The coat was warm with body heat, so she wrapped herself tightly between the lapels before it cooled. When she thanked Renny, she noticed a scattering of pink lesions marring the bare skin on his shoulders. She frowned at the scars. Round and precise, they looked like laser wounds.
“What happened to your back?” she asked.
After engaging the autopilot, he reached blindly across the far end of the dash until he found his glasses, then grinned when he saw that they weren’t broken. “Remember what I said about stealing from the wrong people?”
“They shot you?”
“Thoroughly,” he said with a wry smile. “While I ran screaming for my life, a lot like how you did back there at the satellite.”
Solara wondered if those men had known Renny couldn’t control the impulse to steal, but she supposed it wouldn’t matter to the kind of people who’d shoot an unarmed man in the back. “What about the lady?” she asked. “The one who loved you. Where is she now?”
Renny’s mouth lifted in a sad smile. “I wish I knew…or maybe I don’t.” He shook his head. “Look at the mess we’re in now. This is no life, running in the shadows, never settling in one place. I wanted something better for her—a real home and a family she could be proud of. That’s why I left her behind.” A faraway look crossed his face, and he sighed with so much longing that it plucked at Solara’s heartstrings. “Some days, I hope she moved on,” he said. “And some days I don’t.”
Solara didn’t know what to say, so she took his hand, and they stared silently out the front window as the time and distance passed, along with their oxygen supply.
At some point, their grip loosened and it took a few tries to reconnect. They became clumsy in their movements, dizzy with confusion. Solara let her gaze wander around the cockpit but couldn’t make sense of the blinking lights or remember where they were going. She gulped breath after breath, never able to satisfy her body. The sensation reminded her of the city trams on Earth, how stifling they’d become in the summer until the tram operator had to lower a window.
“Hey, we sh-should open the h-hatch,” she stammered. “And let in some air.”
Renny peered at her through his glasses and tried to scratch his chest, but his hand fell into his lap. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She was about to ask why when a sudden movement caught her eye, and she turned to find an old, ugly ship keeping pace beside them. She knew that ship—couldn’t remember its name but desperately wanted to be on board.
Renny saw it, too, and released a whoop of joy. “We’re coming in hot,” he said, turning his gaze to the control panel. “Need to slow down.”
But all he did was rub his forehead.
A set of thick, metallic cables snaked out from their shuttle and latched onto the ship, then towed them closer. As if by remote control, their engines fell silent and they nestled into the ship’s port with a loud click. Solara tried standing from her seat, but straps held her in place until a boy with blond dreadlocks unfastened them.
He dragged her into the ship’s cargo hold and then went back for Renny.
The air inside the ship was clean and pure, so refreshing that she filled her lungs in great breaths that strained the linen straps binding her ribs. Her mind seemed to sharpen with each rise and fall of her chest, and by the time Renny recovered, she was already hugging him and laughing hysterically.
A while later, after they’d given Doran his medication and made sure he was stable, the crew reconvened in the galley. There she’d learned that the captain had never received her transmissions. He had tracked the shuttle the entire time they were gone. Sitting at the table, she thought about what Renny had said, what he’d wanted to give his lady on Earth: a real home and a family she could be proud of.
Solara still didn’t know this crew’s secrets or how their paths had crossed, and yet these strangers had done more to protect her today than her own parents had done in eighteen years. In her opinion, that was definitely something to be proud of. Renny was wrong when he’d said this was no life.
In that moment, there was no place she’d rather be.
In the days that followed, Doran learned to dread nighttime.
He’d spent so long in bed that his body had forgotten its sleep schedule, and now the eight hours when the ship was still and quiet had become a mental prison sentence. He wished he’d lied and told Cassia that he needed pain pills. Then he would be in a medicated coma right now instead of lying awake, worrying about what Solara had told him.
Your father’s in jail.
The echo of those words still had the power to make his stomach clench, because they revealed a terrifying truth—Doran was alone.