Local Star, Aimee Ogden [ebook reader that looks like a book txt] 📗

hustled her forward, but she craned her neck to look back. “Triz. We’ll get this figured out.”

Triz nodded. She found herself sandwiched between Lanniq’s broad shoulders and Saabe’s narrower ones while the Watch officers checked Casne’s restraints and marched her away into the Arcade. Into the minilift, and up. To Justice. When she disappeared from sight, Triz’s breath hitched, and she doubled over. Saabe said, hesitantly, “Do you . . . do you want company for the walk home?”

Saabe’s hand froze her arm where Casne’s would have warmed it, but she appreciated eir presence anyway. E pulled Triz gently toward the lift. She stopped, unable to believe what had just happened, how they had just left the safety and warmth of Edillo’s. She realized Lanniq had left her side. He was standing outside the bar, head bent, listening to another Fleet officer with captain’s stripes. Triz didn’t recognize the captain’s face, but she knew all too well the look of doubt and dismay on Lanniq’s. When the captain turned and walked away, Lanniq looked around, then followed. That was odd. Why did they need him specifically, but not Saabe, who served directly alongside Casne? Maybe Triz could track him down later to find out. Maybe he’d even tell her, Fleet secrets be damned; he was Casne’s friend, too.

As for Kalo, he leaned up against the doorway of the bar—divested of admirers, he kept company with one of Edillo’s rags pressed to his nose.

“Thanks,” Triz said, and very nearly meant it. But the noise of the Arcade swallowed up the quiet word.

Only Saabe heard, and gave her elbow a reassuring squeeze. “Hey, no problem. How far downhab do you live?” Triz let em lead her to the lifts and tried to focus on the spicewine spinning in her head. Maybe this was all just a lousy bottle-dream.

Chapter Three

Should Triz wake Casne’s family? The thought nearly brought up the spicewine still churning in her stomach. She couldn’t go tell them what was happening when she had no idea herself. Instead, she spent most of the night lying awake on every flat surface in her rooms: her bed, the hard line of her cheap fold-down sofa, squeezed on the floor next to the toilet. Sleep fled from her. Every time she closed her eyes the image of Casne in a cell flooded her thoughts.

The Watch officers took Casne uphab, to Justice—the same place where the Ceebee leaders brought back from the fight at Golros were stashed. She’d be safe, wouldn’t she? Triz thought of Casne sharing a cell with none other than Rocan Melviq, the Unquenchable Scythe, and shivered. No. The Watch was Fleet, and they’d see to it Casne wasn’t thrown in with the same people she’d just helped capture. Triz pressed her fingers against the cold plastic of the bathroom floor and tried to make herself believe that.

Long before the full dayshift station lights came on, Triz made herself stand and pulled a clean worksuit from the drawer under her bed. She stared at her ghastly face in the mirror and dragged her fingers through her snarled hair a few times, but gave up before it could be honestly described as “combed.” The lights in her rooms switched off as she shut the door behind her, and her boots sounded too loud in the empty hallway between her place and Casne’s parents’.

Her wrist fob opened the door. Casne snuck her the passcode access years ago, back when Triz was still just a stupid teenager sneaking in to fool around with her girlfriend. And to enjoy being in a real quadhome—not that the Tolvian creche a few floors downhab was bad, but . . . a wallport you could watch whatever you wanted on? A food printer that would give you sugarpips if you asked, not just on holidays but whenever you asked? It had seemed like heaven to a wide-eyed creche brat.

It still seemed pretty nice, compared to Triz’s current quarters. Hers were big enough to share with Casne now, or Nantha, or Casne and Nantha, if they both got leave at the same time—but only just. When Triz had been old enough to ask for her own place from PubWel, they’d stationed her just a few rooms down in a pairhome on the same level. Tiny though the pairhome might be, it was still nice to be close to Casne’s family, though Triz was glad to have at least a few doors of distance right after Cas upturned the quadhome’s life by running off to enlist. Bad enough to drudge alongside Quelian all day in the ‘works those next weeks; worse still putting in overtime as a disappointing daughter-substitute at the family dinner table once a week.

Inside the quadhome, the lights were low, in tune with their residents’ biorhythms. When Triz settled onto the nest of floor cushions by the wallport, a local light obediently brightened that corner. She preferred to sit in the dark, but it didn’t matter. She raised her fob, then hesitated. It would be nice not to have to hear bad news alone. But it would be nicer to hear it and get herself in check before she had to explain everything to Casne’s quadparents. She turned on the wallport and slid the volume down.

The first few channels were playing, respectively, a documentary about the construction of Centerpoint Station, an old astronautics display featuring half a dozen retired XL-8 Starslicers and a lot of fireworks, and the latest Astral Noise concert from Croelo Hab.

Triz had just started to convince herself last night’s events had all been a bad dream—a dream, somehow, despite having not snatched a single scrap of sleep all night—when her fob finally scanned over to a newschannel.

“—responsible is reported to be Captain Casne Vivik Veling,” the newsreader was saying. The footage shook and wobbled: probably shot from a targeting camera in the belly of a Skimmer or some other starfighter. Explosions in red and gold lanced over the wallport screen. The blasts