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F irst comes back, on the captain’s orders, no doubt, and escorts me to a bunk room. The crew’s quarters are pretty big. There’s space enough here for a crew three or four times the size that the Halifax is now hosting. Money doesn’t seem to be the problem. Which means they’re operating with a tight crew on purpose.

The fewer people you have on board, the less talk you have off.

“Nice digs.” I step into the room First offers me. The door slides shut, leaving me alone in the room. “So polite,” I mutter to the air.

The room is small but bigger than my bunk on Glory . A double-sized bed bolted to the floor dominates one side. The wall by the door hosts a suit rack, complete with recharger hookups. That’s not unusual for a ship like this; crew tend to like to keep their own suits close, and it’s easier to dress in one’s room and then go to the shuttle bay than to turn the shuttle bay into an impromptu dressing room prior to departure. Of course, this means Nandina didn’t have to store my suit in a locker. Which means someone’s going to scan it. I file that bit away as I prowl the rest of the room. Wall cubbies show a few more outfits in the same tunic-and-drawstring style—generic gear made available for crew between suited walks, standard issue. The wash unit has some extra gadgets beyond just an antiseptic sponge and a suction toilet, so that definitely meets my approval.

There’s a large porthole of carbonglass built along the far wall, and even from here, I can see the curve of the planet below. When I press my face against the window, I can almost catch the empty shell of Glory floating nearby, too. My good little ship. “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’m coming back for you.”

My eyes linger at the gaping black scar of the breach.

I force myself to turn to the planet. Protoplanet , I mean. The world is riddled with earthquakes and volcanos, lava spurts forming dangerously erratic eruptions. It’s going to be a nice, big world one day. But right now, that planet is still a baby throwing tantrums about its own tectonic plates.

The porthole is set into the wall, the lip of it forming a space that’s perfect for sitting. I lean my back against the curved metal and stretch out my legs. My eyes drift from my poor, broken ship to the poor, broken planet and back again.

· · ·

I wake up with a start. Who knew lentils were soporific?

The comm by the door beeps again, and I hear Rian’s voice. “Ms. Lamarr?”

I hop off the ledge and cross the room. The door slides open at my touch, and there he is, eyes and all.

“Visiting a lady in her bedchamber, my goodness,” I say, propping a hip against the door frame.

“I sent off for some more data on your ship,” he says. “Can I come in? Or we can discuss this elsewhere.”

I step aside. There really isn’t much furniture in the room, so I perch back up on the porthole ledge, letting Rian take the bed.

Internally, my mind is calculating what he had to do to get even rudimentary data this quickly. The Halifax is obviously on the portal communication system, but even then, he had to have pulled some strings and must be using a booster. Technically, nothing travels faster than light, not even information. The portals just give us shortcuts.

“Tell me all about Glory,” I say, grinning at him.

Rian juts his chin out, looking down at me. “That’s just it. There’s hardly any record.”

My best grin is smeared all over my face. “Hardly any? That means you found something.” Which, shit. I thought I had everything scrubbed.

Rian pulls out a data pad and reads the screen. “Licensed as a salvage; last recorded location was four turns ago. On the other side of the galaxy.”

He doesn’t say who it was licensed to. Nice.

“I’m a busy girl,” I say. “I bounce all around.”

He watches me, waiting for me to say something else.

“When are you guys going to tell me the super secret thing you’re looking for in the Roundabout wreckage?” I ask eagerly.

Rian drops the data pad on the bed. “Who says we’re looking for anything super secret?” But he’s got a wry grin on his face; he expected me to guess this much.

“If you told me and if you sent me down there, I could find it,” I tell him. “Save you loads of time.”

“We already have a crew planetside.”

That explains the empty rooms on this corridor, then. “How many?”

“Two.”

Okay, not all the rooms. Still a top-secret project.

I clap my hands together. “Come on; tell me what you’re looking for. Precious gems? Hidden treasure? Top-secret government files?”

“My lips are sealed.” Rian presses his mouth closed as if to prove the point, although he can’t hide the tilting curve of his smile.

“How big is it, at least?” I ask. “No, don’t tell me. It’s gotta be small. All the big stuff was in the cargo hold, and you didn’t care that I’ve already been there.”

“Didn’t I?”

I shake my head at him. “Nah, I can read you like a data scan. Whatever you’re looking for, it’s gotta be small.”

“And you want me to send you down to help search for it?”

“Hey, I’m just trying to be nice. If you and Ursula—”

“Captain Io.”

“—want me to just nap and eat for the rest of your mission, whatever it is, I am absolutely, one hundred percent fine with that. I’m a good scavenger, but I’ll be honest, where I really excel at life is in eating and napping.”

That much is true.

“What are the conditions like down there?” Rian gets off the bed and leans over me, peering through the porthole. The scent of him fills my senses—I can’t even describe it; it’s just a clean smell but something unique to him, something that fills me up.

“It’s hot,” I say.

My head’s leaned back on the porthole, looking up at him, the planet in the corner of my vision. “So hot down there that the suit almost isn’t enough. There’s a layer of rocky earth, but that planet’s new. Stomp too hard and magma comes up.”

“That’ll make loaders difficult.”

“That’s not your problem,” I say.

“Oh?” He’s got one elbow on the carbonglass, and he drops his gaze to me. I’m caged in by his body and the ship, and usually that sort of positioning makes me claustrophobic, but right now, all I really want to do is close the space between us. Instead, I loll my head on the carbonglass, the smooth surface cooling my flushed cheeks.

“You gotta think,” I say, looking out at the black, “ Roundabout crashed into the planet. Not onto it.”

It takes him a second. “So, parts of the ship were engulfed by lava?”

“I’m guessing. I only saw the aft. I’m thinking the full brunt of the impact was forward. The nose of the ship, hitting a barely cooled surface. It’s not just the impact you got to worry about; it’s also the conditions of the planet fucking everything else up. So, if you’re looking for something on the bridge of that ship? It’s probably not just crushed but also burned up by lava.”

There’s a distant look on Rian’s face. I’m still facing the window, but I can see his reflection. And he doesn’t know that I see the subtle shake of his head, the firm belief that whatever he’s looking for is still down there. That’s not hope—there’s no desperation to his movement. No, he’s certain. Whatever he’s looking for, it’s still there.

He just has to find it.

It’s either not on the bridge, or it’s protected somehow, I think. And, it goes without saying, it’s worth something. A lot of something.

“It makes me wonder what went wrong,” Rian says.

He’s still focused on the ship. And it’s a fair question. All of space, the empty black void, where a ship could just break down and call for help...and it crashed. Into a planet. Made of lava.

“It does make salvage difficult,” I say. “I’m a lot more used to ghost ships in the black.”

Rian glances down at me, but I’m still pretending to look out of the window. “That sounds lonely.”

I close my eyes. “It can be.”

“Is it always just you and your ship?”

I debate whether or not to tell him the truth. “No,” I say finally.

He doesn’t ask more, but it’s weighing on my mind now. “When it is just me, though, I tend to only do the push jobs.” Glory can be used as a tugboat, pushing a dead ship through the void of space to a scrapyard station. Size doesn’t matter, not in space, not where gravity and friction don’t exist.

“This isn’t that,” Rian points out.

“Nope.”

“What made you pick up a dangerous mission like Roundabout? It’s a lot more labor-intensive than just hauling scrap.”

I creak open an eyelid. He’s watching me. I could feel it even before I looked. And even when I open both my eyes, he doesn’t look away.

“Girl’s gotta eat,” I say, shrugging.

He doesn’t buy it, but he lets it slide. That’s how I know he knows I’m dancing with lies and half-truths. Someone trying to figure out the truth knows when to let silence do the interrogation. And he thinks he’s pegged me and time will make me trust him. He’s got sharp eyes, but it’s in the way his shoulders are relaxed—he’s certain of himself. He’s one of those calm guys who just know it won’t take anything but time and persistence to get what he wants. He’s in a marathon and thinks I’m sprinting.

I kick my legs up on the ledge and turn to the window, really looking down at the planet now. “You wanna know what gets me?” I say.

He makes a curious sound. I can still feel him watching me.

“There’s no way you and I both will clear out the wreckage of the Roundabout ,” I say. “Impossible. A matter of mass; there’s too much of that broken ship down there for us.”

“Other scavengers may eventually come.”

“Maybe. But what’s the point in hauling up every scrap? Nah, there’s a good chance some of that ship is going to stay on that planet.”

“Probably.”

“And look at it. I’m not a geologist, but that planet out there? It’s a baby. The volcanos and thin crust and the earthquakes...it’s a planet that’s still growing, not yet fully formed. Give it a few million years, and the tectonic plates will settle. Gravity will pull in an atmosphere. Little algae and stuff will grow, then proper plants. Maybe dinosaurs. Another few million, and this planet could host sapient life. We’re looking at the beginning of a whole world.”

Rian’s gaze shifts to the window.

“And there’s carbonglass down there,” I continue. “Alloy metals that last. I don’t know how this stuff works, but the right conditions...what if the ship just gets buried and preserved? And in millions and millions of years, whatever life this planet fosters includes archaeologists. And they dig down in just the right spot and they find the Roundabout .”

“I suppose it’s possible, if unlikely.”

That’s basically the mantra of my life, but I don’t bother telling him that. Instead, I say, “That’s what I think about. Space is so mind-bogglingly big. Utterly incomprehensible. But we leave our shit everywhere. Ghost ships in the void. Crashes on protoplanets. The litter we jettison. And sometimes, I run into it. It’s always our stuff. Never anything from another species.”

“There are other species, though,” Rian says.

“Yeah, but not sapient.” We’ve found whole planets with life, flora and fauna. Nothing ever talks back to us.

Nothing ever builds spaceships.

“Maybe that planet down there doesn’t even develop life,” Rian says. “Most of them don’t.”

That’s true. But maybe it will. And maybe there will be someone like me, millions and millions of years from now, who finds something from us, who will know that even if the universe is silent, it wasn’t always.