Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ko knew one room in the Rhapsody, and she slept in it.

She knew there were others. She’d been given a tour of the place, a basic overview of the facilities. But the first night – morning – had been shrouded in a haze of exhaustion, and they’d almost immediately set out for Makoro again so Ko could resolve what few affairs she had left. They’d stuck together, all of them knowing how dangerous it would have been for any one of them to be alone, and she’d pushed through her remaining responsibilities as quickly as she could: letting the others make a last sweep of what remained of her building for any personal affects or calling cards from the Scarlet Eye, and, after Pyke convinced Ziggy and Rett to give them a bit of privacy, finding one of Ms. Ume’s closest friends and telling her, as gently as possible, what had happened.

She’d asked Ko who would be conducting the memorial service. If Ko was staying for it. Ko hadn’t missed the look she’d gotten when she’d handed off the responsibility and said she was leaving town, but the alternative – pretending she had any place in their grief, knowing that she was the cause of it – would have been more disrespectful to Ms. Ume’s memory than anything else she could do.

She’d seen the judgement, heard the unspoken you’re running away. Of course she had. She just couldn’t bring herself to care. There was a burned, raw part of her that would tear her insides to pieces if she had to watch them lay empty air to rest. Or worse, if they took the time to find and collect her ashes. Probably they’d been scattered on the streets of Makoro, and Ms. Ume laid between cobblestones and fibers of dust-mats. 

It had been a revolting thought, one she’d fled by going back to the Rhapsody as soon as it came and insisting she was finished with Vanar and everything on it. When Rett had, dubiously, accepted it, they’d all gone their separate ways to finally start licking their wounds. 

So it wasn’t until she woke up the next morning, still wearing her day clothes in a sterile, unfamiliar bedroom, already lightyears away from her home of the last two months, that she’d even begun to process how quickly the last few days had run through her hands.

It was the first moment she’d had that she could just sit, take it in for a second.

The room was bright in a yellow, sunny sort of way, despite not having windows. It half-felt like summer, like sleeping in on a weekday. The other half felt like prison.

With softer sheets. Not smooth, but actually soft. Not the kind of thing people bought in bulk, something picked out by someone just for this bed. She had a sudden, visceral feeling of being given a gift she didn’t deserve, and it pushed her upright to explore the rest of the room before her mind had the chance to pull itself fully into motion.

Someone had, at some point, put a few off-size but clean clothes in her closet. Her toolkit, the only thing she owned that hadn’t been stored in the apartment, sat on an otherwise-bare shelf. There was a lamp, there was a clock. And there was furniture that now belonged to her, room to walk around, empty rooms on either side of her. 

She hadn’t been expecting it. When Pyke had said he and Rett had a personal ship, even her wildest imaginations had pictured something like a smuggling hauler maybe a few times the size of the Bus, something small and secondhand where they’d all be on top of each other. Instead, everywhere she looked, there was excess. It wasn’t extravagance, but there was extra. Things someone else didn’t need.

There’d been so little of that in the undercrust. She hadn’t been able to ignore it, once she’d seen it. There wasn’t enough good water, not enough energy. There wasn’t even enough light, something she’d taken for granted before meeting Pyke – after six months in the can with him, she was more familiar than she’d ever hoped to be with nightsickness, and in the thin, anemic light, every Solari unfortunate enough to be stuck below the top slice was sporting it. It was another of those casual injustices, the way people were punished just for existing.

Why was she the one who got to leave?

It was a train of thought she was still too exhausted to have already ridden so far. A quick glance at the clock – her clock, now – said it was late enough in the morning that at least Pyke would probably already have came and went from breakfast, and she couldn’t decide if that was worse or better. It would be one less person she’d have to interact with, but he was the only one between the three of them who silence was comfortable instead of untested and strange.

Briefly, she considered staying in her bedroom for the day. She’d found an odd kind of calm, and wasn’t sure it would hold up to anything disturbing it. In the end, hunger won out, and she found herself changing into some stranger’s clothes, wandering the ship until she hit a familiar hallway and eventually found the kitchen.

She’d been right, that Pyke had already left. Rett, as well, was nowhere to be seen. But sitting at the table, goggles on and oversized hood pulled up over his frill, was Ziggy.

For a moment, all that passed between them was a paralyzing stare. It seemed to hit them both at once that it was the same stare, two people equally afraid the other would want to start some kind of conversation, and Ziggy visibly relaxed when she only crossed the room to the coffee pot and fridge.

She was usually more social than this. Probably more than Ziggy could stand, she thought, if she weren’t so drained. As it stood, they were evenly matched, and she managed to get through her whole breakfast without either of them saying a word. There was plenty of it, more than enough, and it was bitterly ironic that the first time in months she wasn’t taking from anyone else’s mouth was the first time she didn’t want to eat.

She gave up on trying to resist the way the thought soured her mood, and committed herself instead to trying to ignore the little looks Ziggy was sending her once the air shifted at the table. She could see him preparing to speak for minutes before he did, but didn’t have the strength to try and stop him.

“Are- are you going to get your license?” He asked finally, tentative, and Ko almost gave him an apathetic shrug before she realized he’d offered a distraction she couldn’t afford to pass up.

Was she going to? Pyke had mentioned it, but they’d had a lot going on at the time. She guessed she’d agreed to something like that when she joined the crew, but she had no clue what it would even involve.

“You just got yours, right?” She asked, remembering how shiny and new it had looked next to Pyke’s. He nodded, pulling it out.

“They got my name wrong, but it really wasn’t very hard. You just have to do a few trainings – they can be online,” he said quickly when he saw her grimace. “And then you bring in a bounty. Pyke and Rett helped me, that’s allowed. We might even be able to use Big Thunder for it.”

Ko couldn’t resist scoffing, and regretted it immediately when she saw his face fall. “No, I- it’s not that, that’s a good idea. It’s just… Big Thunder. He’s such an ass. His name’s Sagyo, don’t build him up with cool shit like that.”

Ziggy paused a moment, wincing. “Well, that’s, Sagyo feels really…I’m going to keep calling him Big Thunder,” he said, sounding a bit nervous, and Ko sighed. The conversation was turning back to the places she’d been trying to avoid.

“How’d you do it?” She asked, instead of pushing it, and despite the goggles she could almost see him perk up. “Let me guess. You went for your license, ran into Pyke and Rett trying to grab some guy, did a little quid pro quo?”

“Oh, no, I- I was already on the crew by then. We got some jewel thief, he was easy. No, they were actually sent to get me at first,” he said, and the story he launched into was the escape Ko had needed. She was positive there was some embellishment – seriously, Pyke sprouting badass wings and flying around? – but his innocent awe was infectious. It gave her the same feeling as when she’d seen the Aether whales swimming through the stars the day before, like for a moment she wasn’t running from anything ugly and dissonant, just privileged to be part of some big adventure. By the time he actually got to his own bounty, Ko felt tangibly lighter, and she wasn’t sure why she’d wanted to avoid talking to him so badly before.

“-so we brought him back to the Guild,” Ziggy finished, “and they gave me my license! Just like that.” He pulled it out again to show her, looking like he was still excited just to have the thing, and Ko couldn’t help but give in and take it again, looking it over like she’d never seen it before.

She couldn’t deny it was pretty cool. It was nice, thick plastic, the words raised a little bit from the back of the card and the Galatic Bounty Guild logo embossed on the back. Aside from the peace sign he was flashing in his photo, it made him look official, like he was part of something.

Something with rules, which she’d protested before. But something with protection, which she was starting to see the value of.

She handed the card back. “It’s a damn shame people need a card to clean up trash,” she said, her mind going down four decks to Sagyo, hopefully half-conscious in his cell and feeling every wave of the pain she’d put him in.

“Pyke says it’s more about getting paid for it,” Ziggy said obliviously, putting the card away. “But like I said, we maybe- we might be able to use Big Thunder for yours and not need to find someone else! Well, the bounty was taken under me and Pyke and Rett, so I don’t know, actually. But I think they took out mine since I couldn’t? I’m not really sure. But maybe.”

“If I can’t kill him, handing his ass to the Empire is the next best thing,” she said, standing. “I’ll ask Pyke. You know where he went?”

“The sunroom, I think?” Ziggy hit a button on his computer and peered at the screen. “Oh. It's in the ship's internal log as the solarium. So maybe that?” Solarium. It was just like this place to have a big, fancy word when a normal one would do, and she couldn't get a hold on how she felt about it yet.

“Thanks, kid.” She was already moving, clearing her dishes away and heading towards the door, and she heard a distant “I’m twenty-” before it pulled shut behind her.

Asking about Pyke had been a lie. The last thing she wanted to do was discuss Sagyo again, with Pyke or with anyone – but she needed to move, despite how sore she still was from the fight, instead of sitting around letting the anger build. She could even tell herself it was useful, a way of getting more familiar with the ship.

It was bigger than it looked from the outside. Ko kept expecting herself to hit some kind of access barrier, some door that wouldn’t open for her, but it never came. It looked like Pyke’s trust was enough, or maybe they just didn’t let people onboard who they were worried would cause trouble. There were engine rooms, storage rooms, amenities like the gym – she got so caught up in it that at one point she approached a large door in awe and was embarrassed when it opened and it was the same hangar bay she’d been in several times already.

Generally, she was working from the top down, and it took hours to get to the lowest decks. When she did, she found herself on a path that felt familiar, though after the last several days she couldn’t place it.

A small sound echoed into the hallway from behind the door in front of her that shot through her veins like lightning.

It was Sagyo. She could hear him; this was the brig. There was the occasional moan of pain, more often just the clink of metal on metal, soft sounds and echoes as he talked to himself in the quiet.

Her tattoos itched, and she could feel her hair starting to stand on end. She was shaking, too, but she couldn’t bring it in herself to care; she just knew he was on the other side of that door, and there was no one here to stop her.

The lights flared around her, and the voice stopped from inside. She realized her mistake immediately.

“I know you’re out there, Ko,” Sagyo called, his voice clear through the door. It was slurred and weak, but as condescending and smug as it had always been. “I can feel it through the floor.”

It stoked a white-hot rage in her chest that begged her to ignore the bounty and kill him now. She wished she could say she held back to keep her promise to Pyke, but it was something else that calmed her down. She wanted him to be surprised, she realized. When she came for him, she didn’t want him to know about it first.

And she would come for him. She knew it with a jolt of certainty, more sure than of anything else she’d wondered about since joining the crew. Suddenly her aimless wandering had direction, that pressing grief somewhere to go.

She’d give him exactly what he deserved. Just not yet, not before she’d had time to think. So she turned, hands still, and walked away.

Her curious mood was gone. There was only one place she wanted to go now, and only because there was only one person she wanted to see: belatedly, the lie would become truth.

It had been on the tour, but only as a quick gesture and a passing glance. Rett hadn’t seemed to want to linger. Luckily, she remembered it was up, and the upper decks were smaller, harder to get lost in. She found the space she was looking for almost immediately, and the door pulled open as she approached.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Rett, unlike Ziggy, had just called it Pyke’s sunroom, so maybe something small. Neat, orderly, but a bit devoid of personal affects, like his cell or his room. What she got was something else entirely.

For a moment, it was intolerably bright, and she brought a hand up to block out the light before realizing it was coming from all sides. Then, she heard something shift, and everything dimmed until it reached a tolerable level.

Ko understood at once why the ship listed it under a more official name. It was a nice room, one that reminded Ko of the rooftop greenhouses people in Makoro had tried to set up wherever there was enough sky to see the sun. It wasn’t so humid inside, but there was glass on every wall, with as little resistance as possible to any angle of light that wanted to make its way in. There were a few large but bedraggled plants littered around the edges, and enough patio furniture to seat several people sat in a small corner, creating its own little pocket of ambiance. It was charming at first glance, but a layer of dust sat on it that implied it hadn’t seen use in quite some time.

In the opposite corner, looking much more well-maintained, was Pyke’s daybed, a chaise lounge that looked like a more comfortable version of the tanning chairs by the pools in the upper crust. There was a small table next to it with a tablet placed on it, and someone had dragged up some kind of chair next to that, but it was clearly a space designed for one, sitting far enough away from anything else in the room that low conversation wouldn’t carry enough to bother him.

Sitting in it was Pyke, with a pair of ancient-looking wired headphones on, holding a remote and giving her a curious look. He looked better than when they left Makoro, even in the single night it had been, and she was struck again at how diminished she was used to him being.

When they’d first met, she’d known on some level he wasn’t well. They both knew neither one of them was as strong as they ought to be, but Pyke didn’t know just how faded her tattoos were, she’d never seen his usual glow. It hadn’t been until he’d shown up in Makoro looking healthy and new that she’d really understood, but without the light to maintain it he’d faded again relatively quickly. Now, though, it was as obvious as it was in the bar – not just the way his body had filled out since prison, but his whole aura. His skin was a little darker, his eyes more vibrant and saturated. Even in the brightness of the sunroom, his hair was overpowering, casting a caustic network of orange and magenta across the floor. He looked relaxed. Comfortable. Strong.

She, in contrast, knew she didn’t look much different. Still too skinny, still beat up from the fight with Sagyo, shaking off that poison from a week ago – yeah, that was the Ko he knew.

“You getting soft on me, Pyke?” She asked by way of a greeting, and he sighed, moving his headphones to his neck and following the wire down to something in his pocket.

“I’m fine,” he said, sounding exasperated. “The light from my room would have been plenty. Rett’s just been…protective, lately.”

So that’s what this room was for. If it was functionally a Solari medbay, she could have guessed Rett had been the one to send him up here. Introspection and sitting still were Pyke’s weakest skills. “Can you blame him?” She asked, grateful he was annoyed enough to have focused on his own exasperation instead of her situation. “Ziggy said you got your ass kicked when you guys came out to get him.” Actually he’d talked about how cool Pyke had looked when he’d started shooting light everywhere, but she knew Pyke well enough to put two and two together.

“Nearly,” Pyke started, but Ko was faster.

“‘Nearly’ like ‘they missed,’ or ‘nearly’ like ‘you exploded into flames, dragged yourself back from passing out, and probably collapsed the second you got safe?’” She asked, and Pyke’s silence told her the answer. She didn’t push it, just took the chair across from him and waited him out.

“I was rusty,” he said eventually. It was a relief to be able to hear everything behind it, just to know the person she was talking to so deeply. Doubly so because it was Pyke admitting he’d struggled with the change, too. “You know he kept my room clean?” Pyke asked, in a tone that to anyone not on the Rhapsody would scream bored. “Bed made, no dust, nothing. It’d never looked like that, but I keep it that way, now. I’m so used to it.”

Ko understood what he was really trying to say. It was a nice gesture – better by far than leaving it to rot for however long he’d been gone. But it was another one of those things that had changed without asking either one of them, and after six months with every wrinkle inspected he couldn’t just go back to how it used to be.

“You’re telling me, man,” she said. “I get out and M– everyone’s on a whole other planet. I’d never been to Makoro.” She looked around. Where before she’d seen the similarities to the greenhouses there, now she could only see the differences, chief among them the aether streams floating distantly outside the fortified glass. “I’ve never been on a spaceship like this.”

“Feels like you’ll never get used to it,” Pyke said, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. “Then one day you look up and you are. Just gotta give it some time, Ko.”

“I don’t have time!” She snapped, and he didn’t react aside from turning his head to face her and giving her one of his impassive looks. “I was in there for two years, Pyke. The Scarlet Eye was out there that whole time, doing all this- you saw it! People are getting killed, are getting-”

“We’re not fixing the world by next week,” he interrupted, voice even, and she huffed. It was a conversation they’d had before, when Pyke had only just started his sentence and thought the conditions inside were the only reason she wanted out so badly. The burned face of one of her neighbors, someone she'd only ever seen in the hallway in passing and then dead, filled her mind, and she couldn't stop herself from thinking no, but I didn't have to make it so much worse before burying it as deep as she could. “You need a hobby. You can’t spin yourself in circles like this every time we’re off planet.”

Ko squirmed. In the dark turn her thoughts had taken, she felt exposed suddenly in the light, and all of her injuries were in that annoying stage where they itched and didn’t hurt enough to make her not want to scratch. “Fuck kind of hobbies do you even have on a spaceship?” She mumbled, moderately uncomfortable. It was kind of Pyke to pretend it was boredom that had her on edge, but there was still a trickling discomfort of skirting so close to it so quickly.

“Well obviously you’re not popping wheelies on the bike, but there’s things to do,” Pyke replied. “What’d you wanna do when you were a kid? If you hadn’t been cutting class and helping in-”

“I’ve had enough of everything being new.” And of thinking about when she was little. “I just need a routine. Don’t tell me you haven’t had any trouble with it since they sprung you.”

“I got rid of my routine as fast as I could,” Pyke said. “That’s the appeal of this whole gig. We never know where we’re gonna end up.”

Ko forced a wry smile. “Never know whose ass we’re gonna end up kicking, right?”

Pyke gave her a grin, and she couldn’t help but notice the easy way it came to his face. They hadn’t been back on the Rhapsody very long, but there was something different about him even so – a quiet centeredness, the sure gait of someone who knew where they belonged. There had been a quiet restlessness to him in prison, one he’d shared with Ko. Together, they’d spent every day with the corner of their eyes on the exit door, and Ko had never stopped, never let herself slow down. Pyke had been the same way in Makoro, which had tricked her into thinking he was still like her.

He wasn’t, she was realizing. He was home.

The reminder of Ms. Ume hit her like a freight train, and she could almost feel the weight of it sinking into her shoulders. For a moment, the only thing she could do was force the tears back before they could fall, and Pyke must have developed a self-preservation instinct in the last few seconds, because he just let the war rage on in front of him, looking at her with that blank, silent stare until she had herself back under control. Every time today she’d pushed it away, it had come back stronger, hit her harder; it was half grief and half raw frustration at going up and down so much in such a short span of time.

But the only thing worse than not thinking about it was thinking about it, so she pushed again, hoping this time it’d stay gone.

“Hobbies,” is all he said when she was done. “The kid games. Rett has his projects. You know what I do. It helps.”

It didn’t work. She could feel the pendulum, already on its way back, so she only nodded and focused on a plant in the corner.

It was an ironic opposite of her conversation with Ziggy from before. She had wanted to talk to Pyke, sought him out, and now couldn’t remember why she’d thought it was a good idea.

“I’m gonna go,” she said, standing. She could feel Pyke’s eyes on her while he nodded, but couldn’t bring herself to meet them, instead taking advantage of the silence to get out as quickly as she could.

Her tattoos burned. If they were still on Makoro, she’d be on the streets, probably finding the closest redbelt and an elevator shaft. But she wasn’t. She was here, on a ship with one friend and one enemy and two almost complete strangers, trapped unless she wanted to open an airlock and throw herself into an Aether current.

The next best thing would have been the punching bag in the gym, but it felt too open, too exposed. Even if the only person likely to go there was Pyke, it put her on edge, like she was walking the line of someone else’s territory and waiting for them to come and take it back. The part of her with fangs told her she had a better punching bag four decks down, and it was only the wailing animal-cry of the rest of her wounded mind that stopped her from taking advantage of it.

There were no good options. There were only bad ones that exposed her to other people and bad ones that didn’t. In the end, she went by the kitchen again, grateful to see that Ziggy had left, and got something that would keep long enough that she wouldn’t have to leave her room for hours.

It was empty, and it was cold. There was no better place for her to burn, and burn, and burn.

***

The next morning was better.

She didn’t feel different, exactly, but she was more worn down, which meant she didn’t have as much of herself to spare on anything she didn’t want to spend it on. It took all her energy to pull herself out of bed early enough to catch Pyke in the gym for his morning meditation, and that was fine by her.

He was already there when she arrived, but she’d known he would be. In prison, he’d gotten up with the sun, and she knew from the day before that there was enough of a light cycle to mimic that circadian rhythm. He was deep in meditation, so she started on her own warm ups, trying to get her still-sore shoulders to loosen out after days of inactivity.

Every so often, Pyke’s ears would twitch when she grunted or her shoe squeaked on the ground, and it was the only indication she got that he was even aware of her presence. She wasn’t very concerned – if she was bothering him, he was more likely to just pack up and leave than sit there and pretend she wasn’t – but she made an effort to move a little more quietly, at least until he opened his eyes and started stretching.

“Rett said he didn’t see you at all yesterday,” Pyke said, getting his wrist wrap from a cupboard on a far wall.

Ko threw another light punch at the bag, dodging his gaze and the implied question. “You saw what there was to see. I was exploring for a while. Got tired, went back to my room, went to sleep.”

She could tell without even looking that Pyke didn’t believe her, but she was equally sure he wasn’t going to pry. It had been an invitation to talk, not a mandate, and having rejected it she was in the clear. Hands finished, he only stood and made for an open space in the middle of the room, 

This, at least, was something that hadn’t changed. The guards hadn’t been keen on letting two inmates hone their skills on each other, but it hadn’t stopped either of them – they didn’t have to be quiet about it anymore, but it was still familiar. It was a part of Pyke she could predict, even with the different people freedom had let them become.

She was caught up enough in it that it wasn’t until they took a break that she even remembered to tell Pyke her plan for the day.

“I’m going to talk to Sagyo,” she said, squirting some of her water into her mouth.

Pyke looked up from where he was picking at the wraps on his hands. “Talk to, or talk to? ” He asked, and Ko shrugged.

“That’s his call.”

Pyke, to his credit, didn’t immediately try and shoot her down; but as seconds passed and he didn’t speak, she could tell he wasn’t thrilled about the idea, either.

She didn’t need his permission, she reminded herself. It was her bounty. Probably. As long as he was alive at the end, everything else was between her and him. She’d only let Pyke know as a formality, since it was his ship, and as a friend. It sparked the tired ember in her chest that he even seemed to have reservations.

Eventually he pushed himself off from where he was leaning against the wall. “He’s given up some pretty good intel already. What makes you think you need to work him over again?”

“If you’re ready, then get back out here,” Ko said, instead of answering, and he just shrugged before coming at her with the speed he’d been building back up since – she imagined – he’d gotten out of prison. 

Luckily, she was ready for it, and ducked out of the way, trading light blows until she managed to get one of his knees to buckle and pin him to the floor.

“Look, it’s just-” She started, panting, and realized she didn’t know where to go with it. “I don’t know. He’s holding out on us. I don’t like that.”

Pyke seemed to consider that for a moment before throwing his entire body to the side, knocking Ko off him with the unexpected force in it. Before she knew what hit her, he was the one on top, and had a knee to her chest and his other foot on her right wrist.

“He is holding out on us,” he said, voice strained with the effort of keeping her down. “That’s what people do when you kidnap them for a bounty. Just because you have history-”

Instead of waiting for him to finish, Ko lurched forward, getting her head over his shoulder and twisting so that her horn hooked him and she could yank him back down with her. Without his leverage, Ko had the advantage – Pyke was resilient and he was strong, but even when he’d first gotten tossed in with her, he wasn’t the kind of guy who was hard to bodily throw around.

And he knew it, so when Ko went to get him by the chest and shoulders, he slid out of her grasp and sprang up, putting the distance back between them and waiting for her next move.

“I’m not gonna stop you,” he said, keeping a careful eye on her stance. “I won’t say we don’t need the info if he’s got it.”

“Trust me,” She went for a kick to his left shin, twisting to let the answering body shot graze her instead of strike true. “I could get him to crack.”

Pyke jabbed left, catching her in the feint before taking a hard elbow straight to the bottom of her jaw. Her upper lip caught on one of her tusks, drawing enough blood that she could taste it. Giving her a moment to check the damage, he pulled away. “I just don’t know that it’d be good for you.”

She licked the cut, pulling herself back into a fighting stance. “It would be,” she growled, lunging again and throwing her right arm into a punch. When Pyke twisted away, she let her momentum carry her, taking advantage of her size to twist around and plow her left elbow into his sternum.

She’d expected the rush from going so deeply off-balance. What she didn’t expect was a completely different energy in her veins, and, for just a moment, her tattoos to crackle, a bolt of lightning snaking out where skin met skin and winding around Pyke’s chest.

Ko was off him immediately, but the force of it staggered him, and he bent over and didn’t straighten back up.

“Holy shit, Pyke, I didn’t mean to do that,” she said, stumbling upright. She moved to touch him and thought better of it at the last second, hovering her hands anxiously. Realistically, she knew it couldn’t have been enough to do any real damage – not to Pyke, and especially since he didn’t have his gauntlet on – but the surprise of it was something she thought she’d put far, far behind her, and he wasn’t saying a word. “Pyke, are you- you’re okay? Are you alright?”

He reached out one hand and put it hard on her chest, flinching for a moment at the spark of static electricity, and Ko instinctively brought her weight backwards, ready to be pushed. “Fine,” he said instead, voice quiet and strained. “Winded.”

Ko breathed a sigh of relief, waiting for the gasp that’d tell her his breath had come back. When it came, Pyke coughed, straightening up and taking deep, intentional breaths.

“The elbow got me worse than the shock,” he said after a few moments, stretching out one of his shoulders and wincing. A pang of guilt shot through Ko’s chest. “But I’ve gotta say, I’ve never seen you do that by accident.”

“I used to, but that was- I mean, I was a kid,” she said, looking at her hands. Nothing was sparking there – even her hair had settled down – but she still felt an odd, shaky kind of nervous to touch anything, even her own clothing. “I guess I haven’t had to hold back as much lately. I’ve been trying to end fights pretty quickly these past few weeks.”

The excuse sounded flimsy, even to her own ears, but the alternative – there wasn’t an alternative, not one she could entertain. It was her job to have Pyke’s back, not to mention Rett and Ziggy. Becoming dangerous to them was out of the question, so she was fine.

He only shrugged, leaning against the wall and moving for his towel. “I’m not that worried about it. It’d probably be a good thing to learn to take it head-on like that. But if you need to talk, you tell me, yeah?”

“I don’t need to talk,” Ko said, immediately irritated and somehow even more guilty for having the nerve to be mad. She sighed, trying to level back out. “Quit trying to play therapist with me, man. I’m fine. I’m just beefing back up a little faster than I thought. You know neither of us were on the top of our game in there.”

Pyke gave her a look, but before she could decipher what it meant, he scrubbed the sweat off his face and took the expression with it. “I’m going to shower. But about Big Thunder.” He gave her a piercing look, and didn’t waver until she returned it. “He’s your bounty. If you can get something from him, great, but don’t go into anything without thinking.”

“You’re one to talk,” she shot back, and he shoved at her shoulder.

“See you for breakfast?”

“I’ll meet you there,” she said, gathering her things as if she were going to leave. As soon as Pyke was out of earshot – and then some, to compensate for his Solari hearing – she set them back down and went after the punching bag as hard as she could.

Pyke was right, at least about some of it. It was an annoying habit of his to have an intuition that his intellect didn’t justify. Her bounty. When she’d thought it, it was about possession, but she’d heard a warning in his tone: if Sagyo died, she was putting this new phase of her life on hold, or even at risk.

But she didn’t know how to let go of the old phase yet. She’d left it physically, but with Sagyo in the hold it wasn’t a clean cut. She had to be free of him before she could be free of it, and she couldn’t be free of him until she knew he’d paid for what he’d done.

A bolt of lightning wound down her arm and connected with the bag, intense enough that even she felt the buzz. Before she could set it on fire, she pulled away, gathering everything she’d brought in and leaving the room.

So what if she was sparking again? She was eating well again. She wasn’t getting jostled awake at dawn by prison guards. If she was getting stronger, it wasn’t control she needed, it was an outlet.

And she had one in the brig.

First she’d promised to meet Pyke for breakfast. She wouldn’t break another promise, and he’d probably come find her if she didn’t anyway. There was a small shower just off the gym, and unlike Pyke, she didn’t have any better clothes waiting in her closet to change into, so she gave herself a quick rinse and wandered until she found the kitchen again.

It wasn’t what she’d expected. By the time she’d made it in the day before, everyone except Ziggy had cleared out. This time, though, it was awash with activity, as if they’d planned it. They probably had, in another routine she hadn’t been around long enough to be part of yet.

It was how it must have happened. Still, what was going on looked anything but routine.

The counter and table were littered with parts, nearly every appliance in various pieces and places across the counter space. Some of them – parts Ko was pretty sure were not standard for a dishwasher, given how many times she’d repaired M- the one at her old apartment – were glowing purple with Aether, and Ziggy was passing those carefully to Pyke, who ferried them equally gently to Rett.

“And so this would-” Pyke was saying, pawing at something next to Ziggy.

“Let me do that,” Ziggy said, moving Pyke’s hand away from the keyboard and ignoring his affronted look. Rett was drinking his morning coffee protectively next to the coffee machine, the only untouched part of the entire room, and he looked at Ko with a resigned sigh.

“Morning,” he said, voice flat.

“Hell happened here?” She asked, her interest piqued.

“They’re taking apart the damn dishwasher to ‘fix it.’” Rett set his coffee down and crossed his arms. “As if it hasn’t worked fine for the last-”

“Don’t say the number you’re going to say,” Ziggy said, sounding genuinely scared, and Ko checked the cupboard, grateful the fancy mug she’d been given that first morning hadn’t been taken. “This thing is archaic. It’s got to be older than I am.”

“That ain’t hard,” Rett muttered under his breath. Pyke’s ear twitched at the sound, and he rolled his eyes, not even bothering to turn around.

“The ‘damn dishwasher’ runs the rinse cycle on Aether because you scavenged it from a junkyard when you were picking up spare parts,” Pyke said, reaching again for a part and looking unsurprised when Ziggy swatted him away. “You’re always complaining that no one else cleans the kitchen, well, there you go. We’re not all built to handle that. Kid’s getting it on the electric system with everything else.”

“If you so much as look at the coffeemaker,” Rett began, and Ziggy turned at the same time Pyke did.

“Can I?” He asked hopefully, drowned out by Pyke’s much louder “We won’t,” which seemed to leave Rett tense just for the show of it.

“I’m throwing my vote in for being able to run the dishwasher without Hank plugging in,” Ko said, adding her creamer, and Pyke gave her an appreciative nod.

“You’re out-voted, Rett. We’re fixing the dishwasher.”

“I was out-voted before Ko even got here,” he grumbled. “If you’re going to fuck with it, at least let me look.”

“Oh, good, you can explain how the Aether hooks in here,” Ziggy said, immediately cutting off whatever he’d been moving toward, and Ko gave her coffee another hefty splash as she watched.

She’d spent a lot of time watching them. More than they realized, probably, given how much time she spent actively participating. There was a dynamic between the three of them that, while a step below how Pyke and Rett’s edges laid flush with each other, was still difficult for her to break into.

It was cleaner, she thought. There wasn’t any history there. They got to learn each other as they went. She’d gotten to do Pyke that way, but it complicated things once they added more people – that whole week, she’d kept knowing things about Rett that he didn’t expect her to know, referencing things with Pyke that Ziggy had to ask her to explain.

It had been one thing when she was just alone. Alone would go away after enough time. Already had, to some degree, after everything that happened. But now, without a license or any technical know-how, she was alone and useless, which was ten thousand times worse. It only solidified her resolve to do what only she could do.

When she made her way back down to the brig, she walked loud enough that Sagyo would have to hear her.

The brig was one of the most secure places on the ship. It was almost an entire half of the lowest deck, meant for far more prisoners than they currently had, and had some of the only doors that stayed locked by default on the Rhapsody. The first one recognized Ko’s touch; the second, after a small airlock, recognized the codes Rett had had her set up when she first joined the crew.

The process took long enough that by the time she got in, Sagyo was sitting up in his cell, waiting for her.

He looked better, which was a sentence she hated even thinking. Someone had clearly been by to feed him, give him some kind of medical care, splint his shattered arm. She understood why, but couldn’t ignore the way her mouth went sour at the thought. He didn’t deserve it. Neither of them deserved to be here on this cushy ship getting taken care of.

“I knew you’d come back,” he said, smiling with a missing tooth, and she let the second door seal behind her.

She didn’t sleep any better, when she finally went to bed that night. But she slept more. She could only hope that meant she was on the right track.

***

The morning of the fourth day, Rett caught her in the hallway on her way to meet up with Pyke.

“We’re resupplying today,” he said. “There’ll be shops around where you can get a few things – clothes or furniture or whatever else.”

She shook her head. “I’m not rolling in funds over here, Rett,” she started, but he waved his hand through the air like he was swatting at a fly. 

“You’re part of the crew now. You use the crew card.”

Ko had been hoping on some level for that, but hadn’t wanted to presume. Still, it gnawed at her a bit, just one more thing she hadn’t really earned. Rett must have seen the hesitation on her face, because he sighed.

“You’ll more than make up for it when we turn in Big Thunder,” he said. “A few of- well, someone’s old things fit you, but most of her stuff is too small.” For a moment, he seemed flustered, like he’d been on the verge of saying something he didn’t mean to. It gave Ko pause. There was only one her she could picture, but if Rett had more of a connection to her than ‘also knows Pyke,’ this would be the first she’d seen of it.

“I know about Pyke’s girl, if that’s who you mean,” she said, and Rett looked up, confused.

“What? No, that’s not – look, you and Ziggy are gonna clean out Glup’s old room today. You’re gonna want a real change of clothes for that.”

She didn’t remember exactly who Glup was, but there was only one room that needed to be cleaned out badly enough that Rett would deputize them to do it. Ziggy called it the Slime Room, since every wall was covered in a thick, congealed green slime that had been there since before he joined the crew almost two months ago. Every now and then, when one of them passed too close by the door and it started to pull open, it released a stink into the hallway that would have withered the flowers in the windows of the apartment.

Why he wanted it done now after that long was anyone’s guess, but having a job to do should have thrilled her. She didn’t even mind the mess; she’d been elbow-deep in gore for most of her stay on Makoro. If she’d been asked two days ago, she practically would have insisted on doing it herself, just to make it take longer. Now, though, every hour was an hour closer to letting Sagyo go, and she could feel the time slipping through her grasp.

“Alright,” she said, instead of complaining, but couldn’t scrub the irritation from her voice. She hoped Rett would chalk it up to the task instead of what it was keeping her from.

He pursed his lips, giving her a look she couldn’t make sense of, and turned away, gesturing for her to continue whatever she’d been doing before he stopped her.

When she got to the gym, Pyke was already midway through his morning meditations, and in a surprising change of pace, he paused as she entered the room.

“Ko,” he said, waiting until he had her attention before gesturing across from him. “Come sit for a minute.”

Confused, she complied. She peered at him, looking for any signs that something was different. “You need something?”

“I want to teach you a few of these mantras,” he said, getting back into his meditation position. Ko couldn’t help her bark of laughter.

“You turning me into a disciple of yours, now, Pyke?” She asked, between breaths. “You want me to- to move in silence? Me?”

Pyke took it in stride, giving her a small smile. “Your temper’s good for you,” he said when she started to get control of herself. “But it makes you impulsive.”

Ko’s mood soured immediately. “Wha- you’re serious? Pyke, you’re-” She shook out her arms, trying to will the sparks away before changing tack. 

“Look.” She flexed, letting a bolt of lightning crackle across her bicep. “You see this? You don’t get this from finding your zen. My ‘temper’ works just fine for me, in case you’ve forgotten all that shit we got into. You want a little monk student, go get Ziggy.”

Pyke leaned back, casually enough that she realized he must have anticipated this resistance. “I’m not trying to change you, Ko.”

She huffed. “When have you ever seen me be calm in a fight?”

“That’s my point,” he continued. “Like I said. It’s good for you. It’s just not good for every situation. I’m not asking you to be a different person, I’m asking you to expand your options.”

The problem with Pyke was that he said a lot of frustrating things in a very even, reasonable tone that made it difficult to argue with him without sounding insane. Pyke was not a smart man – one time she’d watched him weigh the options and physically saw the moment he decided a smoke was the best fix for a punctured lung. But when he said things like he knew what he was talking about, Ko didn’t have a response, especially when there was no one there to intervene on her behalf and tell him he was out of his mind.

“It’s like what we did with the kid. He’s not going to get into boxing, we both know that. But he needs to be able to throw a punch every now and then.”

“I can throw a punch just fine,” Ko muttered, annoyed but even more convinced. Right as she was about to break, Pyke sat back up.

“Besides,” he said, “I wasn’t going to ask you to do it for free.”

“Oh?” She leaned forward, all thoughts of surrender forgotten. “What kind of payment’d you have in mind?”

He smiled. “I thought I’d let you shock the hell out of me on purpose this time.”

As annoying as he was, Pyke had a way of picking up her mood when she needed him to. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch, you know that?” she said, extending her hand. He took it and shook, just once, and she let a bolt of electricity flow straight to him, smiling at his startled cough.

By the end of it, she felt like she’d gotten the better end of the deal. She’d always assumed his morning meditation was something kind of mystical or religious, especially because that’s what he’d told the guards to get uninterrupted time to do it. But it turned out to be much more simple than she’d assumed: counting her breaths, keeping stock of where her tension was in her body, memorizing a few mantras. Pyke warned her it’d be harder in the moment, and it turned out that he was right, especially when she realized she couldn’t focus on sparking up her lightning and cooling down her mind at the same time. Eventually, she abandoned his lessons for her own personal brand of combat, but he still seemed satisfied when they finished their spar, running his fingers along small, pale lightning burns that radiated out from where her hands had met his skin.

“That was a good start,” he said, unwrapping his hands and inspecting the electricity lines that had been hidden beneath. “We’ll keep at it next time?”

“If we’re not both dead when Rett sees your arms,” Ko said, looking him over. She distinctly remembered Rett’s unimpressed reaction to Pyke’s bloody nose, but Pyke only shook his arms out and smirked.

“Nah. I’ll be fine.”

“You mean ‘we,’” she said, raising an eyebrow, and Pyke only looked at her, smug. “Hey. You mean ‘we,’ right?”

“I’ll see you for breakfast,” he said, walking out, and Ko sparked him with the back of her hand as he went by.

It was again only Ziggy there when, after a quick shower, she arrived. His face blanched on seeing her, but she didn’t care enough to give it more than a passing thought as she got her meal ready.

“Good morning,” he said, not waiting for her to reply. “You were up- um pretty late last night, weren’t you?”

“What’s it to you?” She asked, sitting across from him.

“Oh, no, nothing!” He was tripping over his words like he did when he was nervous, and she sighed.

“Out with it, kid.”

He deflated a bit. “Well, it’s just, the screams were pretty loud, and I’m kind of hoping he’s still alive?”

Oh. She’d been too deep in the job to have worried about that, but the Rhapsody – empty as it was with only four people on it – was a big, tinny echo chamber, and the crew quarters were only a deck or two up from the brig. It would explain Pyke and Rett’s odd behavior from before, though they at least had clearly been trying to be subtle.

“He’s alive enough,” she said, shrugging. “Bounty just says he has to be breathing.”

It quieted Ziggy until Pyke and Rett showed up together. Pyke’s burns had been slathered with some kind of shiny goop, and after Rett gave her a pointed look and whispered something under his breath that sounded like “a couple of jackasses,” the conversation switched to their resupply. Apparently, they were stopping at something between a mall and a drydock. There’d be essentials, but with limited options and designed mostly to be practical, so Ko shouldn’t expect anything too fancy or extravagant. That was fine by her, though she could tell the idea confused Ziggy. Finally, Rett dropped the same bomb on him he had on Ko, and Ziggy surprised her by seeming open to the idea.

“Oh, that’ll be easy,” he said, discomfort from earlier worn totally away. If there was one thing he liked, Ko had noticed, it was having a problem hacking could solve. “I have a code I can run for that. It might take a little time, but it’s still way easier than doing it by hand.”

“Whatever works,” Rett said, though to Ko’s eyes he looked almost disappointed. “I’ll come by with Hank to make sure it’s sanitized when you’re finished. I’d help, but I’ve still got shit to work out with the Guild.” Ko caught the lie instantly, but she guessed that was part of the benefit of being captain: he could deputize stuff like this to the freeloaders.

Ziggy turned to Pyke. “What about you? Are you coming?”

“Fuck no,” he said immediately. He hadn’t even finished his drag, he’d spoken so fast, and he had to cough it out alongside the smoke.

“Oh yeah? You got something important to do too, or would it just mess up your skincare, pretty boy?” Ko shot a hand out to mess up his hair, but he dodged it, getting her by the wrist.

“Ko, I can’t emphasize this enough,” he said, voice still a bit strained. “I don’t want to.”

Ko shrugged, clapping Ziggy’s shoulder. “Perks of seniority over there, kid.”

“That’s right,” Pyke said, thinking for a moment before shaking his head. “Yeah. No. Absolutely not, no. Besides, if we’re restocking, I’ll be busy helping Rett patch things up while we’ve got the supplies right there to do it.”

“You’ll be busy watching Rett patch things up,” Ko said under her breath, anticipating and leaning into the shove at her shoulder.

“Then it’s settled,” Rett said, ignoring all three of them. “We haven’t got all day to do this. We’ll be at the spaceport in an hour. And Ziggy,” he said, face darkening. Ziggy, tactfully, decided not to meet his eyes, but Rett waited him out until he got a small sound of acknowledgement. “Remember you have a hard spending limit this time around.”

Ziggy visibly deflated, but he nodded, and Rett seemed satisfied, leaving to communicate an ETA with the outpost and get docking permissions set up. Before she knew it, Ko was waiting in the cargo bay with Pyke and Ziggy, catching glimpses of a large sign through the windows that she thought might have said something like Space Tractor Supply Co.

“Alright,” said Rett, coming in from behind them. “Ziggy, did you have time to-”

“Oh! Yes,” he said, typing for a moment. A small card printed off from his portable keyboard, and he handed it to Ko. “You won’t need this once you get your license, but until then, here. You can use this for anything you need to confirm your identity for online.”

“More importantly, you’ll need to show it to security,” Pyke said, taking it from her briefly and holding it up to the light before giving it back. “It’s nothing major. When someone’s got a prisoner on board, they just keep a few guards at the airlock, make sure no one gets in or out who isn’t supposed to.”

“I’m surprised they give a shit,” Ko said, reviewing the card herself. 

Pyke shrugged. “They don’t everywhere, but the Guild has deals with a few places close to dropoff bases.”

Ko tuned out the rest of whatever he was saying, a bit stunned by the detail on her ID. There was her birthday, which she assumed Pyke had supplied, and a few official Makoro seals she would have had to bribe someone with way more than she could afford to get stamped. But the focal point, the thing that mattered, was that it said Ko Tetsutora. It hadn’t even occurred to her until now that Rett and Ziggy didn’t know her legal name, especially knowing that Pyke was too discreet to have handed it over.

“Ziggy,” she said, interrupting his questions to Pyke. “If they cross-check this – the name, I mean – is that gonna pull up a real history?”

“Of course,” he said, looking just a bit smug. “Pyke had me go through and fix everything for it. He said they’d fucked up your name a little during processing in prison.” He frowned suddenly. “Like how my ID says ‘Moog.’”

She couldn’t stop the smile stretching across her face. When she turned to Pyke, he just gave her a wink, that signature smirk, and turned to Rett to finish going over their list. It stunned her sometimes how easy things seemed for the three of them – the four of them, now. The click of a button, and shit she’d been dealing with for years could just go away.

When they docked, Rett gave her their card, introduced her to the guards so they’d know her face, and sent her on her way. He had made a point of giving Ziggy a limit, but hadn’t mentioned one to her, and she assumed that she basically had free reign in getting whatever she needed to fill out her quarters and her life on the ship. It was new to Ko, and she wasn’t sure what to do with it. Every other place she’d ever left had either already been filled to the brim with things from the current resident or had come at a time when she barely had the money to fill the fridge. There were the obvious things – clothes, toiletries – but what then?

She commed the question to Pyke, who replied after seven minutes with “minifridge,” waited two more to send a thumbs-up, and then nothing else. 

It was a step above totally unhelpful, but only one.

It was an odd assortment of things available, being where they were, but she managed to find necessities and eventually ended up with a handful of tchotchkes that caught her eye: a few posters for some bands she liked, a carpet that felt soft on her hands, and, from a small corner of assorted secondhand items, a lamp filled with some kind of goop and a glow that reminded her of Pyke.

It had seemed like so much at the time, but once she’d helped the others load up the rest of their restock and gotten it back to her room, she realized how little of the walls and shelves it covered. Still – it was a start.

A good start, she thought, taking the lamp from where she’d set it and putting it behind her cricket. It shed soft, gently shifting pink light across the shelf, and she liked the way it looked. It was nice, for something to be there just because she liked the way it looked. It was a luxury she hadn’t had for two years and some change.

She was both surprised and not that her own unpacking, as extensive as her trip had been, had taken less time than Ziggy’s. She let herself into his room and found him exactly where she’d expected him: at his computer, scanning line after line of code with some new gadget on his desk.

“Oh, just- five more minutes,” he said when he saw her.

“You know, the sooner we start, the sooner we’re finished,” she began, but she was already pulling up a chair. “The hell is that?”

“The medbay here’s not very advanced,” Ziggy said, not looking away from the screen. “It uses a pre-made list of local programs and algorithms, but it hasn’t been updated in years – I mean, at least twenty. This should help it stay current, but I have to be really careful about what it pulls so it doesn’t corrupt anything or start pulling garbage data.”

None of that made sense to Ko, but it was a grind she could respect. “There’s not much data on Saurians,” he continued. “Which makes sense, because this is a Cavalon ship, but it also – oh, let me check.” He hit a button, and whatever came up he wasn’t happy with. “Okay. There’s some on Raizo, but it’s mostly really just data on…not even Aetheron and Solari. It’s just Pyke and Rett. And…” he squinted. “Lots on robots? I mean, there’s Hank, I guess, but this looks really advanced for that.”

“It’s been five minutes,” Ko said. It was probably a lie, but if she didn’t stop him, he’d go on forever about it. He hit a few more buttons, then sighed, standing up with a look of longing at his computer.

“Silica!” He called, and the Saurian hologram that resembled several of his figurines bounced – in a way Ko could appreciate, if she was being honest – across his desk to the keyboard. “Keep running that, okay? I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Does she hear you?” Ko asked as they left the room, giving her another look, and Ziggy looked up at her quizzically.

“What? Of course she does. She’s voice-activated.”

“No, I mean. I thought you, like…summoned her when you needed her. Is she just always kind of around waiting for you?”

“She runs in the background, and then when I need her I summon her,” he said slowly, not understanding her question, and she just sighed and changed tack.

“Do you know where Rett keeps the cleaning supplies?”

Ziggy shook his head, but pulled his portable keyboard out of a cargo pocket on his shorts. “No, but we won’t need them. I can take care of this no problem.”

The door to the Slime Room pulled open in front of them, and Ko took stock for the first time of exactly how big their job would be. The fabric surfaces were almost definitely a write-off, once soaked and now stiff with something crusty and green. The closet had been spared, but only partially: a crackling sound when they pulled open confirmed that they’d been coated in it and then brought the slime into the recession in the walls that housed them when they were open.

She was sure this was the kind of thing that M- well, that someone else would have gotten out cleaning gloves for, but Ko wasn’t that kind of person, and the massive, disgusting robes hanging there were just beginning for the incinerator.

She was halfway to the trash chute when a realization ran down her back like ice, stopping her in her tracks.

“Ko?” Ziggy asked, looking up from his keyboard. “Are you okay?”

“The person who lived here,” she said, staring at the robes. “He almost killed Pyke.”

Ziggy was silent for a moment, suddenly looking just as uncomfortable as Ko was. 

“Well, it- they were trying to kill me,” he said eventually. “They got really close. If Pyke hadn’t-” he cut himself off, not meeting Ko’s eyes where she’d turned to him. “I don’t really remember much of it. Well, much of that part. I remember the early stuff pretty well, but I was unconscious for a bit, and then I woke up and Pyke was standing over me, and-”

Ko shifted the stiff robes onto one arm, reaching out the other to clap his shoulder. He jumped, but she was gratified to see him look around like he was returning to the present.

It was easy to forget that even this Ziggy that she knew, the one who needed coaching to punch her and who Rett pulled behind a table every time they got into a scrap, was the result of Pyke and Rett training him for more than a month. She already hated the idea of putting him into a scrum, and she knew how deadly he was. The idea of an even greener and more naïve Ziggy getting tracked down and attacked? That made the tiger in her chest begin to pace. He was one of hers now; if she had it her way, it’d never happen again.

“Let’s get every last trace of them the hell off this ship,” she said, and Ziggy nodded, some color coming back to his face. “You said you had something that could deal with it?”

Getting him to think about his tech was a surefire way to distract him, and it worked just as well here as every other time. With the click of a few more buttons, a green box – about a foot on every side, if Ko had to guess – drew itself into being in front of her. She could feel her tattoos begin to spark, still a bit unsettled whenever she saw him do something so strange.

He ran the code, and the box disappeared, leaving the room beneath just the same as it had been before.

“Oh,” he said, looking at it quizzically. “I think the code is recognizing the slime as part of the room. I guess it’s been here long enough.”

“So we’ll have to clean it by hand after all?” Ko asked, even more dismayed at the idea now that she’d seen the room up close.

“No, I can fix it. Just give me a second.” He typed for a minute, and then the box appeared again. “Now it should be fine.”

He hit a button, and the box vanished again, this time taking all the slime inside it away with it. Where it went, Ko wasn’t going to ask – her bigger concern was the smell, ten times worse now that they’d exposed what was beneath the dried-out crust on the surface.

After that, there was nothing to it but to do it, though it still took a few hours. The first few times, the placement was off, and it turned out after they thought they’d made good progress that the underlayer had been wet enough to drip into areas they’d already cleaned. At one point some of it dripped off the ceiling onto Ziggy’s frill, and they’d had to take a break while he recovered from throwing up. While Ko would never admit it, she’d appreciated the break from the stench as well, and saw why Rett had insisted she’d need to get new clothes entirely.

Eventually, though, they’d developed a system. Ziggy worked from the middle of the ceiling out and down, and Ko was in charge of moving furniture and double checking high corners to make sure it was all gone, since all she needed was a stepstool for her horns to graze the metal. 

It had turned a job that could have taken eight or ten hours into about two and a half. It was still a semi-reasonable hour in Rhapsody time, and Ko was considering whether she should even bother changing clothes before going to see Sagyo when Ziggy turned to her, perplexed.

“Rett’s not answering,” he said. “I’m going to direct message him.”

“Direct what?” 

In lieu of replying, he hit his keyboard, and a smiley face popped up in her field of vision. It startled her enough that she jerked back, but it only came with her, hovering just a few feet away and passing through the hand she reached out to touch it.

“Direct message,” Ziggy said, pleased with himself, and she tapped him appreciatively on the shoulder with the back of her hand.

“That’s a neat trick,” she said. “He answering?”

His bright smile faded into a petulant huff. “No. I keep telling him and Pyke that they can reply to those! They always just swipe them away.”

Ko sighed. If the world was going to keep putting obstacles in front of her, she might as well write today completely off, and go down to the brig with a fresh plan in the morning. Her triumph for the day was that, after a string of mounting exhaustion and annoyance since she’d joined the Rhapsody, she could at least say the smile she gave Ziggy was genuine: there was something about his innocent enthusiasm that meant it was hard to be in a bad mood around him, even when she couldn’t help but argue with him. “You did most of the work. I’ll find him and finish up, you get cleaned up.”

She had no choice but to do the same, given that she was going to be wandering the ship. She didn’t bother with the laundry, tossing the clothes she’d worn to clean straight down the trash chute with the rest of the soiled fabric.

She didn’t know Rett well enough yet to know his usual haunts, so she figured the best place to start was the cockpit.

When she rounded the corner, not expecting him to be in the first place she looked and already ready to turn around, she was instead met with Rett, nursing a glass of whiskey and fiddling with something intricate and metallic at his desk. He seemed surprised to see her, a deep bag under his remaining eye that suggested he’d been at it for a long time.

“The room’s done,” Ko said. “Ziggy’s pretty good with that stuff. It only stinks a little bit now.”

“Right,” he said, blinking a few times. “Thanks. I’ll send Hank over to scan it for anything left behind.” Something crackled in his hands that didn’t sound standard, and he swore, setting the tool aside. “You got a spare soldering iron in your toolkit?”

Ko turned back from where she’d been moving to leave, surprised by the question. “Don’t need ‘em. I use my pinky.”

“Damn it.” Rett sighed. “I’ll go- your pinky?”

She stood, taking a tentative step towards him, only fully committing when he waved her over. “I get better control with my own sparks,” she said. “What d’ya need?”

He showed her the seam, and she took the wire in her left hand, sparking her pinky a few times to get the heat up. It was an intricate join, but easy enough when she got back into the swing of it, and she was finished in one pass.

“You ever burn yourself doing that?” Rett asked, watching her work.

“Oh, tons of times. Took a long fucking time to get the distance right. M- people used to get pretty mad when I’d come home with the blisters, but I was a kid then.” She shrugged. “You know how kids are. Get some crazy idea in their head and don’t quit until it’s done.”

Rett’s flinch when she changed the word followed her own, and after showing her the next seam, he got up and found another glass somewhere in the lounge, coming back, pulling up another chair, and pouring her two fingers.

She didn’t go for it yet, taking her time with the join. When her pinky started to get uncomfortably hot, she pulled away for a moment, blowing on it, and took a sip. It was good, with just the right amount of burn as it went down.

“This is fancy,” she said when it subsided, pressing another intricate metal swirl into place. “Not the whiskey, the – whatever this is. You make it?”

Rett shook his head. “It was a gift. From someone special.” He scowled. “Quibly and Glup used it for target practice.”

Ko mirrored his expression. If she’d had any compassion for them before – and she hadn’t – the past few hours would have scrubbed it completely out. “Assholes.”

Rett made a small sound of agreement, watching her work for another moment. He was the one she’d seen least, both last week and since joining the crew, and her tattoos were starting to itch with static under the weight of his one-eyed stare. Just as she was about to speak, he did it for her.

“Look,” He said, keeping his gaze firmly on her hands. “I’m glad you came up. I’ve been wanting to say thank you, for looking out for Pyke in there.”

Ko sparked hot in surprise, and set the metal down for a minute to be sure it wouldn’t happen again. “We had each other’s backs,” she began, but Rett shook his head, turning to face her head-on.

“I know Pyke well enough to know that means y’all got into twice the amount of shit in there, not half. He’s good in a fight because he’s never avoided one in his damn life, and from here you look like two of a kind.”

Ko shrugged a shoulder. There was no point in denying it; the first thing she’d done when she saw Pyke again was lob a Redbelt at him, and he’d caught him with a neat kick to the spleen. Rett had been there to see it.

Rett was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again he wasn’t looking at her. 

“I’ve known Pyke a long time. A long time,” Rett said, his Aether eye whirring quietly. “I haven’t seen him like that first day out, Ko. I mean you’d know, you saw him – hell, you were there with him. He was jumpy. Half-starved. I think he thought I didn’t notice, but that gauntlet was jingling around on his wrist like it wasn’t even his.”

For a moment, Ko wished she still smoked. Now would have been the perfect time to take a drag. Another sip of whiskey was her second best option to chase away the phantom bruises throbbing on her arms, plenty from before Pyke had gotten there and plenty from after. She could feel lightning running just underneath her tattoos, rising to the surface without conscious intention. If she hadn’t deserved them when she’d gotten them – and most of them she had – she did now.

“It’s hard to avoid catching shit in there,” she said. “It’s a lot easier to do what you want when you’re by yourself out here on your own ship.” It was a change she’d seen in Pyke, too. And maybe in herself, these past few days, though she wasn’t sure if she was better now or worse. Something too powerful to be a spark trickled down her arm, and she shook it out, careful not to fry the solder. “Away from it all, away from – I mean, fuck, it’s the Empire. We all know what kind of fuck they give about people.”

“That’s why I’m glad he had you,” Rett said, voice firm. “If he hasn’t said it yet, he won’t, so I will. Things could have been a lot worse for him in there, and they weren’t, because someone had his back.” He turned to face her, face hard. “You did. When I couldn’t. That means something to me – to me personally. And I want you to know I won’t forget it, no matter what kind of shit we get into from here on out.”

Ko felt her face heat up, trying to avoid the urge to turn away. “Well, he covered my ass just as much as I did for him.” She took up the twist of bars again, just for something else to focus on. “Pyke’s a good partner to have.” 

Rett’s lips quirked a bit. “You know he told me about you as soon as he got out?”

Ko turned to him fully, shock outweighing her embarrassment at the compliment. “What, me?”

“You.” Rett laughed. “We hardly even get past the hellos and how-d’ya-dos and the how-the-hell-were-the-last-six-months, and he mentions there’s this Raizo girl finishing up her sentence that he thinks would fit in pretty good around the Rhapsody. Here I was, worried about getting stabbed in the damn back again, and he’s dragging me halfway around the system telling me he’d trust her with his life.” He took a sip of his whiskey. “He was right.”

That was news to Ko. She’d known when she called Pyke he’d probably come running, but that was the nature of the gig – bounty hunter tracking down the Syndicate gets a call about a drug lord, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where he’ll be next. The idea that he’d been keeping close and waiting for it…that was something else, and so was Rett agreeing with the decision.

Ko’s eyes stung. The last person – maybe the second to last one left – who’d thought to take care of her like that had been Ms. Ume. Ko had been nothing but trouble for her. Had always been trouble.

“For what it’s worth, Ko,” Rett said, a bit softer. “Pyke is a good partner to have. I know that better than anyone, and I’m glad you’ve got him, too.”

You’ve got him . It was such a simple sentiment, but there was an us underneath it that seemed to say everything. It did say everything, she realized. She’d always tried to be the strong one – for her sister, for her friends. She’d been protecting Ms. Ume, or failing to. She thought the best defense was a good offense, and what everyone else thought was that she was trouble.

 What Rett was saying was that they didn’t need that. If she was trouble, they wouldn’t be waiting for her to solve it. They’d be in trouble right there with her. She didn’t know if she could accept that, but she was too tired to push back. It was easier to redirect the conversation, and there was only one interest she knew she and Rett shared.

“So, picture this,” she said, careful not to look at his face for the reaction. “Me. Little. Scrawny, always getting into trouble. Not even old enough to have my lightning yet. And I’m doing these little jobs here and there – y’know, stuff people came up with just to give Sagyo and I something to do that wasn’t throwing firecrackers off the roof when people walked by.” Mentioning Sagyo stoked the fire in her that she’d hoped it would, and she let it, needing to keep it burning for the next morning.

“Why does it not surprise me that you were the kind of kid to do all that?” Rett asked, and Ko flashed him a smile, risking a look at his face. He didn’t seem annoyed, so she kept on.

“Well, I’m scrappy. Anyway, one day, I’m on a delivery from, y’know, the store, dropping off some stuff at my friend’s chop shop, and a woman on this gorgeous bike pulls up, right out front. A chrome tiger, purring and purring, shining like new.”

“Like yours?” He asked, and she nodded.

“I’m getting to that part. She pulls up, and the goes inside and leaves the thing in on the parking pad, all by itself. That’s how we knew she wasn’t from around there – she didn’t even lock it to anything. Just took the keys with her, like that was gonna stop it from getting stripped for parts by some junkie.

“So I’m looking at it, and Sagyo comes around the corner. He’d been smoking something in the alley out back. So he sees me, and he sees me looking at the bike, and he leans against the wall, looks me dead in the eyes and says ‘you won’t.’”

Rett barked out a laugh, and she couldn’t help the smile on her own face. “Ko, I’ve known you for all of one week, and I already know I can’t think of a damn thing more likely to get you to take it.”

“Oh, I did,” she said, grinning. She still remembered how proud she’d been of it, how it had felt like she’d finessed away that shiny new toy all by herself. “Once Sagyo saw I was serious, he helped. Hotwired the thing right out front, just to prove to ourselves we could.”

“And took it on a joyride, I bet,” he said, expression fond. “Knew someone who did that to the Sparrow, once. You shoulda seen the look on Pyke’s face when he saw it missing.”

“I can’t fucking imagine,” she said, picturing it and laughing. When he didn’t elaborate, she took the hint, picking up another piece of metal and going on. “Oh, man, we crashed it, too. I’m talking totally in pieces. We knew we were fucked, and it turned out the shop had cameras out there, too, so the cops were on us by the end of the day. Sagyo’d already gotten tall by then, so he could run faster than me. They took who they could get.

“The owner of the bike comes in, and she’s – to this day, Rett, that’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She had this long black hair, I don’t know what she was, but what Pyke’s hair does with light, hers did with shadows. And she comes up to me, and I’m thinking, great. I’m dead. And instead, she just goes ‘kid, can you fix it?’”

At some point, she’d gotten lost in the story. It was an easy rhythm to fall into, sparking at solder, Rett every so often fixing another swirl in place to make sure it was correct. “I’m desperate at this point. I mean, I’m convinced she pulled me out of that cell so she could take me behind the building and finish me herself, and maybe if I fix it, she won’t do that. So I say yes, and drag the thing back to the chop shop, and do whatever I can do. Stupid stuff. I mean, there’s no way she didn’t notice how out of my depth I was, but she never said a word, and by the end of that week, somehow, I’ve got it working again. It’s nothing like before, but it runs. And she tells me that, all this time, the bike was fuckin’ insured – she’s already got a new one. And now that this one rides, it’s mine.”

“And that’s how you got the bike,” Rett said, an appreciative overtone in it. “I’m impressed you kept that thing safe for so long.”

Something pulled tight in Ko’s chest. “I had some help,” she said, finishing the piece she was working on and pulling her hands away. 

“Y’know, I always thought…she didn’t just leave it behind or let me keep it in some alley, broken down forever. She made me fix it first, made me learn how to take care of what I broke. It was the first time I’d been able to do that – put something back together instead of taking it apart. People were proud of me, even though it had all started from such a stupid decision.”

Rett picked up what they’d done so far, turning it around in his hands and pinching the more delicate pieces to see if the seam would hold. “Well, you had some help making that stupid decision, too.”

Ko shrugged. “I already knew by then Sagyo was bad news. Just couldn’t seem to shake him off, y’know? Even though…” Even though Ms. Ume had seen it right from the beginning, told her she could make something of herself – that both of them could, if they’d quit getting tied up in things that were easy instead of right. A spike of shame drove into her chest. Where had that gotten them? A stint in prison, a bounty.

A bomb.

She forced the thought away. “Trouble’s who I am,” she said. “It’s who I’ve always been. So it finally catches up to me, and I get thrown in some Empire prison half a system away from any other planet I’ve ever been on, and about a year and a half in this pretty boy comes around and starts antagonizing people. Not like Sagyo does, just- like he’s better than all of them, and he knows it.”

Rett rolled his eyes, but his expression was fond. Ko knew the feeling. “He gets up to his shoulders in people who can’t fucking stand him, but I’m never gonna sit there and watch some guy get jumped, so I go over and yank him out of a fight. First thing he does is thank me, second thing is insist he would have been fine, and the third is to look me up and down and say ‘you look like you make good trouble around here.’”

She still remembered the look he gave her, a cool confidence in his eyes like he’d been getting into and out of shit since before she was born. It had made him look a hell of a lot older than he was.

“It was the first time someone called me good trouble,” she said. “I liked it. So I decided I liked him, too, and that was that. And then I got out, and I finally met you, and he finally…”

How did she keep circling back to this? It was that same pendulum, always swinging back no matter how hard she pushed it away. She hadn’t told Pyke much about Ms. Ume, or vice versa, in that month when she wasn’t sure if the friendship they’d build would survive when they were both free to really decide. But it had felt right, seeing him in her apartment, the way he’d called them all her friends. She was glad for that week he’d had to meet her, to know her. She wasn’t sure what she’d have been doing now if they’d all shown up after the fact and split her life into two neat pieces. At least this way, there was a bit of overlap, a link back to her past so that someone besides her even knew she had one.

Rett hummed, setting their work back down. It reminded her a bit of the plants littered around the edges of the sunroom. Pyke hadn’t had much of a green thumb, at least while she’d known him; she’d assumed they must have been Rett’s, but somehow she doubted that now.

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, still looking at that metal plant, “when you lose someone, all ‘lost’ means is that you’re not with ‘em right now. I’ve…it’s not the same, I know. But it’s still…” He trailed off, staring through the wall like he was looking at something a galaxy away. For all Ko knew about his cybernetic eye, he was. 

The tightness in Ko’s chest had reached her eyes, and she blinked hard. She raised her glass, and he followed suit.

“For the people we aren’t with right now,” she said. It was the most she could say, without falling completely apart, and if she let herself do that she didn’t know when she’d be able to put herself back together.

“Always too many of them,” he said, clinking his glass against hers and shooting it back.

They didn’t speak again, apart from Rett helping Ko find the next pieces to be joined, but the silence between them was different – comfortable, instead of tense. She wasn’t sure how much time passed, but eventually the door slid open again, and this time Pyke rounded the corner, visibly surprised when he noticed Ko on the other side of the table.

“Thought I’d come tell you it’s about midnight,” he said. “Uh, both of you.”

One filler word from Pyke was thirty seconds of stuttering from anyone else. It was enough to make Ko smile as she sat up, stretching her back out from bending over a work table sized for Rett.

Rett flicked off the station lamp, standing to join Pyke. “We’re gonna find you a place to show that bike off.”

She waved him off. “She’s a patient girl. She’s waited this long.”

Rett flexed his remaining hand, stretching his fingers back and shaking them out. “We’ll keep her in top shape ‘till then,” he said, moving to Pyke and turning to leave. “Goodnight, Ko.”

Pyke gave her a two-finger salute, walking backward for a step or two until she returned it, and then she was alone.

She turned her gaze back to the project, now that Rett wasn’t there to watch her scrutinize it. It was almost a bouquet – rings and loops of metal, worked by someone who knew the lay of the land. The parts Rett had let her work with were intricate, but they didn’t even approach the parts still waiting to be joined, some of them melted at the edge by what looked like blaster fire.

A part of her hoped he’d let her help put the rest of them back together, even when he found a soldering iron that worked.

For now, all she could do was find an empty bin and place it upside down over top of it, duct taping it to the sides of the station. It was an instinct from a much more turbulent life on-planet, with wind and weather and other people around to pick things off, but one that wouldn’t leave her. It was that one level extra of security: if something catastrophic happened, and the inertial dampeners were damaged and the Rhapsody got shaken around like a snowglobe, at least nothing from this table would go flying off somewhere into the other room or out some airlock.

It was a good day’s work. Ko was surprised to realize she hadn’t felt that way once in the past weeks, even after catching Sagyo, even after leaving the brig the night before.

When she went back to her room, she took her boots off at the door, the way she always had except the last few days, and felt her new, soft carpet beneath her feet. It was nice. It felt a little bit more like home.

***

Her dreams that night shattered the illusion. 

When she woke, her heart pounding, she could still see flashes of them in vivid detail – red smoke against red skin, the force of an explosion throwing her into a glowing magenta river below. She waited for the dreams to fade, her sweat cooling on her skin, but when artificial dawn began to fill her room with light she was no closer to sleep than she had been when she’d first snapped awake.

She made for the gym instead, feeling too loud in the quiet ship around her. Pyke seemed interested in the fact that she was already at the punching bag when he got there, but didn’t say a word, only crossing the room and setting up his meditation mat.

“Not today, Pyke,” she growled, before he could ask. She’d been sparking since she woke up, and all she was interested in now was stoking that fire until she could bring it to the person who really deserved to get burned. It brought her mind back to Pyke’s lightning burns from yesterday, still a bit visible despite whatever Rett had done, and she scowled. “I know what you were trying to do, y’know.”

“Do you?” he asked, sitting down like she wasn’t even a consideration.

She landed a hard left hook on the punching bag, and caught it again with her knee when it swung back. “You don’t think it’s pretty fuckin’ obvious? I spend all night giving Sagyo what he deserves, and you pull me in here the next day and tell me I need to learn to control my temper?”

“I didn’t pull you into anything,” he said, shifting to a position that pushed his chest to the floor. “And I was going to do that anyway. You just bumped up the timeline a little.”

Another hard punch, one that jarred her arm all the way to the shoulder. “So there was always something wrong with me.”

Pyke turned his head, giving her a dry look. “Self-pity looks like shit on you.”

Ko huffed, letting her lightning char a dark spot on the bag and ignoring him completely. He continued his meditation without asking her to join him, standing when he was finished and, Ko noticed, taking out the hoops in his ears.

“Don’t think I didn’t see that,” she said, stabilizing the bag and moving for her water. “I already said not today. That’s not changing because you took off your little lightning rods.”

“You wanna shock me, you’ll have to catch me first,” he said.

Ko narrowed her eyes. His stance was different, his expression more intense. “That’s how we’re playing it?”

“That’s how we’re playing it.”

She set her bottle down and moved to the center of the floor to face him. When he lunged at her, it was nothing like the technical, friendly sparring from the days before, or even before that when he’d been actively trying to rough her up – her only option was to dodge and hope she was fast enough not to get hit.

Catching up to his speed wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was that it had been a long time since she’d fought Pyke instead of fighting with Pyke. Back when they’d first met each other, when he was still so on edge and she couldn’t get a read on him, they’d had their moments. But that had been months ago, with a different, weaker version of him than was coming at her now.

He moved with a speed and intention no Redbelt could hope to match. She got in glancing blows, but never landed a solid hit. He was one step ahead of her, somehow always waiting for her swing but reacting almost before it happened. She could feel her breath coming faster, that red haze descending over her vision. Had he always been this annoying to go up against?

She saw a chance and took it, feeling her muscles tense involuntarily as she channeled the energy onto a shock. But Pyke saw it too, backing off into that same patient defensive stance, and when she moved to strike she overextended to where he had been instead of where he was. With a hard elbow to the back of her neck, he had her on the floor; before she knew what happened he had her arms pinned behind her. He was deceptively light – his weight wasn’t much against her, but no matter how much she struggled, she couldn’t get loose.

For a moment, the only sound in the room was their hard breathing. Ko didn’t have the charge left for another big shock, and Pyke wasn’t moving to let her go. The floor was cool against her cheek, slick with a cold, unbalanced sweat from not sleeping enough that vivid night before.

“I don’t care what you do to that asshole,” Pyke said, and the mention of Sagyo inspired another wave of anger in her chest. He’d meant it to, she realized. He’d been annoying on purpose, waiting her out until she made a wrong move in blind fury. “But I’m telling you because we’re on the same team: you’re easy to bait. You need more options.”

He let her wrists go and stepped off her, and Ko rolled over, wincing at the developing bruise on her neck. There was nothing to say against him. Maybe on a different day or in a different mindset, she’d have won. But here, now, as full out as the two of them could get without killing each other, she’d gotten her ass kicked, and it hadn’t even been hard. 

She didn’t say anything to Pyke, and he didn’t make her. They both knew he’d proved his point, and it had soured her mood into something she wasn’t willing to level at him, however much of it he deserved for riling her up on purpose.

There was a sick, fun irony in it, she thought. If he’d hoped the fight had taken the edge off her temper enough to leave Sagyo alone, he was wrong – it had only crystallized it into something much, much worse. And if he truly didn’t care, then all the better that he’d gotten her ready for what was to come.

She’d planned, before the spar, to have breakfast first. Now, she went straight to the brig.

It was the same as before: he had been healed from what she’d done to him earlier just enough to keep him alive and aware. Now, she was grateful for it, because it meant she could do more of the things that had haunted her last night in her sleep.

“Back again, Ko,” he rasped, limp against the wall of his cell. “Like a goddamn hunting dog. You catch the scent and you just can’t help but run it down. I got news for you: you’re supposed to bring the fox back to your owner, not rip it up with your teeth.”

“You’re gonna fuckin’ wish I was ripping you apart with my teeth,” she said, baring her tusks. “As long as you got something to spill, I’m going to spill it. So you’d better be damn sure that your secrets run out before your veins do.”

“Ah-ah-ah,” he said, twitching a finger enough to wag it. “That pretty boy’s got you on a leash. You wanna kill me, you have to run to Daddy and beg.”

It shouldn’t have bothered her. If she was going to take orders from someone, Pyke was pretty high up on her list of options. But with her pride freshly wounded from that morning, she couldn’t help the growl that escaped her throat.

“You can sit there and pretend you’re not worried about any of this shit. You can even sit there and pretend you’re not scared shitless of me,” she said. There was no more grandstanding, no more putting on a show. There was no one to perform for down here except each other, and they knew each other too well for it. There was only the truth. “I won’t be pretending. I’m going to enjoy this a lot. You’ve got things I need, and I’m gonna see how much I can give you before you decide to stop pretending and give something to me.”

“You’ve always been pretending, Knockout,” he said softly, too exhausted to even sit up fully and face her but sneering nonetheless. “You wanna play king of the hill, go right ahead. Waste your time trying to play by the rules – you can’t undo what’s done. Not today, not tomorrow, but at the end of all this, you’ll go join all those weaklings you couldn’t defend, and I’ll have made my way right back to the top.”

“You keep thinking that,” she said, getting out her pocketknife and tuning him out. “I want you to think that every day until it breaks you.”

The hours that passed felt like ten minutes and ten years. He taunted her. He gave up little things, things that felt like victory not because of their contents but because of his surrender, and she noted them in a file to give to Pyke and Rett. But mostly he just hurt: he made the sounds Ko had been stifling for a week, felt the fear that she’d felt of him since Kanabo.

It was satisfying, until it wasn’t. Eventually, he’d passed out, and Ko realized she didn’t have it in her to wake him or heal him or try again. Where the fire had burned was a numb, used-up feeling. There was nothing there left: not hunger from missing meals, the pain from Pyke’s blows that morning. All she had inside her was exhaustion.

They were handing in Sagyo tomorrow morning. Ko had precious little time left to make him feel the pain she’d been feeling since Ms. Ume had vanished into smoke, since before then when she’d watched her sister lose herself. But she was just tired. Tired of thinking about him, tired of the way he made her feel. Tired enough that she couldn’t make herself stay in the brig to make sure he remembered his last hours on this ship. Instead, she went up, passed through the lounge, and found in the cockpit the only other person she was sure wouldn’t ask her to talk.

Hank jumped into her lap as soon as she sat down. Privately, Ko took a special kind of pride at his eagerness to sit with her – she suspected it was because she and Rett had the most lap to give him, but anything worked. 

The bounty intake station was in dead space, Rett had explained to her that morning. It made escapes harder if there weren’t any star systems close by, minimized interaction with concerned governments. Ko didn’t care much, focusing instead on the side effect of how it made the cockpit almost mesmerizingly dim and quiet during the approach. She didn’t need any special protection to look out at the universe around them, turning off her brain and letting anything that came by catch her attention and fill her mind – a glimmer of a star, an asteroid field, a current of purple.

“It doesn’t get old, does it?” Rett asked, following her gaze.

Ko shook her head, her eyes not leaving the viewport. “I still can’t believe it.” She didn’t believe much of anything anymore, least of all that she was out here, day in and day out. “I’ve traveled between planets, but…”

“The view from a starhopper’s got nothing on the Rhapsody,” Rett said proudly. “Yeah, I feel that.”

Ko looked out at the galaxy around them, impossibly large. It was something she’d always known, but there was something peeking in around the haze in her head. They could go to any one of those stars, she thought. For a pleasure trip, or for business, or just passing through on the way. No one could stop them.

“Where are we going?” She asked. “After all this, I mean.”

Rett hummed at the console, hitting a button and swapping the display to a view of a different system. “Cherrix, if everything goes through with your license.”

“Cherrix,” she repeated. It meant very little to her. She’d seen a few shows, maybe, with things that took place there, but it may as well have been any other planet in any other place.

No one would know her there. Not from her childhood, not halfway in stories told from someone else. She’d be whoever she felt like being.

It wouldn’t include Sagyo. In twelve hours, it’d be just the four of them, and there’d be only as much of her past here as there was of Ziggy’s, of Rett’s, of Pyke’s. She’d thought it would claw at her. It had the night before, when she’d been telling stories to Rett, just trying to make sure someone else knew that she existed before everything got so absurd, that she had a story that didn’t start with cuffs and a sentence.

But something had shifted. The idea of living in that world, without anyone left to tell her who she was – it was appealing, for the first time. She could choose who Ko Tetsutora got to be. She had options, if she’d let herself take them.

A soft chime sounded from the console, and the moment was broken. Rett seemed to feel it too, bringing a hand up to scrub at his face and stretching the arm he had left.

“We’ll be there soon,” he said, taking a closer look at the display. “You oughta get some rest. Fuckin’ bureaucracy on your first bounty takes hours, and we’ll be there at o-dark-thirty.”

He moved to leave, and the look he gave her said it was more than paperwork that he was worried about. Ko only stared out the window and nodded, running her hand along the touchpad behind Hank’s ear. With the soft sound of metal against metal, he grabbed the back of her seat to pull himself upright, and for a long moment, he let his hand linger there.

“Breakfast is at 0400,” he said.

Then he left her by herself in the dim light, watching the world go by around her.

***

Ko would say she was up early the next morning, but the truth was that she hadn’t slept.

She’d eventually left the cockpit, and even made her way to her room. But she’d spent hours trapped in that numb twilight, alternating between hope and dread, second guessing if her decision to leave Sagyo alone had been the right one and consumed by the thought that he was just sitting there two decks down. By the time she’d come back to herself to at least get up and do something about it one way or the other, it was late enough – early enough? – that there was no sense in doing anything other than getting ready and meeting everyone else for the early breakfast Rett had warned her about.

She’d double checked herself, over and again – the way her pants fit, the way her hair fell. She wasn’t seeking anyone’s approval, but there was a restless energy at her core that sparked at her arms and told her something wasn’t the way it ought to be. She was in the kitchen even before Pyke was, and his slow blink when he saw her there told her he’d skipped his morning workout and gone straight for breakfast.

“You’re early,” she said, wanting to fill the silence. He only yawned and pushed himself back into motion, getting out a carton of coffee.

“I could say the same to you,” he said, forgoing the scoop Rett kept in it to shake out grounds until he seemed to feel like it was enough. “Rett likes to plan this stuff at off-hours. Helps with the line.”

His glow was dimmer than the day before, and Ko suspected it had more to do with how long they’d been in dead space than the time. They’d been in range of Vanar’s star for a day or so, but in an abundance of caution that Rett said was standard for turning in bounties, they’d been taking a route further from populated systems with bright stars that hadn’t left Pyke with much time to recharge. They had sun lamps and even an emergency sunbed in the medbay, but he'd mentioned once that they gave him a funny, over-charged kind of feeling that he'd prefer to avoid, so in dead space like this he ran on less fuel for a while instead. Especially if he was using what energy he did have to kick her ass, she remembered with a pang of embarrassment.

It was a thought that did nothing to soothe the anxious pit in her stomach, so she pushed it away and seized the other thing he’d given her mind to swirl around. She hadn’t thought before about whose time the Rhapsody was following, but she supposed it made sense. Empire prisons, if they weren’t on a specific planet, all ran on the as close to the same circadian cycle as they could get to facilitate FTL communication between them – if the Guild had a set-circ as well, bounty hunters starhopping from place to place would do better on it than off.

By the time the coffee was ready, Rett had joined them, looking about as well rested as Ko. He seemed to sense the mood in the room and went through his routine without addressing either of them. It was only when Hank tapped into the room and yapped once that he moved to speak.

“Are we almost there?” Ko asked, before he could, and he paused for a moment before nodding.

“Bout ten minutes,” he said, and held out a quick hand to slow her when she stood. “We don’t need to get him yet. We’ll need to talk to the intake agent first, make sure security’s set up to handle the transfer.”

“Amali?” Pyke asked. Rett nodded, and Ko didn’t pry. Intake didn’t matter, only how much of this process was left before Sagyo was off her ship.

Pyke joined her, stretching his back out with an audible pop, and gestured for her to follow him. They wound through the ship, forgoing the safety hatch in the lounge Ko had expected to use. Somehow the Rhapsody felt massive. She kept expecting the next turn to be their last, and almost didn’t believe when they wound up in the cargo bay again.

“We’re closer to the brig at this exit,” Pyke said at her wordless question, strapping himself into a chair that pulled out from the wall. “We try to minimize the time it takes to get them from the brig to holding.”

Ko mirrored the movement, ignoring the sweat on her palms, but the landing was an unsettling kind of smooth that she wasn’t used to after only having been from large planet to large planet. By the time she even knew they’d broken the atmosphere, Rett was joining them, opening the doors to a bright, silvery light and a wash of noise too loud for the time of day.

Ko quickly unclipped her seatbelt and followed, taking a moment for her eyes to adjust. In front of them was a large, gray building without signage or decoration. Floating above it, tethered, was a drydock for personal ships, but instead of the elevator Ko would expect to see to ferry pilots down, there was a small, old-school shuttle descending towards the main hub. On all sides of them were large, flat landing pads that mirrored the one they were on, separated by heavy duty fences sized for ships of varying class and function. At this hour, only a few of them were in use, all of them smaller than the lot the Rhapsody’d needed to land properly.

Around the whole thing was an elegant web of machinery, too complex for Ko to parse out. She knew the gaps must be wider than they looked from this distance, but the effect from the center was to make her feel like she’d been caught in a giant net, just waiting to be dragged from the water.

“Indigo!” An older, amphibious woman in uniform was waiting for them at the end of the gangplank with a clipboard. Ko could see a hint of shimmer of smooth, small scales along her face, and she smiling with pointed teeth. “I saw your coin on that Syndicate bastard. You actually get him?”

Rett pointed a thumb at Ko. “And then some. This one’ll be looking to get her license, if you can walk her through it, Amali.”

Amali looked over Ko, giving her a sly smile and a nod before turning back to Rett. “You’re getting a whole crew together, aren’t you? You keep picking up strays, you’re not gonna have any room left in there.”

“Watch who you’re calling a stray,” Pyke said without venom, emerging from the ship behind them. “This is Ko Tetsutora. Ko, this is Amali. She’s-”

“-the best damn hunter this Guild ever saw, until I settled down and swapped to intake,” she said, stealing Pyke’s dying cigarette, taking the last drag, and stepping on the butt. “Big Thunder as your first bounty. That’s no small thing, Tetsutora.”

Ko couldn’t resist the scoff. “Oh, he’s a pretty small thing. Trust me.”

Amali guffawed, throwing an arm around Ko’s shoulders – or Ko’s upper arms, which was as far up as she could reach – and turning back to Rett. “You two be careful with this one. I like her already.”

The smile on Rett’s face had something in it that Ko hadn’t expected, like he was on the winning end of a very unfair poker hand. He turned to Pyke. “You two go get Big Thunder. I’ll handle things here.”

It was the last thing she wanted to do, for so many reasons, but she only nodded and took her place at Pyke’s side.

“You ready for this?” He asked, and for once Ko didn’t try to push away the meaning behind it.

“I have to be,” she said. Pyke only leaned closer to her as they walked, his shoulder pressed against her arm, and it helped her find a stabilizing breath. “He might try to fight.”

Pyke put his hand against the scanner to the first door. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

When they got into the room, she understood why. Instead of waiting for her, like she’d expected he would even with his injuries, he was slumped over on his cot. The most acknowledgement he gave them was to half-heartedly turn his head in their direction, without even lifting it up. 

“Rett sedated him this morning,” Pyke said, pulling out a hovering transport chair. “Figured he might try something stupid.”

“Stupid’s the only thing he knows how to try,” Ko said, watching him. Even drugged and gagged, he burned with a quiet fury that she hadn’t been able to stamp out of him. She hadn’t even bothered trying. It was one more thing they shared, and it’d have taken more than anything she’d done to him to settle her down.

She hauled him up, depositing him in the chair. There was a buzz under her skin that made her suspect he’d tried to shock her, and she growled. “On a good day that might have worked on Pyke, but you know better than to pull that shit with me, Sagyo.”

She waved off Pyke’s questioning look, taking the handles of the chair herself as Pyke secured him by his one good arm and his chest to the chair. He stayed a half-step away with practiced ease as they made their way to the gangplank, ready to intervene if the combination of drugs and restraints still wasn’t enough.

Sagyo blinked when the sunlight hit his dilated eyes, and Ko took a moment to revel in the fact that it must hurt.

“-still got that Moog kid with you?” Amali was asking, smiling brightly when Rett nodded. She ran her hand along the side of the Rhapsody, giving him a look Ko didn’t know how to interpret. “It’s good she’s got a crew again,” she said. “She’s a beautiful ship, always has been. It was a crying shame to see her go empty for so long.”

Rett, with the sixth sense he always had for when Pyke was nearby, turned around to look at him almost as soon as they were off the ship.

“It won’t happen again,” he said, eyes lingering. “Trust me.”

Amali had already started around him when she saw the two of them approaching, and with Sagyo under her watch, Pyke pulled off to stand to the side with Rett.

She gave him a cursory inspection, checking his pulse, his restraints, going back and forth between him and a paper that must have listed identifying traits like tattoos or the set of his horns. Eventually, she crossed her arms and turned to Ko.

“Seems like it’s all in order. You need anything before I hand him off?” She asked, and Ko took a long look at Sagyo, beaten and diminished, strapped to a chair.

There was no moment of realization. Ko had known what he was for a long time: broken. Pathetic. Competing with everyone, never really winning. In the comics in Ziggy’s shows, people usually pitied the villain at this point or saw some awful truth about their similarities.

She didn’t. She got him by the sensitive spot between his horns and wrenched his head up. Faintly, she was aware of Rett moving as if to stop her, but Pyke held a hand out, and he stilled.

Ko counted her breath. Five to inhale, ten to exhale, as many times as it took until the fire in her chest began to dim.

“I hope,” she growled, “you have a worse time than I ever did. I hope you die by yourself, in a dark room, hoping to see the sun again before you go. I hope they kill you in there.”

She could see the hatred in his eyes, already knew what he was trying to say behind the gag. None of it mattered anymore. With every ounce of her self restraint, she unclenched her fist and let his head fall, turning to Amali. “All yours,” she said. “Alive.”

Amali gave her a knowing look, but said nothing, gesturing for two guards to swap him into Guild-provided cuffs and drag him in. She brought Ko inside to a different room and had her sign several times: that this person was, to her knowledge, Big Thunder; that this bounty was a formal application to the Guild; that she agreed to pay the finders fees and play by the rules in exchange for the benefits she’d get. All the while, Amali seemed intent on wheedling out little pieces of Ko’s past, getting her to talk about them and sharing stories of her own before Ko had even realized her guard was down.

Finally, as they were finishing up hours later, Amali paused for a moment and checked a message on her watch.

“Looks like they got him dead to rights,” she said. “So the bounty’s all yours, and with recommendations from Indigo and Starfall, we can skip the probationary period and get everything filed today, your formal license sent over probably tomorrow.”

Recommendations. Ko could get those, probably. She doubted they’d say no after bringing her all this way just to get her license. “I’ll comm them,” she said, reaching for her own wrist, and Amali stopped her.

“No, I mean we already got ‘em. We were just waiting on the ID verification.” Ko’s surprise must have shown on her face, because Amali’s smile seemed to get gentler, deepen into the wrinkles around her eyes. “They’re good people, Tetsutora. Come a long way since they first got on the scene. You keep in good with them, you hear me?”

Ko nodded, still a bit stunned. It was one thing to feel like they’d say yes if she asked them. Somehow it was different that they’d already put them in before she’d even known they were something she might need. Pyke less so, but Rett too?

She looked to the door. On the other side of it, somewhere, was Sagyo. The fact that she’d had to hand him over had rankled her from the moment Pyke had told her, two weeks and a lifetime ago. But now she was here, now it was done. Now someone had faith in her, a real belief that she could turn things around instead of wary concern for how she was going about it.

It felt good to see him go. Final. She’d been fighting so hard to keep that door open, convinced that the storm on the other side of it was where she belonged. For the first time, she felt like she might just want the peace of slamming it shut.

“Yeah,” she said, bringing her gaze back to Amali. Something in her face said she knew exactly what Ko was thinking, and Ko had the feeling she’d seen it all twice over. “I hear you.”

The next little while passed in almost a daze. She left with a file of paperwork that she was grateful she didn’t have to review until later, and she made her way back onto the ship, waiting in the lounge while Rett and Pyke finished catching up with their contacts – friends? – in the Guild. She didn’t let herself believe it was real until she heard the telltale sound of the gangplank rising and felt the hum of the Rhapsody pulling back off into space.

When she did, she went to the window, gluing herself to the sight of the intake base getting smaller and smaller, until it was nothing but another bright speck in the sky and then nothing at all. She found herself in the brig, staring at Sagyo’s empty cell, still holding the papers his life had bought her, and looked at the remains of him – scorch marks on the comforter, scratches where his horn had hit the metal – until she realized she wasn’t sure which were his and which predated them both.

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, and didn’t really want to find out. All she wanted to do, she found, was sleep, for however long she could before her license arrived and everything started moving again, and the only thing stopping her was that she was hungry.

There was no one in the kitchen when she arrived, and her internal debate on whether to get something real or grab a snack and leave lasted long enough that that changed. Ziggy appeared in the doorway, scooting past her to grab a Gex and making her decision for her.

“I’m going to finish Leo: the First Khan with Pyke in a bit,” he said, oblivious to the struggle or maybe tactfully ignoring it. “If you wanted to- I mean, you should come! We could even play Thoroughfare Combatant 2, if you wanted.”

She grabbed a yogurt and a spoon, leaning heavily on the fridge as it shut. “Look, nothing against you, kid, but I’m gonna get some rest.” He nodded, popping the tab to his can with his beak, and then suddenly seemed to remember something.

“Oh! Actually, before you go-” He hit a button on his keyboard, and his laptop printed out a small photo, still warm when he handed it to her. “I was looking at some old surveillance footage, and I found this.”

The records Ziggy was pulling must have been ancient. This Ko was a Ko she hadn’t seen in a long, long time – short horns, blank arms, thin and reedy like she’d been stretched out longways, clearly running down the road towards-

Ms. Ume. The image was too blurry to make out either of their expressions, but it had caught Ko mid-stride, reaching for Ms. Ume’s hands with both of hers, only one of them having made contact. Ko took it in wonder, bringing it close to her face.

Since the explosion, Ko had only seen Ms. Ume’s face in her nightmares. Even the best of them stretched out the moment until she could see every pained cry, and in the worst, Ms. Ume looked to her, talked to her, begged her for help or cursed her for showing back up.

But this Ms. Ume – a little younger, a little less grey in the muzzle, the fur on her wrist standing on end from the brand-new electricity coursing through little Ko’s veins. She hadn’t even gotten her tattoos yet, it had been so recent. Ko didn’t remember this moment, but she remembered a thousand like it, with the cricket chirping in the store, Ms. Ume’s warm, proud voice every time something went right for her. Distantly, she realized Ziggy was still talking.

“It’s really- I know it’s low quality – they really need to invest in better cameras out there if they want to see anything – but I picked the clearest part of it and tried to enhance it. It’s not- I wasn’t looking into you, or anything, but- I was looking into Big Thunder, and you were in the background, and I thought- it might be nice? For you to-”

“It’s perfect, Ziggy,” she said, aware that tears were forming in her eyes but unable to look away. “Thanks.”

“Of course!” He said, and there was a joy in it that made her chest tight.

“I’m gonna-” she started, trying to swallow around the lump in her throat. “Just- my room. For safekeeping.”

“Yeah- yeah, definitely.” Ko almost turned to leave, but before she could, she pulled her eyes away from the photo. Ziggy, in all of his 5’6” glory, was looking at her with an innocence that made her chest hurt, smiling with the glow of a well-executed plan.

Without hesitating, she reached out beneath his frill and got him in an easy headlock, rubbing her knuckle against the crown of his head.

“Ah- hey! I don’t even have hair!” He pulled back, and after another moment, Ko let him go.

“You’re a good kid, you know that?” She said, beaming, and Ziggy turned away, rubbing where her knuckle had been.

“Can I be a good kid without the noogies?” He asked, his own smile still giving him away, and she laughed, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Just for today.”

She left him at his computer, leaving the warmth and light of the rec areas behind. She realized immediately it had been a mistake, but one she could no longer rectify: in the lonely quiet of the hallways, the radiant joy that had filled her chest was beginning to sour into a kind of panic that left sparks jumping across her skin.

The safest thing for her to be was alone, in her own space. Instead, she found herself across the hall, pushing past Pyke as soon as opened the door to his room.

“You look terrible,” he said, before she could apologize for it, and it was the simple acknowledgement that made her eyes sting. She covered her face with her hands for a moment, feeling Pyke sit beside her on his bed, and handed him the photo.

“Ziggy found this,” she said, past caring if he commented on the way her voice was shaking. “I don’t have any other photos of her. He found it in some old footage and just gave it to me.”

He took it, taking a quizzical look. “It’s a good photo.”

“No, it’s not, but it’s good enough.” Ko felt unmoored, like the rush of emotion had taken her completely off her feet.

“So what’s the issue?” He asked, and Ko snatched it back, a spark of electricity she couldn’t contain hopping between their hands.

“Pyke, I didn’t have Rett and a big fancy ship waiting for me when my sentence was up. They tossed me out with the clothes on my back and hardly enough notes for a phone call. Ms. Ume took me in when I didn’t have a damn thing, not even a job to pay her back with, and I repaid her by antagonizing every last redbelt in the neighborhood until they blew her up.”

It was agonizing to say, but if there was one thing she could count on from Pyke, it’s that he wasn’t going to try and spit out some platitude to try and get her to feel better. Knowing comfort wasn’t coming made it easier to keep going. 

“What’s happened- that’s happened. It’s done. And now you all have taken me in, and you’re helping me get this whole career path figured out, and I thought, I’m not letting that shit happen again. I’m not being the reason anyone else gets hurt. Don’t ask me to. I’m not doing it. But you’re asking me to, and I’m doing it, and I don’t…Pyke, all I’ve ever done is cause trouble, and you and Rett still put me through for that license. What are we doing? What am I doing? What do you need me to do?”

Pyke, inasmuch as it was possible to catch him off guard, looked vaguely stunned, blinking once. He looked from her to the photo, eventually sighing and pulling his knees up to sit cross-legged and facing her.

“I don’t trust a lot of people,” he said. “Rett doesn’t. Maybe Ziggy does, I don’t really know. But you know how rare it is, in this kind of life, to be able to turn your back on someone.”

She brought a knee up until she could rest her forehead on it, closing her eyes. “Yeah, I do.”

Pyke made a small sound. “So you also know that I don’t need you to do anything. There’s one more person around who has my back – someone else who gives a shit. It doesn’t matter what kind of hell we raise together. Knowing that is enough.”

Ko thought of the chair by Ms. Ume’s window, overlooking the alley where Ko would be walking back to her apartment, and then back even further.

“You know Ms. Ume used to plan her walks to go by the school?” She asked, waiting for Pyke’s answering hum. “If me or Sagyo wasn’t in class, she’d go to our families’ apartments with soup. If we were skipping, she’d wait, and give us an earful. If we were sick, we got the soup. Pissed me off sometimes, for sure, but…” She opened her eyes, letting all the exhaustion of the last months seep into her face. “She gave a shit. It was nice to know. It was enough.”

She heard the distant flick of a lighter. “You think she’d like it? You being out here?”

It was a question Ko hadn’t considered, and one that gave her pause. It was dangerous. The kind of thing Ms. Ume had always wanted her to avoid getting caught up in. Still… “I think she liked you guys. I think she’d like that I’m with you.”

Pyke was silent for a long minute, and Ko made no motion to speak. She could hear their breath, the occasional rustle, the hum she’d long since tuned out that always filled the walls and floors of the Rhapsody. She’d poured out all the restless energy from before and felt strangely empty, like a dark sky after a storm – no crackle, no boom, just still air and the promise of something more.

“Is that enough?” He eventually asked, and Ko thought of cherry blossoms. All at once, it was clear what needed to happen.

“It could be,” she said, standing. “There’s something I’ve got to do.”

He gave her a two-fingered salute, saying nothing, and she gave him a small, distracted wave with her fingers, knowing he wouldn’t care about the sudden exit. It took her only a few minutes to find Rett, and even less to tell him what she was after.

“I’ve been waiting for a fuckin’ week for you to ask me about getting some extra furniture,” he said, leading her to a small room near the main cargo bay. “See anything in here that’ll do?”

Ko scanned the room, her eyes landing immediately on a small, two-door medicine cabinet near the back corner. It was covered in dust, and it’d take some pushing to get to, but it looked like real wood, and was easily the closest thing to what she was after – it wasn’t the kind of thing she’d have been able to find at home, but she wasn’t willing to wait any longer.

Besides. She wasn’t the same Ko she’d been at home, either.

“You want help getting it out?” Rett asked, eyeing it, and she shook her head.

“I’ve got it from here. Thanks.” He shrugged and left her to it, and she wound around old, disused bookshelves and frames until she could heft it up on one shoulder.

It was easy to carry, and on her way back to her room, she stopped at the kitchen to take a wet rag and a small orange, leaving her yogurt from before forgotten on the counter.

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough, even once she’d set everything up, gotten the dust off, laid half of the carefully-peeled orange next to Ms. Ume’s photo. It wasn’t anything, when considering everything Ms. Ume had done for her – she didn’t even have a stick of incense to light.

But she had the photo, from Ziggy. And the cabinet from Rett. And this – the Rhapsody, this life, this everything – from Pyke. She was here, in it all, with her cricket, her lamp, her new, fragile sense of belonging. Ms. Ume should be, too. That could be enough.

“Hi, Ms. Ume,” she said, kneeling in front of her makeshift shrine. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I think…I think I’m doing okay.”