with some deliberation, she’d never be free.
Dr. Morunt had given her a warning. She understood and appreciated it. She had four weeks. If she was ever going to anything, it would have to start now.
In the quiet of the medical bay, reading files she wrestled into understanding, Pendt Harland discovered that she knew more things now:
Family was everything; her ship was home; her aunt’s authority was absolute; and as her birthday crept closer, her already limited freedoms became more and more curtailed.
Pendt looked down at her fingernails, and made a plan.
* * *
• • •
In the end, it was both ridiculously easy and impossibly hard. Pendt saved one gram of oglasa from her dinner portion every day for four weeks. It was all she could spare. Her body was already running close to the margin, operating at peak efficiency thanks to eighteen years of training. Any more than a gram per day, and her work would suffer. She might be caught.
She felt the loss of that gram every moment. Worse, she knew exactly where her hoard was, and that she could eat it at any time if she wanted to. It haunted her, and her dreams were full of giant fish that mocked her as they floated in the black of space. But she stayed strong. She was only going to get one chance at this, and there would be no going back. She did her best to put the growing pile of calories out of her mind.
The part that almost made her laugh was that the whole scheme was only possible because of circumstances she had caused. If she hadn’t regrown her fingernail all those years ago, they never would have had to trade for more food at Alterra. They never would have ended up with Talbor. Their food supplies would be endless protein packets, not the densely nutritious oglasa. She didn’t even have to wrap it or keep it somewhere cool. Oglasa didn’t spoil. She could have stored it next to the engine, and four weeks later, it would still be edible.
The rest of her escape was fairly straightforward. Pendt had witnessed several dockings now, and she knew how this one would go. The Harland would make port, the engines would cut off, and Arkady and Lodia would go aboard the Brannick Station. No one else would leave the ship, no Harland, at least. But the doors below, in the hold where the passengers had stayed and possibly died during the extended years of the voyage, those doors would open. And no Harland cared what or who went through them.
The hard seal on the door between the hold below and the rest of the ship was her biggest obstacle. She found a plan of the ship and located an airduct that passed from one part of the ship to the other. It was very, very small, but so was Pendt. It wasn’t like she’d be carrying anything with her.
The day came when the Harland arrived at Brannick Station. Everything went exactly as Pendt imagined, except the part where she ate the twenty-eight grams of protein she’d been hoarding. Nothing could have prepared her for the surge of power she felt rush through her body as it dealt with so much excess for the first time in her life.
When the engines cut, Pendt headed for the airduct. She had picked the one in her mother’s room because Lodia would be gone and Tanith would be in the engine room, running maintenance. No one would see the open duct until much later, hopefully until after the Harland had already left. It was a tighter fit than she was expecting, but Pendt was very determined. Despite the skin it cost her, she shoved herself through the duct, and into the vent that would lead her to the other side of the seal.
The hold below was not what she had been expecting. After so many years of passenger freight, she thought it would be dirty and full of waste and garbage. Instead, it was pristine, so clean it would have met Dr. Morunt’s sterilization protocols. Any evidence of human habitation had been scourged. Beds lined the walls, stacked three high. Almost a hundred people could have lived here, Pendt realized. She thought it was more like thirty. Nothing about it made sense, but Pendt had no time to wonder about it. She had to make it through the doors while they were open.
When she crossed the airlock, she found a large empty