Camellia found her spot in the Halfmoon and sat. She wouldn’t have much to do with the controls today. She was more of a passenger. Florian stood beside her.

“Damn. This is such a bad idea,” Meladee complained from the helm. “We’ve been keeping the wormhole a secret from all of Girandola, despite the fact that they’re looking for it. And, now we’re gonna light the damn thing up, send it somewhere new, and be like ‘Hey creepy aliens! Look at us! We’ve got your ranch of blood-filled people bags right here.’”

“Not a lot is worse than the Finial.” Benham’s fingers fluttered over the controls. He sat in a newly installed chair beside Meladee. They could both work the helm controls with a nice view of the windshield.

Sten and Eva stood at the back of the cockpit. Eva seemed ready to run to Engineering, but Sten wandered over to the weapons station and took the seat.

“A lot of things are worse than the Finial,” Eva said. “Or have you forgotten Ul’thetos and Ah’nee’thit?”

“They were pretty bad.” Benham looked back at Camellia and Florian. “But, how likely are we to find something like them again? Think about it.”

Camellia felt her eyes brighten.

Florian considered, “Iruedim is a kind of spaceship, and we’ve tested many times what comes through the wormhole. Humanoid aliens appear to be the most common. We’ve only gotten an incompatible species once. And, that’s out of who knows how many shifts. Odds are something nice will come through the wormhole.”

Meladee turned in her seat and exchanged a glance with Camellia. “Let’s have the pessimistic version. What do you think?”

Camellia glanced up at Florian. Then, she gave her attention back to Meladee. “I’m usually willing to take the risk, but this time…humanoid colonists aren’t looking for us. We’re looking for them. Who knows how many truly alien species passed Iruedim by, in the millennia since the wormhole’s first shift? Who knows if we’ll find one of those species now? And, who knows if they’ll be friendly?”

Meladee’s face seemed frozen. Slowly, she turned back to her controls. “I’m almost sorry I asked. Almost.”

“There it is. Fauchard. The best ship in our ancient fleet.” Benham sounded like he wore a smile.

The back of Meladee’s head bobbed. “And Curator Rooks is aboard. Pretty damn brilliant to call her that, Camellia. It’s so perfect.” Meladee steered their little Halfmoon towards the lights that signified Fauchard’s bay.

Camellia said, “I’m glad it’s grown on her. I really meant it as a joke.”

Halfmoon entered the bay and hovered toward the yellow lines that marked their parking space.

“Curator Rooks is content with her new title and most of her new job,” Sten said. “Though, she’s a bit stressed lately. The trips back to Girandola to rescue more of our crew members were more involved than we realized. Now, we’re finally ready to put that behind us, and we have the Finial poking around. Plus, we’re experimenting with the wormhole. The Iruedian governments are unanimously in favor of the shift. Well, except Lurren.” Sten shifted his gaze up, towards Eva.

She stood stiff and still, with crossed arms. She didn’t return his glance. She voted against the wormhole shift. With something that she could finally lose, Eva abandoned all attempts at risk taking.

“You’re going to have to get comfortable,” Benham said.

“Everyone wants to make it so that the Finial can never find us,” Camellia added.

“Here here,” came Benham’s reply.

Meladee was the last off Halfmoon. She always locked up. She could let Benham do it, but she was a paranoid bastard. She wanted to know that she locked the door, and she locked it well. Benham let her have it her way, fully admitting that there were times he forgot to lock his ship. Meladee was all for easy-going, but not when it came to the ship.

If one of their ships got stolen, it would be on Benham.

And, we’ve only got three. Can’t afford to lose even one. Damn, I would have been happy with one just over a year ago. I’m getting greedy.

Since Meladee was last off the ship, she arrived well into Rooks’ welcome speech – if you could call it a speech. Rooks didn’t bother with too many formalities in their presence, though her first name remained largely off limits. Even Sten, who had leave to call Rooks – Wren – usually used her last.

Meladee looked at Rooks. Her uniform was orderly. Her hair was too.

But, she looks stressed. Am I glad I don’t have her job.

Meladee strolled into the group.

“Meladee.” Rooks nodded in Meladee’s direction.

Meladee nodded back by way of cool greeting, and she didn’t mean cool in the sense that she was being cold, just that she was being cool. It might be the same thing actually.

The group started to walk towards Fauchard’s bridge. More tests had to be run over the course of several days. Inez and Eder would make wormholes in space, away from Iruedim and away from the natural wormhole. They would practice changing the wormhole’s location, and Rooks’ people would try to get a read on what lay beyond each portal.

Meladee guessed the tests would be uneventful and boring to those not initiated in the ways of sensor data and magic. For Meladee, the tests would be nerve-wracking. She didn’t think the actual wormhole functioned at all like Rooks’ researchers or Inez thought. It had its own special thing going on.

The group chattered around Meladee. Eva and Rooks spoke at the fore of the group. Sten, Benham, and Adalhard – actually Florian – had a conversation going. Adalhard also referred to Meladee’s good friend, Camellia, now.

Speaking of who…where is Camellia?

“What are you doing back here?” Camellia asked.

Meladee almost jumped. “Walking. What’s it look like?”

“You seem kind of worried. I would know,” Camellia said.

“Yeah, well, it’s this wormhole thing. Aren’t you worried…Adalhard?”

Camellia smiled, just a little. “I love it. It’s a good name.”

Meladee nodded. “I don’t know if I could do like you. Just change my name. I like Arai. Martin isn’t so great. They’re both really common, but my name’s better.”

“I do like Arai better. Maybe, Benham would change his someday,” Camellia said.

“Yeah, that would be great. We could be the Arais.” Meladee glanced at Camellia and saw her friend looking distant. “Hey, something wrong with you?”

Camellia’s eyes widened. “Well…”

“Let’s pause here for a minute,” Rooks announced to the group. “It’s our simulation room. I want you to take a look, Meladee.”

Meladee took her attention from Camellia, with great reluctance.

“Yeah sure,” Meladee answered. “You want me to make sure that the Ferrans aren’t going to break the wormhole?”

“I don’t think they can break it,” Rooks said. “But, I do want a second opinion. Actually, more like a hundredth. A lot of mages have been through here, but not one of them is as paranoid as you.”

Camellia stifled a laugh.

“Gee thanks,” Meladee said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got your paranoid evaluation right here.”

A few minutes later, Rooks left Meladee in the simulation room, along with Benham and Camellia for company. Everyone else made their way to the bridge.

Eva thought that wise. Meladee seemed to be taking her time. The rest of them could eat and talk to the Ferrans. Eva, for one, preferred the later.

Rooks stepped on to her bridge first, followed by the three men. Eva hung out in the back.

Sten glanced in her direction. He looked past her to the corridor. He’d wanted to stay and look through the simulations, but he’d done the polite thing and decided to greet the Ferrans first. He was ever the gentle android.

Rooks gestured to some food that sat by the benches on the bridge’s upper level. “We’ve got snacks right here because we’re hardly leaving the bridge these past few days. So, help yourselves.”

“Adalhard,” Eder approached the man.

Inez grinned at him.

Eva moved close to the conversation, ready to insert herself when the time was right.

“You two haven’t been leaving the bridge?” Adalhard asked. “That seems…not good for your well-being.” Adalhard looked at Eder as he said the last.

Eder avoided the other man’s eyes.

Inez said, “The wormhole tests last pretty long. We have to leave them open for the officers to get good sensor reads, and since the spells aren’t sewn into bombs, we have to be present to keep them going. It’s pretty exhausting.” Inez seemed anything but exhausted.

Eder, on the other hand, looked the part.

“You should get out an embroidery machine then.” Adalhard put a hand on Eder’s shoulder. “Get some sleep.”

“Oh, we sleep.” Inez leaned in. “We sleep ten hours a day. Just the rest of the time…” Inez gestured around. “We’re here.”

“You don’t need to rush this, you know. No one’s making you move so fast,” Adalhard said.

Eva agreed. Rooks certainly wasn’t. Maybe, the Iruedian governments gave some sense of urgency to the project but not Eva’s Lurren. Eva was willing to bet it was Inez who pushed the research faster. She had an impatient soul, and poor Eder was along for the ride.

“If I may interrupt,” Eva said. “Do you have candidates for the wormhole’s new exit?”

Inez’s eyes lit. “Yeah. Of course. We’ve been using location symbols from the old Volanter spells. We know they kind of understood the wormhole, and they definitely understood locations. So, that’s where we’re drawing it all from.”

Adalhard crossed his arms. “Interesting. So, you think we’ll send the wormhole somewhere it’s been before? Or, somewhere the Volanters have been.”

Eder nodded. “Probably. We don’t think they’d have symbols for places they hadn’t been.”

Adalhard agreed, “True.”

Eva hadn’t known anything about Volanters before she met Camellia. And lately, Eva had been busy rebuilding Lurren, sometimes literally. But, she’d taken some time to learn about the Volanters. What she had learned, she didn’t like.

The rest of Iruedim walked in the Volanters’ footsteps. All of Iruedim’s modern magic came from Volanter magic circles. Without Volanters, Iruedim would not be as they knew it. The Volanters were certainly powerful, yet something seemed not right. Eva could understand their interest and need for wormhole spells. But, why did they need a spell designed to draw a person into a dark dream? Still, the Volanters had been the key to Ul’thetos’ demise. Eva owed them that much.

Sten broke Eva’s reverie as he sidled close. “I’m going down to Simulations to see how things are. Would you like to come?”

Eva nodded once. “I think I will.”

She left without a good-bye to Inez and the others. They debated with Adalhard the timeline of events in Volanter history; an interesting topic but just speculation. If Eva wanted to know how the wormhole experiment would play out, she needed to look at the data and the simulations, not the past.

“Are you missing our little household?” Sten asked. “Tiny Tin, Wheelian, Ferrou, and Spring Peeper? Not to mention some of the other little repair bots.”

“No. It’s been a matter of days,” Eva said. “You’re so sentimental. And obviously not as averse to Leonidus as I am. It will be many more days before the odiousness of Leonidus leaves my person, and then a few more days until I begin to miss the good things we left in Lurren.”

Sten smiled. “I’m a bit sentimental. Oh, by the way, we have the entire train line clear. And, in two months, we can reinforce the weak parts of the structure. We might be able to use the lines in a traveling capacity by this time next year. We can even get some of those old engines in the shed running again.”

Eva gave Sten an incredulous look. “We don’t have enough population to occupy the three engines we do have, and you want to free and repair the ones in the shed? There’s a reason they’re there.”

“Are you talking about their, sometimes, abrasive personalities?”

“If I have to hear one more of them discuss why they are entitled to ‘biff’ and ‘bash’ each other, I will…”

Sten laughed lightly. “I can work on the rough edges of their personalities. Besides, they aren’t just machines. They’re people. Aren’t they?”

Eva remained quiet a moment. “With souls and all,” she agreed. “Fine. Repair them. At the very least, we can find construction work for them. We’ll need to get our cities rebuilt eventually.”

“Ah, yes. It will be a golden age for trains,” Sten said. “Now, here we are. Shall we see what Meladee thinks of the simulations?”

“We shall.”

Meladee ignored the location data. She didn’t care where the wormhole went. They couldn’t know what was on the other side, and Meladee thought it couldn’t be anything other than trouble.

Sure, they’d found humanoids in Girandola, but they also found the Finial. The more Benham recounted his time with them, the more she was glad she’d gotten him the rescue he needed. It was painful for the two of them to talk about it but more so for Meladee. Benham would get this haunted look in his eyes, and the words would just spill out. Meladee had to listen. Benham had grown to trust Meladee enough to talk about it.

She preferred to forget. Still, Benham’s little confessions had made her remember some of the bad things she’d been through. She gave them some thought, but she didn’t talk about them. She thought it was good enough.

Meladee thought the more fun they had the better, and they had plenty of fun.

This isn’t fun.

Meladee’s eyes traveled over the wormhole spells. She agreed that Inez and Eder had perfected a location switch on artificially created wormholes, but that was a matter of switching out symbols. The real thing didn’t have symbols. It was a beast of magic or of science.

Meladee had the data on the wormhole itself, and though she didn’t understand the science, someone had written detailed summaries about the similarities between the natural and artificial wormholes. That helped Meladee make sense of it.

“So, what do you think?” Benham asked. “Is the world going to end?”

Meladee turned from the large screen. She paused the simulation, and the data scrolling along the side paused too.

Behind her, Meladee saw Benham and Camellia sitting at a table quietly playing with Meladee’s Tarot cards. It didn’t look like any game. It looked more like an amateur fortune telling spread.

“Damn, guys. Those cards don’t really work.”

With wide eyes, Camellia placed a card on the table. She looked like a deer in lantern light.

“It’s just a game,” Benham said.

“How do you explain all the fortune tellers on Iruedim?” Camellia asked. “Not the ones in carnivals. The ones that work for governments outside of Groaza and Tagtrum. They’re right enough of the time.”

“Yeah, well, they’re doing some spell behind the scenes,” Meladee said. “Now, back to the end of the world. I don’t think they can break the wormhole or…I don’t know…explode it.” Meladee leaned against the console behind her. She made an explosion sound and spread her hands far. “What I think is going to happen – wormhole destabilization. There’s no way they can just change the location and have everything move smooth. Two artificial wormholes are nice and neat. The natural one doesn’t have a code that tells it where to go next. It just flits around till it finds a good place to land.”

“That sounds bad.” Camellia looked at Benham. “Or good. If the wormhole eventually stabilizes again, we can at least protect ourselves from the Finial. Hide away.”

“Get on our feet,” Benham agreed. “Yeah, this could turn out good.”

“Do you think the wormhole would go back to normal? I don’t want to lose our link to the rest of space,” Camellia’s eyes drooped with worry.

“Yeah, it’ll go back. Because unlike artificial wormholes, it’s found a way to exist without our help. It’s the more resilient one.”

“That’s good to hear,” Eva said from the doorway.

Meladee startled.

Eva continued, “Though, I don’t see why we can’t just make artificial wormholes for our own uses. We don’t need to mess with the natural one.”

“I don’t want to be the mage that has to do that job. Until we can figure out location markers perfectly, they’d have to leave the hole open.” Meladee laughed. “That would be one tired mage. Probably a dead mage after a while.”

Eva raised an eyebrow.

Camellia didn’t think there was any danger of Meladee being the wormhole mage, but Eva had a point: why mess with something that worked?

Camellia lowered her gaze to her lap. She was vaguely aware of Benham and Sten toying with the Simulations console. The rest of her attention, she sent inward.

I’ve certainly messed with something that worked. Or, at least, my father would say so. He’s been a vampire – an unslain vampire – for a handful of centuries and all because he made a family system that works.

For no one but him.

Camellia paused. Then again, Camellia was the only person who ever complained about it. She was the only one who wanted out. Even her mother found the arrangement acceptable, sharing thoughts and memories. It evoked a cozy image to those who’d never lived through it.

Camellia had a different viewpoint. She thought her father’s lifestyle was invasive.

But, she and Florian had no nearby family. Camellia felt a strong pressure to fill that hole.

A rap sounded on the desk.

Camellia jumped. She looked up to find Meladee shuffling the cards back into a neat pile.

“You don’t even know how to do a proper spread. So, Eva’s taken a quick look at the simulations. I’m hungry. You must be too. She’s agreed to put up with us stuffing our face holes. What do you say?” Meladee asked.

Camellia rose from her chair. “I could eat. Where are we going? The Bridge?”

“No, there’s food closer by,” Eva said. “Follow me.”

Meladee and Camellia left the room on Eva’s heels.

Meladee exhaled a long breath. “I’ll eat. Then, I’ll give Rooks my paranoid opinion. In the meantime, what’s that thing you were going to tell me before I had to work?” Meladee raised a hand. “No wait, don’t tell me. You’re not supposed to be here, right? It’s irresponsible for you to be running off on spaceships, and your Florian doesn’t know.”

Camellia felt her face warm. “What are you suggesting?”

“You know…married stuff.” Meladee refused to meet Camellia’s eyes.

“How irresponsible do you think I am?” Camellia glanced side to side but found herself alone with her friends.

Eva led them into a breakroom and opened the refrigerator. “I told you she wasn’t.”

Meladee shrugged.

Camellia still felt hot in the face. “Meladee, why did you think that? I wasn’t married to Florian, until a few days ago.”

“Well, you said you sleep with him.”

“We are very careful,” Camellia said.

“Yeah, you would be. Forget I said it. It was stupid of me.” Meladee waved a hand dismissively. Her own face had turned red.

Camellia started to laugh. “My god, Meladee.”

Eva placed food on the table and backed away. “Leftovers are served. Now, what was the thing you were going to tell Meladee?”

Camellia took a seat. “I got a gift envelope that I think my father sent.” Camellia reached for food but didn’t bring it to her mouth.

Meladee’s food stopped halfway. “But how? We aren’t supposed to write our names on the envelopes. If we did, then everyone would know I gave you that one with the weird birds. Sorry about that, by the way. I had it laying around.”

“I know his hand,” Camellia said. “And I like your weird birds, Meladee. Why do you think he sent me a gift?”

“What’s in it?” Meladee asked, eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“A lot of money,” Camellia said quietly.

“Take it and run.” Meladee finally took a bite of the leftovers.

“Did he sign it? Did he leave the well-wishing note?” Eva sat at the table, but she didn’t even pretend to eat.

“He did not,” Camellia said.

“Then, leave it alone. Enjoy the money,” Eva answered.

Camellia sighed. “I think I should send a thank you note.”

“No!” Eva and Meladee said together.

Camellia almost smiled. “Alright, maybe not.”