The Human’s eyes turn to hers. Its mouth opens slowly, as if its owner is now unsure what to do with it. Somewhere in its feeble mind, it is now realizing that Sandy is many steps ahead of it. It does not have a plan for this eventuality. It probably constructed vague plans for two or three branches of potential conversation: one if Sandy seemed reluctant, one if Sandy was generous, and so on. It had no plan labeled if Sandy is smarter, faster, and better than me in every way.
[You are welcome to come with me], continues Sandy. [I am meeting my first buyer before we leave this solar system, and the second on the Blackstar. Between the two of them, they have spoken for all the cargo on my ship.]
The Human’s mouth closes slowly: so embarrassingly, nauseatingly slowly. Sandy watches the emotion spread over that furless face, soon to be followed by confusion when the Human realizes it’s been outsmarted, yet is getting exactly what it wanted after all.
“Well, that was easy,” says the Human.
Sandy blinks a smile. [Sometimes you get lucky], she says.
“Mornin’, partners!” says a raspy voice from the galley ceiling, in an accent Sarya has never heard before. “Pilot intelligence Ol’ Ernie here, he/him etcetera, independent, two-seven, yadda yadda, nice t’ meet y’all. We’ll be gettin’ to know each other until y’all’s Network transfer slot, which is in…let’s see…four days. Hooboy, on a budget, are we? Shoulda known when I met y’all’s ship intelligence—don’t talk much, does it? Well, that’s all right; I talk plenty.”
Sarya sits in the galley, sweat rapidly flooding her utility suit. She can barely hear Ernie’s voice over the roar of the ship’s overtaxed cooling system; Riptide is working hard to keep its occupants alive. She tries to ignore Mer pacing the corridor—he has to be absolutely dying in all that fur—while doing her best to unwrap a food bar with wayward and sweat-slicked fingers.
“Gotta say, y’all’re lucky y’all got Ol’ Ernie. Granted, this Blackstar’s got a few trillion of us on the payroll, but Ol’ Ernie’s the best. He’s gonna save all y’all’s hides, ’cuz he can tell y’all ain’t given half a thought to radiation. If y’all’d ever been this close to a star before, y’all’d have a better paint job. But Ol’ Ernie’ll take care of y’all. He’s just gonna slide y’all behind this big ol’ freighter so y’all don’t get overcooked. Sound reasonable? ’Course it sounds reasonable, this is Ol’ Ernie we’re talkin’ about.”
And so begins day eighteen. Sarya now counts time not from the destruction of her home but from the moment she invited the worst parts of her mother into her own mind. That, it turns out, has made the bigger impact in her life. She has almost grown used to the strange, typically violent thoughts popping up at inappropriate times. She has accepted that evisceration will always seem like a valid solution to any social conflict. And the dreams—even now, it’s best not to think about the dreams. But it’s not all bad. She sees how her fellow passengers view her. They never knew the idiot kid from Watertower’s remedial classes. They’ve only known Sarya the Daughter, an intelligence who will cut her own arm off if it will get her closer to her goal, a Human with a Widow raging behind her eyes. They see an intelligence with a falsified registration, the individual who killed the bounty hunter who captured them—at least as far as they know. She would almost dare to say…that they respect her.
Well, most of them.
If she cranes her neck, she can see Sandy’s hatch from here. Of her three fellow passengers—the legal ones—it is the tier three who consumes most of her thoughts. Sandy, who can pull the truth out of anyone. Sandy, who can read and integrate two species’ complete mythologies, add a couple dashes of observation, and distill them down into a solution to an impossible problem. Sandy, who keeps a bounty hunter’s faceplate pinned to her wall. Who is seven years old and actually owns the ship Sarya is living on. Who travels with a father who doesn’t even approach her intelligence. Who has outsmarted Sarya effortlessly, more than once. Who has eyes on everyone, all the time. Whose motivations are one hundred percent opaque.
And who, evidently, also wants to go to the Blackstar.
Sarya coughs, the spray of crumbs immediately reminding her that she still hasn’t