Inalienable: Book 7 of the Starstruck saga

by S E Anderson

  Secondly, a Bic pen–for women. You always need a pen in the vast emptiness of space, but they will always, inevitably, go missing. Sacrificing one to the universe ensures your loose change wasn’t going to go missing instead. Various rubber bands and binder clips are also acceptable. Does it have to be gender specific? Not really, but they were out of gender-free products at this point, so it was all we were left with.

  Thirdly, stress balls. No one knows stress like Terrans, and our balls are renowned for being the sturdiest across a dozen solar systems. No puns intended. The squishy ones are also highly toxic to most races, and they make for a good projectile in a pinch.

  And finally, a dollar store bag of Starburst in case you need to bribe your way through enemy territory. Because apparently sugary Earth treats are a highly prized commodity out there.

  “That or you just have a sweet tooth,” said Blayde, rolling her eyes over-dramatically at her brother.

  “I admit to nothing. But I’m taking two bags just in case.”

  And to carry all this? With my duffel bag stuffed somewhere at my parent’s place—safe, I hoped—we needed a new one. The Dollar Store didn’t exactly promise high-quality goods, and the sturdiest backpack we could find doubled as a stuffed dog for an anxious kindergartener.

  Blayde was delighted, not that she’d admit it out loud. But she insisted it was hers.

  Named it Surly Bop.

  Everything was set. I had scheduled snail mail to my parents and Marcy, explaining that I was safe but would be on the run and thus incommunicado for a little while. Hopefully, Felling would stay true to her word and keep an eye on them. I didn’t have a physical address for her, but I sent it to my parents for them to keep if or when she touched base.

  To my parents, I did the typical teen thing where I said, quite clearly, that I was just going out. I was sure I could mooch that point for a few more years.

  “Try to get us as close to the moment we left as you can,” said Zander, as we circled up in our motel room, grasping each other’s hands like we were about to summon something dark and unholy. “We don’t want to mess with our timelines.”

  Willowcrest and Ev were watching intently, enjoying the rest of their Starburst and the show. Their moderately omniscient gaseous parent had appeared momentarily just to catch an autograph from their two favorite rogues.

  “Make it out to Om,” they had said, though the last part was less of a name and more the sound a gong makes when someone throws a chicken at it. “I just can’t believe my offspring got to save you, and I wasn’t around to witness it!”

  Now, they too, were watching, and I was starting to get a little stage fright. There’s nothing like trying to jump yourself and your closest friends halfway across the galaxy, trying to find an exact time and date out of the infinity of the universe, but to do so with an audience was reckless, let alone a little egotistical.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” I said, trying to put them out of my mind. “Do you think … do you think Nimien knew about all this?”

  “Don’t think about him,” said Zander, squeezing my hand. “Just get us there.”

  “And try to find us a nice, warm broom closet,” Blayde added. “A crowded room would ruin everything.”

  “I can’t make any promises,” I said. “If you think you can do better, you drive us yourself.”

  She had nothing else to say about that.

  “Right, deep breath. Here we go.” I closed my eyes, letting myself break down into my infinitesimal parts. That was the easiest bit of the whole process, the merging with the universe, like stepping into a warm bath. Nothing like traveling with the siblings, all cold void and infinite nothings.

  Driving was so much better.

  Eternity stretched out before me—no, through me, my cells one with the universe, no longer anything between me and infinity. If I had lungs, I would catch my breath. If I had eyes, they would be crying.

  Up close and personal, the universe was even more beautiful than I could ever have imagined. It was like it was standing before me, nude and vulnerable. I could see every nook and cranny, and it was so much bigger and deeper than any of us could possibly have known.

  There were infinite Zanders in the infinite universe. If I had a way of writing them down, I would have finished Meedian’s map in the blink of an eye. It was going to be impossible to find the Traveler in all this mess.

  But I could. I knew exactly where it was, and it wasn’t thanks to Zander from the past. I didn’t need to know why, I just knew. I could follow the thread through the void, bringing us into the heart of the ship that had caused us so much grief.

  We came into existence in a small, empty hallway. Blayde’s hand was the first to break free, her spritely body spinning around to immediately recon the space.

  “Well, I’ll be darned,” she said, scratching her head. “This really is the Traveler.”

  “Didn’t I tell you this girl is amazing?” said Zander, giving my hand an extra tight squeeze before letting go and examining the small space himself. “How close to target are we?”

  “Tee so’ tee meemeetee laso meela, teedoh tee teemeetee tee mee soso,” came a familiar voice. I spun around, but it wasn’t as close as it sounded, just a voice bouncing off a wall.

  “I remember this conversation,” said the Zander beside me. “Couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before we left.”

  “Awesome,” I said, hardly believing it myself.

  “Yeah, yeah, you rule,” said Blayde, tiptoeing past us, pressing herself against the wall of the corridor and peering through the open doorway. She nodded to herself, turning back to us. “Transfer deck, behind the bridge. You’re going to have to show me how you do this, Sally.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t sure I could teach anyone anything at this point. It had been, dare I say, easy. With a little extra courage, I was sure I could find the place again without Zander to guide the way. The siblings had made it very clear that control was not something they had with jumping. Maybe there was something wrong with me that allowed me to do what they could not. Maybe when Cross had been in my head, he unlocked something that was meant to stay locked away.

  The other Zander was making a point or something because he wouldn’t stop talking. It was the same warm tone he always had when he explained some intergalactic nonsense to me, but with all the clicks and nasal splits, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  “Why can’t I understand you?” I asked. “It all made sense when I was, well, her.”

  “We’re out of range,” said Zander. “We need to get you a new translator.”

  Another voice response, quick and quippy, a little annoyed by the sounds of it. And with a jolt, I realized it was me.

  “Marcoli’s lucky to have gotten out,” I was saying, “but Nim’s not in the system yet. We can still help him. There’s still time.”

  Ouch. Here I was, advocating for the boy who would one day grow up to manipulate this whole stupid day into action. I cringed internally. I didn’t want to be reminded of this mistake.

  “We’re talking about the child-hire program?” I clenched my fist. “Right. Let’s also put that on our agenda for radical change.”

  “Righty-o,” said Zander. “We should probably have picked up a notepad at the Dollar-Store-where-nothing-is-actually-a-dollar.”

  Blayde’s eyebrows flew up her forehead as a third person joined the throng. Other Blayde spoke rapidly in the same chirpy language as her brother. Was that their language, spoken on whatever world they had come from? Or just what they were speaking when they got their translators?

  “Hard to believe this is the moment that tipped everything,” Blayde said, turning to face me. “Just say the word, Sally. We can step in, tell them to leave Nimien to his own fate, and neither of us will have to deal with the library shit.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “I made this decision once before. I’m not making it again. I don’t want to mess with time, not when I don’t know wh
at I’m doing.”

  “You do that simply by existing,” she said, turning back to the conversation before us. The sound of spitting filled the room. Past Blayde and I were sealing the pact. Current Blayde shuddered.

  “This time travel thing is some messed up shit,” she grumbled. “We could fix so much.”

  “Sally’s right,” said Zander coolly. “Let’s not mess with the timestream until we know what we’re doing, okay?”

  “Frash. We need to go,” said Blayde, disappearing. Zander and I followed suit and jumped down the hallway, just in time for past Blayde to march through, Jurrah’s hand in hers.

  Only for Jurrah to press her up against the bulkhead, lips entangling, past Blayde falling into the embrace.

  “Ah. She did say she was going to say goodbye,” muttered Zander.

  “That seems like a really, really sweet goodbye,” I whispered.

  Neither of them had any sense of their surroundings. Like lightning, their passionate kiss was fast and hot, a ferocious end to their short-lived reunion.

  Current Blayde appeared before us, glaring. Her hands clamped down on our shoulders, and she whisked us away.

  “I found us a janitor’s closet,” she said. “We can wait out the return to Pyrina in here.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?” I said. “We have no idea if the ship’s even going to Pyrina after this. I was planning on stealing one of the shuttles or something.”

  “We can wait it out,” said Blayde, pushing open the broom closet door. It looked oddly familiar. For all I knew, it could have been the same one we had landed in. That or the ship’s architects copied and pasted their designs on every floor.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  My blood chilled in my veins. Now, that was a voice I had never expected to hear ever again. I turned around, slowly, trying to see the scene from his point of view. The three felons who had just saved his life, who claimed they were jumping away, caught red-handed—or foot-bucketed, in Blayde’s case—getting right back into the broom closet they had first been found stowing away in.

  “Hey, Kork,” I said, giving him the most awkward of waves. “Long time no see.”

  He was just the same as I had left him after our short and sparky goodbye. Even now, I could feel the ghost of his kiss on my lips. It had ranked number one on my list of top ten most epic kisses until Zander came along and filled the entire docket.

  All that beautiful captain posture was thrown to the proverbial wind when he saw us. His eyes went wide, rivaling Foollegg’s, and with one mighty crash, he toppled over.

  “Oh shit,” said Blayde, ripping her foot from the bucket she had casually stepped in. The bucket whirred upwards, shouting utter nonsense that made me glad my translator was gone. She kicked it down the hallway. “The captain just passed out.”

  “Isn’t it my job to state the obvious?” I stammered, sprinting to his side. He was slowly waking up, dazed, his eyes fluttering open and shut. “We have to get him out of here. He wasn’t supposed to see us.”

  “How did you …? Are you out of uniform?” he muttered. “How did you change?”

  “It’s okay, Kork,” I stammered in reply. “Call it a transporter malfunction, all right?”

  “Get him to his quarters,” said Blayde. “Sally, I take it you remember where they are?”

  “Don’t go there.” I hoisted the captain on my shoulder, Zander slipping under his other arm to keep him balanced. I knew this had to be awkward for him, but unlike his sister, he didn’t say a word.

  Now, a lot has happened since we’d last been on the Traveler, but there was no way I was forgetting the most confusing almost-hookup I’d ever had. When the sexy starship captain who’d stolen Captain Kirk’s identity to make a name for himself in the Alliance did so to cover his real name, which happened to be my ex’s. Which I knew now was part of said ex’s ploy to mess with my head, which was all truly confusing and more than a little creepy.

  But none of it was Kork’s fault. So, I’d let Nimien win without me knowing it, throwing away a perfectly good evening that could have been amazing. Which I couldn’t bring up now because my current boyfriend was helping me carry the passed-out Kirk-pretending space captain/failed one-night stand to the room where it had almost happened.

  Smooth move, Sally Webber. You are a master of seduction and romance. Keeping it real.

  His quarters were still the most amazing space room I’d ever seen. We used his handprint to let us in, leaving the fluorescents of the crew hallways and entering a sanctuary of wood paneling and a carpeted floor. Gentle, warm light that didn’t interfere with the massive window that looked out into the sea of stars beyond, a void thousands of light-years from home.

  Zander dropped him gently on his couch.

  “Dang, it’s—” Blayde finished her sentence off with the sound a grape makes when flung against corrugated iron. “I haven’t had this shit in forever. Zander, hand me a glass.”

  “Blayde,” he snapped, “we’re not here to drink the captain’s secret stash. Now, help me convince him he passed out from natural causes.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said. “I think he’s awake.”

  “Of course I’m awake,” he said, pushing himself up on his couch. “Get away from my bar. It’s taken me a decade to get it stocked how I like.”

  “We just rescued your sorry ass,” she muttered. “And all we got were Crandle’s leftovers.”

  “Sorry, Kork,” I said, as calmly as I could. “It’s a long and complicated story.”

  “Let me guess. You have a mop fetish.”

  “What? No!”

  “It would explain why you gravitate toward janitors’ closets,” he insisted. “That, or Alliance intel is incorrect, and rumors of your spontaneous travel are greatly exaggerated. Is this like a Narnia thing? Where you can only travel through closets?”

  “This has nothing to do with the closet,” said Zander. “Forget the closet.”

  “Matthew,” I said, hoping that using his real name would mean something to him, still unready to utter the moniker Matt. “This is going to sound terribly strange, but we’re future versions of the people who just left your ship.”

  He said nothing. I had expected him to sputter and complain, but this was a man raised on Star Trek. He could handle a bit of time travel.

  “Right,” I said. “It’s a long story. It’s been about a month, maybe two, since I left the observation deck of the Traveler. Since then, we’ve figured out how to time travel, and we had to come back here for a free trip to Pyrina. Okay, turns out, not a very long story after all.”

  “You … what? Time travel?” he stammered. “What about the kid? At least tell me he ended up out of your bullshit.”

  “Well, not great news on that front,” said Zander. “We managed to find Earth, but Nim got killed by some jerks from Atlantis, turned immortal, and it turns out he’s the reason you were abducted from Earth in the first place. He manipulated a series of events to trick Sally into becoming like us. That’s an even longer story.”

  “He what?”

  “It’s been a long two months,” I said.

  “Sally saved Earth,” said Zander.

  “Twice,” I added. “Three times if you count the mental hospital. Literal nightmare monsters.”

  “Hey, the first time was the whole planet. The next two, you killed off some assholes,” said Blayde. “And you had help with those, don’t forget.”

  And with that, Kork fainted again.

  “Do you think he’s in shock?” she asked, sipping the purple juice. “Or did we just fry his brain?”

  “Probably a bit of both,” said Zander, rising to his feet. “Come on. Maybe he has a nice closet we can hide in.”

  “What is it with you two and closets?” I asked. “The entire ship is just set design. I bet you we can find empty crew quarters easier than an unused closet any day.”

  “Not on my watch,” Kork muttered. The man could regai
n consciousness hella fast.

  “Great, what are going to do with him?” asked Blayde. “This is probably the worst plan we have ever come up with.”

  “Hey, to break a civilization, you have to break a few eggs,” said Zander.

  “Break a …” Kork pushed himself back up in the couch cushions. “Please don’t tell me you’re planning a coup.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Blayde, swirling her drink.

  “I told you not to drink my stuff,” he said, glaring at her. “It’s expensive. Not to mention almost impossible to get.”

  “You’re Captain-frashing-Kork,” she said. “You can get whatever the hell you want. Hell, you almost even had Sally here.”

  “Do you have to keep bringing that up?” I snapped. “Sorry, Captain. We’re just trying to hitch a ride to Pyrina. We might not have been stowaways the first time we landed on your ship, but we are now.”

  “Now,” he growled. “Now, just when we’re regrouping with the rest of the Alliance fleet. Now, when we have to tell our superiors everything that happened on board. Now when we have to pretend we had no idea who you were the whole time you were helping us?”

  “But we were helping you,” said Zander. I could see his mental anguish keeping him from pointing finger guns. “Think you can throw us a bone here?”

  “I thought the whole letting-you-sneak-away-without-any-attention was the bone?”

  “We won’t be any trouble,” I insisted. “Pretend you saw us get back. We’ll find a place to lay low until you dock again.”

  “Not another freaking broom cupboard,” said Kork.

  We did better. We hid in his closet.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Not to kink-shame, but my feet really hurt

  “I said you could hide in my quarters, not my apartment!”

  A well-cooked frittata was not enough to cheer up the starship captain under house arrest. Blayde frowned as she put down the pan, letting it land on the pristine counter with a loud thtonk.

  Despite the ornate decor of Kork’s apartment, I just couldn’t keep from staring out the window at the city below. It was nothing short of majestic: metal and glass structures that spanned every inch of the planet’s surface, except for the single sea in the distance, which I was told harbored the administrative core of the Alliance somewhere far beyond. Like Da-Duhui, but crisper, more modern in every way. No stonework in anything I could see—at least not in this quadrant of the city-planet. Just spires of materials our world had no words for as of yet.