20:00 - Once we get close to the Belt, Captain Ava and Vedod and I will hop over to a ship they took from Boss Riggh. (They didn’t tell me we were towing it this whole time? I guess it didn’t come up? But I am getting pretty irritated with all this secrecy!) The plan is for Silas, Kal, and Sarge to confront this Rivallman guy directly, while the rest of us do some sneaking to try to find the information for ourselves. That way, we have a better chance of finding what we’re looking for, or corroborating any information we get.

7:37 - Sarge got up early to make preparations, and I couldn’t get back to sleep once she left, so I was awake when Vedod knocked on our door.

When I opened up, he snuck into the room and snapped the door shut behind him. “Hi, sorry,” he said. “I think we’re about to get to the Belt, and there’s a few things you ought to know before we start the mission.”

I was still pre-coffee moody, so I just sat on my bunk and bundled up in the blanket, waiting for him to talk.

He hesitated and glanced around the cabin. I guess he probably hadn’t been in Sarge’s room before. “Weird,” he said. “Anyway. You should know about Oren.”

He told me about the early days of the Sojourner, when it was just Captain Ava and Silas scraping by on fumes of inspiration energy and trying to put together a crew. They stopped in the Belt to look for recruits (I bet Silas didn’t like that idea), and while they were there, they met Oren Ten. He was a mechanic and racer for the Asteroid Rally, repairing and copiloting racing ships under Rivallman. When he had the time, he was an artist. A sculpter. He wanted to get out of the Asteroid Rally, so he took Ava’s invitation to come make art to fuel the Sojourner, and his brother Kal came along with him. (Vedod mentioned that Sarge joined the crew around that time, too, but didn’t say much of anything else. In hindsight, and after thinking about it, I want to ask more about that, too!)

This was before Ava and the others had constructed the Art Detector, so they had to search for art the old-fashioned way. Doing research, eavesdropping, maybe making some under-the-table deals. Sarge still had plenty of contacts with smugglers, so she often gathered information for them and helped them find artifact targets. Oren made a lot of art for them, too, but sculptures are hard to store, so they sold or traded off his work pretty regularly. At some point, Vedod joined the crew because he wanted a better gig than a trade depot frycook, and because he and Kal hit it off when the Sojourner stopped at his port for shore leave.

Vedod said that when he first came to the Sojourner, Ava was different. She was still sort of cool and commanding, but she would make jokes with the crew. She treated Kal like a little brother. She and Silas were always an unshakable duo, a work partnership, but she was warmer around Oren. When she and Oren announced that they were engaged, only Silas was surprised. (Vedod thought it was obvious, Kal had known for a long time, and Sarge was as inscrutable as always. Knowing Silas, he’d probably been too wrapped up in his work to notice anything else.)

Then they took a salvaging mission with Boss Riggh, who had been smuggling artifacts to Scarships, and some actual scarships showed up. Vedod didn’t see much of the fight, but he was waiting at the blast doors to help a wounded Kal back inside.

He said he saw Ava shut the blast doors before Oren made it back.

Right after he said that, Vedod immediately started explaining that the scarships were about to cause an explosion, that Ava had to make an awful choice to save the rest of them, but I just squished myself further down in my blanket. I guessed he was right. I didn’t think Ava was a bad person, and I believed him when he said she loved Oren. I think it just made me scared and sad and a little mad that the universe was cruel enough to allow things like this to happen.

9:47 - I’ve had my coffee, so I’m feeling better now. Vedod and Captain Ava and I are on Boss Riggh’s ship, and not to sound prissy, but it STINKS! It literally stinks! I don’t think the air filters have been changed in years, which is a hazard, but it’s especially bad because I think they smoked things in here! Cigars, I’m sure, but maybe other things? I haven’t spent enough time around people who smoke to identify anything other than first generation tobacco. Every elementary schoolchild knows that you never smoke during space travel, because gummed-up air filters lead to deep space asphyxiation. That tells you what kind of person Boss Riggh and his smugglers are — they don’t take care of things. They just consume them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Boss Riggh gave us this ship because it was on its last leg anyway. I hope Captain Ava checked it for trackers or hidden cameras or anything else snoopy.

12:01 - We’re on approach to Earth 57, which is right in the middle of the Belt. Small asteroids have been thunking against our hull all morning. Right now, I’m sitting in the helm with Captain Ava and Vedod.

Oh, the long-range comm just went off!

12:15 - We’ve heard from Silas and the others!

“We met with Rivallman,” Silas said. His voice was scratchy with interference from the asteroids. “Kal and Sarge have agreed to race for him in exchange for information about Oren. I fear Rivallman might be stringing us along, so I will investigate what I can while Kal and Sarge prepare for the race.”

Captain Ava hit the reply button, holding the comm to her mouth. “When is the race?”

“Um…” There was a scuffling noise, and Silas’s voice came through quietly as he leaned away from the comm. “When is the race?” he asked.

“Tomorrow, 1000 hours,” Sarge’s voice said distantly.

“1000 hours, tomorrow,” Silas repeated.

“And what exactly are you planning to… investigate?” Captain Ava asked.

“Whatever I can. I could try to get into Rivallman’s records and see what business he’s entangled with.”

“If you do, make sure all suspicion circles back to you,” Captain Ava said. “We don’t want them to suspect that we have a second investigation going.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll update you when we have more information.” Captain Ava flicked the long-range comm off and turned to me and Vedod. “We’ll land in a public garage and take a walkaround. Do some shopping. Don’t get into trouble.”

We still have the new artifacts from Port Sumeria, so I won’t need to shop for those. I don’t know what I’ll do! Other than wandering around. I’ll ask if Vedod has anyplace in particular he wants to go.

14:04 - We booked a slot in a garage, and Captain Ava went off to scout around while Vedod and I hit the shops. I mostly just followed him as he restocked our kitchen supplies. Looking forward to whatever he’s planning to make with those moon-blue peppers and kale.

15:47 - Captain Ava said we’ll do some sneaking tonight, once Rivallman’s security switches to the night shift. Apparently she’s found a way to get in, or so she thinks. I wonder if Silas gave her any intel from inside?

“Should Mary and I really be coming along?” Vedod asked her, but she just kept doing maintenance on her pistol.

“You can handle yourself in a fight, and I’d rather Mary come with us than stay here alone,” she said.

I’m not sure which I would prefer. On the one hand, the fact that she’s bringing me along means I’m even more a part of the crew, right? On the other hand, I’m scared to run into more trouble like we saw on Port Sumeria.

Gotta stay positive! If I want to keep doing this space-adventure business, I’m just going to have to learn to roll with the punches. It’s like the first restoration classes I took freshman year! The professor teaches you the basics, but when they actually hand you an old, moldy artifact, you have to figure out what to do with it yourself. Only experience will teach you, and you get experience by trying!

20:12 - Vedod and I are hanging out in a port cafe, and I feel positively covert. We’re wearing new jackets and some glare scarves that’ll help block our faces from the cameras, and our job right now is to sit around and look non-suspicious.

This place is hopping. Outside, the traffic is even busier than Port Sumeria. Lots of low-flying ships looking for a garage to dock, and on the street, it’s like an ant-roadway of scooters, cars, and cobbled-together racers. The racers cruise pretty slowly, pilots waving and nodding to people on the street, and sometimes people go running up to them to snap a photo. Right now, there’s an aquamarine chariot racer with fuchsia-glowing cables connecting the hauler engines and the cockpit. The reflector paint on its side is hard to read, sort of a spidery tattoo font. I wonder if they’ll be racing Kal and Sarge tomorrow.

Inside, the port cafe is packed with people in leather jackets, stringy latex, engineering jumpsuits, light-up platform shoes, neon-glint tattoos, even holo-hair chips. The waitress who dropped off a pot of spicy chai has a blue holo-hair ponytail, but it glitched once or twice and let us see her bald head underneath. Vedod said he was thinking about getting one of those, to add some accents to his braids. Maybe some purple or cobalt blue.

The chai tastes a little like someone left a residue of motor oil in the pot, but not too bad.

22:21 - I’m in a new cafe with Captain Ava, and Vedod is by himself somewhere. Captain Ava is hoping that by appearing in a few different places, we’ll be able to trick any face-tracking software Rivallman might use into lumping us with the rest of the random faces it might identify. When I asked her to explain, she talked a lot about algorithms and artificial intention postulation, but it all went over my head. “Is that the kind of stuff that the… Art Detector uses?” I asked.

Ava’s eyes flicked toward the rest of the cafe. “Not exactly.”

I tapped my toes on the floor. The caffeine from the chai was making me jittery. “Then… what does it use?”

“This isn’t the best place for that conversation,” she said.

“Right. Sorry.” There was a lot more I wanted to ask her about, but I wasn’t sure if that might be crossing a line. She is the captain, after all.

Eventually, the silence got to be too much and I asked anyway. “Do you really think Oren might still be alive?”

She looked at me in surprise, which I’d never seen on her face before. It made her look… younger. Just for a second, because then she looked angry. “Vedod told you, didn’t he?”

“I’m sure he meant well!”

She gazed out the window, and I don’t think I could look that effortlessly dramatic if I tried. “It’s for the best. I should have orientated you to the situation myself.”

She kept gazing out the window for a while, and I started to see why an artist like Oren might have fallen in love with her. She was a study of contrast and line. Her dark, smooth hair, the serious set of her jaw, the focus of her eyes. If I’d taken a photo, she’d have been a solid, simple image in the foreground with a fuzzy background of outlandish shapes and colors. Maybe she’s not complicated. Just private. I think that’s also why Silas gets along with her.

Without looking back at me, she asked, “Are you prepared for tonight? Answer honestly.”

I had to think about it for a few seconds. “I don’t know. Sarge and I… well, Sarge told me that I needed to be sure about all this. And I’m not sure if I am. But I’m going to do my best.”

She nodded, and we haven’t spoken since.

00:41 - I’m glad the chai’s caffeine is holding up. The three of us are back together, and we’re hiding out in some drainage tunnels. We should be under Rivallman’s compound now, or at least that’s what Ava said. Ava’s in one of the access ports, trying to get into the security system so we can find more gaps to take advantage of. We made it into these tunnels because Ava noticed that the security seal stayed open for a few seconds after a drainage chute emptied, so we rushed in during that gap, and we’ve been walking around in the dark for about an hour now.

01:22 - They’ve plotted a route, so we’re on the move again.

02:08 - We climbed out of the tunnels through a maintenance hatch, and now we’re in a series of weird catacombs Captain Ava saw on the security feed. Or rather, she saw the power being directed to the doors. She figured that was a good place to start. I’ll update as we go along.

Flashlights never light up as much as I think they should. We can only see a few crates at a time. Some of the crates are actual wood, but most of them are plasteel. I popped open a couple and found some pretty standard artifacts. Books, poems, some paintings and stained glass.

“Why is this being stored down here?” I whisper-asked Captain Ava. “The conditions are far too damp!”

“Smuggling. Temporary storage,” she said, and kept walking, shining her light on a tall rack of paintings draped over with plastic sheets. She peeled one of the sheets back and stood before it for a little while. “Mary, what do you make of this?”

I aimed my light at the painting, too. It was as tall as a person, framed in black plastic, and the canvas had a plastic-y sheen to it, too. I tapped my finger against it, listening to the pop. “Cheap materials,” I said.

Stepping back, I took a longer look at the painting. It reminded me a little of The Scream, in that it was impressionistic and used sharp, contrasting colors, but that was where the comparison ended. A figure of a person crouched in the lower corner, awkwardly off-set, but it was painted in such a way that I could tell whether it was facing the viewer or staring at something beyond. I wasn’t sure if it was clothed, or if those dark shapes were shadows falling across its body, and the background looked like a room at first, but then maybe a deceptive landscape? Or maybe just abstract shapes? My eye kept finding bits and pieces of forms, but I couldn’t put them together into anything that made sense. It wasn’t abstract, and it wasn’t impressionistic, and I didn’t have enough art education to find another term for it.

“I don’t like it,” Vedod said.

“I don’t understand it,” I said. “Art is supposed to inspire, but I think this was designed to… It has an effect, and it makes you think about it, but it doesn’t inspire. I don’t know if you could get much inspiration energy from this.”

“You said it was made with cheap materials,” Captain Ava said. “That alone would lead me to think it’s pulp-art. A mass-production piece.”

I shook my head. “There’s intention to it. I don’t think this was made by anyone who meant to create something beautiful.”

Captain Ava drew the plastic sheet over it, though I could still see the muddled colors through the plastic. “Let’s keep moving. We know he’s smuggling. What else is he up to?”

We continued through the shelves of crates and hanging racks, and Captain Ava branched off to a different corner of the catacomb. I stuck close with Vedod.

“Is there anything we should be looking for?” I asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.

Something hissed above us, and we both froze. After a few seconds, Vedod leaned over and whispered, “I think that was just a pipe.”

I shivered. “I keep feeling like something horrible is going to jump out at me.”

“You should know that I have a flight response. But I usually grab people to take them with me.”

“I think I’m okay with that,” I said. “Are we… are we friends enough that..?”

“Oh, sure. Bogeyman shows up, I might just scoop you up princess-style and sprint out of here. Nearly did that to Kal after we watched a scary movie and ran into Sarge in the hallway.”

I snickered, clapping a hand over my mouth when the sound echoed.

02:56 - Things are happening. Quick note about what happened:

Vedod and I found some crates that looked older than the others, so he found a tinkery way to jimmy them open. Inside were some weird inspiration extraction helmets. Weird because they had a piece that closed over the mouth and might provide oxygen, and the stimulator pads that lined the cranium were heavily wired, like they were designed to handle heavy strands of inspiration energy. That kind of wiring is only used in machines that use inspiration energy as fuel. That’s not safe in an extractor headset. Vedod also found some canisters with a weird honeycomb wire frame inside and some incredibly suped-up shock absorbing padding around them.

I wondered what kind of inspiration energy might be that volatile, and it didn’t take too long for a really bad idea to come to me. Maybe Scarship inspiration energy needs that kind of special casing.

Then we heard footsteps on the stairs. True to his word, Vedod yanked me back behind some crates. Workers in pearly uniforms came in and started moving crates up the stairs, loading up a shipment, I guess. Vedod and I waited until we figured out their timing, and then we snuck back through the shelves to get to the maintenance hatch. On the way, I was really stupid and bumped into something and made a little noise, and one of the workers came to investigate, and then Captain Ava leaped out of nowhere and shot at him, and then we sprinted to the maintenance shaft.

We’re in the tunnels again, waiting for Captain Ava to patch into the security again. They haven’t followed us yet.

03:04 - We’re running. Captain Ava says there’s alarms going off in the security system, but we can’t hear anything down here, which is even scarier.

03:12 - Stopping to get a breather. We’re taking a different route.

I hope someone gets a chance to read this. I hope we make it out of this.

03:17 - They’re after us!

03:20 - Silas if you see this I’m sorry for moving the anti-fungal kit I didn’t realize the upper shelves got too hot and it’s my fault the solutions got spoiled. Sarge I’m sorry for knocking over your pink succulent please don’t set fire to my grave. If I get a grave.

03:41 - We might be safer now. Captain Ava says we’re under the city. I think we’re mostly in sewers, because it smells awful and feels humid. We had a few armed security guys chasing us, but I think we lost them for now. Vedod’s trying to find signal for the long-range comm so we can call the other team for help.

03:46 - On the move. Trying to find signal.

04:02 - They’re after us again and we can’t find a way out that won’t leave us cornered. Captain Ava wants us to split up.

04:04 - I’m alone and I’m so, so scared. If we divide up, maybe some of us will make it out alive. Or at least won’t get caught. They won’t kill us, right? They’ll want to know who we are and what we’re here for. They’ll interrogate us. Right? But if Rivallman is smuggling things to Scarships, he’s a pretty bad man.

04:07 - I think I see a light.

04:10 - I saw them! The people chasing me! They’re the Heartless! I saw the silver visors and they have machines strapped to their suits and I saw one of them feed a painting through a shredder on his arm before he shot at me, and now they’re chasing me and I’m voice-typing because I hope somebody finds—