She blinked the tears out of her eyes and squinted into the darkness, straining to see what was ahead, to see if that wall of black was getting any nearer.

Without warning, something appeared below her: a rock ledge of some sort. She pulled into an even tighter ball, scared of hitting something, but the platform was several meters below. She glided above it, still moving dangerously fast, when two vertical nets of webbing began slanting in from both sides. She was flying into a wedge of some sort, still rising up and losing speed. As soon as they squeezed in close enough, Molly reached out and grabbed at them. Her right elbow snagged itself in one of the loops, twisting her violently to the side as the crazy ride came to an end.

Then Walter slammed into her back, forcing the air out of both of them with a combination of grunt and hiss.

Walter won his breath back first. “Fun, no?” He laughed. It was the sound of air escaping a balloon.

Molly would have slapped him if it didn’t mean letting go of the webbing. “Maybe if you told me first, you jerk.”

Her complaint just increased the air pressure of the balloon. “People pay good money to do thisss.”

Molly climbed up the netting to take the slack out of her tether. It was awkward, but she was able to reach around to unhook herself. She climbed down until she reached the bottom of the netting and to the walkway below. Above her, Walter made noises as he struggled to free himself.

She reached out and tested the platform before letting go of the webbing. Solid rock, probably carved out of the cliff. She didn’t need directions from Walter—one way led out to emptiness—so she hurried toward the face of the canyon, the sounds of a descending waterfall working through the ringing in her ears.

Walter caught up to her and ran past, huffing for breath. When they got to the end of the walk, he led her over a turnstile and pushed through a flimsy door leading into the canyon wall. The hallway beyond was wider than the ones in the prison. The soft glow of electric lights illuminated their passage through a room full of harnesses and a waiting area with benches. No rusty gates barred their way as they wound down a flight of steps. Molly followed Walter through a large room with lots of tables and chairs and a small stage, and then into some mechanical spaces. A loud humming emanated from somewhere nearby.

“Generatorss,” Walter explained, as if he could smell her confusion.

Hydroelectric, she figured, remembering the ribbons of water cascading down. She followed along through more mechanical rooms and toward the dull roaring. Every piece of machinery they passed had the look of obsolescence. It all seemed cobbled together and poorly maintained, with wires snaking from one point to another along the ground rather than properly routed through ductwork or the ceiling. Tools lay scattered by one large electrical cabinet, probably left there until something else broke. Wouldn’t be long, she surmised. Tape seemed to hold much of the equipment together. It was as if things were fixed just enough to get them running and no more. Why do preventive maintenance and help out whichever clan took over next?

As they snaked through several more industrial-looking passages full of wheezing equipment and squeaking bearings, Molly thought about how closely Palan society resembled its weather. They let everything get out of control here, not a care in the world. Meanwhile, they waited for the next violent wave to sweep through and start things over again. To Molly, it seemed like a process that celebrated erosion—and all that was good for was digging large ditches.

The depressing sight of so much ruin and the long jaunt through repetitive scenery had her mind wandering away from what she was running toward. This made the shock so much more intense when she burst through another door, no different from the rest, and staggered—fighting for her breath—into the large cavern on the other side.

Molly couldn’t believe what she was seeing: Parsona.

13

She could’ve picked that shape out of a used shipyard full of a thousand hulls. It was the profile of a family member: a large window spanning the cockpit, rounded nose below, wide-swept wings that made her as good a craft in atmosphere as she was in a vacuum.

It was a classic design, inspired by the first ships to soar in space and float to the ground.

She was beautiful.

Along her back were the ridges for flight control and the jutting vertical fins many of the modern starships went without. Two small wings, identical to the larger ones at the rear, stood out below the cockpit windows. The hump behind one window marked the life-support systems, a vulnerability that partly explained the GN-290’s discontinuation.

Despite her age, and the limited run of the model, she looked swift, even at rest. Flecks of paint were missing here and there, and lots of micro-meteor burns streaked down the hull, but overall the ship looked to be in fine condition. And aside from being lazily parked nose-in, a habit typical of jittery pilots, Parsona looked ready to fly.

Frozen in the doorway, Molly absorbed the sight. She wanted to shout for joy, but thoughts of Cole being locked up in a rock cell tempered her enthusiasm. She needed to get to work.

Walter seemed to agree. He clapped his hands to break her spell and asked about getting the hangar doors open. Molly nodded and watched him scamper over to a rusty console. She left him to it and rushed around the other side of the ship where the cargo ramp stood wide open. Her feet hit the old metal, the sound and spring of it taking her back to her childhood. Inside, familiar scents greeted her, bringing back more memories. She paused, feeling closer to her family than she had in ten years.

Then the enormity of their predicament hit her, making her feel alone and overwhelmed. This was a massive piece of machinery. Real machinery. She’d learned to fly in a simulator. In classrooms, she’d learned basic maintenance and mechanical duties. Now she stood in the cargo bay of a starship over fifty meters long. When she fired it up, actual mechanical bits would be roaring into motion, not the simulated vibration of a glorified computer. The thought of taking off in this thing without someone here to help her made her stomach flip; she had a sudden urge to use the bathroom.

She fought these self-doubts and nervously made her way toward the cockpit as the sound of metal scraping on metal filtered in from beyond the ship. Molly heard the hiss of a powerful wind and glanced through one of the portholes. Walter had the hangar doors opening up.

He joined Molly inside the ship, anxious to get underway. “Take off,” he told her.

“It’s not that easy,” she explained. “I have to do some things first.”

“No time. Daylight ssoon.”

“Walter, we can’t get out of here until I fix the hyperspace drive. Arrange those boxes or load some more supplies, I need at least an hour.”

“An hour?!” Walter frowned, then sniffed the air. “An hour it iss.” He ticked off fingers with his thumb. “Four tripss to the ssupply room,” he muttered to himself before hurrying down the cargo ramp.

“I was kinda hoping you’d help out here,” Molly called after him, but the boy was already gone. “Okay then.” She turned to the workbench and charged up her father’s old welding torch. This is going to work, she told herself.

She lost herself in each task: cutting lengths of metal tubing from one of the bunks, welding them into a single rod six meters long, running wires from the engine room. The distraction forced her worries away from Cole and the upcoming challenge of flying the old ship.

It also freed her subconscious to secretly fiddle with a puzzle of its own: if Walter didn’t have keys for the gates leading to Cole, how had he disappeared that direction yesterday without passing back in front of her cell?

••••

Cole lay prone on the freezing floor. He had no choice; his cell was a meter wide and just as tall—a stone coffin. Yesterday, his new friends had to drag him into the hallway to have enough room to beat on him properly. One of his ribs felt cracked from their hospitality, and he’d been spitting up blood all night.

The window at the end of the cell, however, was the primary source of his misery. A steady flow of cold evening air poured in with no way of escaping it. He tried blocking it off with his feet, but even through his boots he could feel the chill damaging his toes. His teeth chattered violently as he rubbed his arms to keep the blood circulating through his chest. The uncontrollable shivering was a relentless assault on his tender ribs.

The only food he’d been given looked like something you’d feed a dog—one you didn’t particularly care for. A hissing Palan had tossed the pellets in by Cole’s head. A tin of water thrown in after spilled across the stone and soaked through Cole’s shirt. He couldn’t turn around to see who tormented him, but the mysterious figure promised he’d be executed in the morning.

Cole wasn’t sure he could hang around long enough to make the appointment.

What hurt the most, the thing that kept digging into him, was having failed to protect Molly. No telling what their captors were doing to her. Would they be given a trial? Would Molly have to watch him be executed? Would Lucin and the Navy ever be able to piece together what had happened here?

Cole’s neck cramped up from the shivering of his head and shoulders, and his jaw felt numb from the continuous muscle spasms clattering his teeth together. Minutes dragged out into hours as he suffered the longest night of his life.

It seemed a lifetime later when the faintest glow of a new day began filtering past his boots. Cole parted them, allowing the chilled air to travel up his stomach and chest. It was worth the pain to watch the distant canyon wall color itself in a welcomed dawn. The sunlight signaled his promised execution, but also an end to the biting cold and the strange mixture of numbness and agony.

I may just live long enough to be killed, he thought to himself. It made him want to laugh out loud, this private joke. Laugh and scream.

Delirium must be setting in.

And now he was hearing things. Over the rush of the wind and the staccato of his crashing teeth, Cole imagined he could hear starship thrusters roaring outside: the high pitch of jet turbines mixing with the loud air nozzles used for maneuvering. It seemed awfully detailed for an auditory hallucination.

Pulling his boots completely out of the window, Cole raised his sore chin and looked down the length of his beaten body.

Through the small square of light, he gaped disbelievingly at the mirage rising into view.

If that wasn’t real, Cole knew he’d really lost it.

••••

Walter tested the webbing harness, yanking the tether that secured him to the cargo bay. He couldn’t believe he was going along with this. He’d nearly mutinied when he learned what Molly had planned. Not that he understood how this would work, but nobody broke out of Palan Max. He’d tried it himself. It was impossible. The only two ways out were bribery and death. And most Palans only had coin for the latter.

Then again, he’d gone and helped her escape for nothing but a promise and the mere hope for reward. What had he been thinking? Or had he been thinking? This girl—floods take him—she was strange and incredible and intoxicating, making him do stupid stuff. And he was not stupid.

Walter watched the canyon wall slide by beyond the porthole, wondering how he’d gotten himself in this mess. Didn’t matter now, he decided. There was no turning back. Someone would be waking his uncle soon, blabbering about an empty cell and a lot of oiled hinges. He just needed to stall the escape and hope the guards had already gotten to the boy. What choice did he have? He couldn’t fly this contraption, and now he really needed to get off-planet. He’d return for the other spoils later. Much later. When someone else was in charge.

He shifted the strange contraption in his hand. It was nice and light; he couldn’t see how this thing was going to free the human. At one end of the pole the girl had welded a wide cross, about six feet between the tips. The other end, about twenty feet away, had a chain attached which snaked back to the workbench. Four wires trailed from the tips of the cross and disappeared around the corner into some sort of mechanical room.

Walter supposed they could be blasting wires. He’d seen explosives that worked like this. Was the plan to blow through three feet of Palan stone? If so, she was going to be pretty upset when she saw how small the boy’s cell was. And what will be left of him inside?

The loading ramp opened a crack, letting in a sliver of morning light and a loud hiss of wind. He leaned against the tether and tightened his grip on the cold metal.

He’d help rescue her friend, Walter decided, or at least make it appear he’d tried. Besides, he’d have plenty of opportunities to get the human boy out of the way.

Later.

••••

Molly lowered the cargo ramp from the cockpit and turned on the floodlights to illuminate the side of the canyon. Once the ramp extended fully, she pulled the ship up, pivoting it around until the open bay lined up with the solitary, barred window. She shot a brief glance over her shoulder and saw Walter extending the long boom through the opening.

She performed more calculations in her head, thinking about the thickness of the wall in her own cell and how much mass was likely in the rock. She kept dialing the hyperdrive down, far past its lower limits. Safety overrides flashed red and chimed at her relentlessly as the howling wind coursed through the ship. Molly’s hair had grown long enough for the ends to flick into her eyes, but she couldn’t take her hands off the flight controls and the maneuvering jets to do anything about it.

This was her least sane plan. The one that toyed with the laws of physics.

She could only get within five meters or so of the canyon wall, even with Parsona’s wings retracted in their zero-G position. Harsh gusts swirled and buffeted the ship from every direction. Holding her steady while simultaneously performing rough hyperdrive calculations was a challenge of dexterity and clear-thinking unlike anything the Navy had ever thrown at her. Deep in the recesses of her female ego, Molly wondered how many men would be able to pull this off, much less dream it up.