liked the feeling of pushing the edge with him. It felt like a safe sort of dangerous, falling out of an airplane with a parachute.
“You wanna get some food?”
I almost ran into his arms, as this was, in fact, the password. “Yes! Yes! A million yeses! I could eat tree bark, I’m so hungry.” I opened the door and tried not to appear too excited, but my smile gave me away.
This answer seemed to please him, and I saw the creases around his brow relax. It occurred to me to ask about what had made his mood so sour in such a short amount of time, but then I thought a part of me might not want to know.
“Soup’s on.”
I hesitated. “But aren’t I a stowaway?”
“Right now the first shift is on; most of the crew is first, so they won’t be ‘round the galley.”
“You guys do stuff around here…on the ship?” He led me down a completely different hallway from before, though to me they all looked the same. The halls were a boring white, but every few yards, beneath a glass undercarriage, lay a fire extinguisher, and every door was painted a mundane gray. It made me realize that even if I tried to commandeer a lifeboat (even if I had the slightest clue about boats), I was sure to get lost before even reaching the deck.
“We got to,” he laughed. “Me and Ben got the shippin’ company in the pocket and Ben is technically part owner, but for appearance’s sake, everybody works.”
“And that makes it easier to smuggle things from country to country,” I said. He tapped the side of his head and winked, confirming my answer.
We continued to walk down a long corridor with protruding electrical boxes. Just being near all that power made me nervous.
“That truck I saw you guys stealing from,” I began, “what was in it?”
He frowned, then and looked around to make sure no one could hear what he was about to say. “Mostly hard drives, graphics cards, fiber optic cables, some CPUs…”
“Wow,” I whispered.
“Yeah, we only gotta make this trip a couple times a year.”
“I guess you wouldn’t need to do it every day.” I didn’t know very much about that kind of stuff but I did know it was worth a lot of money, and I could only imagine what kind of income a couple cargo containers full of that kind of inventory could bring to one’s bank account.
He held open a large white set of sliding doors that were labeled Galley just above. “No need to be greedy,” he said.
I smiled back. “Funny, I never thought I’d hear that from a thief…”
“You’ll never know what you’ll hear from a thief,” said Reid, with a mouth full of food. “That’s the point.”
I was taken aback when I saw him sitting there at the cafeteria-style table littered by graffiti profanity. I knew there would be other people there, but Charlie had diverted my mind enough to forget about the impending social awkwardness. Charlie shook his head and handed me a plastic bowl and a set of matching cutlery. On a set of industrial stoves, I could see steaming pots and oversized spice racks.
I tried to seem brave while I walked along the outline of the galley. I watched as Charlie got himself some food and tried not to seem obvious about it. He had tucked a cigarette behind his ear and now his long fingers enclosed around the entire bottom of a bowl.
Suddenly, he looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back but quickly looked away when I felt the blush spread. To keep it from going further I had to look elsewhere. Around Charlie, there were a couple of countertops with grimy microwaves. On a large bulletin board there were laminated documents about safety precautions and avoiding food poisoning. Just outside I thought I could hear a jackhammer…and I was desperate to focus on all of it instead of how much I wanted to look back at his face.
“Here I thought Yuri was screwing with me when he said you had made it through.” Reid’s loud interjection interrupted my inspection. He was eyeing me with the same sort of annoyance as before.
I took the lid off a pot of chowder. Instead of thinking about how it might have been made, I scooped it into my bowl. “Sorry to disappoint.”
Charlie scoffed then and stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth. I put the lid back on and took a