Stars, he was stuck. He was so, so stuck.

Kip scraped and blasted faster now, knowing he’d left bits less than clean but hoping the heat of the sanitiser would burn away the evidence.

‘You missed some,’ Xia said, holding up the dish she’d been handed, pointing at a swatch of oily crumbs.

Kip sighed and took the plate back. ‘Guess I did,’ he said, giving the plate another scrape. How come lunch breaks never lasted this long?

At last, at fucking last, the stack of dishes ended. Xia looked satisfied; Kip was relieved. They both washed their hands. As they did so, a few bubbles appeared in the big clear cistern by the herb planters. Kip remembered one time when he was really little letting the water run and run because he liked the bubbles so much. His mom had given him a strong talking-to for that.

He looked at Xia, counting the seconds under her breath as she washed up, hurriedly turning off the faucet once she hit fifteen. Looked like somebody’d given her the same talking-to.

Kip started to head for home, but his mom stopped him, dead interrupting M Sousa. ‘Kip?’ she called, leaning away from the table. ‘Did you empty the bucket?’

Kip shut his eyes. ‘No.’

‘Well?’

Kip sighed again, trudged back to the kitchen, picked up the forgotten bucket of crumbs and bug husks and veggie stems, lugged it to the garden, and dumped it into the hot box. He could feel Mom watching him the whole way.

‘I don’t understand why he can’t come sit with us,’ he heard Dad mumble. Dad never mumbled as quiet as he thought.

‘He will when he wants to,’ Mom said.

Kip did not want to. He wanted to go home, so he did just that. The front door slid closed behind him, and he exhaled. He kicked off his shoes and headed to his room, letting that door close behind him, too. A double barrier. He flopped down on his bed and shut his eyes. Finally.

He heard the sound of his scrib dinging, muffled under . . . something. He sat up and looked around his bed. Nothing. He rolled over, found his satchel on the floor, and dug around. Nothing. He rolled over the other way. There it was – on the floor, sticking out from the jacket he’d been wearing earlier. He picked it up, and found a blinking alert from Ras.

Ras (17:20): do you have any tethering cable

Kip (18:68): uh no

Kip (18:68): why

Ras (18:69): I have something really cool for us to do

Kip (18:70): what

Ras (18:70): it’s a surprise

Kip (18:70): what kind of surprise

Ras (18:71): a tech project

Ras (18:71): trust me, it’s going to be awesome

Ras (18:71): I can get the parts in a few tendays

Ras (18:72): so long as you’re not studying

This was code. Kip’s parents didn’t read his scrib, as far as he knew, but Ras’ had once, and they’d found out he and Rosie Lee snuck a couple bottles of kick out of Bay Twelve and got shitfaced together, and it had been a ridiculous mess. Like, completely ballistic. So now, if there was something Ras wanted to talk about but didn’t want to put in writing, he said ‘so long as you’re not studying’ instead of ‘it’s a secret, I’ll tell you in person.’ Studying was the perfect cover for anything. What was that if not responsible? What parent would read that and worry?

Okay, maybe Ras’ parents. Ras never studied.

Eyas

Hopping between homesteaders was a beautiful thing. She’d taken the ferry more times in her life than she could count, and yet every time, she looked forward to those twenty minutes or so spent in transit. She could view the space outside anytime she pleased from a cupola, but it was easy to lose track of the fact that reality did not end with a bulkhead, that the starry black outside was not just a pretty picture framed below your feet. It was in passing beyond the hull, in travelling through the gap, that she was reminded of the true scope of things. The view out the window beside her passenger seat was a busy one (the window beside her, that was important – the confirmation that space existed not just below but above and beside). She could see public ferries, family shuttles, cargo ships, mail drones, nav markers, harvesting satellites. There were spacewalkers, out doing repairs or for the sheer joy of it, separated from the ship lanes by rows of self-correcting buoys. Behind it all was their adoptive sun, Risheth – a white sphere that deceptively looked to be about the size of a melon, shining softly through the ferry’s filtered windows, scattering light among the dense plane of floating rock that gravity would gather up in time. No planets to speak of, though. Risheth didn’t have any orbital bodies big enough to build on (hence why the Aandrisks hadn’t felt much loss in shrugging off their claim to the system). Eyas had been planetside twice in her life, both times on short vacations, both times wonderful, yet nothing she needed to repeat. Planets were imposing. Impressive. Intimidating. Eyas preferred the open. It was easier for her to wrap her brain around. Even though it was dangerous. Even though she’d seen it at its worst. But that wasn’t something she needed to dwell on right then. No point in spoiling the view.

The ferry docked at the Ratri, and Eyas took her place in the exiting shuffle. Most people had made the trip for trade or friendly visits, and carried goods or luggage accordingly. Eyas was there for neither, and so carried neither. She had only a satchel of personal effects and the clothes on her back – the latter of which she wouldn’t need for long.