Page 41 of Crave
The reply came back, quite clear. “Shuttle. Where have you been?”
“Had to boost the signal to our comms to reach you,” Kinsley said, slanting a glance at Sil who nodded approval. Not that it really mattered how spaceships worked; reality meant nothing to a good scam. “The interference is draining my batteries, so you’ll have to come get me. The rock is ready for transfer, but you have to take me with you since I’m dead in the water.”
Another brief silence from the other end. “Our translators indicate you are Earther.” A rough sound, possibly laughter, grated from the comm. “It took us a while to find the reference. The planet Dirt is quite remote and backward, isn’t it?”
As ridiculous as it was to feel proprietary about a planet she hadn’t even thought of as her home, she bristled anyway. But she kept her tone neutral. “Why do you think I was trying to escape?”
As if by fleeing an entire solar system she could avoid the uncomfortable truth that she was bringing the source of her troubles and mistakes along with her: herself. But as Sil had pointed out, she’d come looking for something new.
Becoming someone else.
She gave him a quick smile before she said to the comm, “Come get me.”
He gave her a nod and punched the release on the airlock.
It wasn’t much, but it was all they had. And with the interference and a bit of careless greed on the other end, hopefully the lie would be enough.
On the scanner, they watched the ghostly shuttle coalesce on their starboard side.
It wasn’t a real shuttle, of course, but Sil had sung all of their need into a handful of molecules, releasing a decoy of desperate desire. Now they just needed thePratorimto be distracted enough for them to slip away.
Their scanners kept losing sight of the fake shuttle—since it didn’t exist—but the glitching looked like more interference, adding a nice layer of authenticity. She couldn’t open the comm again to distract thePratorimwith patter, not without risking poking holes in the illusion. A signal, even a weak one, coming from a separate location would give the game away.
She bit her lip hard enough to taste blood, and Sil reached one hand across the space between the seats to grip the back of her neck, his strong fingers taking hold of the tension. It would’ve worked too—except his other three hands were working frantically on the controls to ease them away from the decoy in a slow, gradual roll. Nothing to see here, folks, just another dead asteroid chunk.
She wished she hadn’t thought the word dead.
Even as space opened up between the two shuttles—one real, one fake—the blinking marker for thePratorimclosed like a card sharp on a drunken Vegas grandma.
Too bad for them this drunken Vegas grandma had been running scams since her baby teeth came in.
“I’m so proud of you, Sil,” she said. “You made a spaceship out of dust. Anything is possible.”
“It’s not real,” he reminded her, but a bright flush across his face and all the way down his naked chest revealed his secret delight in the praise.
She lifted one shoulder. “Real enough to save our asses.”
“Don’t get cocky,” he warned.
“Not when I got you.” She smiled at him.
“Together,” Roxy called.
Kinsley laughed. “Yeah, all together.”
“Almost there,” Sil said. “Once we’re behind the dust cloud—”
The comm crackled. “Earther. We can’t get an exact lock on your position. Relay coordinates now, and we will bring you in under tow.”
“They sound suspicious,” Sil noted.
“Of course they do,” Kinsley replied. “Because they are lying. No one is as untrusting as a liar.”
She should know. She’d fought so long not to believe in anything because then she didn’t have to be disappointed. She let out a slow breath. “Sil, whatever happens next, I want you to know—”
Before she could finish, another beam of laser light speared across scanners and the viewport, impossibly bright against the darkness.
“Earther, this is your last warning—”
