red hair. “You liked that?” she asked. She blinked, and suddenly her eyes were glowing neon magenta again.

“No, don’t,” Jonesy gasped. “He’ll know!”

“He won’t know a thing. Promise.” Cass turned and lifted the back of her top to reveal two thin black devices clipped to her belt. Stacked, they would have been the size of a deck of cards. She tapped the left one. “Not while I’m carrying this.”

Cass blinked again, and her eyes went back to normal blue. “And as long as you stick close to me, they won’t know about you, either.”

“Okay,” Jonesy said, relieved. “What is it?”

“It’s a Flux shield. You can pick up Fluxing a long way away if you know what to look for, which is how the bad guys like Norcross find new Fluxers like you. This thing blocks the signals they’re looking for.”

“Fluxing makes signals? Like hypercast or something?”

“A little more complicated, but yeah.”

“But—why didn’t he catch me doing it the second time, when I hid from the drone? I’ve been wondering.”

Cass bit her lip, like she didn’t want to think about Jonesy hiding from drones. “Well, pinpointing smallish Flux signals can be tricky, plus you can’t tell someone’s a Fluxer if they’re not Fluxing. They probably did catch it, but they figured it was one of your friends being sneaky.”

Jonesy made a face. “That’s sort of what I thought. What’s the other one do?”

“I could show you,” Cass replied, “but I’d have to kill you.” She chuckled to herself in a way that reminded Jonesy, almost painfully, of their dad.

“Cass, come on. What’s funny?”

“Sorry, but that’s top secret. It’ll make sense when you get clearance to find out.”

Jonesy sighed, long and loud. “So why do your eyes glow? It never felt like mine did.”

“Because I do it on purpose. Well, I started doing it on purpose a long time ago because I thought it looked cool. I don’t really have to think about it anymore, though. I’ll teach you as soon as you’ve had a little training, if you want.”

“Training? I get training? Like for the stuff you were doing?”

“Well, yeah,” Cass said as she stuffed her towel into the lavatory’s dryer drawer and pushed past Jonesy into the dining compartment, pulling her hair into a clip as she went. “It’s not like I popped out ready to rip up station corridors first thing, either.”

“Wow,” Jonesy said. “Wait, are you eating more?”

Cass had loaded her pitcher into the autocooker again. “Get used to it,” she said, pulling out another quart of gray-green smoothie. “This’ll be you pretty soon. You think I stopped a trillion bullets in that impound hangar for free?”

“I guess not,” Jonesy said. “So—is that like energy or mana or something?”

“If mana is a ton of calories, a ton of protein, and about twenty servings of vegetables, then sure. But it’s not like a potion in a game, if that’s what you’re thinking. You still have to digest it first.”

“Okay,” Jonesy said doubtfully, wondering if she could get the autocooker to make it at least look like a yummy-blue game potion before she had to try some. “Wait, though—isn’t a calorie hardly anything? How many calories does stopping even one bullet take? Even if it was only one for every bullet, you couldn’t eat that many—could you?”

“Well, no, but it’s more complicated than that.” Cass circled her arms over her head like she’d done in the hangar. “See, that was the Flux stopping the bullets, not me. And technically it was making the bullets stop themselves, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Basically, that technique just let me put in a little work to make my Flux do a lot of work.”

“Oh,” Jonesy said. “Okay. I guess that makes sense. You seemed so tired, though.”

Cass laughed. “Yeah, because a little work times a trillion bullets still adds up. I probably ran a half-marathon in that little cross-hangar dash.” She sat down and paused for a big gulp of smoothie. “Anyway, that’s why, after a day like today, Fluxers like us either slug a bunch of groceries or ride the weight-loss shuttle right past skinny station to skeleton central.” She beckoned Jonesy over to the table. “Come on. I promise you’ll find out all about it soon. Right now, I need to make sure you don’t end up with a skeleton for a big sister, so let’s hear what happened to you.”

“But that’s all I’ve been talking about all day,” Jonesy said, joining her. “I want to know what happened to you! And Mom, and Dad!”

Cass groaned a loud, fake groan. “Okay, but you get the short version. Long version later, if you’re good—and by good, I mean don’t ask a million questions when I don’t get into every last thing right now. Not that you ever had a problem with questions, but I do have a schedule to keep.”

“You were the only one who said it was a problem,” Jonesy said, laughing. “Dad said it was a good thing.”

“Dad hardly ever walked you to school,” Cass retorted. She drummed her thumbs on her pitcher for a few seconds, thinking. “Okay, so—first off, Mom and Dad are Fluxers, like I said before, and what they really do all day is research and development for some super-secret good guys called the Delphi Exotic Energy Institute—Dexei for short. That’s our team. And the reason we have to be super-secret is because the Gray Legion doesn’t want anybody to know Fluxing exists—or that they exist.”

“So they’re the super-secret bad guys?”

“Exactly. And they’ll do anything to keep it that way. If they blow up a space station, they’ll make sure the official story says it blew up for no reason, with no survivors. And if something happens later that doesn’t line up, like a survivor popping out of nowhere talking about gray ships and freaky dudes like Norcross, they’ll find out and, you know, fix it. Mess with records, make people disappear, whatever it takes. Got it?”

Jonesy opened her mouth to ask But how, then shut it and nodded vigorously so Cass wouldn’t get mad and stop explaining.

“Anyway,” Cass said, “I was with Mom and Dad when the Seraph, Norcross’s ship, attacked Canary. Dad had this whole family escape plan worked out, but he always figured the worst-case nightmare would be having to bounce with five minutes’ warning, and Norcross didn’t even give us one. Otherwise—you know we never—”

“I know,” Jonesy said quickly. “It happened so fast. I get it.”

Cass swallowed. “We wouldn’t have gotten out at all, except Dad always kept our ship in warm-standby mode so we could just jump in and bounce if we ever needed to, and he wasn’t the only one. Seven more ships made it far enough to jump with us, so Dad coordinated with them for a sneaky six-point transit to Vescar. The plan was to drop them off at a big science station there—the Legion doesn’t usually go after people just for seeing them, not unless they know what they saw—but it blew up in our faces because we ran smack into that official story. They’d already heard Canary Station was blown away, no explanation and no survivors, and the JCA had already flagged Noraza as off-limits. And when we showed up, we found out they’d also heard about us—or our ships, anyway, because they were all in the database as known pirates. Shoot-on-sight flags and everything.”

“Oh my gosh, what?” Jonesy gasped.

“Yep. Mom and Dad sent everybody more coordinates and said we had to keep running, but one captain thought they were bonkers and wouldn’t leave with us. Mom was on the comms with him right to the end, but—yeah.”

Cass let out a deep, frustrated sigh. “Anyway, we had a couple more scary close calls, but eventually we shook off the bad guys and headed to Dexei. And after that—yeah. Lots of stuff we can talk about later. Moved to the Academy. Mom and Dad got back to their research or whatever. And I finished school, trained a ton, learned all kinds of spy stuff, started doing this, got my ship, rescued you, the end.”

“The end ?” Jonesy burst out. “But how could those Gray Legion people do any of that? Why doesn’t the UC or somebody stop them? And what do they even want? And why don’t—”

“Nope, later, don’t ask a million questions,” Cass interrupted. “It’s your turn. How in the world did you guys stay alive for three years after the gray goon squad blew up Canary?”

At first, Jonesy thought telling Cass the whole story would take even longer than her interview with Detective Garcia, because unlike her, Cass was allowed to ask questions. The further she got, though, and the more she explained how she and her friends had salvaged this and jerry-rigged that and battled the bugs from A to Z, the less Cass asked about—and the more miserable she looked—until Jonesy couldn’t stand it and stopped, right in the middle of how Ryosuke had found out just how much trouble the bugs could cause with a fabricator.

“Cass, it was okay.”

Cass blinked incredulously at her. “Seriously?”

“Yeah! Rook cut the power after the first swarm came out, and hardly any got into the hideout. It wasn’t that scary. It’s okay—”

“What about you fighting swarms of killer mini-drones could ever be okay?” Cass exploded. “You should have been safe with us all this time, not stuck in the back end of nowhere and working hard-vacuum salvage to survive. You’re a kid. And you’re my sister, and I let you down.”

“You didn’t let me down, you rescued me—”

“Not—” Cass started to say, but then her chest heaved with a quick, harsh sob, and she shut her eyes hard. Her hands curled into white-knuckled fists on the table. Jonesy was about to ask what was wrong when she opened her eyes and spoke again. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said. “Something I promised I wouldn’t keep from you if I ever got you back. Even if it made you hate me.”

Jonesy stared at Cass, bewildered and frightened there might be anything that could make her hate her sister. “What?” she made herself ask.

Cass drew a shuddering breath. “So, um. I doubt you knew, but Canary had all this crazy privacy stuff built into the networks to protect everybody’s research. That’s why we couldn’t just ping our friends’ houses or terminals to see if they were home.”

Jonesy did remember wondering about that when she was little. “Okay, but why—?”

“So I had something on my terminal,” Cass continued, talking right over Jonesy like she was afraid to stop, now. “A sneaky little app Dad had a friend make special to bypass all that security and track you around the station, because—guess whose emergency family getaway job it was to know where you were, all the time, just in case?”

Cass jabbed a finger at herself. “Right here. But I forgot my terminal that morning. Thought it was in my bag, and it wasn’t. Dad told me how important it was to keep my eye on that, but I didn’t check before I left. By the time we knew what was happening, every system we could have used to find you was fried. So we—we—had to j-just—leave.”

The next few moments were silent, apart from the Jinx’s general hum.

Jonesy blinked, then swallowed. She saw Cass watching her, bracing as if for an explosion, but at first she couldn’t think why. She’d heard the words, but for those few moments they were just sounds. The way sometimes when you cut yourself on something really sharp, the cut was just a place your skin didn’t join together anymore, and it didn’t bleed or hurt.

But only for a few moments.

Then those words tightened around her heart like a fist of glass and white-hot wires.

Cass had forgotten her. Even though they were sisters. Cass had forgotten her like she always forgot everything. That was why she’d been left behind.

Cass shuddered again and blinked, sending tears tracing down her cheeks. “I’m sorry. So, so sorry. You can hate me. It’s okay. I deserve it.”

Jonesy felt a thousand awful thoughts and feelings welling up from deep inside like the tide rising in an ocean of poison. Ready to fill her. Ready to drown her. All she wanted to do was let it happen so she could pour it out on her sister and drown her, too.

But even as she was drawing breath to scream that she did hate Cass, that Cass did deserve it, Jonesy stopped short—surprised, and off-balanced, by an abrupt certainty her sister was lying. Not about being sorry, but about it being okay to hate her. It would have been the easiest thing to scream she hated her. In that moment, it wouldn’t have been a lie.

But it wouldn’t have been okay, either. And Jonesy knew it.

She hated lying, and that was nearly always why she told the truth. Sometimes, though, especially when she was really mad at somebody, she told the truth because she knew it would hit them deeper than any punch. Like when she’d called out Rook for wanting to spare her the truth when he’d always said getting the truth out was so important.

She knew she could hurt Cass like she’d hurt him. She knew she could hurt Cass worse.

And since she knew that would be the most unfair thing ever, she shocked Cass by shaking her head. “No! I don’t want to hate you!”

Cass made a face, like she thought Jonesy didn’t get it yet. “Kiddo—”

“No! You rescued me! And you didn’t blow up Canary anyway! And—and my friends needed me!” Jonesy took a deep breath and swallowed, and that started everything awful inside her draining away again before it could take hold. “So it’d be stupid to hate you,” she said. “And mean. So I won’t. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s really not. I forgot you, and it wasn’t okay. I’m a terrible big sister.”

“You are not!” Jonesy went around the table and hugged Cass, hard. “So stop it. Please.”

Cass hugged her back, but she couldn’t stop talking. “I swear I never forgot you again, sis. Never ever ever, all this time.”

“Well, I never forgot, either. I knew you’d find me. You or Mom or Dad. I knew.”

Cass’s chest jolted with another sob. “Sis, I—”

“And you did!” Jonesy squeezed Cass extra hard, then let her go and sat next to her. “I guess I did get worried,” she admitted. “Just at the end. When I found out about the pirates.”

Cass’s eyebrows shot up. “What pirates?”

“Rook said they were stashing stuff in the debris. Except he only told the older kids, so when I saw a ship I thought it was good guys missing us. I went to the command deck, but Rook had unplugged everything, and suddenly my hands glowed and everything turned on. And that was the night the gray ship came back. They took Trace and Rook and everybody, Cass. And I think they took the police who helped me on Lumen Station, too.” Jonesy sniffed. “Because of me, right? Because I’m a Fluxer like you?”

“It was not your fault,” Cass told her firmly. “It had to happen sooner or later. And you didn’t know what would happen if you went to the cops. You did nothing wrong, okay?”

Jonesy wasn’t sure she felt like she’d done nothing wrong, but she nodded. “Okay.”

Cass sighed and paused to check her terminal, and Jonesy wasn’t surprised to see her poking around a FractalTask organizer client with about forty tabs labeled Checklist something-or-other. It wasn’t fair to say Cass always forgot everything, but she had always been pretty good at forgetting stuff she didn’t write down.

“Okay, I’ve got to check some stuff up front,” Cass said, rising. “Are you okay, though? If you’re not, you can—”

“No, I am,” Jonesy said quickly, getting up, too. “Seriously.”

Cass exhaled, softly but deeply, and flashed a smile. “Then come on.”

Jonesy followed her to the cockpit and watched over her shoulder as she ran through a checklist on one of her screens. While she worked, Cass asked, “So tell me again how you ended up at Lumen Station. You said you thought Dad told you to go there?”

“Yeah,” Jonesy said. “See, I was getting his terminal for him the morning the gray ship attacked, so I had it all along.”

She quickly described her last two days on Canary Station for Cass—what she’d done those first three times she’d Fluxed, and how the terminal had gotten messages each time after going three years without getting any. “So then,” she finished, “when I was trying to find a system I hadn’t messed up in the database and the gray ship was trying to get me to answer the comms, Dad’s terminal got a different kind of message with the code for Lumen Station, and I knew it was him telling me where to go, so I plugged it in and went.”

“Huh,” Cass said. “That’s just weird, is all. Nobody else has heard from Dad since he left.” She flipped a few switches and jumped out of the pilot’s seat. “Let’s see this terminal.”

Jonesy got the white Ailon from her backpack. Cass frowned at the messages under the password lock and turned the terminal over in her hand a few times.

“Well, these first messages are definitely from one of Mom and Dad’s automated detectors at the lab. It must have survived the attack.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” Jonesy said, proud of herself for that deduction.

“Except I don’t know why this would be getting messages from those in the first place.” Cass glanced at Jonesy with a torn expression. “For one thing, this isn’t Dad’s terminal.”

“It is so! He told me to get the white terminal under his pillow, and that’s where it was.”

“But Dad had his terminal when we escaped. And I don’t recognize this one. I feel like I’d have seen it—I was around the lab enough back then.”

“Oh.” Jonesy stared at the terminal in confusion. “You really don’t think it’s his? Then whose?”

“Look, I don’t know. He does like Ailons, and if it was under his pillow—maybe it was a spare or something. That’s not the point, though.” Cass tapped the last message with the code for Lumen Station Six. “When exactly did you get this one? Before or after the Seraph tried talking to you?”

“Um,” Jonesy said, considering. “After.”

“That’s what I thought. I’m sorry, but I need to get rid of this.”

“No! You don’t know that message was from them!”

“It might not be safe!”

“It’s not yours!”

She made a grab for the terminal, but Cass pulled it out of reach. “The Legion isn’t messing around, Jonesy. Even if this was Dad’s, it could be compromised now. We can’t take chances like that anymore.” Then she did something annoying that Jonesy remembered from the old days: she stared at Jonesy with her eyebrows set just so, as if to say you know I’m right, so quit arguing. Jonesy, knowing nothing of the sort, stared right back and let her eyes get all watery by thinking hard about how mad she’d be if Cass really took the Ailon away like this.

“Okay, okay, geez,” Cass said, giving up. “I guess I do have a rig for checking stuff like this. If it’s not doing anything sneaky, you can have it back. But I’ll have my systems watching it, and if it does anything I don’t like, you can’t keep it unless I squish it into a very small cube first. Deal?”

“Deal,” Jonesy said. “But it won’t do anything bad because it’s Dad’s.”

Cass went to the dining compartment, folded a tray out of a cabinet, and set the terminal on it. “This’ll take a minute to scan.”

“It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

“Yes, we will.”

“So why were you on Lumen Station, if you didn’t know I was coming?” Jonesy asked.

Cass pulled out a drawer to show her a little stack of shield-bagged storage drives. “To pick up these. It’s a great big dump of research data from the Osiris University advanced physics labs, plus a few fabricator schematics for some weird equipment Dexei’s needed for a while. We can’t exactly order stuff off the hypernet with the Legion out to get us, so we need couriers to go out and make the deals and pickups. Very secret couriers, obviously. That’s what I do, now, which is why my ship is so fast and sneaky, and why I picked the code name Ghost Hawk.”

“You got to pick?”

“Sure. So will you, once you’ve finished training.”

The tray beeped and displayed a small green holo report above the terminal. “Okay, well, looks like it’s not doing anything wrong,” Cass said. “For now, anyway. If it tells you to do anything else, though, promise me you won’t run off and do it.”

“I won’t,” Jonesy said. “Promise.”

“I’m serious.”

“I said I promise.”

Cass finally handed her the Ailon, but it wasn’t quite like getting her dad’s terminal back. Not now. Not if Cass didn’t trust it. Jonesy put it in her pocket without looking at the screen. Even in her pocket it felt ominous.

“I’m going to run behind if I don’t knock a few more things off my list,” Cass said, nodding toward the cockpit. “This’ll only be a day-long transit, but it’s two legs since we had to bounce the same way as that superfreighter for starters. I want to be awake for the first drop so I can check the second-leg plot corrections. You think you can sleep?”

“I don’t know,” Jonesy said truthfully, even though she was exhausted.

“Well, give it a try, okay? Take any bunk you want in the cabin with four. We’ll have more time for talking soon, and anyway, we’ve only got a few more stops before we hit the Academy.” Cass gave Jonesy’s shoulder a squeeze. “Oh, and one other thing—until we get there, don’t try any Fluxing. I don’t want either of us getting blown up.”

“Okay.” Jonesy started for the passenger cabin, then stopped. “You were kidding, right?”

“Of course I was kidding. No, I’ll teach you what I can along the way. I won’t make you wait until we get there. I was serious about blowing us up, though.”

Jonesy swallowed, because that was the part she’d been asking about. “Oh. Um. Okay.”

“That’s part of why I want to start your training as soon as I can,” Cass said. “You’ll be way safer if you know a few things. You’re my kid sister, and I’ve already lost you twice. It’s not happening again.”

“Twice?” Jonesy asked. “What was the second time?”

Instead of answering, Cass roared like a hungry monster and made a fake grab for her—a game they’d played all the time, once. Jonesy played her part by squeaking and darting into the passenger cabin. Cass stopped at the door. “Sweet dreams, sis.”

“You too,” Jonesy replied, flopping into the closest bunk—which was the only one that wasn’t buried in plastic crates of Cass’s stuff, anyway. “See you tomorrow?”

“Not if I see you first,” Cass said, clicking off the lights.

It was an old joke, and they both giggled. “Well, you won’t,” Jonesy said, then yawned and closed her eyes. Cass’s silhouette in the doorway was the last thing she saw that day.