“Can you hold off on being offended for, like, the next ten minutes maybe? We’re in a bit of a sticky situation here.”
“But, Cora, an antique sale?”
“Ten minutes, Elio. Just until we get up into the sky.”
We sprinted around the street corner, sending snow flying in our wake. I’d poorly parallel parked my pod ship—our getaway vehicle—at the end of the block, between a row of pubs and a security station, which in hindsight was probably the worst place I could have left the thing. The puny, dented ship was covered in a thick layer of snow, but it had something else lying on it too. As I leaned against a nearby streetlight, catching my breath, Elio plucked a wet piece of paper from my front viewport.
“You got a parking ticket.”
“Oh, for the love of—” I swiped the ticket off him, crumpled it, and chucked it in a trash can at the edge of the sidewalk.
“Cora, you can’t do that! It’s illegal to throw away a parking ticket!” He glanced nervously through the door of the security station, like he expected one of the officers to come out and reprimand us.
I leveled him with a look. “Seriously? You live with a family of criminals and you’re worried about me illegally disposing of a parking ticket?”
“But according to article 7B of the Intergalactic Statute of Transportation—”
“Elio!”
“Sorry!” Then there was a soft beep, and he clapped his hands over his mouth so hard that he stumbled back a step.
Somewhere through the snowdrifts I could hear the furious shouts of the guards, followed by a blast that rocked the street corner. They were coming.
Working quickly, I swiped the snow off the ship, then pulled hard on the lever to open the hatch.
It wouldn’t budge.
I thrust my hands into my jacket pockets in a desperate search for my key fob to open the pod.
“Cora?” Elio pointed at the viewport. “You locked it inside the pod.”
Sure enough, there it was. Thrown haphazardly on top of the control panel.
“What? No, no, no!”
Elio brought his fingers to his mouth and started nibbling them, probably concealing the beep that threatened to burst forth.
“This day is getting better and better.” Our images had undoubtedly been caught on multiple security monitors since we ran from the treasury, and now the last thing the good people of Vaotis were going to see before we escaped their star-forsaken planet would be me breaking into my own pod ship. Not the most dignified exit.
“We’re going to try something.” I removed a palm-size disc from my pocket and slapped it on the middle of the hatch.
“Oh, the phaser!” Elio straightened. “You fixed it?”
“Not quite.” If the phaser worked the way it was designed to, it would disrupt the molecules in any solid object enough that we would be able to slip easily through. Of the two phasers I’d built, the better one was currently being used by my family to get into the vaults. This one always struggled to work properly no matter how many times I crossed and uncrossed the wires.
Still listening for the sounds of approaching guards, I turned the phaser on. The slush-streaked side of my pod ship glowed, then shuddered, blurring like I was looking through the hatch from underwater. The image flickered for a second, the hatch hardening before turning liquid again.
“Go! Go before it backfires!” I shoved Elio toward the door.
Just as I started to follow, the guards barreled around the corner in an armored transport, snow crunching beneath its wide tire treads. A delivery pod soared off the road to avoid them, crashing into an awning hanging over the front of a diner. Pedestrians ran as smoke filled the street like a low-hanging fog. I couldn’t tell if the guards had spotted us yet or not.
I took my first step into the hatch, but the phaser flickered again, short-circuiting. Elio’s eyes flared bright with alarm while his hands flew across the control panel, powering up the ship. I tried slogging forward, my muscles tensing and burning as I struggled to push through the hatch. It was only a foot thick. It should have been easy.
A blast of light flew over the ship, exploding into the face of the building behind us. The pod started to solidify around me, and I had a flash of fear that I would get trapped inside, half in and half out of the ship, struggling to breathe until Elio could track my family down and get the other phaser to reverse the damage.
But before my panic had a chance to reach meltdown levels, I felt a hand on my arm, pulling me out of danger as if dragging me through mud. With an earsplitting pop, Elio and I landed in a heap in the bucket seats at the front of the cockpit, and the hatch sealed behind us.
“Up! Go, go, go!” I yelled.
We lifted off, crashing into the parked pod in front of us in the process. The guards shot at us a few more times, but they hadn’t accounted for us having an escape pod. In seconds, we were out of range.
A grin pulled at my lips as we hurtled through the atmosphere around Vaotis. We were coming up on the Triangulum Galaxy’s only wormhole, our ticket home. Elio pushed forward on the ion thrusters. The wormhole sphere bulged and spun before us like a bubble. And just like any bubble, the wormhole could only exist for a few precious seconds at a time before popping.
The pod ship shuddered as the thrusters ignited. A shiver raced up my spine. Jumping galaxies always put me a little out of sorts. Something about the speed and the pressure made my body feel like a jar of putty.
Double-checking my harness, I watched as white light flared from the widening sphere, obscuring the front viewport. Then, as always, time seemed to slow, and that beautiful rip in the universe opened. Straight as an arrow, the pod ship soared through.
Good riddance, Vaotis. A pleasure you were not.
My harness cut into my shoulders as the ball of energy bent around us and we were launched out the other side at top speed, only slowing once we hit deep space and the peaceful expanse of stars. Every time I saw the view, I could barely breathe. I knew that space was just … nothing. A vacuum. But even so, that quiet void brought me more serenity than any planet in the universe.
My smile faded only when Elio adjusted the propulsion controls and switched course, sending us down the five-hour trek toward home. In five hours, I’d have to face what I’d done. I’d drawn too much attention. I’d nearly gotten us all killed.
But maybe it wouldn’t matter. If they got their hands on the ten million ritles, my family would overlook one mistake.
Fingers shaking, I sent off a quick comm to Blair. How did it go down there?
He responded immediately.
We failed.
I gripped the straps of my harness in both fists as an all-consuming dread welled up inside my chest.
His next message simply read: Your mother is not happy.
2
The darkness on our tiny planet made it the perfect locale for crime to flourish. And it was an even better locale for hiding my family’s heaps of junk.
Condor’s permanent blackout was courtesy of our empress, Verena. During the few minutes of the day that sunlight touched our borders located in the farthest corner of the Andromeda Galaxy, Verena released a dark tint on the dome that warmed our planet, leaving our streets and neighborhoods in dank, dreary blackness. Why she chose to do it, no one knew. She rarely stepped into the public eye, and I’d heard every rumor from she was a monster that would burn in sunlight to she had skeletal deformities and didn’t want anyone to see her.