Moonbyul had just taken a seat at her desk when she heard Elly’s voice.

“We might run into a little bit of turbulence during our landing today,” she said from the cockpit and Moonbyul rolled her eyes, reaching for the walkie-talkie near her computer. They hadn’t had a functional intercom system in about two years. Walkie-talkies were crude and incredibly obsolete but they worked every time and now that they only had one working tablet, it was the best they could do.

“A little bit?” she asked. “And why’s that, Captain?”

Elly hesitated and Moonbyul could picture her face, annoyed and frustrated.

“Because we’re missing some parts that would otherwise help us land smoothly,” she said coldly. “Don’t you have something you could be taking apart and putting back together?”

On her workbench was an old, junky motor she’d been tinkering with lately. Beyond that was a stack of notebooks in which she’d been drawing diagrams and trying to come up with ways to upgrade certain mechanics on-ship. Then, of course, there was the engine itself, giant and noisy andalways in need of some TLC.

“Don’t crash the ship, Elly,” said Moonbyul, her eyes glued to the schematics on her desk. She would love to stay on the line and give Elly a hard time but she had a lot of work to do. “We truly can’t afford a single repair.”

“Just focus on your toys, grease monkey,” Elly chided. “I’ll take care of us.”

“I know you will, mama,” Moonbyul said with a sigh and a reluctant smile. “Keep me posted.”

She clicked off the walkie and pushed it away, running her hands through her long hair.

It had been a very long journey and it had only just begun.

The decision to go after Jiyong had been made in all of forty seconds. They needed supplies to make the trip but when Elly mentioned pawning her father’s watch, Moonbyul almost slapped her in the face. The ensuing discussion was emotional, almost heated. Moonbyul would sell her own body before she left Elly give up that watch. When it came down to it, she snuck away while Elly was asleep and sold the only things she owned that were of any worth – a laptop, a valuable toolset and a bunch of in-demand silver wires that could be used for a whole array of high-tech hardware upgrades.

By the time Elly woke up, they were two-grand richer and Moonbyul was feeling incredibly comforted knowing that her best friend wouldn’t have to hock her most prized possession. That would’ve been too big a pill to swallow. Moonbyul wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she let Elly do that. Better they end up on the streets, the Pandora broken and repossessed and sitting in some tow yard, than Elly giving up the one true connection she had to her father on earth.

She wouldn’t let that happen.

She didn’t need the laptop anyway. Sunny had a whole room of computers and never minded if Moonbyul borrowed one. She had more than enough tools to get by and the flashy, expensive ones just made repairs go a little quicker. And the wire? There was hardly anything on-board stable enough to be upgraded.

All of it was easily replaceable. Elly’s watch wasn’t. Moonbyul knew that Elly felt guilty about it all, knew that, as the captain, she had the weight of a thousand worlds on her shoulders, but Moonbyul just considered it to be an act of teamwork.

If they wanted to find Jiyong, they needed enough supplies to make the trip. And for that to happen, someone had to make a sacrifice.

For Moonbyul, it was that simple.

She’d used the free trial version of a ship-scanning software to create the schematics currently littering her desktop and now she scanned them very carefully and with a very sharp eye. She’d wanted something tangible, something more than just images and ideas in her memory, and these sheets satiated that need.

Moonbyul had spent at least an hour going through each page, her finger tracing corridors and ports and weapons and facilities. She chewed her bottom lip, muttering to herself as she brainstormed ways to improve the ship while spending as little money possible. How could she increase fuel efficiency? How could she fix those “crossed wire” issues that got in the way of their daily life? How could she keep the back ers from falling the off every time they ran into some choppy waters?

Elly’s voice came through the walkie again, cutting through the quiet and startling Moonbyul.

The words themselves weren’t much of a comfort, either.

“Approaching Cheoeum’s atmosphere,” Elly announced, her voice unsure. “It’s gonna be… a little bumpy. Might want to fasten your seatbelts.”

Moonbyul looked down.

She was sitting in her desk chair. She didn’t have a seatbelt.

She had wheels.

Before she could think of what she should do next, the ship shifted, the engine room suddenly tilting at a sharp forty-five-degree angle. It was bad news for Moonbyul. Now that the room was sloping downward, so was she, the chair hurtling itself towards the wall faster than she would’ve liked.

But Moonbyul had quick reflexes. She couldn’t quite find the time to eject herself from the stupid chair but she was fast enough to cover her face with her arms. As a result, her body took all the impact and her head was protected. Still, she crashed into the wall, flipping out of her chair and landing on the floor in a crumpled heap.

She kept her head down just in case Elly wanted to do some trick flips on the way to Cheoeum but after about a half minute of unfortunate tipping, the ship leveled.

Moonbyul breathed a sigh of relief but stayed on the floor. Her forearms were sore from where she’d collided with the wall but otherwise, she was okay. If the ship had tilted in the other direction, she would’ve been thrown into the engine and that, she was sure, would’ve ended with more significant damages.

“Sorry about that,” Elly said, her voice steadier than it had been before. “I was worried that might happen. Is everyone okay?”

“I spilled my coffee,” Sunny said, “but otherwise, I’m peachy.”

“Byul?” Elly asked. From the floor, Moonbyul could see the walkie-talkie but she didn’t have the drive to spring to her feet and pick it back up. “Byul?”

“Oh, great,” said Sunny. “You killed Moonbyul. And after everything she’s done for you.”

“Byul, please join us on the super high-tech comm and tell us you’re still breathing.”

With a grunt and a swear, Moonbyul peeled herself off the ground and trudged back to her desk, ignoring the way her chair was flipped upside down and parked by the door.

“Elly,” she gritted out, “I mean this with love, but you’re a ty driver.”

From somewhere in the ship, Sunny snorted. Moonbyul couldn’t see her friends but she could picture their smiles all the same.

“Glad to know you’re still with us,” Elly said. “Now go sit somewhere safe. We’re landing in ten minutes.”

Cheoeum looked exactly how Moonbyul remembered but she’d only ever been there once before.

The planet was so small that it had neither a refueling station nor an formal landing port. You kind of just picked a field and landed there, hoping that you weren’t squashing any crops on the way down. With fertile soil and mountains packed full of valuable minerals, the people of Cheoeum were virtually all either farmers or miners.

Elly spotted a nice, open spot beneath the shade of a tall cliff and tucked the Pandora away in the shadows, free from whatever harm could come to it in a planet inhabited entirely by ranchers.

“This planet smells like manure,” Sunny said when they started up a gravel path that appeared to lead to something like civilization. Moonbyul knew there wasn’t an actual city anywhere on Cheoeum but there was a collection of shops and business in the dead center of all that farmland that was technically considered a village. From where they’d parked, it was about a mile walk and it gave all three of them plenty of time to contemplate their lives.

They’d gone to Cheoeum because Elly had received a trip from a trusted friend named Baekhyun. Moonbyul was quietly against it but even she had to admit it was their only clear first step. The more they walked, the more Moonbyul couldn’t believe that the Cosmos’ most-wanted criminal was hiding out among the wheat fields and the silver reserves.

But Elly said that her friend was credible, said that he had insider information and that she trusted Baekhyun’s judgment. And because they literally had nowhere else to start (how do you begin to find one man who could be anywhere in any number of galaxies?), they made the short journey from Geum Haneul.

Worst case scenario, they’d at least be able to stock up on some fresh produce.

Sunny was saying something to Elly but Moonbyul wasn’t listening. She was looking at the endless fields, the distant mountains, the murky sky. She’d spent the first twenty years of her life on earth where the sky was always blue. There was no variation outside of sunsets and cloudy days. The sky was blue. That was the first honest-to-goodness fact that every child learned and Moonbyul didn’t think she’d ever get used to visiting planets where the sky above was anything else.

She liked Geum Haneul but looking up and seeing gold instead of blue would throw her off every single time. Something about it just seemed unnatural.

Sunny was right. The planet did smell like manure, but also dirt and grass and something Moonbyul couldn’t place. Pesticides? What kind of bugs lived on Cheoeum? In any event, she liked it. They spent most of their time in the sky and the rest of it in crowded cities. A small part of her missed the sights and sounds of the great outdoors, though she’d never want to stay on a planet this small and rural for more than a few days.

It would be too boring.

But as the village came into view and Moonbyul could make out buildings and people and rovers (and horses, of all things), she was sure that their next few weeks would be anything but.

Whatever this ended up being, it was only the beginning.

The gravel road soon faded into dirt. Soon, the only ground they could see was dirt, dry and dusty under their boots. Moonbyul figured the paved roads were for tractors and buggies, all smoothed and well-maintained so that farmers could get from their homes and into town without much difficulty. But in the village itself, it was all foot-traffic. Moonbyul could tell from the tracks in the dust.

There wasn’t much to see. The buildings were all either dingy wood or weather-worn concrete. There were some shops (a feed supply store, a guns-and-ammo shop, some rudimentary department stores and a grocery store with a broken neon sign), some community-essentials (town hall, the post office, a very tiny library) and what looked like ramshackle apartment buildings.

There were people around – some shopping, some chatting, some loitering – but no one paid them any mind. Moonbyul couldn’t imagine Cheoeum got many visitors or tourists so maybe the locals just assumed their out-of-place group was looking to buy some silver.

“Where do we even start?” Sunny asked. She was shorter than Elly and Moonbyul but she somehow walked the fastest. Even now, she was about three paces ahead and had to look over her shoulder to address them. “Just get up on a milk crate and ask, ‘Hey, has anyone seen Jiyong?’”

Elly raised an arm and pointed to a building with peeling white paint and a bright blue sign.

“Post office,” she said. “Baekhyun gave me a list of names, people we should check out. I don’t know their addresses but I bet whoever runs the mail will.”

Moonbyul nodded but something else caught her eye before they made it to the front door.

A group of people a little younger than herself were crowding the alleyway between the food store and the ammo shop. They were shouting, cheers and jeers reverberating off the cracking walls, and appeared to be tossing around a pair of dice.

Gambling, something at which Moonbyul had always excelled.

Out of the corner of her eye, Elly say Moonbyul’s face light up.

“Oh, no, Byul,” she said. “We don’t have enough money for you to be throwing it away on dice games.”

“We can spare a few dollars,” she insisted, breaking away from the group. “Any money I win goes right into the fuel tank!” Her hands were already in the pockets of her red letterman jacket, digging around for extra cash.

“That girl is a trip,” Sunny said, looking back at Moonbyul who had already easily joined the group in the alley. She was crouching beside a young man with a freshly-buzzed mohawk like she’d known him for years. Moonbyul had always had a way with people.

“Yeah she’s something else,” Elly murmured. They’d made it to the front porch of the post office and Elly opened the door, holding it for Sunny. “After you,” she said.

The inside of the building was just as drab and rustic as the exterior suggested. Frankly, this whole planet seemed like it was lost in time, hopelessly stuck in a world from hundreds of years before. But part of Elly, the bitter part that knew her best friend had just sold all her favorite toys to help keep the ship up and running, was jealous. These people had it easy. They were doing things right. They didn’t have to scour the galaxy for a criminal in hopes that they could one day pay their bills and fly around in something other than a hard-to-handle deathtrap.

“How can I help you young ladies?” a heavyset woman behind the counter asked as she closed her book. Her hair was dark red and cropped short and her denim vest was embroidered with pink and yellow flowers. She must’ve noticed the lost, thoughtful look on their faces because she added with a crooked smile, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No ma’am,” Elly said. “We’re actually here looking for somebody.”

“Looking for somebody?” she parroted, leaning her elbows on the counter.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Elly, reaching inside her jacket for Moonbyul’s tablet. The simple motion sent a twinge of up her shoulder before settling like a knot in the base of her neck. She did her best not to outwardly groan.

For people with advanced ships, flying wasn’t a very physical game. Most ships were equipped with extremely powerful, extremely accurate auto-pilot capabilities. For the most part, pilots programmed in where they wanted to go, and how and when they wanted to get there. They calibrated certain things, made tactical decisions about the journey, and stayed in the driver’s seat in case something went wrong. With advances in modern technology, pilots had an easier time than ever.

But nearly all of the Pandora’s auto-pilot features had broken in some way or another. Elly didn’t have the luxury of punching in an address and letting the ship fly itself. When she flew, it was strenuous. It was hard on her back, her arms and her eyes. She spent hours upon hours in the pilot’s seat, her hands flying around the cockpit, pushing buttons and pulling levers and trying to steady manual throttles that other pilot’s never had to touch. (A lot of newer ships didn’t even have manual controls.)

She was always tired and she was always sore.

Elly unlocked the tablet and swiped to the list of names that Baekhyun had sent her. He was a good friend, the kind of devious brain who had dirt on just about everyone in the ‘verse, and he’d helped her without giving it a second thought. Elly figured Baekhyun knew that helping her could mean that she, Sunny and Moonbyul could potentially make a hundred-million dollars while he made nothing. But either he didn’t think that they’d actually find Jiyong or he didn’t give a .

Either way, he gave them three names – all farmers on Cheoeum.

“I’m looking for the Huangs, the Augustines and the Lombards,” Elly said, reading the names off the screen, and she noticed the older woman’s grimace right away.

“We have privacy rules, you know,” the woman said, her tone changing from friendly to annoyed like Elly had flipped a switch. “Even on a planet as small as this one, we have rules. We can’t just be giving out names and addresses. It goes against policy.”

Elly fought a frown. She’d been so tired and so thinly-spread that she hadn’t even considered meeting with resistance. She'd kind of just figured they'd ask politely and get the information without any fuss. It never even occurred to her that it would be more complicated than that. But this woman, with her round face and deeply-set wrinkles and straight-browed scowl didn't look like she was planning to share anything with the nosy out-of-towners, no matter how nicely they asked.

Elly was just starting to think of a new plan when Sunny piped up, standing up straighter as she donned her most professional smile.

“Ma’am,” she said, “we’re with the Cosmos. We’re investigating, informally, and looking into the sudden disappearance of Kwon Jiyong, the felon. You’ve heard of him?”

Though she was still eyeing them with an uncomfortable intensity, the woman nodded.

“Of course,” she said. “His name and face are plastered all over ‘verse.”

“We pay really close attention to what people say online, what names and places get mentioned most frequently in connection to Jiyong, and these three family farms keep popping up. We don’t think that they have anything to do with Jiyong and we don’t want them hassled by freelancers who are looking to claim this bounty.”

Elly was dumbfounded, eternally impressed and boggled by her friend’s ability to think on her feet, but she caught on just in time.

“There are a lot of innocent people being bothered by money-grubbing freelancers, ma’am,” she said, “and we’re just doing our best to even the score. We’re checking into people to make sure they really are unconnected and then we’re wiping their names from the ‘verse ‘net so that nobody can bother them.”

The old woman looked at Elly, then at Sunny and then back again, both of them suddenly exuding an air of the utmost professionalism and sincerity.

“The Cosmos is doing all this?” she asked.

“Ma’am, the Cosmos is incredibly well-staffed,” Sunny said. “We exist for the sole purpose of keeping peace in the ‘verse and spreading prosperity.”

“And if our asking the public for help finding Jiyong inadvertently results in good, honest, hard-working people be harassed,” Elly continued, “then we need to try our very best to make good. Otherwise, we look bad.”

“And it makes our bosses look even worse,” Sunny said lightly, her tone that of someone who was standing around an office water cooler, shooting the breeze with fellow paper-pushers. “And we certainly can’t have that.”

It was cheesy but somehow, it worked. After a moment of consideration, the woman’s face softened and when she smiled this time, she looked considerably younger.

“Don’t you hate that?” she said. “When it’s up to you to keep the bossman looking good?” She shook her head, clicking her tongue. Clearly an authority figure in the past had pissed her off. “What are those names again?” Elly angled the tablet so that the woman could see and she squinted as she said, “Okay. Let me program their addresses into a chip. Wait here.”

When she was out of earshot, Elly shoved Sunny so hard she almost fell over.

“Now that’s some quick-thinking,” she said quietly.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Sunny said, shaking her head and blowing her bangs out of her face. “I really thought she’d see right through us.” She looked down at herself, admiring her bright yellow shirt and ripped jeans and then ran a hand through her red hair. “I guess I pass for a Cosmos sheriff.”

Elly snorted.

“It’ll be a sad day for the Cosmos if they ever hire us,” she said.

“Good thing she didn’t ask to see ID,” Sunny murmured.

When the redhead returned, she handed Elly a small, disposable microchip that would pop into the reader on her tablet and send the information programmed onto it to the appropriate app. In this case, it would send the addresses right to her GPS.

“Do you girls have a rover?” she asked.

“Yes,” Elly lied.

“These three farms aren’t very far from here,” she explained. “You’ll see them on the map. It makes the most sense to visit the Augustines first and then the Lombards and save the Huangs for last but you’re smart girls. You’ll figure it out.”

“Thank you so much for your time and for your help,” Sunny said, reverting in an instant back to her phony professionalism. She gestured to the chip, smiling sweetly. “And I’m sure these three families will thank you, too.”

They phoned in a few more empty, courteous words before ducking out the front door, trying to get out of dodge before the woman realized she’d been played and called the authorities.

Then again, did Cheoeum even have a formal police presence?

Moonbyul was sitting on the bottom step when they got back outside and before Elly had a chance to say anything, Byul was on her feet and waving around a wad of cash.

“Hey, losers,” she said, a smile spread across her face. “I won a whole bunch of money by rolling a pair of sixes. What the heck have you done today?”

Elly held up the tablet.

“We got addresses,” she said smugly. Moonbyul’s smile dropped for a brief second, upset about having been one-upped, but it was back just as quickly as it had disappeared. “You beat all those big, strong boys?”

Snorting, she rolled her eyes.

“Elly, baby, there’s never been a boy who’s been any match for me,” she said lowly, a familiar arrogance exuding from her like smoke. “You get the addresses with no problem?”

Sunny grinned and looked up at Elly.

“We may have employed some,” she paused and gestured with both hands, “creative deception.”

Moonbyul cocked an eyebrow as she slipped the money in her pocket.

“How creative?”

Sunny her lips and nudged Elly’s ribs with her elbow.

“Let’s just say if anyone asks, we’re Cosmos officials,” she said and Moonbyul laughed out loud.

It wasn’t wasted of Elly how much Sunny and Moonbyul were contributing. Thanks to Moonbyul’s skill at dice games and her sacrifice back on Geum Haneul, they had money in the bank. Thanks to Sunny’s charm and quick-thinking, they had addresses. And as she watched them chatting and teasing, standing in the dust of Cheoeum, Elly felt a swell of pride and affection wrap around her heart and ribs and squeeze inside her chest.

Right after that warm, fuzzy feeling passed, though, she was wracked with guilt once again. Moonbyul and Sunny were doing so much to help and Elly felt like she was only bringing tough times and bad luck. It was her busted-up ship that had them searching under space rocks for pocket change. It was her fault they were doing all this.

And they weren’t even complaining.

They were just doing their best and supporting all of her choices as a captain.

“We need a rover,” Sunny said. While Elly had been thinking, she’d unconsciously followed them back down the path from which they came and now she found herself at the edge of the village. “Do you think there’s a rental place somewhere?”

“Not likely,” Elly said, squinting. There were no trees on this part of the path and the direct sunlight stung her eyes. “I don’t think they have anything so formal.”

“Then how do we get wheels?”

Moonbyul was standing a few feet away, hands shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked around. There was some sort of recreation center on the other side of the trail and a young man in a basketball jersey was taking a bag from the back of a rickety rover with a bad paint job. It wasn’t much but it looked like it was built to seat four.

“Hey, kid!” Moonbyul shouted. “That thing got gas in its tank?” Confused, the young man nodded. She pulled a few bills from her jacket and waved it like a flag. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if we can borrow it for two hours.”

“Sold,” he said. When they got closer, Elly noticed that his duffel was actually a gym bag. “I’ve got a game anyway.”

Moonbyul handed him the money and then her cell phone.

“For collateral,” she said.

Elly wanted to kiss her. Yet again, Moonbyul was taking one for the team. Yet again, she was the reason that they were up and running. Yet again, she was carrying them.

“Don’t crash it,” the man said, pocketing both the phone and the cash. “I can’t afford to get it repaired.”

Elly smiled as she took his keys.

“I feel that,” she mumbled.

According to the tablet, the trip took two hours and fourteen minutes.

And they came up with absolutely nothing.

Following the redhead’s advice, they visited the Augustine family first. According to Baekhyun’s intel, Jiyong used to be tight with their oldest son, Clifford, back in high school. But Clifford had gone to college on Geum Haneul three years before and hadn’t been home in months.

Under the guise of using the bathroom, Sunny had snuck into Clifford’s old room and scanned his hard drive. He hadn’t logged in since December, corroborating the story that he hadn’t visited since Christmas. When he had, he’d only checked sports scores and sites. The other hits were all child-friendly gaming sites, probably the work of his nine-year-old brother.

If Clifford and Jiyong had ever been friends, it was a friendship that now existed only in memories.

The Lombards lived on a soybean farm twenty-seven miles from the village. Their daughter, Noelle, had dated one of Jiyong’s closest friends. Baekhyun had attached three different pictures of Noelle with Jiyong, two of them group-shots and one of just the two of them. They looked happy, chummy.

But Noelle wasn’t home. Nobody was. The Lombard farm actually appeared to be downright deserted and the girls spent a solid fifteen minutes trying to break into the house before giving up and spending the next forty searching the property.

They were nowhere to be found. Maybe they’d seen the news and had a feeling some pilots were coming to talk to them.

The Huangs were last. Their farm was the smallest and their house was the smallest. The girls expected a family but all the found was an elderly man named Feng. It was fine, though, because he was actually the one whose name had been mentioned in the email. Baekhyun said that Mr. Huang was an old Kung Fu master and had acted as Jiyong’s mentor after Jiyong graduated. But this was the wrong Mr. Huang. Feng didn’t know Kung Fu or Jiyong. His brother Kuo had been the martial arts expert and he had been the one to teach Jiyong.

Feng said he remembered it vividly but just in case he was a few stars short of a galaxy, Sunny stepped outside and ran a background check on the tablet. While making the girls some tea, Feng explained that Jiyong was Kuo’s favorite student, how he was respectful and intelligent and naturally athletic. He insisted that Jiyong was a good boy and that he couldn’t believe Jiyong would ever get himself into this kind of trouble. Elly asked where they could find Kuo but Feng informed them that his brother had died last summer.

When Sunny confirmed that they had the wrong brother, the girls thanked Feng for his time and left with their tails between their legs.

It was after four-thirty when they got back to the village and Moonbyul ran inside the rec-center to trade the keys for her phone. They were dirty from searching the Lombards’ farm and sweaty from the hot sun and they still had a long walk back to the ship.

And now they had no idea where they were going next.

Elly wanted to scream but she settled for kicking a rock across the dusty path and cursing at the sky.

“What a waste of time,” she said.

Moonbyul was back with her phone in under a minute and when she returned, she was smiling.

“Rover dude won his basketball game,” she announced happily and nodded her chin down the trail. “We should start walking back. I think we all need a shower.”

“Agreed,” Sunny said. “Last one to the ship has to clean the kitchen after dinner.”

As they made the trek back to the Pandora, Elly hung back behind her friends and considered a few things.

The first was that she really hated nature. If it were up to her, she’d stay inside her ship where she never had to deal with dirt and bugs and grass stains and humidity.

The second was that if they didn’t somehow manage to find Jiyong, they were up creek without a paddle or a backup plan. They wouldn’t be able to afford any additional supplies or repairs and they would be completely sunk because of her hubris.

The third was that she was more than happy to be the last one back to the ship – cleaning the kitchen was quite literally the least that she could do.

“Hey, Byul,” Elly beckoned. “What would you say is the ship’s biggest issue?”

Moonbyul looked over her shoulder.

“Out of all of them? Probably the leak in the fuel tank. But we got that fixed, didn’t we?”

Elly nodded.

It was a temporary fix, a Band-Aid solution to a much bigger problem, but it would probably keep them together a while longer. For the rest of the walk, Elly considered other potential professions. She didn’t have that many skills. She’d gone to flight school, after all, not college. She knew how to fly and that was about it.

There were some profitable jobs available for talented pilots – commercial space tours, interplanetary delivery services, search-and-rescue teams. Hell, she didn’t have a criminal record. If things got really bad, the Cosmos would probably hire her. The military was always looking for pilots.

But she wouldn’t be able to do any of that in the Pandora and she wouldn’t be able to do any of it alongside her best friends.

Once again, she reached down, her fingers tracing the gold watch in her pocket.

Would selling it even make that much of a difference anymore? One-hundred million dollars would be life-changing but how much could they do with a few thousand? Maybe they could get an apartment on Geum Haneul (or, more realistically, someplace much cheaper and much less scenic) and figure it out from there.

She honestly had no idea.

Sunny and Moonbyul had wandered pretty far ahead and so Elly picked up the pace and broke into a light jog. She could see the cliff they’d parked under and breathed a tiny sigh of relief. At the very least, she’d at least get to take a shower and rest her head.

A few paces ahead, Sunny and Moonbyul had stopped walking. The former had her hand over her eyes, shielding them from the sun, and the latter had her hands on her hips. They both looked lost.

“What’s wrong?” Elly called. “Tired of walking? Can’t make it the last hundred feet?” She didn’t blame them. She was getting a cramp in her side from all this walking. She needed to start working out again but they’d sold all their exercise equipment to fix their landing gear last winter.

Moonbyul turned to face her, swallowing hard as Elly got closer.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” she said, her face suddenly pale despite the sunburn that should’ve been burning her cheeks. “The good news is that you don’t have to worry about that leak in the fuel tank anymore.”

“What?” Elly said.

As she got closer, though, she saw it and suddenly, went dry.

She saw the shadow cast by the cliff, darkening the spot where they’d left the Pandora. She saw the black puddle that stained the red dirt below, smelled the jet fuel as it spilled out and pooled into the soil. She saw the shattered glass, the twisted metal, the horrible, broken remains of her beautiful, beautiful ship. She saw the enormous spacecraft that had landed on top of hers, clean and strong and unscathed. She stared at the three women who had emerged from the superior ship and read the name painted on the side of the craft over and over and over again, trying to understand what she was seeing.

It didn’t make any sense.

“And the bad news,” Moonbyul sighed, tucking her hands into the pockets of her jeans, “is that some monster-ship called the Unity has just crushed the Pandora to dust.”