The Song in the Stars: Starborn Knights, #1

By J.F. Narnett

Lumia Emelisse will never leave her home planet. A weak heart made sure of that. She's content with it, unlike her twin brother, Sol, who has spent his life studying the stars. He wants to escape to distant cosmos, but Lumi is fine where she is in her shop... right?

 

That is until an ancient army takes over the entire planet in seconds, lead by a queen of her darkest nightmares, and she seems to have a vendetta against the Emelisse family specifically. Lumi escapes only through dumb luck, but soon finds herself on the other side of the universe.

 

Lumi is in an unknown galaxy, surrounded by aliens and fighting a ticking clock to get anyone to listen to her pleas. All she has is a dysfunctional group of smugglers to help her, each caught in their own personal war. Yet, when she learns the Queen has a closer tie to her family than she first realized, she knows Sol will be the one to pay for it. The answer to why leads to a mysterious song calling out from somewhere between the folds of space. It promises a power that could bring an end to these tyrannical monsters, or offer the already powerful queen an undefeatable godhood.

 

Between criminal organizations, exploding cats, and weapons that change form on a whim, Lumi's only choice might be to follow the music to the very edges of the universe - but how much of herself will she lose along the way?

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.F. Narnett
• Release date: May 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224759576

Book preview

The Song in the Stars

The Song in the Stars

Starborn Knights #1

★☆★

J.F. Narnett

Cover design by Muhammad Waqas

Copyright © 2024 Jane Narnett

No part of this work can be copied, reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system of any form.

All characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to real world equivalents is coincidental

This book contains aspects and themes that may be disturbing, including descriptions of body horror, violence, claustrophobia, suicide (mentioned), and existential themes.

All rights reserved.

For my darling cat, Sootie.

She protested the completion of this book until I put her in it.

Part One

Eriell

Chapter One

★☆★

The little spaceship sat lodged between a rock and a pile of junk on the edge of the world. The crash had awoken the whole neighbourhood of the Stacks, and Lumia had, with many others, closed up her shop and rushed out to see what the commotion was. She regarded where it sat, tilting upwards as though it was ready to blast back into the cosmos, she wondered how it was still in one piece. She had questions about how something so strange could end up all the way out here, but the true curiosity wasn’t in how it got here, but in what stories it could tell. This thing could show wonderful histories of the galaxies it might have flown through, what nebulae it had navigated, the things it had seen that she never could.

Lumi scrambled up the hill, scaling an uneven path of old tech and discarded furniture, foul-smelling juices and other mushy things that burned her nose. One wrong step could send her skidding down the side of the mountain, where nothing would stop her from plunging over the edge of the world and into empty space. Many people didn’t get this close to the edge of the meteor they called home, and the mountains served as good a boundary as any, but Lumi had come out here enough to know what was loose and what was solid. Besides, from this angle, the dome that served as an artificial atmosphere had a way of shimmering in the afternoon sun that turned it iridescent. It was the kind of sight she couldn’t find anywhere else in the city.

The ship was a smooth, shining thing, or it would have been if not for the dust and grime that had collected over its surface. It reminded Lumi of a bird in how it was shaped. It was round at the front and pointed at the back, with the wings turned backward to meet at a point past the ship’s tail. A tinted glass window wrapped around its front, and the whole thing was flat, almost two-dimensional. Underneath the grime, the metal shone like stars on a clear night. Lumi regarded where it sat, half-buried by an eroding mountain of garbage. The piles of trash had merged together so completely over the decades that it was hard to tell what was stone and what was junk, especially when they stood at the same heights.

The tail of the ship had burned into the rubble, though it hadn’t been here long enough to sink or merge into it. It didn’t look anything like the other ships that blasted in and out of the city. At this end of Eriell, so close to the Landing Station, dozens of them set off a sonic boom every day, lighting up the sky in flashes of orange as they passed the atmosphere. None like this ship though. Her fingers already itched at the thought of getting inside, of revealing what secrets lay just under the surface.

A small handful of people were milling around the junk it was lodged in, studying it and trying to find a way in. Most of these people were engineers and mechanics, and she knew she should stay out of the way, but part of her wanted to get up there just to touch it; she wondered if it felt cold. Space was supposed to be cold, after all. Or maybe it was still hot from where it had burned through the atmosphere. She was surprised they were the only ones here – usually unregistered ships were immediately quarantined, when they weren’t being blown to pieces by Eriell’s defence system.

Pagolo, an older man with rough, leathered hands, helped her up until she was directly underneath the ship. Lumi hooked her fingers into the loops of her overalls as she pretended to know what she was looking at. The old man picked up his crowbar once more and wedged it into a thin crease, and though his muscles bulged and his veins popped from his skin, the ship didn’t budge. 

‘Help me out, kid,’ he grunted. He gestured to where his hands rested on the now wedged in crowbar, then laced his fingers together in front of him. ‘Boost up and throw your whole weight on it.’

‘Okay.’ Lumi obeyed, the metal flaking against her skin as the bigger man hoisted her up to the underneath of the ship. ‘Anyone figured out anything yet?’ 

‘We’ve got radiation read-outs up here!’ This came from a younger woman, younger than Lumi, who stuck her head over the edge of the ship, letting a mess of red curls fall with her.

‘If this thing went out beyond the local space, it wasn’t for long. We can’t pick up much gamma at all.’

‘No-one up our end has been hiding something like this in their backyard,’ Pagolo said.

‘What about those rich boys up the other end of the city?’ Ayn said. She scrambled up to meet them under the ship. The little Drolk clambered across the junk on all fours, a blowtorch lodged between her teeth. She straightened in one swift movement and handed it to the older man. Lumi dropped from the crowbar as he powered it up, rushing over to Ayn to keep out of the way. 

‘Should we be breaking in if it belongs to someone in the city?’ Lumi asked. 

‘Everything out here is ours,’ Ayn pointed out. ‘Besides, it’s not registered.’

‘You found the registration numbers?’ Lumi asked her. 

Ayn rolled her shoulders towards the top of the ship, the closest she could get to shrugging. She studied the thing with her large, black, bug-like eyes, scanning the curve of its front, the way the wings almost touched at their tips. Ayn was half the size of a regular human, though she reached Lumi’s chest in height. She was humanoid with two arms, two legs and a head on a torso, but each of her limbs were square. Where joints would have been on a human, her body pinched in, letting each of her limbs rotate in complete circles. Her square face was taken up by a large, flat nose, and the grey-purple tone of her skin was half-hidden by long, thick, white hair, and the leather straps that made up her clothing. 

Lumi ducked out from under the ship to the red-haired girl, who now sat where the tail merged with the garbage. Her boots skidded against the smooth metal of the ship, and the girl watched as she struggled up to stand straight. ‘You found something?’ she asked. 

The girl nodded and pointed to a faded scratch along the tail. Lumi studied it, making out the faint line of numbers, not for a ship, but for a piece of it, probably the rocket in its tail. She pulled out her comm, snapping it open so the small, rectangular device folded outward into an L shape, allowing another corner of wire to be pulled out to make a screen. She turned off the privacy settings, so the screen became holographic, then snapped a photo of the code.

‘You can check registration?’ the little Drolk asked. 

‘No, but I know someone who can,’ Lumi said, and she wanted to know only to ease her own curiosity. The issue was that the numbers were so faded they weren’t picking up on the camera. She sighed. She wasn’t here to write up the bad parking job, she knew that. Though, her expertise in rare tech could help them stay out of trouble. If anyone out this way got caught with weapons - or worse, a bomber ship - they would all face the kind of persecution that was only heard of in old stories. Still, her fingers itched at the thought of getting inside, urged by the primal desire to know, to see what lay beyond the sky. 

‘If we call it safe, can I pull it apart?’ Ayn called out. ‘I want to play with the engine.’

Lumi grinned. ‘I’m not the one in charge here!’

‘You help us get that registration code, and we’re all gonna be playing with this thing!’ Pagolo yelled. ‘I’d love to get it working again.’

‘I’ll help!’ Ayn cried. 

Lumi chuckled as her friend climbed the side of the ship, crawling along the surface like a spider She drove the crowbar into the side and lurched hard enough to almost fall off. Lumi felt her heart speed up as the little alien ripped a section of the ship out, exposing wires and bulky, mechanical lumps that Lumi didn’t understand, and didn’t care to.

‘Very dead,’ Ayn confirmed. ‘But not permanently.’

‘Good,’ Pagolo said. ‘Let’s try and get this open. I can see Lumia vibrating from here.’

Before Lumi could throw her best attempt at a retort back, the ship began to whirr beneath her. She leapt out of the way as the top of the ship split down the middle, the line along the bottom of the window separated from the rest of the body and sliding down to either side. Lumi scrambled up the pile of trash eating the tail, skidding across a worryingly damp piece of cardboard until she was standing on the roof, overlooking the cockpit. It was comfortable, dusty and faded. 

Dropping into it, the overwhelming smell of old metal hit her nose, and the ground beneath her shifted as though one strong jump could send the ship sailing into the abyss below. The leather of the chair was worn and split, and the dash circling around the entirety of the space had long faded. Behind the seat sat a single door, though Lumi was sure that if it didn’t open inwards, the chair wouldn’t allow it to open at all.

Lumi made her way around and tested the door, but it was either locked or had long rusted shut. She drove her shoulder into it, but she wasn’t kidding herself into thinking she had any upper body strength. There wasn’t any scanner for an ID, or a lock, and she couldn’t even spot a hole for one of those old-fashioned metal keys.

‘Rejibi!’ Ayn’s voice called out from outside. ‘What’s the engine’s serial code?’

‘Where do I find that?’ Lumi called back. 

‘There’s a series of numbers under the main control panel!’

Lumi regarded the dash, running her fingers along the dead switches and screens. Her nails left trails in the dust. The bigger of the two main screens had a small metal label bolted to it, a string of numbers and letters etched into the surface. Lumi brushed the dust away and yelled them out to Ayn, tracing them as she did. She tried not to feel disappointed that they were in Earthian, imagining an exotic language made of weird symbols that she’d never fully understand. Though, the ship being Earthian was interesting on its own. There were human settlements outside of this little mining asteroid, and they were just as alien and strange, just as unfamiliar as any other alien, and that on its own was incredible. 

Lumi dropped into the seat. The driving stick fit so perfectly in her hands, the grooves matching the curl of her fingers. Where had this ship been in all the years it had been flying? What corners of the universe had it seen? How easy it would be…

Lumi shook herself and let go of the stick. The Eriell defensive stations would shoot her down the moment she tried to break out of the atmosphere, and leaving officially would be impossible. Too many people had to sign off on whether or not her pesky heart condition would kill her in the pressure of space. Even if they did, she had been given so many variables that clearing them all for the chance would take the rest of her life. She couldn’t fill her head with these ideas; they weren’t happening now or ever.

Another clang rang out, and Lumi jumped as the screens and lights across the dash hummed to life with a gentle purr from the engine around her. The screens were glaringly blue, flashing rows and rows of numbers. Lumi considered the buttons for a second, then pulled her comm from her pocket. She snapped a picture of the biggest screen and of the serial code.

Pagolo climbed up to the edge of the cockpit, his muscles straining against his weight, and he regarded the door behind the seat. ‘That’s a bio-lock that is,’ he said. ‘We try and blast that thing, it’ll only seize up more.’

‘Would one of these buttons get it open?’ Lumi gestured to the dash, shame flushing her cheeks as Pagolo pulled a face. 

‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to be pressing random buttons on this thing until you can tell me it won’t set off any explosions.’

‘I need to get inside it to do that,’ Lumi pointed out. ‘Up here it’s just… ship. It’s the same as any other ship.’ Though that wasn’t entirely true. Usually when she appraised old ships for their purpose, there was something of a hint in the flight-deck; a photo of a loved one the pilot had put up, a mark where the colouring of a hastily made uniform had rubbed off on the seats, or even as much as the tech on the dash. The ship was worn, but not in a way it had been used, the screens were basic and held no sign of a watermark, and the dust in the air suggested Lumi was the first to sit in it for decades. Maybe longer. 

‘It’d be safer to just see if the ship is registered.’ Ayn peered her head over the edge of the ship, her nose twitching in amusement. ‘Someone can check the serial code.’

‘You want me to go and ask Sol?’ Lumi asked. 

‘You’re already thinking about it,’ Ayn said. It was true, since it was a nice enough afternoon for a walk, and sending a text seemed so impersonal when she hadn’t seen her brother in a while.

Lumi grinned, then pulled herself out of the seat. A wave of dizziness knocked her back down. She brushed it off, but it quickly morphed into a hot, biting prickle that exploded against the base of her neck. Cold pain spread across her chest, and it collected into a static white noise that buzzed through the base of her ears. Her vision blurred. Her heart pounded against her ribs; a frightened animal desperate to escape. Ayn said something, but the sound was lost in the static, and for a horrible second, Lumi thought she was about to pass out. 

A hand pressed into her back, and the sensation rushed to the contact, as though bugs had come alive under her skin and were looking for a new home. Ayn recoiled, and Lumi jumped up. Another wave of dizziness sent her falling into the dash. 

‘What happened?’ Ayn asked. ‘You’re over-charged, rejibi.’

Lumi shook her head. ‘I’m okay.’

‘You’re over-charged.’

‘Humans don’t get over-charged,’ Lumi pointed out. At least, she’d never had electricity or static shock make her physically ill before. She could brush it off as something in the old air of the ship, or something in the junkyard that had made her nauseous and she hadn’t realised. A quick pat down told her that no rusty nails or eroded metal pieces had cut her. She straightened, then tested the strength of her arms as she lifted herself out of the ship. Her skin buzzed against whatever she came into contact with, but otherwise, the strange feeling had passed as quickly as it came.

Both Ayn and Pagolo stared at her. Their eyes burned into her as she climbed out of the cockpit, joined quickly with the others who were still inspecting the underneath of the ship. Ayn scuttled down with her. 

‘I’ll stop by the shop and take a painkiller,’ Lumi said. ‘I need to get my keys anyway.’ Hopefully by then, whatever this was had passed. 

‘Does that mean you’re locking up the shop?’ Ayn asked. 

Lumi forced a smile. ‘I’ll leave the key in its secret spot.’

‘It’s not a secret if we all know where it is!’ Pagolo called out. 

Lumi stuck her tongue out, then leaned over and kissed Ayn on the top of her head. Ayn vibrated, a usual reaction that Lumi didn’t understand, but Ayn never complained or said it was bad. ‘I’m alright, I promise. I’ll let you know when I learn something.’

Ayn pulled a face. 

‘I’m fine, really.’ It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t dishonest either. Still, as she turned and made her way back around the mountain, her feet fell out from under her and she stumbled more than once. The white noise in her ears turned into a gentle but persistent headache that pulled at the skin of her temples.

She reached the Stacks of Eriell, and any question of her health died as she focused on navigating the narrow paths.

The Stacks had started as a collection of stone buildings built into the side of the natural mountains, a maze of grey and brick with tiny, block alleyways and streets that could barely fit a single car. As the population increased though – as the streets became filled with vendors and neon decorations and home-made extensions – the city response had been to build up instead of out. Now buildings were stacked on buildings. They sat so close together and so dysfunctional that it formed one solid tower on a dangerous lean, using the mountain as a support just to stay upright. Bridges had been added to the upper levels, punching through crumbling walls to create layers on layers of streets, their underneath decorated with lights and flags of different worlds. 

Lumi was glad her store was on the upper levels. The Stacks were a community in themselves, a clash of culture and connections. Personal space was a suggestion and anyone could become best friends simply by being able to recognise a face in the crowd. Now though, with this strange illness making thought impossible, everything was loud and crowded. Overwhelming smells of spices and cooking meats from alien worlds filled the air, mixed with the odours of the hundreds of bodies that milled about. The fuzziness of her vision left her stepping on tails and scraping skin against scales, of running face first into fur, and the shoving and swearing she got in response only aggravated her headache further. 

The staircases leading up to the higher levels were narrower than the alleyways that made the main parts They were so tightly packed that Lumi’s shoulders brushed against the walls. She took a moment to collect herself, to let the headache ease, to catch her breath away from the overpowering smells, when her comm went off in her pocket.

The external buzz was enough to pull her from her daze and pull the device free. She saw the familiar green lights of a phone call, along with a name lighting up the thin surface of the folded mechanism. Mother. The sight gave her pause, and an angry curse rang out as someone elbowed her in the back. Lumi mumbled an apology and let them pass.

Constance Emelisse had not changed her number for Lumi’s entire existence, and Lumi never cleaned out her phone. It didn’t matter much when the woman never called. Lumi hadn’t spoken to her in nearly six years. 

Part of her wanted to respond, just to see what was so urgent that years of silence be broken – silence that had been mutual as far as Lumi could remember – then she hit the ignore button. Her comm buzzed again in her pocket, but stopped before she could turn it off. Lumi considered the many things that could be going disastrously wrong, then shook the possibilities away and pushed it to the back of her mind. Sol would probably tell her about the so-called catastrophe later, with the right amount of snark and fatigue that would make her feel better for missing it. She didn’t need to worry herself with such pessimism right now. 

Lumi’s shop was a tiny space crammed in amongst other tiny shops, and rather than flashing lights and loud paint, she kept the front grey, with an old, recycled scrap of metal swinging outward to show the name of the shop: Scavenger’s Rest. Inside was a tall set of shelves filled with all kinds of junk; old tech and pieces of spaceships, pieces of communication and radio equipment, sentimental toys and old tech. Most of it from the days where humans were trying to preserve their memories of Earth. She had forgotten to put the closed sign up, but the door was locked. Still, a man waited by the front, peering through the window with his hands cupped over the glass. 

‘Is there something I can help you with?’ she asked. The man turned, and Lumi recoiled when she saw the familiar constable uniform. She swallowed the lump in her throat. The constable’s eyebrow raised in question, and she wondered if he expected the section manager, or worse, her landlord. Surely, if he was here because of the ship, he wouldn’t come to her. 

She thought about opening the store, if only for the comfort of being in her own territory and feeling a false sense of security. Yet, she knew that was exactly why he was here. In the days where she had just been one of the managers, people would tell all kinds of stories about them being a front, about selling contraband to the crime networks within the Stacks. Most police quickly lost interest in looking into what was clearly false. The whole selling point of the shop was to find things that weren’t readily available, tech pieces and mechanical bolts, old files and outdated things; the hand-made passion of the Stacks demanded that market. It kept people out of the illegal end. If he wasn’t here about that, it meant he was following up on her non-existent debt. 

‘Miss Emelisse?’ he quizzed. On his belt, a baton hung loose on one side, while the gun on the other had green lights flashing across its handle – it was charged and ready to fire, but the safety switch was activated.

Lumi shivered. ‘Yes?’

‘I have to see this is delivered, read, and understood,’ the constable said. He reached into his pocket and produced an envelope, passing it to her. Lumi tried not to roll her eyes as she took it. Even as she opened the message, she knew what it said. One of her credit accounts – one set up by her parents when she was a teenager – was locked, and any money taken would plunge her into the negative. Only, Lumi had set up her own, separate account as soon as she turned seventeen, which was running fine. The systematic quarterly mail was annoying, but each time the numbers were the same. The account was at zero, and the debt didn’t exist. She held up the paper to show the Constable, and he nodded. 

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I have to. You’ve technically been in debt for more than five years, which means police get involved.’

‘I know,’ Lumi said. ‘You guys say it every time.’ They also explained the way to make it stop – Lumi had to spend money on that account and then pay it off with interest, but she wasn’t exactly rolling in riches, and she never found the time to do the maths either. She folded the envelope closed and passed it back to him. ‘It’s all done then?’ she asked. 

‘Yep, that’s all,’ the constable said. ‘Although, I was wondering if your store was open?’

Lumi chewed on the inside of her cheek. She generally didn’t work on a strict schedule when most of her jobs were commission, but all at once her mind flashed back to the days where other constables would go searching for contraband.

‘It’s personal, I swear,’ the Constable said. ‘See, I just noticed you’ve got an old Romeo blueprint on your wall in there.’

‘Oh.’ Lumi craned to see it from where she was standing, but she knew which ones he was talking about. The aged paper – paper that came from Earthian trees and needed all kinds of layers of preservation – in the glass frame on the wall. ‘It’s the real thing, would you like to see?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ the Constable said. 

Lumi pulled the key from the fake panel by the door and unlocked the store, letting the bell ding against the musty silence. She made her way over to the counter and pressed the buttons beneath to light up the store, the Constable already moving over to the far wall where the single frame hung. It was only one of many that had arrived with the ship itself, but most of the others had been destroyed. She thumbed a card from the counter and moved over. 

‘Did you know that this particular Romeo ship was named Eriell, which is where the colony got its name?’ she asked. 

‘I did,’ the Constable said. ‘It’s the same with the other colonies in the belt, isn’t it?’ 

Lumi nodded. ‘Apparently Romeo means pilgrim. Rome was the centre of a newly developing world, the place all roads led to. Or it might have. I couldn’t tell if it was a real place or not, or an idea. An Earthian myth or something. All roads lead to… the new world?’ she shrugged. ‘But that’s what Romeo means. Pilgrim to Rome.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ the constable said. He pulled a comm out of his pocket, snapping it open to reveal the camera. ‘My daughter is huge on all this history stuff. It’ll make her day if I show her this. Where’d you get it?’

‘Before the Stacks were built, the temporary settlements of the original settlers were right here where we’re standing. A lot of the stuff they held was tossed to the wayside when they started building. I managed to find it in an old storage space.’

‘That’s incredible,’ the constable said. ‘My girl is just starting to learn about the original mining operations. You don’t mind if I take pictures, do you?’

‘I can do you one better,’ Lumi said. 

‘More facts?’ the constable asked. He seemed genuinely excited, as though he were a little kid given five coin and free range of a toy store.

Lumi smiled. ‘I can do that,’ she said. ‘The minerals that turned it into a colony are still abundant in some parts of the mountains, but did you know those same minerals powered the artificial atmosphere? Until planetary human settlements recognised each colony as its own nation, they weren’t allowed to run on anything else. That was when we moved to more sustainable energy powers.’

‘Now that, I can surprise my girl with,’ the constable said. He grinned.

Lumi held out the card. ‘Down on the second floor, there’s a Drolk woman who can make a perfect recreation of it. If you show her that card, she’ll know I sent you.’

The constable paused. ‘What? Why would you do something like that for me?’

Lumi shrugged. ‘I don’t see a reason why not?’

‘I made you open your store just for me,’ the constable pointed out. ‘I’m delivering notices of debt.’

‘That’s not your fault,’ Lumi said. ‘Besides, if I didn’t want to open the store, I wouldn’t have. Take it.’

She handed him the card. He took it with a long string of thanks, but she didn’t hear it. The sound died as another wave of heat and pain washed over her, even more powerful than before. Lumi cried out as loud, stabbing white noise exploded through her head. It screeched so consuming she felt as though something had grabbed hold of her bones through the stretches of muscle and veins. It pulled, dragging her into a space she wouldn’t fit in. A hand grabbed her arm, and that same pull yanked all the strange energy towards it. The heat and the prickling and the sound all ripped away and ran down the length of her arm. The constable screamed. 

Once again, the feeling faded into a gentle hum that drilled a headache into her temples. Lumi tried to shake it off, but fear only made her skin grow hotter. Next to her, the constable rubbed at his own forehead, the colour drained from his face. His whole body was shaking.

‘What was that?’ he demanded. 

‘I don’t know,’ Lumi had to force the words out. No bug or virus acted like this. She knew some could transfer through touch, but she’d never heard of one that could transfer so literally. Studying the skin where he had grabbed her didn’t give any answers; everything looked fine, normal.

Lumi shook herself, ignoring how her skin prickled and burned at the feel of the air around her. She wasn’t going to panic, not yet. She couldn’t panic until she knew what was going on, and the best thing she could do was visit a doctor or medic while she was in the main part of the city. She wasn’t going to panic. 

The constable said something, but the words disappeared under the hum before she could understand what he was saying. Instead, she made for the door, and the constable followed silently. She wasn’t going to panic, no matter how hard her heart was pounding, and no matter how each step towards the road out of the Stacks only squeezed the dread in her chest tighter.

Other people were waiting outside her shop, obviously seeing the now open door and scrambling over. Lumi forced a smile for the elderly human woman at the front of the line. The constable tipped an imaginary hat, his face grim, before he turned away. Lumi could only hope she hadn’t hurt him somehow.

She recognised the old woman and her request for a filter they only made on a galaxy ten million light years away. The woman stepped into the shop with her, and Lumi offered the two different kinds she had found and ordered. The woman took both with a comment that her son would know what to do. Then came the Drolk man who wanted to see the date on new gears and bolts that were shipped to Holdrian but never Eriell. Then the young boy who had just gotten into spaceships and how they worked, and she pointed him to the scrap drawer with a pair of gloves waiting on the rim. One by one they each came in, looking for scrap that wasn’t so easy to find in Eriell, and as Lumi did the best she could, the smile became more natural, and the prickling under her skin faded.

This was what mattered right now. Whatever the sensation had been, it must have come from the ship, and wasn’t anything to worry about. Ships from strange places carried strange things, and Lumi didn’t need to know where any of it came from. Her home was here. Each of the people returning her smile, the questions met with shrugs and nonchalant promises of little worry, that was what she needed. Not anything more than this.

Chapter Two

★☆★

Sol Emelisse stepped into his work, sure if tried to understand the chaos, his head would explode.

The control tower was a round space with rows of concave desks looking out over a large window. With the only entrance being a glass door at the top of the room, he couldn’t avoid the dozens of people who rushed around him, yelling at each other over beeping screens. The noise left a sickly feeling across his skin, as though someone were persistently poking him over and over with gentle fingers. Beyond the large, time-stained windows was the Landing Station, with its giant mechanisms for parking spaceships. A few of them were visible from here, jutted up towards the sky.

The air conditioning was already turned up to its maximum chill, which made the air stale. Either something had come across the comms promising a warm weather day later this afternoon, or nobody had fixed it. Sol hoped it was the latter; he hated when the weather tower decided to make it a hot day for no reason at all.

Easing his way around the frantic workers, Sol let himself into the back room and pulled his tie loose. The intern that had been rostered on before him had seemingly dropped everything as soon as the clock ticked over. None of the systems or machines had been switched off, and the tablet that ran through each of the coffee orders was still ticking away, many of them in the red for exceeding the waiting time. Sol sighed, then dug around until he found an apron that wasn’t as damp as the others and cleared out the machine to hopefully mask the smell of burning beans. 

As the orders began properly pouring the way they were supposed to, he tried to get a sense of what was happening on the tower floor to create such a panic. A routine landing wouldn’t have all hands-on-deck like this, and he was sure he would notice if a botched entry had messed with the mechanism of the atmosphere. His best guess was that whatever ship came down in the next hour or so either didn’t fit in the vertical bay, or it was someone important in charge of a galaxy he’d never heard of. He considered opening his comm and checking the local news feed, but since a lot of the sources came from this very tower, he doubted he would find anything. He pulled it out anyway, only for it to start buzzing as his mum came up on the ID. Rolling his eyes, he shut off the call and shoved it back into his pocket. 

As he loaded each of the coffees – and one extra strong hot chocolate – onto the trolley, his phone buzzed in his pocket again, and he ignored it as he pushed out into the floor. The front wheel had a habit of catching and making the whole trolley glide sideways on a whim. Pushing it through the rush took too much effort in his upper body, but the motion was practised enough that he could still drop off the coffees at their respective tables. The people receiving them gave either a nod in thanks, or no sign they had seen it at all. That wasn’t out of the ordinary. Though, as he moved, he tried to get a sense of what was going on by peering over the shoulders to see the screens, to catch flashes of colour in the readout. 

He came to the largest screen at the front of the room, and finally saw it. The ship trying to enter onto the main landing pad was massive. The length of the ship could rival the asteroid this little city sat on, and it was twice as wide. According to the path layout being input by a quick-typing worker, they were sling-shotting smaller carriers between the two suns instead of trying to manage a ship that could easily pull Eriell out of its gravitational field. The man working the controls glanced up, and Sol swore internally. The one time the floor manager was outside his office and putting in the code, and it had to be when he was snooping. 

‘What are you doing, kid?’ the manager growled. 

Sol grabbed a random cup from his trolley and placed it down. He couldn’t tell if the manager had even ordered anything. ‘Coffee,’ he said. 

‘You’re in the way,’ the manager snapped. ‘Get off the floor.’

Sol thought about throwing a snide comment back, but bit down on his lip and went back to the trolley. When a hand grabbed his arm, he turned around ready to snap, and he came face to face with one of the control supervisors. He yanked his arm away anyway, ignoring how the bitter taste of cinnamon filled his mouth at the contact. 

‘Why are you making coffees at a time like this?’ she demanded. ‘We need all hands-on-deck.’

‘He’s not a scientist, he’s an intern. He’s not qualified to be on the floor.’ The manager turned back to Sol. ‘I told you to go.’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ the supervisor said. ‘I was the one who hired him; he’s trained enough as an astro-cartographer. He’s on the floor.’

‘I’m a student, actually,’ Sol mumbled. Though he only had a year left and being called something other than coffee boy was a nice change of pace. He dared let the smallest flare of hope spark in his chest. If the manager stopped being a dick for five minutes – as impossible as that was – he’d actually get to do the job he signed up for. 

‘Please. He’s here because he’s cheap labour,’ the manager growled.

Sol glared at him. ‘I already have two degrees, in maths and astrophysics.’

‘If you can do maths, you’re on the floor,’ the supervisor said. ‘Can you do maths?’

‘Yes, miss,’ Sol said. 

She reached over her desk and grabbed a headset from the chair in front of her, throwing it at him. Sol scrambled to catch it as it barrelled into his chest. ‘Sit. Start working. Any funny business and you’re out of here permanently.’

Sol lowered himself into the worn leather. The screen was a garbled mess of code and programs. Though he usually saw numbers as having their own individual colour, and complex equations flashing in patterns and mandala curls, all he saw now was a mess. He’d never treated his synaesthesia as a cheat to be automatically good at maths – only the condition that got him into numbers in the first place – but the spotlight of chaos around him had spilled everything he knew out of his brain. He could feel the manager watching him, waiting for an excuse to kick him back into the staff room. 

Taking a deep breath, he paused to orient himself on the desk, pulled at his tie to loosen the tightness in his throat. Keyboard, built into the boxy, grey desk, so he couldn’t move it. A single ball hung out to the side as the mouse. Forcing another breath, he considered the bigger picture. If he could prove himself, right now, he could get out of the coffee room. With a better job here, he would have a better pay, a better reference, and finally enough savings to get off this rock. He could be really mapping the stars.

Don’t mess this up.

Sol focused in on the screen. Something was wrong with the equation that charted the ship’s path. He traced over the numbers with his eyes, watching the pattern each numeral carved across the screen. There. They forgot to carry the second half of the equation over. 

‘You didn’t translate it into the four-d plane,’ he pointed out. ‘Here, you forgot to carry over.’

‘Good eye,’ the supervisor said. ‘Clear it and start again.’

Sol ignored her. It was easier to pull it apart as it was and put the numbers in their right place. The supervisor shifted next to him. 

‘Now’s not the time to show off, kid.’

‘I’m alright,’ Sol mumbled, keeping his attention focused on the code. There wasn’t a possible reality where the ship on the screens was landing in the city, unless a mistake had been made in the measurements. He hoped so. As it was now, the ship was the size of a small planet, twice the size of the asteroid. Nothing showed outside the