Starborne

Chapter 28

Two years earlier, I was broken. Not necessarily due to the heartbreak, but rather because I’d faced the emptiness that was my life, and been forced to admit that the way I lived wasn’t good enough.

The things I told myself I needed were broad goals and ideas, just outline and structure for what constitutes a complete person. 

Losing Stefin didn’t destroy me. Wounded, certainly, but I could have picked myself back up. After all, I’d lost people I loved more deeply, more purely. All loss fades eventually, becomes a part of an intense, internal ache that rears its head when you feel your most vulnerable. The specters of those we lose only visit us at our lowest, they frequent the dawn and dusk hours that blend our days between unconsciousness and the land of the living.

My ghosts haunted me, but I’d lived long enough with phantoms. Insecurity, aimlessness, were the true culprits that dragged me down into depression and refused to unclench their corruptive grip from my skin.

It was with ambivalence and apathy that I received my promotion in the Terran forces. With vapid stares and masks of pride I accepted acclaim for a supposedly successful cultural mission; Stefin’s father placed a medal around my neck even as he refused to look me in the eye. 

I was given a new ship, a sleeker model, and I didn’t care enough to challenge the disruption. I worked long hours, volunteered for missions dangerous and above my skill level. I tried to replace the security and comfort I felt on Cynabar with excitement, novelty. Craving family, friends, the starvation burned into an empty ache, and I eventually learned to fill it with other things. Temporary people, temporary assignments, and temporary acclaim.

It was in those circumstances, three months down a path to personal destruction, that I was brought into the Captain’s office. He revealed to me what I already assumed to be true: Jack survived my attempt on his life, and he was behind the mercenary insurgence.

They offered me a top secret position, to infiltrate behind enemy lines and relay information back to the Terrans. Completely insane, with certain death only a single misstep away. The smart thing to do would have been to say no. They knew my past with Jack, and wanted me to use it to my advantage. It was the kind of risk seeking behavior that could eventually kill me, but I was past caring about that. 

Every time I thought I was at rock bottom, a cavern opened up inside me, and the floor fell out again. This was no different. I accepted immediately, was trained for two weeks, and shipped out unceremoniously to be dumped on a desert planet, helpless bait.

The men who picked me up were disinterested in who I was. It took me days of being tossed around in cargo ships, chained together with other women and children, before I caught someone’s attention because of my Pilot’s uniform. 

I thought it would take longer, but luck, or something, was on my side, and I was taken to the very ship where I would later reside. Jack’s name had barely left my lips before I was taken to interrogation, where I had to swallow all my truths like acid and instead spew the machinations of my superiors. 

For three nights, they beat me. On the fourth morning, Jack came to see me.

I expected him to look older, jaded or wisened. Instead, the same boyish enthusiasm that made me fall in love with him had twisted into an arrogant charm, intended to be disarming until his knife was firmly in your gut. His eyes twinkled while he watched them torture me. When they were done, he offered me clemency. It took everything within me not to spit in his face, and instead accept.

Jack never touched me, not in the way he used to, or in the way I had feared he would want to again. Instead, the intimacy he demanded of me was personal, emotional. I told him about everything that happened since I walked away from his prone form, over a landscape of ice. The key to my cover was the truth, and he silently counted up my tears as I wept for the prince who cast me aside.

For nearly a year, Jack visited me every night I slept in that empty cubicle. His only touch was an occasional hand on mine, for which I bit back revulsion and accepted as a sign of friendship. The others made assumptions about these nightly meetings, and I let them believe it. The truth was much more revolting, that I let such a man comfort me as I cried.

The months went by, and I began to see things with clarity, started to build myself back together, even stronger than before. 

I recognized myself as a girl who traded poverty for rigidity and depersonalization. I was a young woman who threw herself out of structured confines into the arms of a man she barely knew, and left myself open to even the most predictable of heartbreak. These things I accepted, with a new maturity and clarity that, although tenuous, dried my tears until I had none left to weep. 

As my grief dried up, so did the nightly rendezvous with Jack. Instead, he called for me during the daylight hours, giving me more power and control in his twisted organization. 

Every ship I blew up, every skull I cracked, he would repay in whispers of information, sideline comments about the range of their reach, the size and might of their battalions. This I recorded in my mind, repeating the facts and figures over and over to myself throughout the day, so I could write it in the small ledger that sometimes appeared in the third stall of the women’s bathroom in a bar on a nearby satellite. 

For weeks, the ledger had been missing, but I refused to be concerned about it. Instead, I threw myself into my cover, and the nightly recitations became longer and more elaborate.

There are fifty incoming battalions from the Ethion galaxy, the mayor of Bentary is corrupt… new code was obtained to track Terran ships… we are closing in on the hidden stronghold on Mizzourei, the desert planet… the prince of Cynnabar has been captured.