Soon Qole veered off the main road—if the strip of frozen dirt even warranted the name—and I followed her through a battered door that she nearly let close on me. The bar was housed in an ancient pre-fab building, and it would have been as drab and boring as those types of buildings usually were if it weren’t for the interior decorating.
Reclaimed machinery, battered bits of ships, and chunks of smooth driftwood had been used to create almost every piece of furniture. An ancient heating pillar dominated the middle of the room, glowing with a distinctive purplish cast. Lurking in the back corner was a worn leather mannequin, impaled with rusty throwing knives, a crude crown cut from a cross-section of old piping perched on its head. I didn’t know exactly which king it was supposed to be, but since we were in the Dracorte system, I could guess. At least it appeared no one had taken up the game in some time.
The few patrons slouched at scattered tables were even more weathered and varied. Etched, beaten by the elements like everything in Gamut, they paid me absolutely no mind. Their indifference was the most disconcerting thing, as used to attention as I had been my entire life.
The pillar glowed with purple fire, warming the entire room. The flames moved in slow motion, like oil poured into water. As soon as my eyes started to trace individual tendrils, they would snap in frenetic motion too fast to follow, then settle back into their languid dance. In their center I could spot tiny flecks of light so bright they were white, winking in and out of existence.
Shadow.
I couldn’t help but shake my head. “That seems…safe.”
Qole shrugged her shoulders, hands still in her pockets as she picked her way through the tables toward the vacant bar. “Safe is relative. If you live here, you’re better off staying warm than worrying about Shadow.”
I leaned up against the bar next to her and signaled to the man I presumed was the bartender that we wanted two drinks. He stared without registering, just long enough that I started to motion to him again, in case he hadn’t seen me. But by then he’d turned to fetch our drinks with a disgusted sigh.
I hunkered down a bit farther, feeling no more welcome here than I had on the ship—or anywhere on Alaxak—and looked over at Qole. The corner of her lip was upturned in a marginal smile. Apparently, I was more likable when I made a fool out of myself. Being friendly, knowledgeable, assertive—all those approaches had been a lovely way to piss her off. It made almost no sense to me, but there it was.
“Thanks, Larvut,” Qole said, as the man passed us our smudgy bottles. He grunted at her in return and shuffled off.
So they knew each other. She’d just wanted to see how I would handle him.
More likable or no, I wouldn’t gain Qole’s trust by playing the fool. I wondered how long the decon would give me, how long I could keep Qole listening. I resisted looking at my wrist feed, shoved down the panic that threatened to spike. I wanted to simply tell her why I was here, but the truth without trust would make her worse than pissed. I’d lose her forever.
“So is Shadow really your best option out here?” I tried to make my voice casual, as if I were simply curious.
Qole slid her bottle closer and looked at it for a moment before answering. “Depends on what you mean. As the best job or the best heat source?”
“Both, I suppose.”
“Well, people are desperate for both out here,” she said with some bite, “and it’s what’s available. But no, I wouldn’t say it’s the best anything, even though we use it for everything: cooking, heating, lighting.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of the pillar. “I know; it’s like using a nuclear reaction to boil a teapot. That’s why most people here have it in their bodies.”
She took a deep breath, as if fortifying herself for what she was about to say. “But it’s the fishing that’s the hardest on you—it’s only fair that you know what you’re getting yourself into. You can’t take that kind of exposure without going mad and dying eventually. It’s a slow death for most of us, decades until the eyes finally go black with the poison, like Gavril outside. You can escape it if you leave. But for some of us…” She looked away, not meeting my gaze. “It’s in us already, the kids of the older Alaxan families that’ve been doing it so long. We have a tolerance or something that’s been built up and passed down. It could probably happen to anyone, but we might be some of the first. Or the worst.”
She was right. There were others from different planets, but none with an affinity so strong, at least not that had been discovered. However, I didn’t want to let on how much I knew about her condition, in case she stopped talking.
“I…uh…saw your eyes flash black,” I said quietly. She straightened against the counter, shooting a glance at Larvut, who’d retreated to the other end of the bar to watch a cracked news feed. I understood her reaction. Talk of Shadow poisoning made people nervous—one reason among many that it had been so hard to find someone like her. I’d pitched my voice so he wouldn’t hear, but still, to put her at ease, I added, “But they changed back. So you’re not poisoned, right?”
“Not exactly,” she said shortly. “It affects us differently.”
This was her Shadow affinity, her “tolerance,” as she called it, though that didn’t do justice to what I had seen. “How so?” I prodded her.
“Sometimes”—she cleared her throat and lowered her own voice—“sometimes some of us can sense Shadow.”
“Is that how you pilot better than anyone I’ve ever seen? It must be more than that.”
She glanced at me sharply, and I couldn’t tell if she was surprised by the praise or by my “guess.” “It’s hard to explain, but I can feel everything…more. Faster. Not just Shadow. We can do some surprising things, but then sometimes we’re crazy and dead before we’ve barely lived, so don’t get too jealous, hey?”
She wasn’t looking at me anymore, her eyes on the driftwood countertop, so she couldn’t know that jealousy was the last thing on my mind. For a moment, everything I was working toward was eclipsed by the sobering realization that Qole could die tomorrow, and she knew it. The immediacy of the inevitable can unravel even the strongest, my father would say, but Qole wasn’t unraveling. She was a pilot, a captain, and better at both than many I had met.
She kept studying the bar, scratching at it with a dirty fingernail. “The children of our old fishing families die younger and younger every generation, until the family eventually sputters out. It’s a wonder any of us are still around.” She smirked. “Still happy to be on board with me? I’m a bomb ready to blow, like anyone around here was probably happy to tell you.”
I held her eyes when she looked up at me. “Like I said, I wanted the job.”
She looked away again. “Why? Is Shadow really your best option out here?”
I smiled at the reversal and toyed with my bottle. It was devoid of a label, covered in dust. I’d been so engrossed in my conversation with Qole that I had consumed the entire beverage without noticing. In retrospect, it had tasted like fermented dishwater.