Something about being under attack and surviving has made me absolutely ravenous.
Max told me it’s the adrenaline, and he’s probably right. But I can’t help wondering if it has something to do with whatever weird thing that seat did when it disappeared me.
I was there the whole time—I could hear everything, see everything—but at the same time, it’s like I wasn’t. Not just to everyone else but to myself, too. I couldn’t feel my body, couldn’t reach out and touch anything.
It was the strangest experience in a trip full of strange experiences. And I have to admit I’m not the least bit sad when Ian mentions he ripped up that seat. I don’t think I could ever sit in it again.
Speaking of Ian, he heads straight for the gerjgin when he walks through the door—and then straight toward me. My stomach jumps a little as he stands over me, his dark eyes filled with a concern I don’t usually see from him.
“You okay?” he asks, his gaze roaming over me from head to toe, like he’s looking for something to fix.
But I’m not broken. At least not on the outside. “I’m good.” I nod toward the dishes Max is just now pulling out of the processor. “Get something to eat.”
He holds up his glass. “I’ve got everything I need right here.”
“Because what we need right now is a captain who’s completely drunk off his butt,” I tell him as I make a plate and then shove it into his hands. “Here, eat this. It’ll sop up some of that gerjgin.”
“I’ll eat if you have something, too,” he answers.
“Oh, I intend to.”
He continues to watch me as I make a plate for myself, and there’s something different in his eyes—something I’ve never seen there before. I wouldn’t call it predatory, exactly, but I wouldn’t not call it that, either. All I know is, as I sit down, my entire body feels like it’s gone on red alert—and not because of what happened earlier.
No, the feelings currently bouncing around inside me are all because of Ian.
It doesn’t take long before we’re all seated around one of the thin tables in the galley, eating fishgalen casserole and drinking gerjgin. It’s a far cry from the parties I used to attend at the palace—where one glass of fiznachi was my allotted limit and the finest food in the system flowed like water—but that’s okay, because this is so much better.
Ian and Max are telling stories of other strange things that have happened to them in their years flying around the system. Rain is peppering them with a million questions, while Beckett hangs back and watches with darting eyes. Gage and Merrick have their heads together and are riffing off each other. Merrick’s drunk enough gerjgin to make him almost as hilarious as Ian and Max.
As for me, I’m nursing the same glass of alcohol Ian slid into my hand when we sat down. I still remember my hangover from the night of our trip to Rangar, and I have no desire to repeat it.
Ian, who is sitting next to me and hasn’t left my side since he walked into the galley, surprisingly isn’t hitting the booze as hard as I expected him to, either. Instead, he keeps asking me if I need anything and running to get me water or more food or an extra napkin even though I keep telling him I don’t need anything.
Max, on the other hand, is sitting across from me and downing shots like his life depends on it. It surprises me, because he’s usually not like that, while Ian totally is. They’ve both come close to dying on this trip—Ian more than once—and I’ve never seen either of them react like this. Maybe it’s because this time it was out of their hands. The other times, they were in control of what they were doing, but this time the Starlight took it from them and they were at her mercy.
Considering they both seem like control freaks in their own ways, I can see how that would freak them out.
Max finishes telling a hilarious and slightly slurred story about the time they got roped into smuggling Askkandian seeds onto Vistenia and ended up with a giant borgameloon growing in their cargo hold that ended up feeding them for months as it resisted all their efforts to uproot it.
“So, is that what you’d be doing now if Milla hadn’t been captured?” Rain asks as she puts another serving of casserole on her plate. “Smuggling things from planet to planet?”
“Maybe.” Max shrugs. “Or maybe we’d be fighting in someone else’s skirmish. Merc work usually pays the best.”
“And doesn’t leave us with a rogue plant taking over the cargo hold,” Ian says, tossing back the last of his gerjgin in a quick swallow.
“Did you ever work for the rebels?” Beckett asks. It sounds like a casual question, until I see the way she’s watching them.
“Not since early days, when we escaped from the work camps.”
“Work camps?” I ask, because I’ve never heard of them.
An awkward silence descends over the table, and I realize I’ve said something wrong—or, more likely, done something wrong in not knowing about the camps. Even Rain looks uncomfortable, and usually she’s as clueless as I am when it comes to these types of things.
I turn to Ian. “Tell me.” If it’s one more horrible thing my mother and the Council have done, I want to know about it. How can I ever hope to fix things if I don’t know what’s broken?
“The Corporation raids all seven of the functioning planets for resources several times a year,” Beckett says matter-of-factly. “It’s supposedly a sweep for illegal activity, but people die in the raids, defending their homes and their families, and the Corporation scoops up whatever they had—including any kids they left behind. They take them to the camps under the auspice of caring for the orphans and teaching them a trade so they can have successful lives, but there’s not a lot of success that comes out of those camps.”
My stomach clenches at just the thought of what she’s suggesting.
“How old were you when your parents died?” Gage asks. He’s got a bag of ice on his head, but he’s not slurring his words or nauseous, so I think he’s okay.
Max doesn’t answer, just pours himself another drink. So Ian finally says, “We were eleven when we got to the camps. Still just kids ourselves.”
“You were eleven?” I ask, bile rising in my throat. I don’t know what happens at these camps, but based on Beckett’s description, I’m guessing nothing good.
“Milla, Max, and I met in the camps,” Ian says. “And we escaped together when we were twelve.”
There’s a wealth of things he’s not saying in that statement. A wealth of things I don’t know, though my imagination is running wild with all kinds of scenarios, none of which are good. And if my imagination isn’t enough to convince me, the expressions on everyone else’s faces certainly do.
“And you’ve been on your own ever since?” I ask, appalled at the idea of three twelve-year-olds negotiating life on the seven planets entirely on their own. I’m almost twenty, and this is the first time in my life I’ve been on my own. And while I acknowledge that my situation isn’t exactly normal, either, it’s a lot more normal than what Ian and Max are saying.