Venturers

by Bella Forrest

As I drifted among them, my mind turned, unexpectedly, to thoughts of Galo. Navan believed that this outpost was where he was telling us to go, but I no longer believed that. Galo had tried to tell us something just before he died—he had wanted us to seek someone out, but this couldn’t be it. He’d said something about finding a star, but then he’d been cut off before he could finish. What if we’d misunderstood what he was trying to say? What if there was more to his words that we were missing?

  I was just reaching into the pocket of another poor soul when something launched itself at me in a tangle of flailing limbs and terrifying eyes. All thoughts of Galo dissipated as I screamed into the helmet of my spacesuit, the glass fogging up, making it difficult to see what was coming for me. I held up my hands to defend myself, but I could only feel the bump of bodies against me, not knowing which belonged to corpses, and which to my assailant. I grasped for my triggers, trying to keep my body from flying backward. Suddenly, the onslaught stopped.

  As the condensation cleared on my helmet’s visor, I saw a female fae hovering in front of me. She was about the size of a child, and her enormous eyes—with bright purple and gold irises, and pitch black where the whites ought to be—were staring at me through the glass of a similar helmet’s visor. She was wearing a dark gray spacesuit that almost camouflaged her against the chunks of debris that floated around her. It explained why I hadn’t seen her until the very last moment.

  “Intruders come to take away our lives,” she said, her voice echoing out through external speakers. An eerie smile spread across her mouth, showing two rows of tiny, sharp teeth, which looked oddly like a shark’s. “Big boom, and we all go floating!” She giggled, darting left and right in the air, the sound of her misplaced laughter sending a shiver of fear up my spine. Nothing she said sounded normal, her voice carrying a high-pitched, detached tone.

  “You called us to help you, didn’t you?” I asked. Even though her voice sounded strange at close quarters, I could tell this was the same person who had sent out the distress call.

  The fae tilted her head at me. “Nobody home.”

  “I know we didn’t come when you called, and we’re eternally sorry for that, but we’re here now. Are you the only survivor?” I pressed. “What’s your name?”

  She did a funny twirl in the air. “There is never anyone home. Now, there is no home!” She giggled again.

  “What’s your name?” I tried again.

  “Mauve. Who are you?” she replied, swooping forward suddenly, her helmet clashing with mine. I gasped, struggling for breath, convinced she’d cracked the glass. Her huge eyes were staring right at me, our visors touching.

  “I’m Riley,” I said, panting, trying to restore my heartbeat to a normal pace. I could see it beeping wildly on my forearm panel.

  She squinted at me through the visors. “I know you. You ran away.”

  I shook my head. “No, we didn’t run away from you. We were just slow getting to you. Are you the only one left?”

  “Lonely as a cloud. I’ve never seen a cloud. Have you seen a cloud?” she asked, tilting her head again.

  “I’ve seen a cloud, yes. Does that mean you are the sole survivor?” I asked, determined to get an answer out of this strange being. Were fae always like this, or had the trauma and the time spent with limited oxygen addled her mind?

  “My soul survives. Everyone has a soul, which survives everything,” she replied, her answer just as disjointed as expected. “I’m the only one whose heart is still beating, though.” A giggle rippled from her throat, but it was the confirmation I’d been looking for. Mauve was the only one left.

  “What happened to the Fed outpost?” I went on, knowing I’d have to decipher her responses. However, it seemed like she’d had enough of chatting with me. She pulled away, weaving through the tangled mass of bodies and debris, moving like a swimmer.

  Pressing down on my triggers, I chased after her. She was the only one who knew anything, and I wasn’t about to let her out of my sight. Only, she was moving pretty fast through the crowd of corpses, and I was having trouble catching up. More than once, I bumped into a frozen body in my attempt to move around them, grimacing as I watched them float away into the endless reaches of the universe, which would forever be their graveyard.

  On and on I floated, feeling like I was in some twisted version of Alice in Wonderland, falling down a rabbit hole filled with the bloated, frozen dead and the fractured remains of their former home. Occasionally, I’d catch glimpses of my white rabbit, her gray suit flitting through the orbiting mass, but then she’d disappear again, giving me only a vague direction to follow.

  I was close to giving up when something appeared in the near distance. It shimmered in the reflection of light that glanced up from the moon’s surface, the shape smooth and perfectly round. I’d seen a similar structure before. Mauve hovered beside it, pressing one hand against the gleaming hull.

  I gasped. “It’s a pod.”

  And not just any pod, I realized, coming closer. The bolts showed where a panel had once been, but it now revealed the engraving beneath. It was carved in the shape of Queen Brisha’s symbol.

  I’d never seen the pod Jethro had sent away from Earth with my vial of blood inside, but I had a sneaking suspicion this was that exact pod. The one that had gotten him killed for being a traitor.

  As the pod rotated slowly, I saw that the panel wasn’t the only thing that had been torn off—the whole vessel was in pieces. Only half remained intact, giving the illusion of a complete pod when seen from my angle, while the other fragments had evidently floated off into the vacuum of space. It looked like someone, or something, had forcibly torn the metal apart. And the blood it had been carrying was nowhere to be seen.

  I pressed the comms device. “Navan, there’s something you’ve got to see.”

  A moment later, his voice crackled through. “I’ll be there soon.”

  Glancing at Mauve, who was staring at me intently, I wished for him to hurry. There was something wrong about the female fae, something that made me fear for my life. Her eyes were wild, her movements disjointed.

  And yet, she’d brought me to this pod.

  “Why… Why did you bring me here?” I asked.

  A giggle erupted from her throat, the eerie sound rippling through the emptiness of space.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  With the helmet blocking most of my peripheral vision, it was hard to keep an eye on the debris to signal Navan when he finally found me in the chaos. It was even harder to look out for him, with Mauve darting around in front of me, flitting around like a frazzled bumblebee.

  “Do you know what was inside the pod?” I asked.

  “We plucked the shiny thing out of the sky!” she shrieked, turning a loop-the-loop overhead.

  “You brought it here?” After my experience with Freya, I’d hoped never to have to decipher the speech of another species again, but here I was, trying to make sense of the fae’s words.

  “I sought buried treasure,” she replied, giggling into the side of her helmet.

  “So you and the other fae intercepted the pod?”

  She shrugged. “They would have stopped me.”

  “The other fae would’ve stopped you from doing what?” I asked, praying for a simple response.

  “I heard about the Vysantheans and their little deviation into the realms of immortality,” she said, speaking more clearly, her eyes still wide. “I wanted to see if we could do what they could not. We are small, our bodies like glass—brittle and fragile. We warp minds to make up for our weakness in the physical world.”

  I gaped at her as the pieces connected. From what I could grasp, Mauve had stopped the pod on its journey through space and sought to use the vial of blood to make an immortality elixir.

  “Why would you do that? You’re part of the Fed—that kind of thing is banned,” I insisted, but it only prompted Mauve to laugh louder.

  “I was tired of rules. I was tired of being weak
. Why have all this power, if we can’t stand up against those who would seek to crush us?” she asked. “I stole the blood. I tried to create immortality in a bottle. I got it wrong. And guess what happened next?” Excitement sparkled in her eyes, her behavior bordering on giddy.

  “What happened next?” I replied dutifully, waiting for the punchline.

  “They all died!” Mauve burst into raucous laughter, gripping her stomach as she doubled over in hysterics. I watched her, unable to believe what was happening. Mauve had caused all of this. She had somehow blown apart the outpost, causing every single floating body. Either the weight of that consequence had made her crazy, or she had been crazy in the first place.

  My comm device crackled. “I’m having trouble finding you,” Navan said.

  “I’m off to the right of where you left me. Just keep going through the debris until you come to a pod-like structure,” I explained, hoping it wasn’t too vague. Mauve was still laughing manically, apparently unable to stop. We had to take this poor fae to the quarantine facility as soon as possible so she could get some psychological help.

  Slowly, I moved toward her, pushing down lightly on my hip triggers. I wanted to stop her and let her know everything was going to be okay. My hand closed around her wrist. The fae suddenly stopped laughing, her eyes flicking up to meet mine. A smile spread across her face, her spiny teeth flashing with menace. I held her gaze, unable to look away, panic rippling through me.

  Glancing down, I watched as the clamps holding my helmet in place opened. Frantically, I raised my hands to stop them, but she was controlling my arms too. I tried to force my hands to do what I wanted, but it was like trying to drag them through molasses, a significant strain holding me back. With every second that passed, the clasps were coming further undone. I fumbled for the hip triggers, trying to move far enough away to avoid her telekinesis, but it had a longer range than I expected.

  No matter where I went, she continued to stare, her telekinesis following me. The last clamp was opening, and I had no way of stopping it. Gritting my teeth, I struggled again to control my hands, but she was too strong. All I could do was watch, knowing I’d have a very short time to live if the helmet came off. I tried to remember everything I’d ever read about surviving in space, and knew I had to expel all the air from my lungs, but what was the point? I’d be dead before anyone could find me.

  A hand grasped mine. Turning, I saw Navan looking down at me, his brow furrowed in confusion.

  “Navan! The clamps! Put the clamps back down!” I screamed, my breath fogging up the interior visor.

  He lunged forward, snapping the clamps shut again. He almost missed one, his gloved hands fumbling, but he managed to get them closed.

  “What the hell happened?” he demanded, breathing hard.

  I looked over at Mauve, who flashed a savage grin before floating off, using her telekinesis to bring objects toward her so that she could push off them. A moment later, she was gone, rocketing toward the surface of the moon, where she vanished into the ruins of the Fed outpost.

  My heart thundered in my chest. I had come way too close to death. A few more minutes and those clamps would’ve been open, with Mauve’s telekinesis pulling my helmet free of my head. Everything felt overwhelmingly claustrophobic. I knew it made no sense, but I wanted to tear my way out of my suit and breathe freely again.

  “Breathe,” Navan murmured, taking me by the shoulders. “You’re having a panic attack. You need to breathe.”

  I nodded, gasping to get oxygen into my lungs, my heartrate monitor beeping frantically. “She nearly killed me!”

  “You’re safe now.”

  “We need to get her—she knows about the blood. She did this,” I croaked, my heartrate slowing.

  Navan shook his head. “We need to get out of here and leave that insane creature to whatever fate the universe has in store. There’s nowhere she can run to, and she can’t have much longer left in that suit,” he assured me, holding me tighter.

  I couldn’t shake my uneasy feeling at leaving her out here. What if she tricked an unsuspecting ship into coming to rescue her? What if she commandeered their vessel? The thought disturbed me, but I didn’t fancy chasing her through the throng of corpses and chaos to stop her.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I whispered, though I still didn’t feel good about the decision.

  “Come on, let’s get back to the ship,” Navan urged, pulling me along.

  I sighed, feeling a trickle of cold sweat meander down my neck. “Did you find anything down there?” I asked, as we made for the Vanquish.

  “Nothing but death and destruction. The blast seemed to originate from a single room, but it was hard to tell what anything was. The whole place was a mess.”

  “Mauve heard what the Vysantheans were doing,” I said softly.

  He looked at me. “Mauve?”

  “The crazy fae. She heard what the coldbloods were up to and intercepted the pod with my blood on it. She wanted to make an elixir of her own, but it all went wrong. It caused all of this.”

  Navan looked worried for a moment. “Any experiment can be volatile, but I’ve never seen an elixir do something like this before. This stuff must be more dangerous than we thought.”

  The idea that a certain combination of ingredients could be unstable enough to destroy an entire outpost, killing everyone inside, was horrifying. I’d known the elixir could kill people, if ingested, but I didn’t think it could explode like this, causing so much devastation. The fact that Navan hadn’t known, either, made me feel even worse.

  I kept my head turned over my shoulder as we made our way back to the ship, keeping my eye on the debris, in case Mauve was following us. Now and again, I thought I saw something flit between the chunks of rock and metal, like a fish darting in a stream, but it was hard to know where reality ended and paranoia began.

  As the hatch to the exterior airlock door opened, the two of us stepped inside and quickly closed it behind us. I peered out of the small window, making sure nobody was trailing us. If Mauve got on board, I was pretty sure she’d kill us all in our sleep.

  Navan typed in the code to re-pressurize the chamber. Outside the interior door, the thud of boots signaled the arrival of Bashrik, Angie, and Lauren. They appeared at the opposite window, their faces showing their horror. Navan had already relayed to them what had happened via his comm device—the panic was evident in their expressions.

  As soon as the hatch came up, Angie and Lauren enfolded me in a tight hug, gripping me until I thought my lungs might explode—for the second time that day. Bashrik slipped past us and headed straight for his brother, embracing him, patting him hard on the back.

  “Is that psycho still out there?” Bashrik asked.

  Navan nodded. “Yeah, so we should probably get going before we end up with an insane stowaway.”

  “We thought you were a goner,” Angie whispered.

  “Bashrik brought your vital signs up on the main screen, and they were all going crazy,” Lauren added miserably. “We were all shouting at you to get away, but you couldn’t hear us. It was horrible.”

  “We’re safe, and that’s all that matters,” I said firmly, trying not to let the real terror set in. If I dwelled on my near-death experience too long, I knew it would drive me mad, too.

  With that, we closed the airlock behind us and clambered out of our spacesuits, with the help of Angie and Lauren. Bashrik went on ahead, the engines whirring louder as he steered the Vanquish away from the fractured Fed outpost. Even then, I couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief. It had all been too close for comfort, and now we had no Fed to help us out.

  As soon as we were out of our suits, we headed up to join Bashrik in the cockpit. My eyes snapped up toward the windshield, watching the horrible place disappear. I was glad to see the back of it, though I still felt sad for the countless dead. It wasn’t their fault they’d been caught in the blast that had ended their lives. It was Mauve’s doing—yet another group of pe
ople brought to destruction by the actions of a single, greedy individual.

  “What are we going to do now?” Angie asked, sitting down in the copilot’s seat.

  “We need to contact another Fed outpost. We have to find the next closest one, and see if they’ll help us,” I said.

  Navan shook his head. “It’s too risky. If Brisha is tracking the Vanquish, we can’t afford to go too far off our set course. Even coming this far was a risk, but we weren’t diverging too much from our main path.”

  “Then we steal the ship and go!” Angie urged, garnering a nod from Lauren and me.

  This time, it was Bashrik who shook his head. “If we steal the ship and run off with it, Brisha will send her army after us. They’ll chase us down as traitors and execute us when they catch us,” he said with a defeated sigh. “I’d rather we didn’t have both queens and Orion trying to kill us.”

  Angie pulled a face. “Looks like your memory is coming back nicely,” she muttered, evidently disappointed that we weren’t going to be running off with the ship.

  Without Pandora around to keep us all locked up in one room, I hoped the two of them would find time to be alone together. After all, they hadn’t had the chance to be particularly romantic since leaving Zai, due to Bashrik’s delusions and recovery. It was obvious their feelings for one another hadn’t changed, but they just didn’t know what to do with them.

  “I’m just stating facts,” Bashrik retorted, putting up his hands. “It’s not my fault if you don’t like the truth.”

  “Then we need to find the Titans and see if they can help us out. We don’t exactly have many options left,” I interrupted, before Angie and Bashrik could start a full-blown spat.

  “I already told you, the Titans are too risky,” Navan replied.

  “What, riskier than finding another Fed outpost? Which is the easier of the two?” I pressed.

  Lauren raised a polite hand. “Actually, the Titans are a surprisingly noble species, once you’ve earned their trust. That tends to be the hard part, but I’m sure they’d listen if we told them what was going on,” she suggested, but Navan only groaned.