on one of her various advanced scanners that didn’t rely on light.
“We could turn back,” she suggested, sensing his apprehension.
“And go home with nothing?” Draden scoffed. “What’s the point in that?”
“What are you even looking for, Draden?”
“I don’t know yet. I just know it’s here. We have to look harder. Go deeper, maybe.”
“Something is here. Something… huge. Something so big it’s blocking out the stars. I don’t like it. I feel like… like we just floated into some kind of… lair.”
“Yeah,” Draden agreed. “I feel it too. But that’s why we need to keep going.”
“I think they’re watching us.”
“Good. Let them watch. Maybe they’ll get tired of watching and make contact?”
“Call me overly cautious, but I’m fairly certain we do not want to make contact with these people.”
She realized her mistake as soon as the last word left her mind.
Whoever was in charge of this place—they weren’t people.
“I would just like to point out,” Booty continued, “that this place is not yellow, Draden. You were looking for a yellow place.”
“I know. But the yellow got us here. Maybe that’s all it was supposed to do?” Draden could tell that Booty was no longer on board just using his typical humanoid-ish senses. But his new mind status picked up more from his other mind brethren. Like the way people can read others. It’s just a feeling, mostly. And you don’t know how to explain it. Some emotions are easy to spot on people because most people are very bad at controlling their expressions. But even when people do have that kind of self-control and are very good at hiding their true thoughts and intentions, they just give off a vibe. You just know this. It’s a sense, like hearing and vision, but not one you can explain with biological mechanics.
Booty was giving off a mind’s version of that vibe.
Draden wouldn’t go so far as to call it fear. He didn’t feel any fear. That was one of the first things he noticed about being a mind versus a person. Emotions were difficult to feel. They weren’t completely gone, but they were all vague. Like if he were wearing a blindfold and hearing protection at the same time. The differences between extreme emotions like elation or anger were muddled and foggy. He felt very meh about almost everything that didn’t relate to his current objective. And if things did relate to his current objective then he just felt… motivated.
Yeah. Motivated to get answers, or solve problems, or find a place filled with golden light.
He was focused.
One good thing that came out of this was that Draden totally understood Tray better. All those years of meh from Tray suddenly made sense.
So the vibe he was getting from Booty wasn’t fear. But it was definitely something along the lines of dread.
They were silent for a little while. Booty kept moving in a direction that appeared to be forward, but how could one know when there was nothing around them?
Finally she broke their stillness with a question. “What are you hoping to find here, Draden?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. I mean, I’m not looking for something specific. I just feel the need to be here. That’s all.”
“And then what?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno. Go home, I guess.”
“Then what is the point?”
“I just told you, I don’t know the point. I just feel like I need to find this place.”
“And that will be enough?”
“Look, you’re in charge so if you want to turn around, I’m not going to stop you.”
Booty decided she wasn’t going to push it any harder. And she just kept them moving forward. But she had a really bad, bad feeling about this trip. Ever since they entered the sector she’d felt uncomfortable. Almost like she had forgotten something important, but couldn’t figure out what this important thing was.
But now that they were deeper into the void—and she knew it was a void. It had to be a void—that nagging feeling of forgetfulness was morphing into something that might be called panic if she thought she was capable of feeling such a thing.
And it all had to do with her lapse in memory when she’d woken up on the prison moon called Castor Theta. Back before she was the Booty Hunter.
That was a weird time in her life. The only time up until recently where she had felt disoriented. But after she named herself the Booty Hunter and got to Harem Station all that disorientation had turned into certainty. Like she was right