“Yeah, great. That sounds great.” Was it hot in here? Why was it so hot in here? “I’m going to find a change of clothes, maybe take a shower. Anything to get the stink of Ironside off me. Elio will keep you company. Right, Elio?”
I didn’t give him a chance to answer. I stepped back, ignoring the look he gave me—like I’d just kicked a puppy—and raced from the cockpit, my mother’s disgust still ringing in my ears.
8
By the time I located a functioning shower in the residential quarters on the topmost floor of the ship and found new clothes—scuffed brown boots and an olive-green flight suit—I had extinguished all traces of Evelina’s voice from my head. But as soon as I took a seat on the lumpy bed in an abandoned cabin and dared to take a glance out the porthole above my head, she was back.
These days, the sound of her voice always brought on sweaty palms and a racing heart, but it hadn’t always been like that. There was a time, when I was young, that she would joke and play with me. The lines around her mouth had been from laughing back then, not frowning. I think I was the respite she needed after a long day of work. But then I grew older. She taught me how to shoot a blaster, how to build my first flash bomb. And then she’d made the decision that I was old enough to work alongside her. A decision that I’d had no say in.
If I was old enough to work with my family and share in the profits, then it went without saying that I was old enough to fail with them too. Or I guess fail without them, like I was now.
I knew without a shred of doubt that if Elio and I didn’t find the Four Keys of Teolia, if we ended up trapped in Ironside again, no one would come for us. Not Blair, not Cruz. Certainly not Evelina. In their mind, we were failures the second we got caught on Vaotis. And my family didn’t help failures.
And yet … they were all I had. They annoyed me to no end. They were impulsive and rude and condescending, but … if I lost them, and then if I lost Elio too …
Who would I be?
I grabbed a plaid blanket off the bed, a possession of a former Starchaser crew member, and wiped my sweaty hands all over it. Turning away from the depths of outer space, I took a good look at the cabin for perhaps the first time since entering it. Evelina would have hated this ship. There was no glitz, no glowing traces of moonstone like in our house. The cabin, like all the hallways I’d traveled through so far, was a combination of gunmetal gray walls, neon green uplighting, and dozens of exposed rusty pipes. The cabin at least had a few more flashes of color than the rest of the ship. Posters of Earthan men and women modeling skimpy outfits covered the wall across from the bed. Swimming attire, if I remembered correctly. A map of Earth was tacked up beside the photos, with large circles drawn in red ink around various tropical nations on the planet. Whoever lived in this room before me must’ve had a thing for warm climates.
“Cora?”
The door to the cabin opened with a swish, and Elio scurried through. He took a look around, eyes lingering in interest on the map of Earth, and then climbed up on the bed beside me. “I like your outfit,” he said. “It’s very ship-mechanic chic.”
“Thanks?”
“At least you look cleaner than Anders.”
“You talked to Anders?”
“Well…” Elio tapped a finger on his chin. “Talked to is relative. Wren asked me to find him to make sure he wasn’t dead or anything, so I did. But then he yelled at me for waking him up and shut the door in my face. I’m hoping he took a shower after that. My optic sensors may be on the fritz, but I still know filthy when I see it.”
“Oh. Yeah, he’s … unique?”
Elio laughed, a single squeak. “I’m unique. He’s grumpy. You’re both alike in that way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He picked at a cracked spot of paint on his hand. “Just that I think you hurt Wren’s feelings when you said you wouldn’t be her co-pilot. And then when you criticized her ship. Maybe rein in the insults a bit?”
“Please, I can read her emotions. I’d know if she were insulted.” I thought for a second. The memory of the sad ocean-blue aura surrounding her head when I’d left the cockpit made my heart twist. “Yeah, she’s insulted. Crap.”
But it wasn’t like I was here to be her buddy. Especially not after she tried to leave Ironside without us. Powering up the ship, she’d said. Yeah, and Anders was in his room composing a love ballad at this very moment. I wasn’t born yesterday.
Although … maybe it wouldn’t hurt to befriend her. Befriend them both, actually. If my plan worked, and we really intended to take the keys and the treasure chest in the end …
“It will be easier if they trust us,” I said. I recited my plan to Elio and his eyes glowed, a round of beeps echoing through the cabin.
He almost fell off the bed. “You want to give the treasure to Evelina and use the money to buy me a new body?” He looked like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, which was a definite possibility, if his auditory processors were glitching.
“Do you think it’s a good idea?”
“Well … won’t it hurt Wren and Anders? Don’t they need the treasure too? I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
“No, they’ll be fine.” Maybe. “I swear. Have I ever lied to you?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not,” I repeated. “Just promise you’ll help me make friends with them.” The only way I could steal from them was if they trusted us completely.
“Okay…” He sounded unsure. “I love making friends…”
I nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly.”
“And I really do want that new body. With the mustache!”
“Of course. A huge mustache. You’re going to look amazing.”
“And you promise Wren and Anders won’t get hurt?”
I couldn’t promise anything. Elio needed a new body, and Evelina needed the entirety of this treasure in order for me to get it for him.
I hesitated, but he didn’t notice. “I’ll protect them. They’ll be … fine.”
It was obvious Elio wanted his second chance at life more than he wanted to think twice about the lie I was feeding him. “Well … all right!” He jumped off the bed. “Actually, this is a great plan. Think about the possibilities! I mean the literal possibilities! I just ran all thirty-five thousand, seven hundred eighty-nine of them through my processing system and determined that giving the treasure to Evelina is by far the easiest way to get me a body.”
“What’s the hardest way?”
“It involves a hot air balloon and crash landing on Earth. Trust me, you don’t want to know the rest. Are you hungry? I’m hungry. Wren said the galley is stocked with Earthan food, so I’m making snacks.”
“You can’t eat them.”
“But I can pretend to smell them, and sometimes that’s just as good. Come down whenever you’re ready. And be nice.” He pointed a finger at me as he headed for the door, a newfound spring filling his short robotic strides.
“Yes, boss,” I called after him. Picking up a flat pillow from the bed, I gave it a joking toss at his head. He batted it to the ground and kept walking.
* * *
Only once the Starchaser cleared the atmosphere above Andilly and drifted into a steady orbit around one of its four moons did I exit my room and attempt to find the galley. Millions of stars winked at me as I passed a long row of portholes lining the central corridor. If we actually managed to pull this job off, right after I bought Elio his new body, I was going to buy one of those stars and name it after myself. Just because I could.
The galley was housed in a windowless space directly above the cargo hold, its location only revealed by the smell of chocolate wafting down the hall. The chocolate smell was soon followed by the sound of breaking glass, and then I knew without a doubt I was in the right spot. I just hoped that today none of the shards got trapped in Elio’s cooking. Now was not the time to get ten stitches in my tongue. Again.
A face full of flour greete
d me the second I stepped around the doorframe. I wiped at my burning eyes, watching the blurry form of Elio hurry to grab a pan out of the oven before his cookies started to burn. Wren was seated on a stool at a round table in the corner, wearing a flight suit that matched my own, licking raw batter from her thumb.
“Don’t tell me you left Anders in charge of flying the ship,” I said, grabbing for a towel to wipe my face.
“Incoming!” Elio yelled right before a glob of cookie dough flew through the air, landing with a splat against a cabinet.
Wren offered me her bowl of batter. “Anders isn’t flying anything. The ship’s locked in orbit right now. By the way, your little robot is a whiz in the kitchen.”
“Only with desserts. Don’t try his real meals. I promise you’ll get food poisoning.”
“Hey!” Elio protested. He rushed back to the oven when a curl of smoke started to snake into the air.
“Last year I tried his lasagna and ended up with a mouthful of glass. He didn’t even cook it in a glass dish. I’m still trying to figure out how that happened.”
“Oh stars!” Wren dissolved into a fit of laughter. “I swear I’m not laughing at you … but actually, I am. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well.” I picked at the cookie dough she slid in front of me. Like a … peace offering, maybe? Okay, then. Might as well start dialing up the friendship charm.
“So, Wren? Hey, I’m really sorry for what I said about your ship. You’re right. It’s not that bad.”
How was that for an apology? I’d never had many friends, and consequently never had to make many apologies.
But Wren grinned like I’d just handed her a shooting star. “Thanks, Cora! See, I told you. She grows on everyone.”
“Like a fungus,” Anders said from the doorway. He stumbled into the galley, gripping the countertop. His red skin had a touch of green to it.
“Excellent. The party’s here.” Wren pushed the bowl toward him. “Want some cookie dough?”
Anders’s lip curled to new heights. It was rather impressive.
“I don’t eat … that. Sorry,” he added when Elio’s face fell.
“No worries,” he said. “I can make you something else. What do you like?”
“I…” He looked around the room, lost. His gaze lingered on the open pantry door, filled with a sparse supply of canned foods and dried packaged fruits, before his dark eyes glinted hopefully. “Do you have pon?”
“Porn?”
“No! Pon. It’s meat, but … sorry, I don’t know the word in your language. Bloody?”
“Raw?” Elio asked. “Um … I can try, but I do best with chocolate. Any sugary substance, really.”
“Raw meat,” Wren muttered. “Of course that’s what he eats.”
“Maybe I’ll eat you,” Anders replied under his breath.
Wren popped a hunk of cookie dough in her mouth, feigning politeness. “Sorry, didn’t catch that. Did you say that you have something against Earthans? Did your prison warden father instill that belief in you?”
“Enough!” He slammed a fist on the counter, claws slicing through his fingertips. Elio dropped the pan of freshly baked cookies he was holding, beeping.
Anders stepped forward, oddly unsteady on his feet. “I told you before,” he said, teeth flashing, “I don’t talk to Earthans. You hide behind your weapons and your words, destroying everything. Well, we’ll happily destroy you first.”
“Holy—” I pushed my chair away from him.
Wren didn’t even flinch. “Wow, look at you talking to me. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Flustered, Anders raked his fingers through his messy bundle of hair. One of his claws got caught in a giant knot and he retracted them instantly, grumbling something in his language that definitely sounded like a curse word.
“Fine,” he said. “I will try to be civil if you never mention my father again.”
Wren shrugged, not protesting—but also not not protesting. For once we were on the same page, equally curious about the warden and his estranged relationship with his enigmatic son.
Anders frowned, giving us all this weird look like he was disappointed about something, and if I could read his aura like a normal person’s, then I would’ve known for sure that’s what it was. I guess I could have tried asking, but it seemed like being civil toward him would ruin all the progress I’d made with Wren. I didn’t know how to befriend them both.
Another one of my plans, already swirling down the drain.
“I’m going back to bed,” Anders finally muttered.
“Nighty night!” Wren waved, not looking at all upset to see him go.
The galley door slid shut behind him. I assumed he would head to his bedroom immediately, dead set on sequestering himself until further notice, but he shocked us all when his footsteps stilled in the corridor with a squeak. A door banged open somewhere nearby, and then the unmistakable sounds of vomiting and a toilet flushing filled the air.
“Oh stars!” Wren failed to suppress a fit of giggles. “Big bad Andy gets flight sick? Of all the people!”
Another toilet flush, following by a second verse of puking and a chorus of groans. It was probably the saddest song in the galaxy tonight.
Elio grimaced at me from across the galley. He likely wanted to comfort Anders. Being helpful was ingrained in his programming, after all, but he remained where he was, washing a cookie pan in the sink with steady strokes of a sopping wet sponge.
On second thought, maybe Elio should have comforted him. It would have gone a long way toward aiding my friendship cause.
With a harsh sigh, Wren stood and announced that she was returning to the cockpit, leaving her mostly empty bowl of cookie dough for me to finish. As she passed by me on her way to the door, I was hit with a face full of possibly one of the most depressing auras I’d ever seen. A deep violet, punctured by inky black holes that dripped into the air and formed ribbons that bound around her chest. They contracted, squeezing. Wren’s breath seemed to still in her lungs. But then she exhaled through her nose, and the ribbons vanished in a puff of smoke.
“There goes my hope of us braiding each other’s hair and telling scary ghost stories,” she said with a weak smile. “This is going to be the most fun trip ever.”
9
Anders’s cabin was right down the hall from mine, and lucky me, I had the pleasure of listening to him vomit all night long.
When I stumbled into the galley the next morning, running on two hours of sleep and a heap of treasure-hunting adrenaline, I immediately came face to face with my new archnemesis. Anders was hunched over the table, shaking as the ship’s old engines shuddered beneath us, his eyes tightly closed.
The bright side was that he wasn’t puking. After last night, I doubted he had anything left in his stomach to puke.
“Coffee?” Elio presented him with a mug of dark brown liquid that only smelled vaguely burnt. “Wren doesn’t have creamer. Sorry.”
“I don’t know what that is anyway.” He rubbed his temples.
Grabbing the pot from Elio, I poured myself a cup into a chipped tumbler and took a seat.
As I watched Anders sniff at the coffee, I realized that, with the exception of raw meat, I had little clue about his diet. Most people from Condor ate a diet similar to Earthans’, having lived among them for the last few decades, but all planets’ inhabitants were different. Some ate enough to feed ten or twenty, while others concocted syrupy drinks full of vitamins and minerals found in deep space and had little need for solid food.
The floor vibrated as the engines turned over, causing Anders to moan and clutch his stomach.
“Whatever you do, don’t puke again,” I said.
Another groan.
“What do you eat anyway?”
Anders looked up at me blearily. “Meat, mostly. Or grains. Anything high in fiber.”
“Do you think you’d like oatmeal?”
“I’ll make you some!” Elio rummaged through t
he pantry. “I promise I won’t burn it.”
“You can eat it,” Anders muttered to me over the clang of Elio’s pots and pans. “I won’t keep it down. Stars, I hate flying. It’s a result of humanity’s selfish desire to seek more than what they already have in front of them.”
“Or,” I said, “maybe it’s a result of humanity’s innate desire to seek something greater. To learn. To better themselves.”
Anders snorted. “It’s definitely not.”
I studied the tattoos arching over his eyebrows, curling in tight spirals. Getting those must have hurt something awful. “Be honest with me,” I said. “What’s the real reason you don’t like Earth?”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. I…” He sighed, looking half his massive size. “It’s personal.”
His change in demeanor shocked me. All his former anger from last night had vanished as quickly as the claws on his fingertips, and I wondered briefly if he’d had the same idea I had. Befriend now, betray later. Anders and Wren weren’t idiots. If I had ulterior motives, they could easily craft a similar plan.
I watched as Anders hunched over his knees, gripping his stomach. Or maybe he was still too sick to resume yesterday’s angry Earth rant.
“Hey, I’ve been thinking…” (For the record, I hadn’t; it just popped into my head.) “It’s okay if we keep calling you Anders, right? You don’t hate that, do you?”
I didn’t care about his feelings—I just wanted him to believe that I was nice.
He shrugged. “Anders is fine. Andy is less fine, but what do people usually say? Is the phrase whatever?”
“Look at you integrating into modern society. Your planet is archaic, by the way. Tell me, do you battle wildlife for fun?”
“Fun? The Andilly sea bear is a prime food source. You’re just jealous that we’re more resourceful than the good people of Condor.” He started to do something that looked like a smile, but then he gripped his stomach tighter. “No net programs rotting our brains.”
“I’m surprised you even know what a net program is.” Then I remembered an Andilly fun fact Wren shared during the first hour in our cell. “So everyone on your planet has numbers instead of names?”
The Good for Nothings Page 10
