“Stellers.” A voice pulled Thorn out of the fog he usually drifted in, making him uncomfortably aware of the damp clay that had found its way inside his boots, feet throbbing along to his heartbeat, and the wet-wool and armpit reek of the foreman standing next to him. “Stellers,” the voice—Thorn’s foreman—repeated. “You’ve got a visitor.”
“A what?” Thorn had half-noticed the transport pop out from under the cloud cover right about the time he’d started to trek back for shift change. He thought it was the usual Blue Alliance or Collective supplier, some freighter bringing fresh blood to supplement the planet’s local labor force, the same way he’d come here.
“Visitor.” The foreman wasn’t a fan of repeating himself. The look he leveled at Thorn for having to do so twice could have boiled mud off a pipe. “It’s an ON ship.”
“Why would the Orbital Navy do a drop on this hole?”
The foreman shrugged and pointed over his shoulder at the conjoined huts that served as both housing and chow hall. “Couldn’t say, but the military don’t send pretty girls out for a common plug.” He directed a glare at Thorn. He always had a look like he’d eaten something rancid and was trying to ignore the taste, but today the foreman looked especially bad-tempered. “Once they fly out, you’d do best to find your way off planet, too.”
Thorn’s aching feet, the foreman’s stink, and the muddy sludge around him—it all fell away. Reclamation work was last resort stuff. If he couldn’t make it here, there wasn’t much to fall back on. “But mud’s all I’ve dreamed about since I was a boy. What will I do with myself if I can’t do this?” Thorn said it like a joke, pulling out a grin to back it up. The grin fit just fine. “If this is about the card game, boss—”
“Ain’t about the cards.” The foreman nodded at the huts again. “Ain’t even about the ON lady over there waiting. Something just rubs me wrong about you. I’ve never seen someone so fresh-washed mucking pipes.”
“Wait.” Thorn held up a hand. “This is about the cards, isn’t it? There’s no rule against winning.”
“Find yourself a way off-planet, Stellers,” the foreman said, expression of mild disgust unchanged. He could have been talking about the weather, the mud, or a rock in his shoe. “The sooner we’re rid of you, the better.”
Thorn watched the man slog off through the muck and started to call out, maybe offer him a rematch on the cards, double or nothing, but decided against it. Instead, he picked his way through the mud and the damp toward whatever fresh trouble might be waiting at the hut.
The foreman was right. The ON soldier was pretty. She was also smart. She’d grabbed coffee for both of them and brought it outside the chow hall doorway so the other workers wouldn’t stare, but it wasn’t until Thorn was close enough to grab the steaming tin mug that he realized he knew her. The realization hit him hard—a forced remembrance of a time that he’d tried to forget.
“Kira? Kira Wixcombe?”
He hadn’t seen her since they were both kids at the Children’s Refugee Collective, the de facto dumping ground for orphans in the early years of the war. Unwanted kids, bad food, and despair. A perfect recipe to produce people like Thorn, who fit nowhere but lived everywhere. The flotsam of war.
She flashed Thorn a smile. She still had her dimples. “How’d you know it was me?”
“We don’t get many redheads,” Thorn replied.
Kira glanced around the mud-smeared stoop of the chow hut, the utilitarian bulk of the sleeping quarters, and the soup of the flats beyond. “Doubt the hair’s what sparked your memory. Anyone could dye it this shade.”
The coffee she’d handed him had the texture of runny grits, but it was hot. Thorn took a long swallow and stared at Kira over the mug’s rim. She was the cleanest person he’d seen since he got here, and even more surprising, she was armed—a railer at her hip, the compact, powerful weapon gleaming darkly in its synthetic holster. Though small, the personal railgun would send rounds through walls, not at them. It was a menacing touch on Kira, but it didn’t detract from the pleasant sensation filling Thorn’s body. He wasn’t working in the slop, and for the moment, that was a vast improvement over his daily life.
When he lowered the mug, he shifted his grip from the handle so he could cup it in his hands and warm his fingers. “People in these camps are happy to get two squares a day. No one wastes credits on hair dye.”
“Redheads aren’t exactly rare, Thorn. Plenty of people come by it naturally.”
Kira’s eyes were still roaming the camp and mudflats. Thorn followed her gaze. From his perspective, there wasn’t a damn thing worth looking at with that level of intensity, except for maybe him, and he was the one thing Kira’s gaze wasn’t burning a hole in.
“Redheads are rare on this planet. Prevalent shade is brown,” he said. “Protective camouflage. Blends with the scenery.”
Those blue eyes stopped roaming and locked on his. Kira arched an eyebrow and waited.
“Alright.” Thorn tried out the grin that hadn’t worked on the foreman. “I read the name tag on your uniform and put two and two together. You always said you wanted to enlist.”
Kira flashed him those dimples again and then pointed at the silver bars on her collar. “I didn’t enlist. The enlisted have to work for a living. I’m an officer.”
“Look at that,” he said and then took another long pull of coffee. “Good for you. Glad someone made it out of there, I guess.”
The wind picked up. It pelted rain against the construct material of the awning that sheltered their stoop.
The pause in the conversation felt awkward. The silence needed something, so he added, “Do you like it?”
“Hmm,” she replied, staring out at the mud again.
As an answer, it wasn’t the most positive one Thorne had ever heard, but it beat the hell out of what some of the crustier ON vets on the reclamation team had said about their years in service. “I’m guessing we owe the pleasure of your visit to some policy shift between Collective and the Alliance? They’re trying to make nice and now the ON’s responsible for surveying reclamation work. That sound about right?” Thorne asked.
Kira tapped a finger against her chin, her head tilted a bit as if in thought. “Nice place you got here, Thorn.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “You get to pick between two seasons: slush or monsoon. Lucky you to visit during slush.”
Kira took a long pull of her coffee, grimacing at the taste, and then stared down into her cup. Thorn studied her while he could. That red hair and those ice-blue eyes hadn’t changed a bit. Thorn would have known her without the name tag. Kira was impossible to forget.
But when those eyes looked back up, he saw they were chilly. Her face was a lot more closed off than when they were kids. Now, it was dark with secrets.
“I need to ask you something,” she said.
He put his grin back on and turned up the wattage. “Here we go, the woman with a plan—ask away.” Thorn reached out to clink his mug against hers.
She didn’t grin back. “Do you remember when we were kids?”