Sail

Titanium walls, floors, and ceilings polished to a low shine echoed our footsteps through the entryway of the Vicio. Every two feet of patterned ridges on the floor ended with another two feet of grating, beating a thunk, thunk, plunk, plunk under our feet. Lights hung from double cords above every other solid square of metal. At each change in the flooring, a thick metal strip dotted with bolts arced up the curved walls. When I stepped over the grating, a faint light glowed beneath my shoes to the floor several feet below. The ship smelled like engine oil, something that usually calmed me since it reminded me of Pop, but he wasn’t here with me.

A figure emerged around a corner up ahead. “Ah, you must be the cooks. The crew will be thrilled they don’t have to rely on my skills in the kitchen anymore.” A stocky black man with a wide, friendly smile thrust a hand toward Randolph then me. “Or lack thereof. Welcome aboard the Vicio. I’m Captain Glenn.”

His handshake matched the confident spark in his brown eyes and the set of his broad shoulders. I squeezed with as much force as I could with my dainty non-boy hands. As soon as he released me, I jammed the fingers of one hand back into my pocket to hide them and hid the other behind my back with my suitcase. I’d completely forgotten to cover them up with gloves, and there weren’t any in Franco’s coat.

“Randolph here,” my ‘father’ said, then rested a hand on my shoulder. “And this is my son and apprentice, James.”

I tried not to wince at the sound of my new name while I silently thanked Randolph for his smooth delivery. Uncle or not, he and Moon shared a similar talent.

“Randolph. James,” Captain Glenn murmured, seeming to file our names away for easy access. “Let me show you around the Vicio.”

“Would you like us to show you our identification cards and run us through your security system first?” Randolph asked.

Captain Glenn laughed, a deep, jovial sound that reminded me of the imaginary guy in the red suit the people on Mayvel were so obsessed with this time of year. “We’re going into deep space to one of Jupiter’s moons, so I hope you’re armed with something. As long as you feed my crew and keep them happy, I really don’t care who you are. Now, come this way and…” He started down the remaining length of the entryway, the rest of his sentence bouncing behind him and losing itself in our trio of loud footfalls. A wide grin stretched his mouth when he turned back around, but I’d completely missed the joke. Randolph, who walked a little in front of me, chuckled enough for the both of us.

I patted my fake identification card in my pocket, just in case the captain changed his mind. Did he really expect us to be armed? He knew more about deep space than I did since he’d most likely been there before, but I had to wonder yet again if I’d just doomed myself to certain death by stepping aboard this ship.

Just outside the inner door, Captain Glenn hovered his thumb over a flashing green light on a control panel. “This button closes this door first, and then there’s a ten second delay between it and the outer one closing. Our engineer rigged it that way for when we deliver our livestock. It will keep them together in case one leaves the herd and it gets left behind. We had a hell of a time getting the teralinguas on this ship, so bottlenecking them out should help us some. I’ll show you them sometime if you’re interested, and you can see how much they keep us on our toes. Anyway, once you push that button, it falls fast.” He pressed it, and the door swooshed closed behind us, sealing us in, and sucking the air from my lungs at the same time.

I loosened my coat zipper to draw in a wobbly breath. Ten seconds later, the outer door crashed closed, and I knew from my experience on the Nebulous it would take a special call to the pilot to open both of them again. My heart roared too late through my head on repeat, so I focused with all my might on what the captain was saying.

“… I mean? Wouldn’t want you to get squished on your first day here, would we?” he said with a laugh and clapped me on the back hard enough to rattle my teeth. I fought the urge to rub my stinging shoulder because I didn’t think a fourteen-year-old boy would do that. Instead, I shrugged off his man paw and stepped forward to pretend fascination with the ship, though there wasn’t much to be impressed with.

The only ship I’d ever been on for any length of time was the Nebulous, and its double-layered hull, thick carpets, and padded walls insulated it from the frigid temperatures in space. Not the case with the Vicio. It was downright chilly.

Two similar looking corridors forked off from the one we stood in and turned somewhere unseen into an L shape. Captain Glenn led us toward the right with hesitant steps, and his large shoulders bunched around his neck, almost as if he expected the floor to drop from beneath him at any second. Strange that a seemingly confident captain would walk through his own ship like that.

As we went, I stitched a map through my head, using the squares of the periodic table as my grid. That was how I remembered every nook and cranny aboard the Nebulous. I started at iron because I always started at iron, and we went past three identical doors I mentally marked as cobalt, nickel, and copper.

“I think you’ll find our kitchen and pantry well-stocked,” Captain Glenn said and stopped in front of the fourth door: zinc. “The pantry is in stasis to preserve the food, and the temperature outside the ship helps with that, of course. The heating unit is running full-blast, but in an old ship with little insulation, that doesn’t make a lick of difference. The crew seems to have gotten used to the cold though.”

And so should we. I pressed the sides of my elbows into my ribs to contain my body heat, certain that my lips would soon match the color of Jezebel’s claws. Sure, I might lose a few fingers and toes to hypothermia, but I’d get used to it. Losing some appendages was nothing compared to losing my sister, though. I’d just have to suffer through it.

Captain Glenn pulled at the lever and the door swept open. He stood there a moment, blinking, while he clenched and unclenched his fists before he finally stepped inside.

I followed Randolph into a well-lit, small but cozy dining area. A large wooden table with deep cracks stretching from one knot hole to the next took up most of the room. Six straight-backed chairs sat around it, a few of their legs slanting at such odd angles, it seemed kind of dangerous for anyone to actually sit in them. On the wall to the right, someone had stuck a poster of a well-endowed woman dressed in nothing but space-blown hair and a smirk. She carried a blue planet swirling with clouds in her palm against the backdrop of millions of glittering stars.

Randolph cleared his throat and ticked his gaze at me like he thought I might be offended. As both a nineteen-year-old woman and a fourteen-year-old boy, I wasn’t. But as a boy, maybe I should have some kind of reaction. I settled on tilting my head at the poster with wide eyes, feigning memorization of the woman’s curves, and nodding my approval. Randolph, on the other hand, frowned and looked away.

“Ah, yes, that’s Esmerelda the Space Vixen. Sorry if it offends, but a few of the men love her nightly show.” He shrugged and shook his head at Randolph. “She’s too skinny, I think. Anyway…” he said and nodded at some double doors diagonal to the naked wall vixen. “Kitchen’s through here.”

A large stove and a sink cramped one side of the room while floor to ceiling cabinets crowded the other. A small table took up the middle. Randolph and I would practically be working on top of each other. Great.

Captain Glenn pointed to another door in the back with a blue light seeping from underneath it. “A previous chef set up a mattress beside the stasis pantry back there. I guess he didn’t like being too far from the food. Someone can take that if you want since there’s a toilet back there, too. Otherwise there are sleeping quarters next door. We operate on the Ring Guild’s standard of time, so breakfast is at six, lunch is at twelve, and dinner’s typically at six, but it doesn’t have to be anything spectacular tonight since you’ve only just got here. Take some time to get settled in.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Randolph said. “This will do just fine.”

“If you have any questions, please,” Captain Glenn said while throwing a wink and a smile over his shoulder. “Ask someone else. I’ll tell the pilot to get us in the air.” The double doors flapped closed behind him.

I willed him to hurry. We were already almost a week behind Ellison. Hopefully this ship could travel faster than her cruiser. If so, we’d be in deep space in three or four days. Could she hang on that long, wherever she was? I had to believe she hadn’t already let go.

Randolph’s friendly demeanor seemed to have walked out with the captain when he turned to me in horror. “Six o’clock,” he hissed. “We only have one hour and forty-five minutes to get dinner ready. Quick, get a base for stew on the stove.”

I stood frozen, very near literally, while I tried to figure out what language he was speaking.

Realization seemed to brighten his cheeks while he watched me suspended in action. “Tell me you know how to cook,” he said, his voice a low warning.

“I know how to cook?”

His eyes narrowed. “Tell me the truth.”

“I’ve never cooked a day in my life.” I twitched my lips to the side to give him what I hoped was an apologetic, yet enchanting, smile. “I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen the inside of a ship’s kitchen.”

“Great boogly bags,” he said and dropped his head back to stare at the titanium ceiling, mouth open, shoulders drooped. “Moon Dragon told me you were training under the best chef on Mayvel.”

The ship gave a giant lurch that sped my heart into double-time. We were moving, closer and closer to deep space and Ellison. The thought filled me with so much hope I grinned up at Randolph.

“Now I’m training under the best chef on Mayvel.”

“It’s standard protocol to go to chef’s apprentice training before actually apprenticing with a chef,” he said, his voice rising. He rooted around in a drawer until he snatched a long handle with a flat end full of holes and wiggled it in front of my face. “Apprentice training is where they teach you what a spatula is.”

I took the thing from him and stood so my nose almost touched his ruddy one. “I could recite all one hundred forty-eight elements and their properties at the age of seven. How hard can cooking be, really?”

Holy Feozva, I wished I could’ve crammed those words back down my throat. Randolph kept barking at me to peel the potatoes and carrots so fast, the end result looked like a butchering inside a broken appearance modification booth. My chopping skills made him drop whatever dead thing he carried to the boiling pot and come running over to yell something about me killing myself.

With a deep, angry red flush creeping up over his face and a strip of white outlining his pressed lips, he set down several spices from his loaded arms next to the stew. “Use your Mind-I to find a recipe for heatherberry shortcake.” He grimaced at the word recipe like he thought it just as vulgar as Lady Esmeralda, the Space Vixen. “It’s simple. I think even you can handle it.”

“I don’t have a Mind-I.”

“I thought all young people had a Mind-I,” he said between slurps of stew.

“I’m not all young people. Mind-I’s have to be inserted into your brain, and I already have enough chaos up there.”

Randolph narrowed his eyes for a long moment, possibly deciding how serious I was about my mental state, then finally said with a shrug, “I don’t have a Mind-I either. They’re pointless inventions for people with pointless lives who like to make public every mundane thought they have. No thank you, I say.”

I nodded. Those were my thoughts exactly. And maybe it was the color fading from his cheeks or the wonderful smell that came from that pot or the fact we were finally moving toward Ellison, but I didn’t think he would say anything to the captain about my lack of cooking skills. I could’ve been dead wrong, but it seemed like we were on the same wavelength.

“Heatherberry shortcake, you said?” At his nod, I bit back a smile and pulled out my phone to text Moon Dragon’s not-so-pointless Mind-I. I kind of wished I did have one because my regular phone would be useless once we travelled out of local space.

I’m trying to decide if your “uncle” is related to Satan.

Moon’s text back was instantaneous, like she’d been waiting.

MD: Be nice.

I’m trying. He wasn’t happy when he found out I didn’t know what a spatula was.

MD: Spatula?

Exactly. Do you know a recipe for heatherberry shortcake? I’m too busy trying not to chop my fingers off to find one I might not mess up.

MD: I’ll find one and link it to you.

Seconds later, a recipe with step-by-step instructions and pictures showed up in my inbox.

You’re a goddess.

MD: I know. Jezebel misses you.

At the mention of her name, a sharp pain stabbed through my heart. Poor, sweet Jezebel. Hopefully Moon wouldn’t be too busy with her and Franco’s sexanigans to cheer Jezebel on during her victory lap around the ceiling.

Give her a squeeze for me.

MD: Done. Be safe.

I put my phone on the table and busied myself searching through the large pantry for ingredients, comparing pictures to the food labels under the eerie, bluish stasis light. In the kitchen again, I got to work, measuring and mixing under Randolph’s watchful eyes. All my worries about Ellison kept biting at my feet, forcing me to move, wanting me to do something. And I finally was. The ship was hurtling toward her, and the only thing to pass the time was to throw myself into this small task.

It required deep concentration, similar to when I melted down iron into bite-sized pieces, and maybe because of that sameness, it helped ease some of my helplessness.

In the middle of cracking open the second egg since I’d completely mangled the first, the double doors burst open. I jumped, and when I did, a string of gooey yolk flew back on my sweatshirt.

The captain looked around the kitchen, the whites of his eyes blazing around his dark irises. His wide chest hitched with every quick breath, like he’d been running. “Everything okay in here?”

Randolph glanced at me, his forehead puckered. “Yes…”

“Good… I thought I… Good.” Captain Glenn nodded as he took in the steaming pot and the mess of ingredients covering the counters, table, and me. “There’s a telecom in the dining room if you need anything.”

With the shift of light when we’d been in the dim hallway to the brightness in here, I finally saw him straight on. The deep blue pockets under his eyes sagged into his cheeks and pulled his whole face into a tired frown. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, but it was more than just exhaustion I saw there. While smoothing his hands down his coat, he offered a smile that looked more like a grimace and backed out again before I had a chance to pinpoint what it was.

Randolph scratched the end of a spoon over a furrowed, bushy eyebrow. Steam from the pot curled the ends of his hair over his ears, which made it look like it sprouted from inside. “I once knew a captain who wore some of his own toes around his neck for good luck. Space travel does strange things to people sometimes. Anyway, I turned the oven on for you. You’re welcome.”

“Thank you, oh great boogly bags,” I muttered. He must’ve heard me because he threw back his head and laughed at the ceiling. His hand disappeared inside his vest and emerged with a silver flask. So that was what was making his spirits bright. As if he’d read my mind, he began to hum the Christmas carol.

I focused on the piece of egg shell swimming in the bowl and finally used the edge of a spatula—that’s what it was for!—to get most of it out. Some lucky soul may find the rest of it. Once I’d scooped the mixture into a pan, a blast of hot air hit my face as I opened the oven door and shoved the pan inside. I was tempted to climb in after it to bring feeling back to my fingers and toes, but a cooked Absidy, James, whatever, probably wasn’t on Randolph’s menu.

When I finished beating some heavy cream into perfect peaks, Randolph slammed a bowl of plump red heatherberries onto the table. “Watch and learn.” With a small knife, he sliced through one with a shaky yet precise hand. “See? There’s no need to kill it when you’re cutting because it’s already dead.”

I held out my hand and wiggled my fingers for the knife. His eyebrows climbed up his forehead when he handed it to me, like a cynical kind of dare. I bent over the table to stare down that heatherberry, steadied my numb hand, and sliced one up in flawlessly even pieces.

“Better,” he said and heaved a sigh that burned alcoholic fumes up my nose. “But now we won’t be able to eat for another two years at the rate you’re going. Tell you what, I’ll finish this, you set the table and promise to practice.”

“Fair enough.” In the dining room, I spread the dishes out around the table but stopped a plate mid-clatter when I thought I heard something.

A scream? A drawn out deep one that peppered my skin with more goose bumps. I shot around the table and into the hallway. A bone-deep shiver rattled through my body. The tip of my nose iced over, and I swore my fingers creaked over frozen joints when I balled them into my pockets.

The light at the end of the hallway hung crooked and swung back and forth, pulsing bursts of light onto one wall with a faint buzzing noise. Leaping shadows painted the walls on either side of it until they faded into gloomy darkness. All the other lights in the hallway had gone out.

A familiar dread trickled into my stomach and quickened my breaths. But it was just an old ship, and old ships fell apart sometimes. Screaming sounds could be the result of a reluctant engine. It could be cold because we were leaving Mayvel’s atmosphere. No worries. I had enough to last a lifetime, anyway.

“Hello?” Unease laced through the word and carried it to the end of the hallway and back again. If no one answered, then it had to be the engine. Several heartbeats later, I slipped back into the dining room.

Randolph crashed through the double doors, an obvious sway in his step. “Are you timing your shor’bread or do you ’spect me to do everything?”

“Ah, shit.” I nearly mowed him down in my haste to get to the kitchen. He snapped a towel in my face when I pulled open the oven door, and I took it to rescue the singed-around-the-edges shortcake.

“Dinner is in five minutes, so it’ll have to do.” A string of slurred orders flew from his mouth as final preparations began. The captain had said dinner didn’t have to be anything spectacular, but Randolph made it clear that if I set out the wrong forks, I’d be dumped with today’s space trash. If this wasn’t considered spectacular, then I feared the day when spectacular was expected.

When he finished lecturing about proper place setting, I sank into a chair just as the hallway door opened. In came a youngish man in a black suit, a wool overcoat, and a red, silk scarf, his blond hair slicked back behind his ears. This groomed, and kind of attractive man didn’t fit inside this drab titanium room with the voluptuous Esmeralda smirking at him. He belonged on a ship like the Nebulous with its million dollar views and luxury tablecloths.

He circled around the entire table while tapping the wall with his index finger. An imperfection on the wall, one of Esmerelda’s nipples, the crack between the double doors, the telecom. Tap, tap, tap, all before folding into one of the chairs closest to the door he’d just entered, completely ignoring me.

Then he finally looked up, his expression empty. “I don’t know you.”

I shook my head in agreement. I’d seen that vacuous look before, and that was reason number twenty-two why I didn’t have a Mind-I. Did this guy even know where he was? And what was with all the tapping?

He placed both manicured hands on the table and went back to whatever he was doing on his Mind-I.

Captain Glenn came in soon after, much more relaxed this time, though still exhausted-looking. “Yes, that seems about right, Daryl. We can check on them again after dinner.” He held his hands out and flashed me a bright grin. “Dinner! It smells amazing. What are we having?”

Randolph poked his head from behind the double doors. “Jamessss,” he hissed and curled a finger at me.

He must have finished that flask because the lack of alcohol was dulling his spirits dark like Satan’s again.

“Um, it’s a surprise,” I told the captain and popped up before Randolph forked his own tongue.

He shoved a piping hot plate of bread into my arms, twirled me around by the elbow, and pushed me through the double doors again.

A surge of heat that had nothing to do with the bread boiled through my blood. I threw the plate on the table and tried to shake the burn from my fingers. But then I remembered that I needed to hide my girly hands so I shoved them into my pockets and marched into the kitchen again.

Randolph carried the pan of stew toward the door with trembling hands. I took the handles from him and crashed it back on the stove.

“You need to drink more of this.” I flashed a hand into his vest and shook the contents of his flask under his nose. Except he’d drank it all already. I pitched it onto the stove where it clanged against the pan. “Dinner doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be edible, and it will be unless you burn my fingers off. Calm. Down.”

“But someone will notice the stew meat is undercooked, the vegetables just seconds past raw, the shortbread burnt,” he whispered, his eyes watering. “I can’t get fired again.”

I flexed my burnt fingertips, still in my pockets, with a sigh. At least they weren’t frozen like the rest of me. “Blame everything that’s wrong on your new apprentice. Tell everyone I skipped apprentice school since it’s the truth, but tell them I’ll do better next time. Just don’t freak out again.”

He nodded at the flask as he looked at it longingly. “Get the stew in the bowls. I’ll be out in a minute.”

The tips of my fingers were as bright as heatherberries. I picked up the pan by the handles and sawed my teeth across my lip at the stinging pain. The food couldn’t be that bad because it really did smell amazing. If Randolph was fired, then I’d have to find another ride to deep space and Ellison, and how long would that take? Randolph couldn’t get fired. Besides, Captain Glenn seemed like too reasonable a man to fire someone on their first day. I didn’t see any toes around his neck.

As I nudged the handles into my palms so my fingers wouldn’t have to touch anything, I kicked open the double doors just as the hallway door opened. Another man stood there, charging the entire dining room with a sweep of his gaze. When he pinned me under it, I froze. One blue eye held mine. His other one was several shades lighter, like wispy clouds laced over the sky. Above it, a deep scar cut down his eyebrow and his cheek to his jaw.

“Smells good in here,” he said and sauntered to a chair close to me in cowboy boots that clipped the metal flooring. Frayed jeans dragged stray threads behind him. He scraped the wooden legs of the chair backward, and when he turned, my gaze instinctively travelled upward to a backside I’d already committed to the man candy section of my memory.

That guy, the one I’d seen arguing in the Waiting Room, was here, and his front side was just as lickety-lick as the back. Delicious. Even the scars couldn’t mar that face. His muscles bulged under a tight, white thermal as he took off his brown coat and draped it over the chair. He shook a head full of messy blond hair out of his eyes, his gaze fixed on the empty plate in front of him while he sat.

At the sound of someone clearing their throat, I snapped out of my trance and threw myself into stew-serving overdrive, a blush heating my cheeks. I needed to act like a boy, not some sex-starved school girl, but no amount of inner-scolding could slow the rush of my heart.

It seemed logical that the captain should get his food first, though I had no clue if I was right. I never paid attention to proper serving etiquette on the Nebulous.

When I’d managed to fill Captain Glenn’s bowl without slopping any in his lap, I moved to the chair to his right, just inside the door that led to the hallway. A man with wildly untidy hair, a long face, and crooked teeth sat there, his gaze aimed at Esmerelda’s poster.

“Esmerelda, you devious vixen, you,” he said. “Didja miss me?”

“I doubt it, Nesbit,” said the man with the multi-colored eyes. “But I’m sure the paper she’s on missed your globby splooge streaking down her tits.”

A wave of disgust jerked my serving hand, and a potato popped out of the spoon and landed on the table with a wet splat. Did he seriously just say that in front of everyone? At the dinner table of all places? Even Smixton students knew how to rein it in every once in a while. I scooped the potato back up and, not sure what to do with it, put it back in the crooked tooth guy’s bowl. Nesbit, was that his name?

“Not in front of the boy,” Captain Glenn warned, unfolding his napkin.

“Yeah, Mase,” Nesbit said.

“What? How else do you think that poster has hung on the wall so long?”

Mase, kind of like mace, the spiked iron weapon in Earth’s medieval times. I was pretty sure I could remember that.

Next to Nesbit sat the pristine man who was still absorbed in his Mind-I, then at the end across from the captain sat Mase, his watchful gaze pointed at me. The weight of it quavered my stomach. Could he see me, the real me, hidden behind this façade of a fourteen-year-old boy?

Or maybe it was my hands. They were right out in the open, but it was too late to hide them. I held my breath as I spooned stew into his bowl because the force of his eyes pressed on my chest like an accusatory finger. Just breathing felt like a crime around him. I allowed myself the smallest of inhales after I served Randolph, who still hadn’t come out of the kitchen, and sat down.

Randolph finally burst into the dining room carrying a bottle of wine, his cheeks rosier than they’d been five minutes before. I’d bet a couple frozen toes this bottle wasn’t the only one he’d found.

He put the wine in the center of the table, and with a dramatic sweep of his hand, said, “Savory red duck stew with a delicately spiced sauce, potatoes, caramelized onions, and the sweetest of carrots. A crisped loaf of bread on the side and a bottle of red wine to compliment your taste buds.” His mouth slid into the first relaxed smile I’d ever seen on him. “But save room for dessert. Enjoy.”

Raucous applause and the banging of cutlery pulled a beaming flush from the tips of his ears to his bulbous nose. He caught my eye, and I couldn’t help but smile. After a description like that, who cared what the food actually tasted like?

Everyone shoveled food into their mouths with the speed and carelessness of starving dogs. Randolph had passed the wine around the table, and everyone but Mase filled his glass.

“I only drink milk,” he said to no one in particular. “A whole pitcher of it.”

Randolph dabbed his napkin over his mouth and stood. “And milk you shall have. Anyone else need anything?” When no one said a word, he shot through the double doors. I could’ve guessed the reason he didn’t have me get it.

“You’ll have to forgive our table manners,” Captain Glenn said, giving Mase a pointed look. “Some of us think we were born in a barn. Let’s not forget to be civilized so we don’t scare off our new chefs.”

So what had happened to the old one? Why had they quit so suddenly? I wanted to ask but didn’t dare draw more attention to myself than I already had.

The captain set his fork down just as Randolph came back and set an empty glass and an entire pitcher of milk in front of Mase.

“You’ll have to forgive me, too, for my lack of manners,” the captain said. “I was so excited about the food, I didn’t introduce everyone. Randolph and James, meet the entire crew. Doctor Daryl, who keeps himself entertained when no one is sick or hurt by writing for medical journals. What’s the one you’re writing now?”

The man with the red scarf blinked. “Perioperative allogeneic blood transplantation.”

“Yes, that. And Mason Ryan, the best pilot in any solar system I’ve ever been to, and Nesbit, our genius engineer.”

Nesbit pushed out a high-pitched giggle between his crooked teeth along with a half-chewed chunk of duck.

“Crew,” Captain Glenn continued, “meet our newest chef and his apprentice who have both outdone themselves tonight, Randolph and James.”

“Hear, hear,” Nesbit said and emitted another nasally cackle of laughter.

“To Randolph.” Mase raised his glass of milk above the center of the table and cocked an eyebrow at me. “And James.”

Was it me or did he give a hint of a question mark at the end of my pseudonym? I kept my eyes averted from his penetrating stare as we all raised our glasses and smashed them together with loud clinks. But I couldn’t keep my gaze from straying to his side of the table and his bouncing Adam’s apple as he finished off his entire glass of milk and filled it with more. Rusted balls, it took a lot of milk to make that man go.

“But wait,” Nesbit said, wiping the drops of wine from his lips with the back of his hand. “You’re the pilot, right Mase? So if you’re here…”

The captain groaned. “Nesbit…”

“If you’re here…” Nesbit said again. He raked both hands through his hair, spiking it into wild tufts, and rocked back and forth in his chair like he was having some kind of fit. “Then who’s flying the ship?”

Mase ran a hand down his face then leaned his forearm on the table toward Nesbit, the set of his jaw like steel. “It wasn’t fucking funny the first hundred times, Nesbit.”

Oh my Feozva. Was that one of the reasons why deep space was considered so dangerous—because it made you psycho? I shifted in my chair and let my gaze roam over their faces for clues of just how far gone they were.

A deep blue pocketed all their eyes, like they hadn’t slept in days, weeks even. Maybe they were all just sleep-deprived, which would make anyone a little nuts. Small crews such as this probably had to stay awake all hours to make sure the ship didn’t drop out of the sky.

“Captain,” Mase started, twisting the bottom of his second empty glass in half-circles, “the light at the end of the hallway broke again.”

The atmosphere in the dining room seemed to stiffen, as did fists and shoulders from the other three crew members. Even Doctor Daryl swallowed thickly, and as he adjusted his scarf around his neck, he glanced over his shoulder at the hallway door.

Again? So the light had broken before.

The thought of the scream I hadn’t heard earlier shivered up my back. Maybe that hadn’t been the engine protesting. Had it been Mase? But no amount of imagining it could solidify that picture in my brain. He didn’t seem like the type who screamed at falling lights. What could possibly make a grown man who reduced my stomach muscles to mercury with one look scream like that?

The captain pushed his bowl of stew away. “Will you fix it, Nesbit?”

Nesbit gave a curt nod, with no sign of an upheaval of giggles.

Randolph looked just as perplexed as I felt at the sudden shift in mood. “Who’s ready for dessert?” he asked with a clap of his hands.

Hands shot up, lifting corners of mouths and the mood along with them.

“Okay, then. James?” Randolph stood.

I did too and followed him into the kitchen.

He spun around as soon as the double doors flapped closed behind us, a grin splitting his face from ear to ear. “Did you hear ’em? They loved it!” His words slurred through a haze of wine breath.

“Yes, I heard. You did great. Just…keep drinking, I guess.” Whatever made him happy. And tolerable.

He guzzled from an open bottle of wine next to the stove then stumbled toward the small table in the middle of the kitchen. “We’ll cut off the bottom of the shortbread, and no one’ll be the wiser.” With a spatula and a knife, he made quick work of slicing around the burnt edges, easing the cake out, and flipping it over to carve the black off the top that used to be the bottom. “Ta-da!”

No doubt about it—I liked Randolph a hell of a lot better when he was drunk.

After he turned the cake over gain, he showed me how to slice it into perfect squares, dollop it with the whipped cream, and arrange the heatherberries into a beautiful rose pattern on top. It almost hurt to think about something so pretty about to get mauled, but we carried it out on little plates anyway.

“May I present to you James’s first heatherberry shortcake,” Randolph said, serving the captain first.

“It looks like heaven on a plate, James,” Captain Glenn said.

“My favorite,” Mase said as I leaned over to set a plate in front of him. His breath caught my earlobe, and I jerked back at the unexpected warmth. “James.” He said my bogus name like an afterthought, but I wondered if in some way he was making fun of me. He knew. He had to know.

I turned away and risked a glance down my front to make sure everything was still bound up tight. All the bumps there were just the result of an ill-fitting sweatshirt, though. Maybe his cloudy eye had been modified for x-ray vision. That idea stirred heated possibilities to every corner of my brain. I forced myself to focus or I’d have to scoop the puddle that used to be my panties off the floor.

Once everyone was served, I settled back into my seat next to Randolph and slid my fork through the top of my dessert. Moans from the crew after their first bites reminded me of Moon and our dorm room. Sex and food. I was beginning to think she was right about men.

My first bite included an unexpected crunch, and I swallowed back a grin. I won the egg shell prize.

Everyone had already devoured their dessert. Everyone except Mase. His dessert was only half-finished like mine, with his odd pair of eyes closed and his head thrown back in complete bliss. It looked like he was caught in some sort of sexual trance. I squirmed in my seat and crossed my legs to absorb the electrical charges that kept melting into my lower belly.

“Tastes like summer. Like picnics at midnight and water balloon attacks,” he said. Then his laugh danced across the table, not crazy like Nesbit’s, but soft and deep.

All of it caught me off guard. My iron melting, chemistry experiments, and research papers never elicited moans of pleasure or made anyone so emotive, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do or say to that.

Captain Glenn looked at his watch, then out of the corner of his eye toward the hallway door. “It’s after seven o’clock.”

The doctor flicked his gaze up from his dessert. “Should we--?”

“No,” the rest of the crew answered in unison.

“What are you goin’ on about?” Randolph asked, his eyes half-closed.

The captain searched for an answer in the swirl of a knothole with his fingertip, but settled on a shake of his head. Everyone else shuffled their feet or gave nervous glances over their shoulders at the hallway door. Quiet gripped the room in an iron fist.

Pieces clicked together in my head, faster and faster until the contents of my stomach lurched. I gripped the underside of my chair and buried my fingernails into the wood to keep myself from hurling myself off this ship.

They didn’t have to tell me what they were talking about. I knew.

Something lurked outside that door, something that chased these grown men into sleepless nights, something that made them run screaming. I knew because all their faces reflected the nightmares I’d witnessed as a child. I felt it in the bone-deep chill inside this ship that never went away, in their nervous glances, in the importance of certain times of the day. I knew, without a doubt, that something dark haunted this ship.

And it was too late to jump off.