…For the most part. And yet one arrogant offworlder was making me doubt myself.
I wished I could ask my father. It had been his ship first, after all, and his father’s before him. I missed the days of sitting up here in a spare chair, my knees pulled up to my chin against the chill, as I watched my father pilot. I’d ask him every question under the stars. It was usually just me, since Onai—the thought of my oldest brother still made me wince—would be piloting the skiff, and Arjan was usually along with him, learning how. As the youngest, I’d been riding on the bridge with my father on short Shadow runs practically before the buckles fit tight enough to hold me in my seat during takeoff. So I’d known the moment his flying began to grow more erratic, when his eyes went from only darkening in the corners during his more daring moves to turning fully black and back again.
If only he were still here. He would have been able to talk to me about everything from containment hold upgrades to suspicious strangers, and about this blackness that felt like it was eating me up from the inside out.
He would have been able to, if the very same blackness hadn’t killed him. And my mother. And Onai. And my grandparents and all their other children. And my great-grandparents.
Ours was a legacy of pride and tradition. It was also a legacy of death and madness. This blackness was deeper and darker and more dangerous than the hidden corners of space. And it lived inside me. In my blood and bone, in the fibers of my being.
Shadow poisoning affected anyone exposed to too much of the energy for very long, but this…this was different. This was generations of exposure built up in our bodies, lining our cells and nerves like soot.
And it didn’t only kill us. For some of us, it made us great before it did. And that scared me more than anything.
It was in moments like these that I felt very small, very young…and very alone. It was, I knew, the same feeling that crippled Arjan and kept him from being able to lead as captain.
And yet here I was. So I raked my hands back through my hair, threw myself down in my seat, and shook off the feeling of clinging darkness. It eventually stopped weighing on my shoulders, encroaching on the corners of my eyes.
Darkness seemed to still be pressing on the viewport, though. It was actually the middle of our day—we’d fished throughout the night and the next morning—though it was hard to tell from the blackness of space.
It was almost as peaceful as sleep. I paused for a second to watch the partial arc of the intergalactic portal float across my view. Once, it was a gateway from Alaxak to the rest of the galaxy, and even to distant galaxies beyond, but now it was still and empty as a doorway without a house around it. Unimaginably large, the twisted girders, damaged over the centuries from meteor strikes, hovered like broken ribs. Sometimes drones would collect in front of it in an attempt to travel through it using a technology that…well, that nobody understood anymore. The Great Collapse was named for its loss. Eventually, the drones would revert to other programing and disperse, leaving what remained of the ruins to float alone. I found it comforting in a way—civilization had imploded, but my people had endured. Our culture had existed for thousands of years before the Great Collapse and it would exist for thousands after.
Even if I didn’t make it that much longer.
My brother’s voice over the comm brought me back to myself. He was using the channel that piped only into the bridge. “Great flying, little sister.”
I felt my eyes tear, despite myself. Arjan had been in this with me from the beginning. We’d both watched our parents’ loving gaze go dark and never change back, heard the chaotic nonsense that replaced their steady words of reason, and found them—finally—unmoving one morning over five years ago. After Onai followed my parents’ dark path less than two years later at age twenty-five, it was Arjan who had eventually encouraged me to take over their operation, even with me just fourteen and him eighteen. It was looking out for him and the crew that helped me keep my self-control. Without him, I wouldn’t be here, and yet I so often treated him just like any other member of the crew.
“Thanks,” I said. “You too, really. Look, Arjan, when we’re done with this run, let’s you and me…go somewhere…different for a little while.” The words tripped awkwardly out of my mouth. “You know, like, away from Gamut for a couple of days. Maybe we could camp on the beaches on the northern sea, or in the equatorial forest.”
“I think it’s called a ‘vacation,’ and I’m not surprised you don’t know the word.” I could hear his grin. He hadn’t teased me like this for a long time. “Sounds amazing.”
I grinned back, even though he couldn’t see it.
“But you know,” he added with a yawn, “going to sleep sounds nearly as amazing.”
I was also tired. Dangerously tired, where control slipped away faster than Shadow from a net, and a laugh burst out of me. “There’ll be time enough to sleep when we’re dead.”
My laughter hitched. That eventuality might not be too far off for either of us, if Onai was any indication. I cleared my throat and pushed the button to comm the entire crew. “Let’s get back into position, everyone, in case there’s another flare worth running.”
Voices came back to me in sleepy assent. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t hear from Nev. He was probably asleep standing up.
“Eton and Telu, eyes out for any drones or asteroids headed our way. Nev, get me a count on our remaining empty canisters—”
“Um…Captain?” Nev’s voice was unsteady as he interrupted me—but not from tiredness. He sounded more anxious than he had at the sight of the drone.
“What?”
As if answering for him, a red light flared on the dash, followed by the piercing buzz of an alarm. Panic rose in me at the same time, until I forced it down and scanned the feeds as quickly as possible.
Someone had pressure locked the cargo hold.
“Nev!” I shouted into the comm. “What’s going on?”
“A few of the canisters—the panels might be fried, because I didn’t see any Shadow, but they’re saying they’re losing pressure.”
Another pulse of fear ran through me. If he was trapped in the cargo hold with leaking canisters…I would not lose a crewmember this way. Even if he was new, even if I found him strange and infuriating, I could not watch his skin bubble and blacken. Even if he was lucky and only came into contact with a concentration of Shadow too weak to burn him, he would still fall into madness faster than an airship into the gravitational pull of a planet. I would no more be able to stand watching his eyes turn black than the rest of him.
And I wouldn’t risk the rest of my ship. Leaking canisters could blow us all to hell. I would vent the cargo hold into space before I would let that happen, but that would of course kill Nev.