No eighteen-year-old traveled to the fringe unaccompanied, not for training. But he didn’t bother pressing for the truth. If she wanted to risk her neck in the middle of no-man’s-land, that was her business.
They reached the ship’s bottom level and turned on the lights, which didn’t do much to orient him. Half the room was a cargo hold with massive crates bolted to the floor, and three sliding metal doors compartmentalized the other half.
“If this is the engine room,” he asked, “where’s the engine?”
“There’s more than one,” Lara told him. “They’re kept quarantined, so if a fire breaks out, it won’t fry the whole system.” She pointed to the first metal door. “Hear that whirring sound?”
He nodded.
“That’s the emergency engine. It powers oxygen and heat: things we can’t do without. There’s usually a backup generator, too. If we run out of fuel, we can hand-crank enough air to keep us breathing until someone responds to the distress call.”
Doran didn’t say so, but only idiots responded to distress calls. That was a good way to get yourself robbed, sold, or killed. Maybe all of the above. He’d heard about pirates sending distress beacons and then sitting back while the victims came right to them. Smart travelers kept their heads down and minded their own business.
“That’s the main engine,” Lara said, pointing at the middle door. “It’s powered down, otherwise we’d need earplugs.” Then she indicated the final door. “There’s the room we want—secondary systems, navigation, electrical. All the ship’s bells and whistles.”
“Bells and whistles?” he asked. “More like rubber bands and Popsicle sticks.”
Lara frowned at a flake of rust floating past her nose. “Well. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve picked a different ship.”
She pushed off the steps, sailing across the room, and Doran followed. It took some maneuvering, but they eventually made it to the last door and slid it into the wall.
A warm gust of static blew over them, smelling of oil and dust. It tickled a sneeze from his nose and sent him backward an inch. When he caught hold of the doorframe, he let his gaze wander over the variety of machines mounted to the walls. They varied in size and shape, but each was dulled by layers of old grease, their tubes opaque and gummy with age.
The ship’s innards matched its hull—ridden hard and put away wet.
“At least no moths fluttered out,” Lara said. She gripped her way around the room until she settled in front of a boxy device that resembled a climate console.
The tiny space made Doran’s airway squeeze, so he stayed put. “I’ll wait here until you need me.”
Nodding, she snapped the grav drive casing from the wall, then began prodding at its wires. It didn’t take long for her to find the problem. “The couplers need replacing.”
“Easy fix?”
“Five minutes, tops,” she said. “But I’ll keep it powered off until the crew’s awake. I don’t want bodies crashing to the floor. That’s no way to say good morning.”
Doran laughed. The sensation felt foreign, and he wondered how long it’d been since something had struck him as funny.
“Hand me the smallest wrench,” she said. After he delivered the tool, she held it between her teeth and delved inside the grav drive. But loose strands of hair kept drifting into her face, tangling among the wires. She growled and mumbled around the wrench, “Help me out, will you?”
Doran didn’t want to go in there, but he stuffed down his fear and moved behind Lara to gather her wayward locks. He smoothed the hair back from her head and twisted it into a ponytail, then rubbed the ends between his thumb and index finger. Her hair was freakishly soft, like liquid velvet. Lara shivered when his thumb accidentally brushed her skin, and he noticed chill bumps break out along the back of her neck.
She spat out her wrench. “That tickles.”
“Sorry.”
He tried coiling the twist into a knot, but the strands were too satiny to hold. Faintly, he recalled that he’d done this before—run his hands through a girl’s hair—and liked it. But he’d never felt anything as silky as this. Probably because his girlfriend had damaged her hair by dying it so many glaring shades of pink.
He blinked and saw the girl’s face, so stunningly gorgeous that she barely passed for a mortal. A sheet of sleek bubble-gum tresses fell just above the swell of her flawless breasts, and the rest of her was pretty impressive, too. He recalled that she’d even made elevator rides enjoyable, no easy task for a claustrophobic like himself.
“I think I have a girlfriend,” he said, grinning. “She has pink hair.”
Lara snorted a laugh. “Yeah, I met her. Pink hair and a black soul. You really know how to pick ’em.”
“Oh, that’s rich,” he told her, “coming from a felon.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, several things happened at once.
Lara whipped around to face him, jerking her hair from his grasp.
Their eyes widened and locked.