CHAPTER 1
The searchlight hits Ven’s startled face at the same instant my chest hits the broad surface of the dune. I yank on my captain’s ankle, tumbling him to the sand alongside me on the off chance that someone didn’t notice a surprise person in the midst of what’s supposed to be an unpopulated world. The searchlight pans back over the air above us.
“I don’t think they saw us,” Ven says just as a bolt of blaster light strikes the sand near our conjoined hands.
I scramble to my feet, unsteady in the light gravity and uncertain footing. “Oh, you think?”
Three more bolts hit as we crest the dune, both of us half falling when the sand slides from under our feet. He reaches back and catches my arm, yanking me up and over the peak to the dubious protection of the downslope. I duck lower while I skitter-skid down the smooth surface of the dune, darkness pressing close because when one is on a stealth surveillance mission, carrying a light is counterproductive. I have a pair of infrared glasses in my pocket somewhere, but I took them off when I was nearly blinded by the bright lights of the illegal grow operation.
“Guess we found out what was in the dead zone on the satellite and drone maps.” I’m running so quickly that I have a hand to the side, scraping the steep slope of the dune for balance. My cheap body armor is stiff and awkward, making running more difficult than it should be. The dunes fade to a rocky plateau in front of us, pitted with stone chimneys and caves. The perfect place to hide from the pursuers I can already hear climbing the other side of the dune.
“Temperance, if you don’t draw your blaster right this instant, I’m going to shoot you in the foot and leave you for them.” Ven likes to call me by my full name. My mother did the same thing, to remind me of its meaning. My father shortened it to Temper because I have a bad one. Most people use Temper.
“If I unholster my blaster, I’m going to trip over the sand and accidentally shoot you in the back. Nobody wants that.” It’s a nice back. Better without holes.
We reach the bottom of the dune, sprinting headlong toward the nearest stone chimney, lit only by the light of dual crescent moons. Ven reaches back and captures my hand, pulling me forward. It would be romantic if it wasn’t for the running-for-our-lives part.
One of the planet’s many tumbling air-plants suddenly goes up in flames next to me. Like an idiot, I turn my head to look back. I don’t know why I do it. Knowing what our pursuers look like won’t do a thing to keep their blaster fire from killing me. It’s about ten people, vibrant banishment tattoos glowing under their eyes. Their leader has a big blaster and Pierce-blond hair, illuminated by the light mounted on a neighboring weapon.
We reach the first pale stone chimney and put it between us and our pursuers, carefully winding our way between pits and narrow basalt towers. When we’re far enough into the stone formations that they can’t see us anymore, Ven gives me a boost to the hole in the side of one of the chimneys. I brace my legs inside and hold out a hand for him. He lets me haul him up after me. “Chimney” is the right word. It’s a narrow tube, pressing us together. Chest to chest. Hip to hip.
Other things to other things.
“Do you really have an erection right now?” I hiss at him. Seems like inopportune timing.
His shrug displaces a thin rain of dust from within the walls of the chimney. It patters down at our feet. “You inspire me.”
I laugh, nothing more than a puffed breath, forehead falling forward against his chest. I focus on keeping my breathing silent even though it feels like I inhaled about half the dune. As I catch my breath, Ven contacts the ship on his coms. Nothing much they can do now. We’ll hunker down here and then sneak back; vid evidence captured to share with the Flores Family. Our job is just to scout the place, not to enforce whatever law the growers are breaking.
I don’t even know what the stupid night-blooming flower in the vibrant green fields under the stark grow lights was, but you don’t go to a ghost planet near the edge of charted territory to grow legal florals.
“They were all banished.” Ven is fascinated by my own mark of banishment. It’s the first thing he ever commented on, when we met. All banishment tattoos are the same aesthetically, a glowing line that drips from beneath the left eye, about two finger-widths long. His finger traces down the line on my cheek, tender. Both of us have helmets, but the face shields are back—it’s too dark for them.
A shaft of moonlight from the hole above us illuminates his narrow face and sharp jaw. Ven’s built like a fencer, long and lean. His hand drifts from my cheek to where a strand of my dark-red hair has escaped, coiling it between his fingers. I press upward on my toes, adrenaline still hammering in my veins, and his lips meet mine in a frantic hard kiss. It builds in intensity until I feel like I could float away.
Which is stupid because there are very likely still people pacing around this stony valley waiting for us to make a noise so that they can murder us. We can get away with whispers, between the thick rock walls and the wind whistling between the formations. Not more than that. I disentangle myself gently.
This thing between us isn’t new. It’s been simmering for about half a standard year. Sometimes boiling. Sometimes exploding. But always a secret from the others on board the Quest. According to Ven, fraternizing with the crew leads to feelings of unfairness. Better to keep it quiet.
Honestly, I was just happy to be getting laid. Now, it chafes. It’s time for us to come clean. I want to tell Caro and Itzel, our engineer and biologist. Micah, the medic. Fuck, I even want to tell Itzel’s intern, Oksana. I don’t want Ven to be my secret anymore.
Ven traces a finger on my cheek one more time and takes the opportunity to state the obvious. “People aren’t driven to frontier planets unless they’ve been kicked out of regular society. They’re dangerous.”
All the shooting was a good clue. I snort. “The reason they’re here is probably the reason they were kicked out. They’re farmers, not soldiers. Besides, regular society isn’t all that safe. The Five Families are at each other’s necks and the next Ten are just as bad.”
“You were wasted with the Families, especially with Frederick.” Even trapped in a stone pillar, whispering to avoid getting shot, Ven has a way of stabbing me right in the heart with kindness. Perhaps it’s because my heart is so unused to defending against it.
It’s maybe the shock from that kindness that makes me say what I do next. “We should tell the crew.”
He blinks. Glances up at the night sky visible through the chimney above us. “I did just tell the crew. Sent an image of the flowers to whoever’s awake. Maybe they can ID them.”
A sly spike of discomfort worms its way down my spine. I quell it. He misunderstood. He’s not trying to change the subject. That’s just my brain trying to sabotage itself. “I don’t mean about how we were chased by murderous farmers. I mean about us. We’ve been doing this long enough to know it’s not just hormones and tight spaces. It’s real. I’d like to try it outside storage closets and stolen moments. Not that I don’t enjoy a storage closet here or there.”
He shifts his weight slightly, hand slipping up my back, when the crunch of gravel outside makes its way through the whistle of the wind and the stone of the chimney. We freeze. More steps sound around us, and I flash through a vivid fantasy of them shooting blindly into the rock formations, hoping to startle us out. I hold my breath. Ven is absolutely motionless.
Something scrapes the rock on the other side of the chimney, like the barrel of a blaster being dragged over the basalt.
“Where did you guys find plankat nibarat flowers?” Oksana the intern’s loud cheerful voice squeals out through my inner-ear coms, almost startling me into movement. I do twitch. Ven does, too. I also grimace because of course it would be plankat nibarat.
I’d rather it was drugs.
In the glory days of personal modifications, the one thing that never quite worked was intelligence boosting. Plankat nibarat was a sort of superfuel for fetal brain development and a medium fuel for adult brain enhancements. Nearly every one of the Fifteen Families had their hand in plankat refinement and some even experimented on their own.
Plankat does make geniuses. It just also makes paranoid sociopaths. One murdered his way through a whole satellite before he was finally captured. Shockingly, that wasn’t as popular. After a few very public examples of what became known as plankat poisoning, the cultivation of the flower was banned, and any existing crops were destroyed.
If they were making synth out here, no one would care. Plankat is a different matter because plankat is banned everywhere. It’s a danger to everyone. Plankat is one of the rare things that would drive a Family out of its comfortable territory.
Which means our pursuers really want to kill us. More footsteps approach. My palms grow sweaty.
“I haven’t seen it outside the banned-biology section in school! Could you get me a sample? Everyone would be so jealous if I could get an actual sample of plankat. The professor didn’t even have one.” Oksana keeps yammering, apparently having taken no cue from our silence.
Halfway through a midterm pleasure cruise, Oksana got dumped by her rich boyfriend and left at the nearest way station. She’s trying to save enough credits to work her way home, too embarrassed to admit the situation to her family. Ven’s been generous enough to take her under his wing, pointing out to Itzel that she always said she could use an intern.
“Hello? Are these coms working? If you’re responding, I can’t hear you.” She blithely continues as the scrape of metal against stone comes from our other side. I shift my hand to my hip, drawing my blaster and pointing it up at the open space above, heart lodged firmly in my throat. A slight mutter and scuffling sound comes from the other end of the coms.
“Oh no, you’re in danger. I didn’t know you were in danger.” Now she’s whispering. I pinch my eyes shut. “Itzel says you’re being chased, and I need to shut up because I’m distracting you because you need to lose them before you can come back here. Oh … She says I’m still distracting you. I didn’t mean to dis—”
The coms cut out. Thanks to Itzel, I assume. Ven’s chest moves against my own and I glance up to find that he’s silently laughing. I shake my head. Not the time or place. It’s not charming, it’s dangerous.
He silently laughs harder.
The sound of footsteps on gravel retreats. They don’t return. We continue to wait to be discovered or shot.
“My drones just passed over your location.” Caro’s calm voice comes over the coms sometime later. “They’re currently searching the dunes to the south. There’s a window for you to escape to us in the north if you do it fast.”
“Good.” I stretch upward to the hole above, fingers gripping the edges. “I’m starting to get a cramp in my leg.”
Ven thumbs his coms off. “I could have rubbed it for you.”
I raise a brow. “And what would you have wanted me to rub in return?”
He laughs out loud this time. We finally exit the narrow stone chimney and head north, leaving the basalt formations and setting out across rolling hills of sandy desert. The moonlight spills silver on the pale gray sand.
We almost make it to the ship.
“Shit. They have a drone of their own deployed. They’re approaching your location. I missed it. Shit.” Caro’s voice sounds in the coms again. Less calm. I’d define her tone as seriously fucking concerned.
“How far out are they?” Ven asks as we start jogging faster, glancing over our shoulders.
“Don’t jog. Run.”
The sand slides under my boots, loose and silty, turning my attempted sprint to a stumble. We finally reach the last hill and there it is in the distance, our glorious hideous ship, a dark bulk against the dunes. Ven found it in a junk heap and named it Quest. It’s not a good name but we’re used to it. Ven loves the name because of some story he read as a child. The Quest is the closest thing I’ve had to a home in ten standard solar years, and I love every dented bulkhead like it’s my own and I love its crew even more.
“There they are!” someone yells from behind us and the heat of a near-miss blaster shot traces over my hip.
As motivations go, it’s a fantastic one. I tuck my chin down, lengthen my stride, and push as hard as I can for speed. Ven pulls ahead of me.
“Run faster! They’re catching up and they have blasters. Really big ones!” Oksana’s voice breaks through the coms yet again, continuing to offer the sort of top-notch advice that will get her hired on exactly zero future scouting crews. She then appears to respond to something that was said to her outside of the coms stream. We try not to clutter the airways. “What? You said I had to be quiet before. They’re being chased now. Clearly the bad guys know where they are. I am being supportive. You can do it! Run faster!”
The Quest’s lights come on and the sand stirs around the landing gear as the engines rev up.
It’s all going so well until my foot plummets far deeper than a loose spot in the sand should allow. I crash down on my face, knee-deep in some sort of burrow or hole or maybe wherever the stupid air-plants that roll lazily around the surface of this desert originally grew. It should be easy to free myself, but my foot is caught. I shove at the sand ineffectually, trying to get a firm enough grip to pull through it but failing every time.
Ahead of me, Ven reaches the safety of the ship. He turns, probably expecting me right behind him. I’d love to meet expectations.
I give up tugging and dig around my ankle, shoving sand in the air. As I paw at the dirt, I look behind me. In the darkness, lit only by the crescent moons, it’s difficult to count pursuers. Luckily for me, they were all banished, so I can go by the little glowing tattoos bobbing above the ground. Which means that all ten pursuers have crested the hill after us and are closing in on me.
I point my blaster back at them with my free hand, shoveling with the other, and squeeze off a volley of fire. I’m not even aiming. I’m just trying to slow them down. I look back at the ship to find Ven racing toward me, tension bracketing his mouth, eyes darting from me to our pursuers who are getting ever closer. As I frantically yank my ankle again, Ven skids to a halt at my side, reaching into the hole with a knife in his hand. He starts to saw at the thick knotty roots.
My foot breaks free with shattering force, still tangled in roots that don’t seem to have an associated plant, but I don’t even care because I’m back on my feet, and we’re sprinting for the ship as fast as we can. A shot collides with the back of my armor, and two others with the helmet. The sizzle of energy dissipating dances over my skin.
My ankle hurts. Breathing hurts.
My heart, though, is so full it might burst. Ven came back for me. This isn’t just a fling. It’s real. He didn’t get a chance to answer earlier, but of course we’re going to go public with our relationship. This is more than sex.
We burst through the hatch, and it immediately swivels shut behind us. The ship vibrates as Caro launches. I lean against a bulkhead, panting for breath, and watch Ven, heart in my throat. A bead of sweat trickles down my neck.
Copyright © 2023 by Constance Fay
