Rylan

“Shouldn’t we hunt?” she asks, looking worriedly over our rations.

“Do you truly wish to eat those awful things we’ve been catching?” I ask her with a raised brow. She makes a slight grimace and I imagine we are both thinking of the slimy substance that fills the hard exoskeletons. “Just as I thought,” I tell her with a smile.

“Still, we should save these for emergencies,” she frets.

“We will be off this planet soon, Faith. You won’t need to be concerned over such things for much longer.” The worried expression on her face tells me she still doesn’t quite believe me, but that doesn’t stop me from forcing some of the fruit we stole from Kalmut Ruo into her hands. She should be eating better. “Besides, I think the hunting experience has been soured for me,” I admit. “If I never hunt again it will still be too soon.”

She rolls her eyes but gifts me with a smile. “Do people even hunt much on Aragran?” she asks.

“Oh yes, it is the primary means of sustaining oneself.”

“And you’re never going to hunt again?” she questions, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

“Never,” I vow, placing my hand over my chest and laying on the dramatics. “I will forgo meat for the rest of my days if it means I never have to hunt. For the first time, I’ve imagined what it must be like to be preyed upon and I must say, it is an unpleasant feeling.”

She laughs at my words but looks thoughtful. “My grandpa was like that. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. The man owned a bait shop for over 50 years. I never once saw him fish,” she tells me as she works to repack our supplies before we continue on our path to freedom.

“You jest?” I ask, laughing at her ancestor’s tenacity.

“Nope. Serious as a heart attack. Said he didn’t like killing anything. Interestingly enough, he had no problem killing fish vicariously.” She laughs at the memory she carries with her in her mind. “We’d sit on that lake for hours with him barking out orders and giving fishing instructions. I was gutting and cleaning my own fish when I was seven years old,” she adds proudly.

“Hmm, that explains a lot,” I tease, and she scrunches her face up at me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, laughing when I give her a pointed look and she swats lightly at my shoulder. We walk together, side by side, our arms bumping as we do. It’s a silly thing, but it makes my heart soar. It almost feels like that first night we shared together, talking and flirting on Nydor. There is just something natural to Faith and me. Even when silence stretches between us, it is a companionable one.

“What will you do?” she asks after some time. “After we escape?”

“We will have to escape The Conglomerate as well.”

“So you’ll be losing your home too,” she states, her tone morose.

“If the cost of staying is murder, it isn’t a price I’m willing to pay,” I remind her, though her expression still seems upset.

“Besides, Faith, if I am honest, I like the idea of leaving. My world has changed since we were absorbed. My people have changed along with it and their priorities too. Just look at my sisters, I do not like the idea of selling them off. A dowry is reasonable, of course. But if it were not for something substantial, my sisters, my beautiful sisters, would have no prospects for their future, no male to love them, and no respect from other races,” I explain.

“For a while now, I have heard talk of new colonies just beyond the reaches of The Conglomerate. The people there are called the Iredesca. I do not know anything about them besides the fact that their worlds are rugged and new. I have not seen them, nor do I know their values. It is very far from here, but still…I haven’t been able to shake the thought that maybe there's something better out there for us…for all of us.” My gaze goes back to Faith, but she stares ahead, keeping her emotions hidden.

“What do you want after this?” I ask her finally, wondering if I fit into the equation at all.

“I don’t know,” she says, looking down at the ground. “Not a lot of options for a girl like me.”

“You are smart, I think you have some ideas. There is no need to be embarrassed about speaking your mind in front of me. Remember, Faith, I’ve already seen you naked. What good is shyness now?”

She laughs and blushes at my words. “You’ve got a point,” she tells me with a smile, but as she continues I can see it is still with some reluctance. “I don’t know, I’ve thought a little about pirating,” she says in a small voice with a noncommittal shrug.

“What?” I ask, suddenly feeling very protective.

“Um, pirating…like stealing things from people. But I’d need a ship for that and I don’t exactly have the startup funds for such a big purchase. I was hoping to keep your ship, but we all know how that turned out.”

“Don’t you think pirating is a slightly dangerous profession?” I ask, trying my best to deter her.

“Life is dangerous, Rylan. There’s no avoiding it.”

“But isn’t—”

“Look, Rylan. I’m a woman alone in freaking space, alright. I was meant to be a slave out here. A sex slave. As far as I’ve seen, there are only two steady lines of work for someone in my position: whore or criminal. Guess which one I would choose?”

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” I insist, but her expression is skeptical to say the least. So, I change directions. “You’d need a crew,” I point out. “Surely you can’t pirate alone.”

She grunts but does not respond. It is as if she has thought of this before and can’t seem to work out a solution to the problem.

My heart pounds in my chest, but I have to ask. “Why not come to the colonies with us?”

“While I’m sure your sisters would love me, a different world wouldn’t change my situation,” she insists, sarcasm heavily lacing her words. “You said this place is a backwater colony, right? What use do you think they’ll have for me out there?” Faith scoffs again, shaking her head at me as if to call me naïve.

I search my brain for a better solution. “You could fish,” I suggest hopefully. Faith stops suddenly in her tracks. She looks up at me blankly for a moment before doubling over in laughter. It’s a full belly laugh, real and sincere. She laughs so long and hard she needs to lean on me for support and tears trail down her cheeks.

She struggles to speak through her fit. “Growing up I spent my whole life working behind the counter of my grandpa’s bait shop, I moved halfway across the country, got a degree in computer science, was abducted by aliens, taken thousands of light years from my home, only to end up working in a bait shop? Is that some kind of sick cosmic joke at my expense?” she asks as she wipes her tears and stifles her laughter.

“Would it really be so bad?” I question with furrowed brows. Anything would be better than a life of piracy.

She breathes out a long and slow sigh and the deep green pools that are her eyes get a faraway look, as if she is more connected to a memory than to this moment. “Bad? My grandpa’s shop back home was home. He was the cornerstone of our family. The heart. I can remember every single detail about that place, down to the feel and the smell of that old wooden counter and the sound of the fridge humming in the corner. To try and have that again somewhere without him? I don’t know if it would bring me peace or madness.” She blinks suddenly, coming back to the moment and an errant tear slips down her cheek. She tries to wipe it away.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me,” she apologizes, but I refuse to let her dismiss these tender moments between us. I tilt her face up, forcing her to look at me and I think that maybe she sees what I offer. The look I give my female is one of pure and fierce compassion. It is a look that almost dares her to try and push it all away again. Tears well in her eyes and silently I pull her to my chest in an embrace. A single sob racks her body and she holds onto me just as intensely as I hold onto her.

Eventually her tears dry and she pulls away just enough to look up at me. A question sits on her lips, unasked.

“I promise you, Faith,” I tell her sincerely. “If you feel that strongly about it, I will not make you fishmonger.”

Her face screws up and she looks at me as if I might be stupid, but then she sees the teasing glint in my eyes and we both begin to laugh. She slaps at my chest and we fall away from each other, the intensity of the moment gone.

“You’re such a dope,” she tells me, smiling. “Way to kill the mood.”

“There was a mood?” I ask surprised, tugging at her hand in an effort to bring her back to me. “Come here and cry on me some more, female. We’ll see if we can bring it back, eh?” But she just rolls her eyes at me and we get back to our trek.

“Thanks,” she says after a while.

“For what?”

“Letting me cry…and for being so stupid that I have to laugh.”

“Anytime, on both those fronts. I am for you, Faith. If you ever need anything, I am here.”