“You’re OK, Dellie. You’re OK.” He soothes her as he points to the boy. “That’s enough now, Toby. No more running in the kitchen. If you want to play chase—”
I stop listening.
These are my kids. My real, actual fucking kids when they were small. And that is me… except it isn’t.
I whirl around. “Where am I?”
No one answers. The people in this kitchen—me and my children, who are not me and my children—don’t react. Can’t hear me.
Because that’s not you, Crux.
The room disappears and I now find myself in a place that reminds me of an unfinished sector of the Pleasure Prison. Hazy grayness that goes on forever.
“Wait!” I call out. “Go back!”
I don’t know who I’m talking to. Myself? Other Me? Corla, who obviously, isn’t… Corla.
“You can’t go back.”
I turn to see ALCOR. At least he looks like a familiar version of ALCOR that I recognize from some long-ago time. Except it’s not ALCOR. I don’t know how I know this, I just do.
“Why not?” I ask.
Not-ALCOR smiles at me. “You know why. That’s not really you. It’s just a glimpse.”
“Of what?”
“Another version of you. One who knows nothing about artificial beings, or giant outlaw stations, or wars being waged in his name.” He pauses, waiting to see if that satisfies me.
It doesn’t. “Those wars aren’t being waged in my name. And who are you?”
“Which am I, you mean?”
I narrow my eyes at him. I’m not in the mood to play.
“I’m Security Beacon Number Nineteen, of course. But you can call me SB19 for short.”
“Corla’s security beacon,” I mutter, considering this.
A year ago my brother Serpint showed up at Harem Station with my star-crossed princess inside a cryopod. Our brother, Draden, died stealing her and Serpint had to limp his way back home because Booty Hunter was severely damaged.
After that nothing was ever the same again. And Draden dying was only the first in a long string of… well, what to call them? Coincidences? Doesn’t really fit. Bad luck doesn’t really fit either. I guess the appearance of Corla in that cryopod was a little bit of both.
Normally, when a Cygnian princess comes in to Harem Station she is thawed out and put to work. But I didn’t thaw Corla out of her cryogenetic sleep when Serpint brought her to me because I was afraid the Cygnians would be able to track the pod.
But that wasn’t the only reason.
Twenty years ago Corla told me that we would never see each other again. And if we did, things had gone terribly wrong. So even though I spent all twenty years between that night and the day Serpint brought her to Harem Station wishing for a second chance with my one true soulmate—I knew, deep down, that she was not supposed to be there.
I could feel the truth of that warning inside me.
She scared me.
I sent Corla out to Security Beacon Number Nineteen after everything started going sideways. She’s a bomb. So are Lyra, and Nyleena, and Veila. And I know what people think. I let them stay on the station—well, I didn’t really have a choice when it came to Veila, but the others, yeah, I let them stay—and I sent Corla away. Put her out on that security beacon so just in case anyone decided to blow her up, she would not take the rest of us down with her.
I had to do it. I didn’t have a choice. She was dangerous. More dangerous than the others because we didn’t know why she was in that cryopod, or what she was doing on Cetus Station, or where she was going.
So I don’t feel guilty about keeping her frozen. It was my duty.
Serpint and I had a chat about her that day while we were inside the security beacon. I told him my suspicions about ALCOR. Specifically, I told him about how I saw ALCOR kill our brother Draden back when he was thirteen. And how I knew that the reappearance of Corla after twenty years was also the beginning of something big.
Something bad.
SB19 heard everything I said to Serp, of course. But I didn’t think about it much back then. The security beacons were never very communicative with us. They are their own minds. They live—for lack of a better word—their own lives, preferring to be seen and not heard.
And by seen, I mean every once in a while they will target-lock their SEAR cannons onto random ships just to