“What watch do you have this evening?”

“Four A.M., sir,” Vale replied. The captain grunted.

“Maybe I should take that one instead.”

Vale felt heat rise up her neck. “And why is that. Sir,” she said.

The captain held up his hands. “Hey, if you want to keep to your watch-“

“I do.”

“That’s fine, then. I just...” he sighed, running his hand through the thick, dark hair that was showing just a few streaks of gray here and there. “I feel badly. I don’t particularly like these passengers. I don’t particularly agree with what they’re doing. I don’t like how they talk about our Chief Engineer, and I really don’t like that they attacked you.”

Yeah, it’s really bothering you. I can tell. “Only one attacked me, sir.”

“Yes, well...if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve got to keep good standing with Prism Control, I’d consider scrapping this whole thing and flying them back to Palerno-4.”

Vale laughed, then modulated herself when the captain squinted at her. “Sorry, sir. Just imagining the look on their faces if you told them they weren’t going through the Prism. Funny, to me.”

Not as funny as you lying to me, she thought. Yeah, you’re going to turn around a fully paid crew, with the possibility of being a primary contact for future colonist transit to Cyton? Fucking bullshit right there. Sir.

“Yeah, it would be kinda funny, wouldn’t it,” Patek replied, a smile breaking out on his face. He shook his head. “Alright, then. Four A.M., you’ll relive Mr. Nought. I’ll see you for the crew meeting at eight, then?”

Vale nodded. “Yessir. Have a good night, captain.”

“You too, S.O.”

As she left the command module, Vale tried to follow the advice of the various senior officers, therapists, books, and feel-good movies had given her over the years. She tried to tell herself that the captain was in a difficult spot. That this wasn’t a military ship, it was a business – and the business was, at the moment, taking chrisfash to some new planet on the other side of the Prism so they could build some shitty little chrisfash society in peace.

It’s just business, said a voice, unfamiliar to her, in the back of her head. The captain’s just trying to earn a paycheck. And besides, when the job is done, that will be ten fewer chrisfash in governed space. And that’s a good thing.

“Fuckin’ assholes,” Vale snarled to herself. You know what was also a good thing? Back when it was your job to-

Images flashbulbed in front of her. Sitting down with her back to a half-collapsed brick wall, smoking a cigarette, winking at some green recruit who, although kinda cute, looked as if he was one more near-miss from pissing his camo. A bar brawl, one that she started, but not really, since it was those three assholes’ choice to wear sleeveless shirts to display the large, flourished cross tattoos on their arms, flanked by automatic rifles. The bullet-holes in the sign above a girls’ school-

“Fuck.” She came back to herself suddenly, leaning against the wall, her world mostly black but coming back into focus. “Fuck fuck fuck.” There was a piercing pain in her head, the type of migraine that she hadn’t dealt with in a while.

“Come on.” She pushed herself, gently, back into a more appropriate position, quickly looking around to check that she was alone. She was.

Vale took in a deep breath, counted to four, then released it over four. She tried the same thing twice more, but didn’t feel much better.

“Fuck it,” she swore. “Why bother?” She heard a few voices, telling her not to silence her feelings, not to put her head down and muscle through them the way she always did, telling her to embrace them and-

“Fuck you, Dr. Ballas,” she swore, pushing herself along the hallway to the medbay. “And fuck you, Captain Devoy. And fuck you too...whatever your title was, Guintano.”

She reached a corner, grabbed a handhold to swing herself around. “All of your advice is- shit.”

Vale collided with the person she hadn’t seen at about three-quarter speed, sending both of them bouncing off in different directions. She instinctively pulled back the fingers in her right hand, remembered she had given the tranquilizer glove to Diego, and prepared to expose the hypo in the palm of her left hand.

Then she saw who she’d run into.

“Jacob,” she said, as inside she told herself to stand down. “Jesus. Are you okay, kid?”

“Yeah. Sorry.” Thomas’s younger son, sixteen, skinny, and with his sister’s same dark features, looked at Vale for a second, frightened. Then, without another word, he turned and started pushing and pulling himself down the corridor to the passenger section of the ship as fast as he could.

“Uh huh,” Vale said to herself, watching him go. “Scared? Or suspicious? We’ll have answers for you after the break.”

Then she sighed, closed her eyes, and slowly drifted to her left, allowing herself to rest against the wall. You are so fucking old, she told herself. And so fucking tired.

And yet, she said out loud, “somehow, not suicidal? How the fuck is that possible?” Vale opened her eyes, and started pulling herself down the last little stretch of hallway that led to Diego’s small corner of the ship. “Fucking wish I was. It’d make a lot of things a hell of a lot easier, that’s for fucking sure.”

“Talking to yourself again, Vale?” Diego called from the doorway up ahead.

“You know it,” Vale replied. “Got my glove reloaded?”

“Ja, boss,” he said, drifting back. “Come, step into my laboratory.”

“Oh Dr. Frankenstein,” Vale said in a high-pitched, effected voice. Diego faked a deep, mad scientist’s laugh as he floated over to a workstation protruding from the wall.

“What the fuck is wrong with us?” Vale asked. “I mean, seriously. I want to know. Like think back to Earth history. You know, the folks who were all cooped up in their boats, traveling for months over dangerous oceans...were they like us?”

“Undoubtedly,” Diego said. He picked up the synthetic leather glove and brought it back over to the Security Officer.

“Jesus,” Vale said. “How humanity survived long enough to get to the stars...”

“Right?” Diego said. Vale took the glove from him, slid it back on, and flexed the fingers. She hyperextended her knuckles, felt the click of the hypo extending, saw the small point rise up from the palm. With two fingers on either side of it, she pushed it back down until she heard it click once more.

“Thanks, boss,” she said.

“De nada.”

“Oh shit, do you actually speak Spanish?” Vale asked – in Spanish. Diego looked at her quizzically.

“Que?” he said, then laughed. “I don’t speak Spanish,” he said, in English. “My parents were second-generation Honduran-American. They spoke some, but they moved us to Japan when we were kids.”

“So you speak...English and Japanese?”

“And Dutch!” Diego said proudly.

Of course. Because of your husband, Vale almost found herself saying. But she stopped herself before she could – the nationality of Diego’s husband wasn’t on his official shippapers. But it was on the dossier Lee had provided her. The doctor’s primary languages were part of his ship record – and Vale knew that his primary ones were English and Japanese – but she decided to keep up the charade anyway.

“And Dutch,” she said, echoing him as he returned to the workstation to clean up the tools and vials he needed to refill Vale’s glove. She absentmindedly squeezed her hand into a fist, released, and squeezed again.

“I crashed into young Jacob on my way in here,” she said. “Everything okay with him?”

There, she thought to herself. He stiffened a bit – didn’t he?

“Oh sure,” Diego replied, focused on his cleanup and not looking at her. He paused a second before speaking...right?

Vale gave him a few seconds to elaborated, but he didn’t. “Doctor-patient confidentiality stuff?” she asked.

“Hm? Oh, no, no,” Diego replied. He finished with his cleanup and turned around to face her, casually holding onto the workstation behind him. “Yeah, no, he was just worried about his dad.”

“He was worried...about Little Thomas?”

“Oh sure,” Diego lied. “I mean, think about it. He comes at you. You karate-slap him in the neck. He goes completely limp, starts drooling, his eyes roll up into his head...I mean, it’s pretty terrifying to see your dad in a state like that.”

“Uh huh.”

She fixed Diego with a hard stare. Liars love to elaborate, she thought, and sure enough, Diego kept talking. “I mean, I know it doesn’t seem like the two of them are very close...and it seems more like Little Thomas is closer to Tiny Thomas than he is to Jacob. But that doesn’t mean...”

He trailed off.

“Uh huh,” Vale said again. Diego’s mouth twisted up and to the side.

“You’re not buying this, are you?” he said.

“Nuh uh.”

Diego sighed. He nodded towards the door. “Anyone out there?” Vale backed up, not allowing her eyes to leave the doctor as she did so. Outside of Teek – and occasionally First Mate Nought – she trusted him more than anyone else on the ship. But Vale knew how easy it was for trust to be misplaced.

She leaned backwards out of the doorway, slowly turning her head first to the left, then to the right, keeping Diego in her peripheral vision at all times.

“Nope,” she said, pulling herself back into the medical area. “Just us.”

“Okay. Well, look, Jacob...has taken on an interest in medicine, since being on board.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah. It took him a little bit to warm up, but he’s been asking a ton of questions about being a doctor, and medical school-“

“I don’t think there’s going to be a medical school for him to attend on Cytus.”

Diego’s face darkened. “Yeah,” he said, “you’re telling me. That kid is gonna have to find a way off that rock, or find himself...” he shook his head.

“Anyway,” he continued, “he wants to learn. And so he’s been asking me stuff. And I...” He bit his lip, then leaned in.

“I can trust you. Right, Vale?”

“I can’t answer that for you, Diego,” Vale said slowly. She shrugged. “With some things, sure. With other things...not so much. We’ve known each other for only a few weeks, so you’ve got to decide for yourself.”

Diego sighed. “You’re so fucking honest sometimes, it’s scares me,” he said. “Look, I gave him medical texts. And vids. Basically, enough data that he could self-teach most of what he’d get by going to school in governed space. Yeah, maybe he won’t be able to go to a traditional school, especially if he doesn’t find a way off that chrisfash rock and back through the Prism, but...” he trailed off, his face confused as he looked at the expression on Vale’s.

“What?” he said.

“I dunno, Doc,” Vale replied. She thought back to the passenger dossiers. Like the other kids, Jacob had been forced to go to public school – no way the central government was going to give possible chrisfash kids the opportunity to be further indoctrinated through homeschooling. And as far as Jacob went, he was a straight-C student, who seemed disinterested in academics, but not too stupid or disinterested to fail outright.

“Don’t you have to be smart to be a doctor?” she said finally. Diego, annoyed, crossed his arms.

“Christ, Vale,” Diego said, “I know neither of us have very high opinions of the chrisfash. But that doesn’t mean you get to automatically label the children as idiots.”

“It’s not that,” Vale said, shaking her head. Had to open your mouth, didn’t you? she said to herself. Couldn’t just let it go, huh?

“Then what is it?”

“A bit protective there, Papa Bear,” Vale replied.

“So? So what if I am?”

Vale looked at the doctor expectedly.

“So maybe I see a little bit of myself in him,” Diego said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I agree,” Vale replied.

“With which part?”

“Both,” said Vale. Diego’s face screwed up in concentration and confusion. Then he sighed and began to rub at his temples.

“Look, Vale,” he said, “I feel like you’re getting at something. But I’m a little too tired to try and figure it out. So if you could just...” Diego’s voice trailed off. He looked up at Vale, realization dawning on his face as she gestured first to him, then to the area of the ship that Jacob had fucked off to.

“Oh,” he said. “Shit. You mean-“

“Yeah,” Vale said.

“You think he’s...”

“I think that he thinks he has something in common with you that isn’t a mutual interest in medicine,” she said. Then paused. “Like maybe-“

“Don’t say it,” Diego replied, waving her away.

“A mutual interest-“

“Vale, seriously-“

“In male anatomy.”

“God damn it, Vale,” Diego swore, shaking his head. He took a few more moments to contemplate the ramifications. “Fuck, how did I miss that?”

“For real,” Vale replied. “I thought you guys were supposed to have a sixth sense about that sort of thing.”

“Normally, yes,” Diego replied. “But...traveling around in an interplanetary tin can...that’s about to become an intergalactic tin can...well, that can do a lot of stuff to mess up your senses. Shit!”

“I might be wrong,” Vale said, “It’s not a given, obviously. I’d take it with a huge grain of salt. But I’m guessing he wants something more than just some medical texts on a portable drive.”

Diego held up his hands. “Whoah,” he said. “Whoah. No-“

“Not...Jesus, Diego. Advice. Counsel. I mean, weren’t you surrounded by chrisfash growing up?”

“Ye...es,” Diego said, eyeing her closely. “How could you tell?”

Fuck, Vale said internally. This is why I never was asked to do intelligence work.

She shrugged. “Just a guess,” she said casually. “But regardless. This kid’s about to be cut off from...well, from the potential of having a life where he can be him. You know? I mean...that’s got to be pretty fucking daunting.”

“God damn,” Diego said, shaking his head. “That poor fucking guy. What’s he going to do?”

“Maybe become a doctor,” Vale said. She suddenly felt completely exhausted. And bad for Jacob. And for Diego. She should have just kept her mouth shut about her suspicions. Because they were just suspicions...buttressed by a few small notes in the boy’s dossier, but still. And now, because she knew Diego, she knew that he’d feel guilty – and somehow responsible for doing something for the kid. It was one of the reasons he was a great doctor...and one of the reasons that it was good that the chrisfash would soon no longer be their problem. Who knew how attached Diego would get to the kid if the journey was going to last more than the few days it was going to take to get rid of him – and what he would do to try and protect Jacob from his own future.

“I gotta go, Doc,” Vale heard herself say. “I’m honestly about to pass out. Unless...you need someone to talk to.”

“Hm?” Diego was biting his thumbnail, deep in thought. “Oh. No, no. I mean, that’s...I’m fine, thanks, Vale. I’m going to go to sleep soon myself.”

“Okay,” Vale said. She pushed herself backwards towards the door. “Thanks again for the refill.” Diego waved her off. “Good night.”

“Night, Vale.”

The security officer drifted through the abandoned corridors, fighting to stay focused. The lights in each section had been dimmed, although motion sensors brightened them as she passed through, only to darken them once more as she left them.

Three more days, she told herself in between longer and longer blinks. Three more days. The chrisfash will be on Cytus, and I’ll be headed back through the Prism, ready for a new life.

She saw Lee as she did a few days before the ship left. He was on a video screen, location undisclosed, his disingenuous smile filling his boyishly round face.

“So,” he said, “you’re sure that’s what you want?”

“Absolutely.”

“A non-chrisfash planet out in Prism-space,” he said. He ticked points off on his fingers. “No way for me to follow up on you. No way for us to do our little favors for each other. Banished to a colony, doomed to a life of hard labor, trying to build up a planet from nothing in a place that will probably take ten generations or more before a normal human civilization will exist.

“Yep,” Vale said. “I don’t know why this is so difficult for you to grasp.”

“I mean, come on, Vale,” Lee said. “You gotta be fuckin’ crazy to go out there. Those places suck. They suck even more than the...the American frontier did back in the...I don’t know, 1990s?”

“Try 1830s,” Vale replied.

“Fuck, fine, 1830s, whatever. I’m not a fuckin’ historian,” Lee said, annoyed. “But really...you hate being on my radar that much? That you want to go to some libertarian hellhole for the rest of your days?”

“Why the fuck not,” Vale said, back in the present. She reached her space in the crew quarters, a little slideaway cubby right between Nought’s and Teek’s. Teek, as far as Vale knew, never used theirs – they went to sleep in Engineering, foot hooked around some handhold like some sort of sloth.

And what’s that sleep schedule they use? Vale wondered to herself. Twenty minutes every...three hours? Four hours?

She slid open the door to her space and pulled herself in. Lights sprang to life as she shut the door behind her, and she immediately touched the controls to dim them. Pyvoceaea, she said to herself as she pulled herself into her sleeping bag and zipped it up around her. That was the name of the colony that she was headed for after she was done with this job. A place on the other side of the Prism, a place where Lee wouldn’t be able to check up on her, and where Lee’s bosses wouldn’t be able to check up on her.

A place to try and hide from your sins, said a voice in her head.

A place for me to work until I die, she corrected herself, dimming the lights into nothing as she checked her alarm for three-forty-five.

Hey, she thought, in the few moments before she drifted off to sleep. At least it’ll keep me from thinking.

“Doc, you gotta give her something,” Vale said.

Diego was about to respond, but another earsplitting wail caused the pair of them to wince in unison.

“Believe me,” he said, once it pulled back into normal sobbing once more, “I tried. Repeatedly. She refuses.”

The captain floated up, an apologetic look on his face. “Hey, sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Doc...can you give her something?”

“She won’t take anything,” Diego said. Philippa shrieked once more.

“My baby! My baby!” Her two older daughters tried comforting her, their mother’s stress the main source of their own. Pastor Lorence floated uselessly nearby, consulting his holy book, searching for the best words to comfort his wife. Felicity, of course, was nowhere to be found.

The rest of the passengers had been strapped into their launch and land couches, fully prepared for the passthrough of the Prism.

And a good thing, too, Vale thought. Who knew how the Thomases would react...but like the wild animals they were, it was unlikely that they enjoyed loud noises.

“Oh, Lord have mercy, my baby...” Philippa wailed some more. Nought approached her, a bulb of water in her hand, but the distraught woman knocked it away, sending it spinning through the air and ricocheting off the wall. The daughters both apologized to the First Mate as their mother clutched at their arms, pulling them back, demanding their further comfort.

Nought approached the Captain, Diego, and Vale.

“Hey, um, Doctor,” she said, “sorry to interrupt, but could you-“

“She refuses medication, God damn it,” Diego said.

“Well,” Vale replied, after the quartet recovered from another assault on their eardrums, “this is just fucking ridiculous.”

She pushed herself past the group, ignoring the captain calling for her, and approached the three women nearby. The daughters, Abigail and Candace looked up at Vale apologetically. Phillipa’s face was buried in her hands, her entire body shaking as she sobbed into her palms.

Vale surveyed the scene, trying to think through the best course of action. Just keep your cool, said a voice, just keep your-

Philippa raised her gaze to the ceiling and let out another banshee wail. Instead of covering her ears, this time, Vale reached out and grabbed the distraught woman by the front of her flight coveralls. She shook Philippa twice, turning the scream into a wet gulp followed by a hiccup.

“Shut up,” Vale said, her voice pleasant, a friendly smile crossing her face. “Just shut up.”

“Or what,” Philippa half-sobbed, half-gasped. “What, you’re going to poison me, like you did Thomas? An innocent mother, crying for her lost child? You beast, you d-....d-....”

Vale shook the woman again. “Say it,” she said cheerfully. “Come on, spit it out.” The two daughters, terrified, were begging Vale to let the woman go. She heard only the weeping tones of their voice, ignoring any of the actual words.

“I’ll tell you this,” Vale said, still smiling, pulling Philippa close enough so that their noses almost touched. She could see a different kind of fear in the woman’s face now. Not the fear for a mother losing her child...the fear of an animal about to be viciously and thoroughly devoured by a predator twice their size.

“If you do not shut the fuck up,” Vale said, punctuating the important words with further hard shakes, “I swear to your almighty fucking God that I will put you in a coma. I won’t need drugs, the way I did with that fucking coward Thomas. No, I’ll just beat you until the Doc there tells me that I’ll do permanent damage if I don’t stop.”

“No,” Philippa said. “No. The captain won’t let you.”

Vale laughed – a genuine one, not one that was put on in order to frighten the woman. “I’ve got over a foot on him, over thirty pounds of muscle on him, and a whole bunch of genetic and military conditioning that he hasn’t got. Try again.”

“God will-“

“God,” Vale said pleasantly, “made me with a purpose. And that purpose is to put down chrisfash scum like yourself. Like that piece of shit Thomas. You think he’ll protect you? I’m out here doing his motherfucking will lady, His Name be praised.” She pulled back, and looked at the pastor, who was green once more, exactly as he had been after Vale’s scuffle with Thomas the evening before. She looked at the daughters, whose pale faces were now stained with tears.

“Get her in her launch and landing seat,” she said to them. “The Doctor is going to come by with medicine. Make sure-“

Philippa started whining, a needling cry that threatened to turn into more wailing. But she shut up as soon as Vale fixed her with her hard stare.

“Make sure she takes it,” Vale said. “And make her understand that if I have to, I will forcefeed it to her. And it won’t be pretty.”

She pushed herself backwards towards her group, maintaining her smile the whole time.

“Doc,” she said, “Philippa has requested some minor sedation. Do you think you could oblige her?”

“Sure,” Diego said coolly. “Not a problem.” He floated away.

“Jesus, Vale,” Nought said, watching the woman as she stifled her sobs and allowed her daughters to bring her in the direction of the launch and lands. “What the hell did you say to her?”

“Oh you know me,” Vale replied flatly, “I’m quite the motivational speaker.”

“Well, that’s great,” Patek said blandly. “But how are we going to find-“

Vale held out a finger to the captain, holding her hand over her other ear.

“Say again, Teek,” she replied, pressing the transmit button on her earpiece. This time, she was able to fully hear what the chief engineer had to say. “Got it, thanks buddy.”

“You can keep on with the final prep Captain, First Mate,” she said. “I know where she is.”

“Uh huh, thanks Teek,” Vale replied, pressing TRANSMIT once more. “I’ve got her.” She looked at the tall cargo stacks, bolted to their spots in the side of the ship. There was a little space for a child to crawl through here...or a seventeen-year-old who was close to child-sized. Vale pulled herself down and peered into the darkness between the crates. She pulled out the small flashlight she kept with her and turned it on. The small corridor filled with light, and she spotted a pair of outstretched legs that were pulled around the corner of a crate as soon as the light hit them.

“Felicity,” she said calmly, “what are you doing, girl?”

Silence.

“Come on, Felicity,” Vale said. She checked her watch. They were cutting it close, rapidly approaching the time that Prism Control told them they should expect to be told to embark. This was going to require a good amount of diplomacy...the kind that Vale was certainly not well-known for.

“Felicity,” she said, “I really don’t want to have Fungko out here to start unbolting crates.”

More silence.

“Not only is it dangerous, and likely to lead to you or someone else being injured, but it’s just going to take more time out of our schedule that we don’t have. I mean, if we don’t make this traversal time, we’re going to have to wait several weeks for the next available timeslot.”

There was a sneeze from within the crates.

“Bless you,” Vale said.

A few seconds passed without anything further.

“Really?” Vale said. “You literally just sneezed. I’m literally right here. And you’re literally pretending you aren’t?”

“I know you know I’m here,” said a weak, tinny voice from within the crates. “I just...don’t have anything to say.”

Vale checked her watch again and swore quietly. “Come on out, Felicity. Don’t you want to be breathing real air again? Instead of this recycled crap? Don’t you want to feel a breeze on you again? And how about gravity? Huh?”

With her eyes on her watch, Vale continued. “Walking around, using your legs again. Sure, you’ll be able to use them for a day or two right after we exit the Prism and are en route to Cytus, but still – it’s different.”

“Vale,” said the small voice without a body, “is it going to be better for me?”

Vale felt a lump form in her throat. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, everyone keeps telling me how much better it’s going to be. My mother. My father. My sisters, and the Thomases. They all keep saying that Cytus is going to be so much better for everyone, how we’re going to love it there, how great it will be to be free again, praise God, and to worship as He intended, and to live as He intended.”

Ah, shit, Vale thought.

”But is it going to be better...for me? Because they’re going to marry me off soon. And I’m going to have children soon. And I’m going to have to take care of them, and a house, and cook, and clean, and...”

Felicity’s voice was shaky and on the verge of tears. “But that doesn’t sound better than what I had back home. It sounds worse. Don’t you think so?”

Well what the fuck am I supposed to say to that? Vale asked herself. She was reminded of how Diego must have felt about Jacob following the conversation the night before – all of a sudden responsible in part for a child who wasn’t theirs.

“Don’t make me go,” the voice followed up with. “Please, Vale. I don’t want to go. Please don’t make me.”

Vale suddenly felt hot all over. She put her forehead against the cool side of the cargo container, gasping in relief at the temperature difference.

“Fuck,” she half-mouthed, half-whispered. “Fuuuuuck.”

Okay, said something inside of her. We can do this. We can arrange for her to sneak back aboard the ship before it launches for home.

Nice try said something else inside of her. Following this little issue, there’s no way Philippa allows the kid out of her sight. And if we were somehow to launch with a stowaway, they’d undoubtedly contact the ship, and undoubtedly the Captain would turn around, land again, and take the ship apart piece by piece in order to find her.

It’s not possible- she thought, and then the hallucinations returned in full force. An ankle with a white, bloodstained sock on it, the shiny black edge of a shoe right below the ankle bone. The rain pouring down as she watched a small coffin being loaded into a crematorium. The smell of-

“Fuck,” she said through gritted teeth. “Fuck, fuck, FUCK!”

She wondered how hard it would be to stage a mutiny. She’d have to take out the captain, and Nought, and probably the Thomases. Fungko would probably try to stay out of anything big – but even if he did step in, it wouldn’t be on Vale’s side. She wondered how hard it would be to convince Diego and Teek to help her – or if she could convince Prism control that the ship was trafficking humans to the new planets. Or-

There was a scuffling sound, and Felicity slowly floated out of the tiny corridor in between the crates. Her eyes were big, and wet from the tears, but her cheeks, although blotchy, were dry.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s go.” She pulled herself up and then pushed herself towards the exit of the cargo room. More by instinct than anything else, Vale reached out and grabbed her by the arm. Felicity didn’t even look back when she spoke.

“It’s okay, Vale,” she said in a quiet voice. “It’s okay. It was wrong of me to ask for your help. I know that now.”

“Felicity-“

“No, no,” she said. “It’s okay. Because I know you. And I know that if you were ordered to kick me off the ship and abandon me on Cytus, and if you knew that’s what I didn’t want, you would fight it. You would fight it hard. And you might get hurt in the process.

And I can’t do it. I can’t have people getting hurt for me. So please, Vale, just let me go back to my couch.”

Vale still held onto the girl, searching inside herself, trying to find the words to say something, anything.

“It’s okay,” Felicity said softly. She put a gentle hand on Vale’s and began slowly peeling away the security officer’s fingers. “It’s okay. Just let me go, and forget about me. That’s all I really want anyway.”

Finally, Felicity turned to Vale, and her sad smile almost broke the ex-soldier’s heart.

“It means a lot to me,” Felicity said, tears trembling on her lower eyelids. “Really, it means a lot. That you would understand. That you would try to help me, even though you’d be in so much danger doing so.

I can’t put you in danger. So I’ll go. And I’ll forget about my life. Okay? It’s going to be okay.” Fully freed from Vale’s grasp, the girl floated over to the exit of the cargo bay.