to go home to.
I try not to let my envy show.
“We went to Vilt,” Gal says, and Arso’s eyes snap to him, stunned. “There was…Ettian, you remember?”
Horrified, I nod. Better for me to complete the thought than him. “The planet was one of the first to be mined out completely for dreadnought metal. We went there on leave once. There’s a base in the southern hemisphere with an adjacent resort town. There was, uh, recreational climbing. In the quarries, or…well, what was left of them.”
Arso’s pride keeps her disappointment off her face, but a spark of hope in her eyes winks out. My stomach twists. I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to have your family’s world transformed from a home to a plaything for Umber officers.
And I feel the resentment for the three of us reaching a peak. We’ve each had our own hardships, but in their eyes, we’ve never been touched by the horrors of the War of Expansion. Gal and Wen certainly haven’t.
But I can’t stand the guilt anymore. “I was ten,” I start, and every eye in the hold snaps to me—even those of the soldiers who’ve been drowsing on their cots. I stare at my feet.
Can’t look at Gal. Can’t look at Wen. Can’t look at any of them.
“My parents were a part of Noam plan-Rana’s advisory board, and we lived adjacent to the planetary governor’s household in the heart of Trost. I think my mother worked on the planet’s defenses. I didn’t see her much in the last days. There was an airstrike, and—”
Smoke in my lungs. The world shattering around me. The woman who was supposed to be looking after me gone, a twisted red mess in her place. Shouldn’t have panicked. Should have stayed put for the rescue crews. But I was ten and terrified, and the world around me had descended into a twisted hellscape, and the only thing I had any presence of mind to do was run until I reached a part of the city that was still intact.
“In the aftermath, there was no one left for me. No one would help—in those days, everyone had their own battles to fight.”
But that’s not quite right. I went to no one. Did nothing. Hid in an underground garage for three days, until the hunger was unbearable. Started stealing. Started fighting. Started telling myself it was all necessary. Went feral—for how long, I’ll never be entirely sure.
“I had no identification, no friends, nothing. I did what I had to do to stay alive, one day to the next, for two years. By then, Umber had installed social welfare programs, trying to wring the war out of the city. They cleaned me up, put me in a foster household, even arranged for me to attend a school. A propaganda-heavy school, where Archon children were raised into proper Umber citizens. And I guess it worked, because I went straight into the academy when I was fifteen.”
I break off, feeling like I’ve already said too much. It’s like my outburst at the train station with Wen all over again. The parts of me that I thought were blasted away like that big stupid crater outside Trost have come squirming back to the surface again. And this time makes the information I told Wen look like a trickle in comparison.
I’m bracing for the soldiers to scoff, to call me on the places where my voice rang false. But instead Arso softens. She reaches over and pats me gently on the knee, and when she speaks, her rough-edged voice is low and soothing. “You don’t have to say any more,” she reassures me.
“I…uh. I need to go check on the autopilot,” I say, standing before anyone can protest. Across the hold, Gal’s dark eyes find mine. Now? he seems to ask, an ember of fury in his watery stare. For ten soon-to-be-dead strangers? That’s when I get to know you?
But I think it’s more than simple jealousy that I withheld my history from him when everyone else on this ship brings it out effortlessly. By throwing my story in with the rest, I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m