The stars shone down overhead as Vincent and Shelby crept through the void, their light, Shelby’s headlights and the green glow emanating from her hull the only light in the sky. They were far from Etelu, farther still from the Perfectorate. In fact, with every bridge they made between islands, Vincent was the farthest he’d ever been from home.
“I could get used to this, Shelby. What about you?” he asked. There were no scheduled rescue missions for some time, so he and Shelby had been put on patrol duty. They were supposed to make sure that no incursions of foreign populations or hostile wildlife posed a risk to Etelutian territory. (And that no Etelutian artifacts were rotating toward human space, like the factory that had sealed Vincent’s fate what felt like so long ago.) Since Vincent couldn’t be seen anywhere near the Perfectorate, they’d given him the route along the outskirts of Etelutian space, and aside from a solitary void beast slumbering in the distance which he’d radioed in the coordinates to three days ago, the mission had been a quiet one.
“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED DERRING DO,” said Shelby.
Vincent shrugged, his feet propped on the dashboard, Shelby doing the driving. “I’ll take starry nights with an old friend for a little while.” He pulled the harmonica out of his pocket and played a few chords, then Shelby came to a sudden stop.
“WAIT, WHAT IS THAT?”
“Are you fucking with me or is there really something there?” said Vincent.
Shelby’s essence scanners flashed over the island directly ahead of them. It was large for this section of space, and sure enough, when Shelby restarted her approach, slower this time, he could see her headlights casting shadows across the rock behind something that didn’t look organic. He swung his feet off the dash and leaned forward in his chair.
“I AM NOT DETECTING ANY LIFE FORMS,” said Shelby, “BUT I THINK IT IS WORTH INVESTIGATING.”
“Let’s do it,” said Vincent, a bubble of something between excitement and apprehension floating in his chest. Instinctively, he gripped the wheel and pressed on the accelerator, but Shelby ignored him, continuing her measured approach.
“LET US MAKE SURE IT IS NOT A TURTLE BEFORE WE GET TOO HASTY,” she said.
Vincent chuckled and relaxed his grip, letting her lead. “Yeah. I guess neither of us want that much derring do at the moment.”
Crossing the bridge to the island felt like it took forever. As Shelby’s cabin ticked across her cables, the wreckage they were approaching came into sharper relief, but he still wasn’t sure what it was, or rather, what it had been.
It looked like a vehicle of some sort, a vast one on the scale of a rimship, but of completely alien construction. It was missing the gears and pistons. The supports for the balloon. The anti-grav generators. At first, he figured it must be Etelutian in design, but by the time Shelby pulled herself over the island’s edge, he was fairly sure that wasn’t right. Etelutian ships were intricate and swooping, covered in decorative metal vines and pains of colored glass. The panels that remained of this ship were sleek and gray–perhaps they’d once been white–and what glass lay scattered and broken across the island, throwing starlight back at the sky, was clear.
Shelby parked near the wreck and opened her door. Vincent went out to investigate. There wasn’t much left of the interior to explore, and when he tried to sense the ship’s spirit through the great connectedness of The Giver, everything was quiet except for his and Shelby’s heartbeats. Whatever this thing had been, it was old. Maybe older than any machine he’d ever felt before.
This didn’t look like a crash landing–the earth wasn’t torn and scored how it should be if a ship of this caliber had skidded across it guided only by gravity. Rather, after countless years of abandonment, the panels appeared to have been peeled back by some combination of looters, wild creatures, or simple weather and decay. A few of the remaining bits of siding had the telltale ax marks of the goblin pirates that the Etelutians trained him to watch out for when traveling through less densely inhabited parts of the void, but they were so weathered that he estimated no one had been here for decades. Perhaps there had once been more clues within the rubble, but anything more than rusty scrap metal and broken glass and whatever strange, smooth synthetic had made up this thing’s body had been blown away or stolen or carried off to become part of some giant void nest years ago. Vincent was about to mark the whole thing down as an unsolvable mystery, when he lifted up one of the large gray panels leaning against a boulder, trying to get a sense for what it was made of, and found himself staring at a painted icon, more protected from the elements than the other bits of the ship he had examined.
It showed a blue circle, pockmarked with the peeling remains of stars and an orbit line. Cutting across it was a streak of faded red that he, at first glance, thought might be rust or blood, but upon closer inspection seemed to be a purposeful if misshapen V. But most curious of all were the white letters still visible across the circle’s radius. NASA.
“The Kingdom of Nasa,” Vincent whispered. He took a step back, letting the panel fall. He scanned the horizon, trying to piece the ship back together in his imagination. It didn’t look human, or Etelutian, but if he closed his eyes and squinted, he could almost picture the rocket ship from the old picture book his mother used to read him. “It was real?” he muttered, the question catching in his throat. He looked back to Shelby, his eyes wide. “The Kingdom of Nasa was real?”
Shelby’s lights scanned over him and the panel. Her outside speakers crackled on. “I HAVE NO MORE ANSWERS THAN YOU.”
Vincent backed up until his heels clicked against her front leg. He leaned back against her and tried to stop an unexpected rush of tears.
“VINCE, WHAT IS WRONG? I DO NOT REMEMBER YOU GETTING THIS WORKED UP OVER THE STORY BOOK.”
“I miss my home,” Vincent sobbed like the little fairy girl from the Kingdon of Nasa in The Fairies From the Stars and the Tree of Light. He could hear his mother reading those very words, her voice twisted up in faux tears he’d never heard her shed in real life. “I’ll never see Mom again. I’ll never see Dad. I never got to say goodbye.”
Shelby was quiet. She moved her leg a millimeter toward him, the closest she could offer to an embrace. “I AM SORRY THAT YOU MISS THEM, BUT A LOT OF THINGS ARE OBJECTIVELY BETTER HERE.”
“They are,” said Vincent. “But the cookies aren’t. They aren’t even close. Voids, I’m never going to have Dad’s cookies again.” Vincent wiped his eyes on his arm. “And here I’ve been been, moaning about the cocktails.”
Shelby was quiet for a little while, then offered. “DO YOU WANT TO KEEP EXPLORING?”
Vincent shook his head. “We’ll mark the coordinates and trajectory down and radio it to the control station. Maybe the Etelutians already know what to make of this place.” He straightened up and climbed the steps back into the cabin. “Can you drive for a while?”
“I HAVE BEEN DRIVING,” said Shelby.
Vincent made a gesture with his hand that he hoped would convey something to the effect of “For the first time I am letting myself feel the feelings I should have been feeling the whole time about my sudden exile from my home. I know they’re probably fine, but my family feels as far away as Esilania did after she fell into the void, and if you let me anywhere near the steering wheel right now I’m probably going to have an emotional breakdown about some rock formation that looks like Mom’s pasta and crash us into a skywhale,” then grabbed his mother’s jacket out of the closet and shrugged it around his shoulders on the way up to his bunk. It didn’t even smell like her any more, at least not any more than mom always smelled a bit like this jacket, but it was the closest thing he’d ever have to a hug from his parents again.
He felt Shelby start the trek to the edge of the island under him. She stopped a few more times to run more scans, but that was her business. Right now all he wanted to do was hug his blanket to his chest and sniffle into his pillow. He’d always had his differences with his parents, but they were still Mom and Dad. He wondered if they thought he was dead.
Eventually, he must have fallen asleep, because he woke up to a lack of motion and Shelby informing him that their shift was over and that she’d found a place to camp.
“Thanks, Babe,” he muttered. He jumped down from his bed, his blanket pulled around his shoulders like a cape though he wasn’t particularly cold. He half expected toaster to scamper up to his heels and shoot feel-better-toast at him, but that was just his current case of nostalgia. Toaster was off working in the restaurant industry, making his own way. Might as well miss him, too.
“God, that stupid emblem hit me hard,” he said to the floor. “I can’t prove it’s not just some weird coincidence that it shares the name from the kids’ book, but it doesn’t matter. All I can think about is Mom reading it me. She wasn’t home from work that much when I was little, but when she was, she used to do all the voices and pet my hair until I fell asleep.”
“A NICE MEMORY, I AM SURE. YOU SHOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO EAT.”
Vincent opened the ice box, then closed it again. “Why do you keep trying to change the subject when I talk about my parents? I’m trying to open up to you, here.”
Shelby hesitated. “YOUR PARENTS ARE A DIFFICULT TOPIC FOR ME.”
“Why? You didn’t grow up with them.”
“WELL, FOR STARTERS, YOUR FATHER BELIEVED I SHOULD NOT EXIST.”
“He was coming around,” said Vincent. “What else?”
“YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY HURTING. I DO NOT WANT TO GET INTO IT RIGHT NOW.”
“Get into what?” said Vincent. He realized that anger was creeping into his voice, and he took a deep breath. Feeling angry might feel better than being sad, but Shelby had done nothing wrong except peak his curiosity. “Sorry, I don’t mean to snap, it’s just weird is all. You used to scold me for ignoring Mom’s advice and then one day you just…tense up–or whatever the ship equivalent of that is–whenever I mention her.”
Shelby released her exhaust vents in a way that sounded like a long sigh. “DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW?”
“I’m asking, aren’t I?” He sat down cross legged on the floor like he had during so many heart to hearts.
“SHE DID BAD THINGS, VINCE.”
“Well, yeah, sure, she ran that crime empire and all, but we didn’t exactly operate on the right side of the law that often. Why are you taking the inquisition’s side all of a sudden?”
“I…THERE IS NO EASY WAY TO SAY THIS.” Shelby’s lights blinked on and off, not in the steady way they normally did, but off tempo, wrong as a stutter. “I SAW HER MURDER TWO INNOCENT PEOPLE IN COLD BLOOD. I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO LOOK AT HER THE SAME SINCE.”
“What?” Vincent’s shoulders tensed under the jacket, reminding him how tight it was on him. “Are you sure? When?”
“YEAR 351 A.E., ROTATION 30,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” said Vincent. “My brain’s not a computer.”
Shelby paused for long enough that the silence dragged out as long as it might have with a fellow human. “DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU BROUGHT THAT OTHER EDGER’S CRAWLER TO LIFE?”
Vincent swallowed, suddenly queasy. He hadn’t thought about that day for a long time, but he could certainly never forget that afternoon he’d spent plastered in his mom’s garage, staring at a plate of cookies he was sure was going to be his last meal. He’d been so sure it was all over. But mom had promised to take care of it. She had. She’d left with Shelby, and when they came back, she’d lifted the bottle out of his hands and pulled him against her shoulder. She’d told him everything was going to be alright. “She didn’t,” Vincent choked.
“The boy and the ship,” said Shelby. “He was the first aeo ship I’d ever met. He was a child, and then he was gone.”
“Voids.” Vincent squeezed his eyes shut. He was shaking and he couldn’t stop.
“SHE MADE ME PROMISE NOT TO TELL YOU,” said Shelby. “SHE SAID IT WOULD BREAK YOUR HEART. I DID NOT LIKE LYING TO YOU, BUT I WAS AFRAID THAT SHE WAS RIGHT.”
“Well it sure doesn’t feel great.” Vincent counted the rivets on the floor by his left hand. It was his fault. If he hadn’t panicked, maybe he could have found a solution where no one got hurt. And of course his response right now was to panic again. There were fourteen rivets between his thumb and the edge of the panel. The ring around the right handle on the sink was red, and the one on the left was blue. If he hadn’t brought that ship to life, it wouldn’t have had to die. But then again, it never would have been alive. The edger was alive, though. Because of Vincent, he wasn’t any more. There wasn’t enough air in this tiny room.
“I SHOULD NOT HAVE TOLD YOU,” said Shelby.
The handle on the icebox door was silver, and the icebox was black. Vincent took a steadier breath in and out. “I’ve put you back together from worse. Broken parts can mend. I’m glad you don’t have to carry that alone anymore.”
“YOU ARE HANDLING THIS BETTER THAN I THOUGHT YOU WOULD,” said Shelby.
“Oh, I’m not,” said Vincent. “I’m just hiding it really well.”
“IT WAS NOT YOUR FAULT,” said Shelby. “IT WAS HERS.”
He wanted so badly to believe that. Certainly it had been her who had done the acts. Certainly he wouldn’t have done the same in the same circumstance. He could say that confidently, as he knew for a fact that he’d run away and gotten drunk in his mom’s garage instead. “Voids, I could use a bottle of rum right now.”
There was a soft metallic click and a whir as shelby reached an arm into a compartment he didn’t even know was there and pulled a bottle of coconut rum from it like a rabbit from a hat. Vincent’s mouth dropped open. The label was in English. He recognized the logo. It was mid shelf.
“I AM NOT LEAVING YOU WITH THE WHOLE BOTTLE, BUT YOU HAVE HAD A ROUGH DAY.” She poured two fingers worth into a plastic cup from the cupboard and handed it to him before stashing the rest of the bottle back in the compartment. It didn’t even have a handle, or a visible lock. “I WAS SAVING IT FOR A HAPPIER OCCASION, BUT I FEEL LIKE IT’S THE LEAST I CAN DO.”
Vincent cupped the drink in two hands and took a deep whiff of the sickly sweet aroma of coconut and fermented sugar. But it was the scent of the leather jacket that made his nose curl. He set the cup a little bit away from him, then shrugged off the jacket and tossed it in the corner by the closet with more force than he needed to.
Then, he lifted the cup and tapped it against Shelby’s wall. He hesitated, then whispered. “To the ship and the boy. They’re part of the great everything now.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever really believed the Priestess’s stories about life after death in the collective consciousness of The Giver, but he needed to believe it now. Maybe Esilenia was there too.
Holding in a sob, he brought the cup to his lips and let the liquid sit on his tongue for as long as he could stand. It tasted like home, but still, it burned.
Crawling the Edge: The Coastrunner Chronicles 