Keep it together, Stein, because I can’t do this on my own.
Stein nodded, as if he could hear her thoughts.
After a minute, she eased up and stood, keeping her eyes on him. “You gonna be all right?”
“Yeah.” He looked away, embarrassed. “Sorry about that.”
“It could have been me who lost it.”
“But it wasn’t,” he said. “I thought getting the change would give me some kind of-of, I don’t know. I’m still weak.” He sighed, the sound full of regret and defeat.
“I don’t know what you mean about ‘the change,’ but you’re not weak, Stein. You’ve been like a rock through this whole thing, keeping me in one piece.” She pointed to the hole in the shuttle wall. “I didn’t do that. You did. If it weren’t for your awesome shot and quick thinking, we’d be the main course for a bunch of space octopuses.”
Through the visor, Leda saw him crack a smile. A second later, he laughed. “Team effort?”
She nodded. “Team effort.”
“Maybe,” Stein began, but then he turned away.
She placed her hand over his on the armrest. “Maybe what?”
He sucked in a lungful of air. “Maybe if we make it through this, I can tell you everything. About me, I mean.”
She remembered Tuva calling Stein her and said something about the name Sofia back on the Chandra, and Leda wondered if the change Stein talked about had something to do with gender reassignment surgery. “I’d like that.”
After a few beats of silence, Stein unclipped his harness. “We should get those things off the shuttle and repair the door.”
Shock rendered her speechless for a moment. “How? They cut a hole clean through the wall.”
Stein’s eyes sparkled. “You’ll see. First things first, though, we’ve got to wipe up that mess and get them off the shuttle. If we leave it for too long, their blood will eat away at the floor.”
“Ew.” Leda cringed, wondering if it could eat through her suit. “What do we do?”
Stein got up and crossed the shuttle, careful not to step in the mess. He hit a panel and it popped open, revealing two tubes. One red, the other silver. He handed her the silver tube. “You spray, I’ll shovel.”
“What does it do?”
He gave her a sly grin. “You’re supposed to be a genius. Figure it out.”
Leda scowled. “I could always take off your helmet and whack you over the head with it.”
Stein opened his mouth to reply but Leda waved him off. Holding the silver tube up to her visor, Leda examined the outer surface and saw two small buttons. She held the tube away from her face and tested the upper button. A small nozzle popped out of the top of the tube and she jumped in surprise. Stein sniggered, but Leda ignored him and pressed the second button for a couple seconds. A fine mist sprayed out of the nozzle. When it touched the wall and came in contact with a splatter of the Woede creature’s blood, the mist instantly foamed and fizzed and fell to the floor with a thud.
With wide eyes, Leda knelt down to get a closer look. The foam had turned slightly solid. She flicked it with her finger. It now had the consistency of chewed gum in a cold climate.
“Cool, huh?”
“Yeah.” Leda stood, her mind whirring. When they got to Aurelis and stopped the Woede, there was an entire planet filled with technology like this, just waiting for her to explore it.
“Spray that on all the blood and guts,” Stein said. “When you’re done, I’ll shovel it up.”
Leda’s stomach lurched. “Thanks,” she said, her voice a little shaky.
After she sprayed the mist, she leaned on the pilot’s chair and watched Stein scoop the gum-like substance into the boarding pod. She used the opportunity to peer into the pod from her vantage point. It was black inside and all surfaces were covered with a layer of shiny slime. The tech seemed advanced but the controls were crude. Then again, an octopus didn’t exactly have the right features to use the kind of controls on, say, an Aurelite ship.
Stein shoveled the last of the creatures’ remains into the boarding pod and leaned on his shovel, his breathing heavy through the comm. “Now comes the tricky part,” Stein said. “Getting rid of the pod.”
Leda didn’t know if they’d manage that. “How?”
“We push.”
Leda glanced down at her legs, but then remembered the power behind the suit. “Are you sure this’ll work?”
“Always does.” He leaned against the pod and motioned for her to get into position. “On three, push as hard as you can.”
“Got it.” Leda pressed her hands on the pod wall and braced herself.
Stein began the count. When he got to three, they both pushed as hard as they could on the edges of the pod, where a thick black substance had fused to the shuttle’s hull. Sweat dripped into Leda’s eyes. Her muscles burned under the strain, and she put more of her weight into the push. The makeshift seam popped after a few seconds, and her suit flashed in warning as the shuttle’s atmosphere hissed out into the blackness. She gave a triumphant cry and pumped her fist.
Stein smirked. “A little premature. Now we have to remove the anchors.” He motioned to the hole, then crawled through.
Tension bunched and knotted in her stomach, but Leda followed him out into space. Stein explained that they had to yank the anchors off and showed her how to brace against the shuttle with her feet and wrap her arms around the anchor lines.
Panic bubbled in her throat. “What if we both fly out into space and can’t get back to the shuttle?”
“The suits have thrusters.”
Leda remembered the thrusters from when she and Roar had used the suits. “How do I activate them?”
“It’s all in the mind.” Stein was silent, then his thrusters fired, and he flew away from her. A second later, he was on his way back. “See? Now you try.”
After several tries, Leda managed to get the gist of how the thrusters worked. “I think I’m good.”
Stein nodded, his face obscured by lights and shadows. “On three again.”
It took a lot more force to yank the hooks from the hull. By the time Leda’s anchor snapped away, her body was drenched in perspiration and her arms felt like wet noodles. Stein took her anchor and shoved it inside the pod. Then he took something from his utility pocket and brought it up to his visor. It looked like a small grenade. Stein pulled a long pin from the top and tossed it inside the pod. Seconds later, the pod shot away at breakneck speed into the blackness of space.
From far away, Leda felt the blast wave, and she drifted backward into the shuttle with a soft thud. She blinked.
That’s it, they’re gone. For now.
Stein reached for her hand and helped her back inside the shuttle. Now the only signs of attack were the blast marks on the outside of the shuttle and the massive hole in the door and the missing piece of the puzzle lying on the floor.
How the hell were they going to fix that?
Stein drew her attention, kneeling on the floor by the cut-out door piece. “Let’s fit this in place.”
Leda grabbed one side and Stein the other, and after a few tries, they got the piece in the hole. As she wondered what they were going to do next, Stein floated to the middle of the hole and held the piece in place. He jerked his helmet to the right of the door, indicating a panel. Weightless, Leda drifted over and opened it up.
Through the comm, Stein said, “Hit the green button to deploy the patch.”
Leda pressed the button, and her eyes widened as a silvery blob snaked around the outer edges of the piece Stein held up, filling the cracks. It hardened instantly, forming a seal that locked out the vacuum of space. When the breach was sealed, she heard a hissing sound.
“Don’t take your helmet off until the shuttle’s fully pressurized,” Stein warned.
Leda wasn’t stupid enough to do that. Also, she smelled pretty rank, and she wasn’t looking forward to revealing that fact to anyone. She and Stein sat in the pilot an
d co-pilot’s chairs. A few minutes later, her suit’s sensors let her know the air was breathable again. But neither she nor Stein removed their helmets, intent on keeping a little distance as Stein took the shuttle away from the sight of attack.
They were alive, but shaken, and Leda’s mind raced. If the Woede could attack at the drop of a hat like that, and she hadn’t even faced one in person—other than Nils, of course—how was she supposed to destroy an entire planet of them?
Chapter Twenty-Five
A few days after the Woede attack on their shuttle, Leda and Stein were almost back to the original position the Equinox had been in when Tuva had shown up.
Stein said Oline probably started tracing the Chandra until Tuva’s after-market modifications blocked the trail, so they’d have to do a number of leaps to find Equinox. Leda had settled in for a long trip, though the shuttles weren’t designed for prolonged journeys. There was only one small sleeping platform on board—which Stein only mentioned an hour ago—and it came out of a panel in the wall near the door. And of course, the one bed had sustained damage when the Woede boarding pod cut through that shuttle wall.
Jerks.
At least they had a small restroom, complete with a shower. In the past few days, Leda had figured the system out—she even managed to wash and dry her clothes. Wearing the same dirty shirt and pants day after day was one thing, but she needed clean underwear.
They had just caught a hint of Equinox and were about to perform a shuttle leap to the proposed location. Leda worked the replicator beforehand and served them lunch, consisting of tasteless colorful cubes. She’d gotten used to them now, though she longed for the burst of flavor from fresh fruits and vegetables.
Stein was in the pilot’s chair, his expression tight. Intense. He was mad that he couldn’t reach Equinox, Leda knew. So she thought she’d take his mind off of their current predicament.
“How long have you known Roar?”
Stein mustn’t have expected the question. For a moment he was still, his eyes trained on the screen ahead. “I met him a while ago, but I doubt he remembers. I looked…a lot different than I do now.”
Leda’s stomach squeezed. Obviously Roar would have a past, but she didn’t like to think that Stein—as Sofia—might have been a part of it. She swallowed the sharp, bitter taste in her mouth. “Oh, cool.”
Stein smirked. “It’s not what you think. He was trying out the prototype for the RomTek suits, and I had to show my face. The event took all afternoon, from Roar fighting in an arena to an early banquet dinner hosted at the most prestigious hotel in the city. Roar and I were at the same table during dinner. We talked, but not about anything important. Small talk, I guess you’d say. Then he went home to the Elders, and I went back to my life.”
“So you two never…?”
“Oh, hell to the no. Roar’s not my type.” Stein winked.
“Who is your type? Someone like Oline?”
Barking laughter was his reply. “Yeah, again, no.”
She thought for a moment. “Hmm, you probably need someone who’s your polar opposite. Let’s see: you’re loud, brash, kind of an asshole—”
“You wound me!” He faked an arrow to the chest.
Leda rolled her eyes and continued. “So your ideal person would be someone…softer. The ‘strong but silent’ to your ‘unorganized chaos’ or something like that.” She laughed at her own joke but noticed he didn’t seem very amused. Stein was blushing. How close to the mark had she come? “Does this person exist? Is it someone I know? Someone on Equinox?”
He angled away from her. “Drop it.”
“It is! Oh, c’mon, Stein. Tell me! I won’t say anything. I promise.”
“Leda,” he said, her name a warning.
“So it’s not Oline or Roar. Definitely not my grandmother, or my uncle.”
Irritation seethed from him, raising the shuttle’s temperature.
“And there’s no way you’d ever date a Woede, am I right?”
He snorted. “You got that right.”
“That crosses Nils off the list.”
“Can’t you just shut up for like, five minutes?”
“I probably could, but this is getting exciting.”
A muscle ticked in Stein’s jaw. “Why is this so important to you?”
“I like knowing things about people. It helps me decide if I can trust them or not.”
“How the hell does that make any sense at all?”
She nibbled the tip of her tongue. “You’ve lied to people you love, right?”
The color drained from his face.
“So have I. We all do it, and there’s mostly an acceptable reason for it. But you can tell the difference, if you look for it.”
“Difference between what?”
“A calculated lie and an outburst of honesty. It’s the unexpected honesty that carries the most weight. That’s how I know I can trust someone.” She leaned toward him and grinned. “Tell me. Tell meeeee. Stein, just tell me!”
“Shut up.” He covered his ears. “Not listening.”
“Well, I’ve gone through everyone on Equinox with three left over. Obviously you’re not into me. You can’t handle this awesome.”
“La-la-la-la-la!”
“And I can’t see you going for Rika.”
Stein hummed loud and out of tune.
“That leaves…” Leda raised her voice over Stein’s.
It was almost funny, the way Stein froze in place. Every part of him went still at once. He didn’t even blink. Out of the stillness, she nearly missed the soft-spoken word.
“Petrus.” He swallowed then, the sound like Fourth of July fireworks over Manhattan.
She reached for his hand but Stein busied himself at the controls. “I’m guessing things on Aurelis are sort of the same as they are on Earth, and you can’t freely be yourself without others judging you, hating you. There are good people in the universe, you know. People who don’t care about your gender or who you love. People who know what it feels like to be judged by things beyond their control.”
Stein kept his attention on whatever he was doing with the shuttle.
“Does Petrus know how you feel?”
He didn’t reply.
“Are you mad at me?”
Again, nothing.
“Am I the first person you admitted your feelings for Petrus to?”
“If I answer, will you stop talking?”
Her smile felt 100 percent triumphant. “About this? Yes. I can’t promise I’ll be quiet forever, though.”
“Fine. Yes, you’re the first. I haven’t even really admitted this to Petrus.”
Leda pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t burst out in a chorus of awwwwwwww! She guessed that in a universe this big, there were a million complications two people had to overcome if they wanted to be together.
Like knowing you might literally kill each other.
Maybe it was better this way, her separated from Roar. But she did miss him so deeply that her chest ached. She wanted to see him again. Just once.
Once she composed herself, she turned to Stein with a smile. “Thank you for trusting me.”
“You didn’t give me much of a choice.”
She pretended not to hear him. “Now that I know you’re mostly trustworthy, tell me how you got mixed up with Tuva.”
He avoided eye contact with Leda as he engaged the drive for a leap. She recognized the sensations now, but no matter how many times she tried to prepare for it, she still experienced the weightless feeling, and her stomach flopped in her gut like a fish out of water. When it was over, she swallowed and resisted the urge to dry heave.
Stein released the controls and pulled up the radar. Nothing showed up onscreen. He rested a hand on the panel, then spun his chair to face Leda. “I was going through a lot back then,” he began. “My father didn’t understand me. He kept forcing me to be something I wasn’t. So I rebelled. The Underground seemed like the perfect answer for
me, a way to get out from under my father’s thumb and a place where I’d belong, no matter who, or what, I was. They didn’t care how I looked, only that I believed things were wrong on Aurelis.”
“Wrong how? The way Oline and Roar told it, things work pretty well on your home world.”
“For them, maybe.” Stein unclipped his harness and pushed to his feet. “Not everyone on Aurelis is treated equally. Did you notice how Petrus has the same kind of name as the rest of us, but he doesn’t look like us?”
She had noticed. “I just thought maybe his parents moved somewhere more uh, ‘western’ and…” At Stein’s arch look, Leda broke off. “Okay, so that’s not it.”
“No. It happened over a few generations, but basically, other cultures were erased. There’s no more traditions, nothing that makes people special. We’re all the same, even if we don’t all look the same.”
“They just got rid of other cultures? How can they do that?”
Stein turned, facing the sealed hole in the door. “By outlawing any practices that are considered inferior.”
The answer stunned her. “So, when Tuva said something about people having to run away and live in caves to keep their ancestors’ traditions alive, she wasn’t kidding?”
He shook his head. “Anyway. That’s an issue that isn’t going to get fixed anytime soon. In the meantime, you and I need to focus a little harder on trying to find Equinox. Barring that, I hope you’re a good actor.”
Leda jerked her head back in surprise. “Why?”
“Because you and I are going to have to steal a spaceship.”
She thought he was joking, but Stein had been serious. After a couple of days searching for Equinox and coming up with nothing, Stein piloted the shuttle toward what he called an outlying spaceport, on the far edges of Stein’s home galaxy.
Leda noticed something. “If we’re in Aurelite territory, how come there’s no Woede here?”
“They started off with the smaller planets farther in the galaxy to get a foothold on Aurelis. By the time they took over, we didn’t know what had hit us. And Aurelis was their goal, not backwater space like this.”
All the Stars Left Behind Page 23
