STERLING CHILDREN’S BOOKS and the distinctive Sterling Children’s Books logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Text © 2020 James Pray

Cover illustration © 2020 Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4549-3837-8

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

sterlingpublishing.com

Cover (front) and interior illustration by Antonio Caparo

Cover (back) illustration by Eratel/Getty Images

Cover design by Irene Vandervoort and Shannon Nicole Plunkett

Interior design by Shannon Nicole Plunkett

For Mom, Nanna, Grandma B., and Kelsey, Warriors all

Prologue

A long way from here, and a long time from now, there was a star named Noraza.

Noraza’s system had five planets. Four were small, gray, and rocky, and didn’t even have names, but the fifth was a huge lemon-yellow gas giant named Amberius.

Amberius had wavy gold stripes and long creamy swirls and strings of white storms that looked like pearls, at least from a distance.

Amberius also had two rings around it. The first ring was made of ancient dust and pieces of ice. The second, however, was made of new dust and pieces of space station.

Three years ago, the pieces floating around the second ring had been put together properly in one place, and that place had been a research station called Canary. Exobiologists had started Canary Station so that they could drop probes and drones into Amberius’s stormy yellow clouds to study the alien creatures that lived in them. Amberius had animals like blimps with tails, and plants like thousand-foot wads of crumpled green tissue paper, and even a few flying mile-long see-through eels, and none of them needed to touch the ground even once in their whole lives—which was good, because Amberius didn’t have anywhere they could land.

Amberius’s creatures were the only things you couldn’t find somewhere besides Noraza for much less trouble, but they weren’t the only reason scientists had come to Canary. Some had moved there because their work was too secret, dangerous, or strange to do anywhere that wasn’t quiet and lonely—and Noraza was a very quiet and very lonely star.

Even so, Canary Station had been a happy place, with sweeping white-and-yellow halls where children played, big bright exobiology wings where their parents studied blimps with tails, and a handful of high-security laboratories where a few very smart people studied things that made blimps with tails seem very ordinary.

Now, though, Canary Station didn’t look like a happy place.

It looked like a place where a lot of people had died—and it was.

It didn’t look like a place where you might still find anyone who, well, hadn’t.

But it was that, too.

PART 1:

The Castaways of Canary Station

Chapter 1

Jonesy Archer’s second-to-last day on Canary Station started off as a day of firsts.

For the first time ever, she was the first one on the Canary Station salvage team to get her spacesuit on and double-checked from bubble helmet to magnetized boots. So for the first time, she got to help Trace, her best friend, with his suit computer instead of the other way around. And then, for the first time, she got to wait with her helmet clipped to her belt and watch the other kids checking their readouts and snapping on their gloves instead of hurrying to catch up.

Jonesy had blue eyes, too many freckles to count, and curly red hair she wore tied back in a bushy ponytail, because otherwise it was just bushy. She was two and a half if you counted in local years, or eleven if you counted the legal way. She preferred being eleven, but she was the youngest kid on the salvage team either way.

Jonesy was also small for her age, which was why she got to be a salvager in the first place. She could squeeze through gaps too tight for the big kids. Canary Station had lots of those, so squeezing through them was her job.

Everybody in the crew had to have a job. Even little Davenport Jr. and the Gifford cousins, the only kids younger than Jonesy, had jobs. Rook said everybody’s job helped the crew somehow, so everybody’s job was important—whether that was tending strawberries and kale in the hydroponics patch like Khouri, rebuilding scrubbers and recyclers like Nikita and Terry, or wiping your own drawings off the hideout walls, like Davenport Jr.

Jonesy, though, thought salvaging was the best job of all. Nobody helped the crew more than the salvage team. She didn’t care that she came back exhausted most afternoons. Or that she’d almost died fourteen and a half times since Rook had found a proper spacesuit her size and recruited her.

Rook Lopez was the crew’s leader and the captain of the salvage team besides. This was partly because he was seventeen, which made him the oldest, and partly because he was smart, and fair, and almost always right. He wasn’t the tallest boy in the crew, but he was stronger than anybody, with short black hair and intensely dark, serious eyes. He was always the first out when the salvage team left and always the last to return.

Today, though, for the first time Jonesy had seen, Rook wasn’t there in the airlock with them getting ready—and when he arrived, he wasn’t suited up.

“Little change of plans,” he announced. “You’re heading out without me this morning.”

“Uh-oh, Jonesy,” said Hunter, with a nasty smile. He was a big, brown-haired boy, and the second-oldest salvager. “Who’ll rescue you today when you get your boot stuck and Stick Tracy can’t get it out?”

“You will,” Rook said sharply, over Trace’s indignant Hey! “And she’ll rescue you if you forget your tether today and go sailing away again. How about that?”

Hunter scowled and didn’t answer.

Rook glanced at Jonesy and smiled. “Don’t worry,” he went on. “I’ll still be on the comms like always. The bugs got the autocooker again after breakfast, so either I stay home and fix it or it’ll be emergency rations for dinner.”

Everybody groaned, including Jonesy. She tried not to complain when the other kids did, but emergency rations were like cardboard, only less tasty and harder to chew.

“Okay, assignments,” Rook said, slipping his hand terminal out of his pocket. He thumbed across a few menus and tapped the screen to pop out a glowing blue hologram that looked like an iceberg-shaped stack of broken glass but was really a map of Canary Station that he’d edited to hide the missing parts.

“I was planning to jet over here this morning to check for more rolls of barrier fabric,” he said, pointing to a small, faraway area two decks up, “so, Fred, that’s your first job. The maneuvering pack’s topped up and ready to go.”

Fred made Jonesy think of a nervous grasshopper—tall, fidgety, and so thin that he had to wear two extra layers so his spacesuit would fit. “G-got it,” he stammered, fishing out his terminal to snap a picture of Rook’s map. He was the only other kid Rook trusted with the maneuvering pack, which was funny because flying outside the station with it scared him to death.

“Hunter, Ryosuke, you’ll keep working on that generator in the number twelve maintenance bay. Think you can get it out today?”

“Sure, if Ryosuke will let me bring the cutting rig,” Hunter said.

“We need the mounting in one piece,” Ryosuke said crossly. Ryosuke was barely taller than Jonesy, with dark red hair, black eyes, and a permanent scowl from having to be salvage partners with Hunter. “Otherwise we’ll just need to make another. And by we, I mean me, because we still have no safe fabricator, and the last time you touched my mill—”

“Thanks, Ryosuke,” Rook interrupted, “and I agree. Hunter, I know we need it before our old backup dies, but no cutting rig. I’d rather get it tomorrow in good shape than tonight with the Hunter Special.”

Jonesy giggled. The Hunter Special meant warped, dented, and covered in scorch marks.

“And Eva’s with us today to check the quarters over past D Concourse. Right?”

“Yeah, where Mr. Stanford lived—the old math teacher,” Evangeline said. Eva was the oldest girl in the crew—tall, white-blond, and very pretty—and her main jobs were teaching school and running the hideout while Rook was away, but she went out with the salvagers sometimes when she needed something special. “I’ve only got a few more months of course materials for you and Ryosuke,” she explained, “so I’m hoping I can recover the libraries for his upper-level classes.”

“Even if he had backups, the bugs probably did us a favor and ate them,” Hunter said.

“Even if they did, it won’t get you out of anything for another four years,” Eva retorted. “So don’t sound so hopeful.”

“Maybe we’ll get rescued before you run out,” Jonesy suggested.

Eva smiled at her. “Maybe we will. Keep your fingers crossed for me, okay?”

“Both hands,” Jonesy said.

“Sounds good, Eva,” Rook said. “Meg, you go with her and help her out. Don’t take any chances getting over there. D Concourse is rough territory.”

Meg was Eva’s opposite—short, Black, and even more serious than Ryosuke—but she was as pretty with her Navy crewcut as Eva with her long white braid. Plus she could beat anybody but Rook at arm wrestling and never let Hunter forget it. “Will do,” she said, with a quick salute for Rook.

“Last but not least, Jonesy and Trace, you’re headed up here,” Rook said, pointing to an area just below the command deck at the top. “I found a loaded storage bay here with its hatch jammed partway open. Jonesy, if you can fit inside, I want you two to empty it out. If you can’t, radio me and I’ll give you something else to do.”

“Got it,” she said, nodding smartly.

“No problem,” Trace said, nodding, too. He was an athletic, cheerful boy with a ready smile; he was two years older than Jonesy and talked too much about sports sometimes, but they’d been fast friends from the start.

“What’s in there?” Jonesy asked Rook, hoping it was something important.

“I know it’s foodstuffs, but the bugs got the detailed manifest,” Rook said. “Could be autocooker inserts, could be a couple tons of noodles and spices for the old Mad Wok—”

“Or,” Hunter fake-whispered, “could be a couple tons of emergency rations—”

“Which’d be great,” Rook finished, “since we don’t have nearly enough laid up yet.”

Everybody groaned again, Jonesy as loud as anyone. Finding more emergency rations didn’t seem helpful at all.

“Hey!” Rook said. “Every job’s important and every bit helps. Khouri’s a long way from covering anything past very small salads with the hydroponic crop, so if I can’t fix the autocooker today, those rations are all we’ll have. They’re a lot better than starving.”

“Says you,” Hunter said.

“Exactly,” Rook replied. “Helmets on and arms up, everybody.”

Jonesy lifted her helmet over her head and snapped it into her suit’s neck ring with a quick quarter turn. Seals hissed. Fans whirred. The airlock’s odor of spray-sealant faded, replaced by the sweat-and-rubber-gloves smell of her suit’s air supply. Her helmet’s readouts flashed a few messages from her suit’s computer, then changed to say OK in green.

Everybody on the team had to maintain their own spacesuit, even Jonesy, and double-check the whole thing every time they put it on. And they never went out without Rook checking everybody again himself, just to be safe—even today, when he wasn’t going with them.

“Hey, Rook?” she yelled when he got to her.

“Yeah?” he asked, leaning close to her helmet’s bubble so they could hear each other.

“What if I fixed the autocooker instead? Then you could go out. I can clear out bugs!”

Rook shook his head. “If it was just the autocooker, I’d say yes. I really need to track down how they got in this time, though.”

Jonesy could have done that, too—she’d gotten lots of practice back at the beginning when the bugs were in everything—but clearing out bugs was Rook’s job (well, one of his jobs) when they weaseled into the hideout’s systems, so she didn’t argue.

“Hey,” Rook said. “It’ll be okay. Maybe it’ll be full of chocolate.”

He held out his fist and grinned. Jonesy bumped it with hers and grinned back.

Rook stood up and tapped his earpiece. “Testing,” he said, but now Jonesy heard his voice clearly through her helmet’s speakers, cutting through the ocean-surf-and-popcorn noise Amberius pumped out on their radio channels all by itself. “Sounds like Big Yellow’s feeling extra noisy today, so don’t take any chances you don’t have to. You might have a tough time calling for help. Everybody good?”

Jonesy gave him a gloved thumbs-up with the rest of the team.

“Stay safe, stay solid, and bring back some good loot,” Rook said, like he did every morning they went out, except this time he climbed back through the hatch into the hideout.

The airlock started its cycle as soon as Rook sealed the hatch behind him, flashing the lights red and sucking out the air with grumbling vacuum pumps so that it wouldn’t be wasted when they opened the front doors. The pumps started out loud but got quieter as the air got thinner, like somebody was slowly turning down the volume.

Waiting for the airlock to cycle meant standing around in a spacesuit for ten minutes with nothing to do, and the wait always made Jonesy antsy. She listened to the older kids chat on the salvage team’s open radio channel until Ryosuke dropped to listen to the BHBC News and Fred switched out to ask Rook some questions. After that Hunter teased Eva about how her suit made her look like a burly asteroid miner until she and Meg left the channel, too.

“Hey, Joe,” Hunter said, turning to Jonesy, “about those rations—”

“My name’s Jonesy,” she interrupted. “And it won’t be rations, anyway.”

After that she followed Eva’s example and switched to a private channel with Trace. They spent the rest of the wait laughing about the last time they’d played Pilothouse, their favorite space-combat simulation, and ignoring Hunter, who’d switched to charades and was acting out himself eating Jonesy’s arm off when she brought back emergency rations.

The airlock took a long time to cycle partly because it was huge, for an airlock, but mainly because it wasn’t really an airlock. Or rather, it was an airlock now but hadn’t always been. Once it had been the reception for Canary Station’s main B Deck medical clinic.

Jonesy’s life was full of things like that. The black backpack she wore over her spacesuit had been an adult-sized military thigh pouch, once. Her cabin in the hideout had been a medical supply closet, once. Trace and the rest of the crew had just been other kids at the station, once.

It would have been easy for Jonesy to feel like she’d been a girl with a family, once, too. Most of the other kids felt like that, but she knew better. She was still a girl with a family. She knew they’d gotten away safe because Rook had recovered recordings that proved it. She knew they still thought of her, too. And that they were coming back for her as soon as they could.

In the meantime, she had a job to do.

The airlock’s red lights stopped flashing. All Jonesy could hear now was her own breathing, her suit’s fans whirring, and the faint mantra of hush-rush-pop-hush-click that Amberius never stopped whispering through her radio. She couldn’t hear the others’ footsteps or the rattle of their gear. The airlock’s big, welded-on pressure doors unlatched in silence and opened on the giant hole and tangle of blackened wreckage where the corridor to Canary Station’s main concourse had been.

Everybody kicked their heels to turn on their boot magnets and stepped up to the ragged edge of torn decking outside, past the painted line where the artificial gravity stopped. If you looked left or up, you could see clear out into space. If you looked right, you could see all the way to the lemon-yellow storms of Amberius. Jonesy had looked in all three directions on her first day with the salvage team and scared herself silly. Now, though, the view didn’t scare her a bit.

Well, maybe a bit. But she was used to being scared, and the view was pretty, so it was worth it.

“Ready?” Trace asked over the radio. The others had already kicked off, flying away into the station.

“One sec,” Jonesy replied.

She tapped the back of her left glove to pop out her suit computer’s holo display. The bugs had ruined both of Canary Station’s building-sized hypercast transmitters (and their gigantic generator array was long gone, anyway) or she and her friends could have called in a rescue three years ago, but they had plenty of hypercast receivers that worked fine. Those were tiny and ran on batteries, so she could still listen to music on her favorite hypercast stations, even if they were transmitting from halfway across this arm of the galaxy and the shows were a week old by the time she heard them.

Until Jonesy had joined the salvage team, though, she hadn’t been allowed to listen properly to her favorite music, because her favorite music was boomstep.

She’d only played her boomstep properly in the hideout once. Three songs in, Hunter had burst into her cabin and ripped her sound system off the wall. Rook and Eva, who’d both mistaken 2Zeus’s Superdestroyer no. 9 for a pirate attack, had helped him throw it out the airlock. The Gifford cousins had cried for hours, and Davenport Jr. had suffered nightmares for a week straight. Jonesy had never been in more trouble in her life.

In space, though, nobody else could hear how loud you played your boomstep, so she found her favorite station and spun the volume to 100.

“LIVE FROM SISYPHUS FOUR,” the station’s DJ roared inside her helmet, “PROGBOOM, BOOMSTEP, BOOMCORE, AND MORE—”

Sometimes, when Hunter was extra mean, Jonesy wanted to sneak into the workshop some night and set his suit’s receiver to a boomstep station and then mess with its software so he couldn’t turn it off, or down, or change stations. She knew how.

“—ALL THE SOUND TO POUND YOUR SKULL OUT OF ROUND—”

So far she hadn’t, though. Some tricks were too mean even for Hunter.

“—AND IF YOU THINK YOU CAN HANDLE IT, YOUR SYSTEM AIN’T BIG ENOUGH! IT’S THE TOP OF THE HOUR, SO GET BRACED WHILE WE THROW OUT A BIG BOOMING SHOUT TO OUR SPONSORS . . . ”

Jonesy had a headache before the music even started. That was how you knew you were playing it properly. Her big sister, Cass, who’d taught her all kinds of things when she was little (including why boomstep was the best music), had said so, and Cass was always right. Even if that was annoying sometimes.

She gave Trace a thumbs-up, and together they kicked off into space.

Apart from the big hole right outside the airlock, the areas near the hideout were some of the safest places left. Most of the lights still worked. Some of the sweeping, yellow-and-white corridors looked almost the same as before, except for all the trash and specks of metal and screws and things floating around because the gravity was off now.

When Jonesy went floating through those places, she liked to imagine them full of people again, all staring as she flew by. Sometimes, on the rare mornings when she and Trace weren’t in a hurry, she even walked for a corridor or two, drowning the clunk-clunk-clunk of her mag-boots with her boomstep and pretending her home was still in one piece.

The truth, Jonesy knew, was that the station was in about a billion pieces—but as long as the emergency beacon was still pinging away on the command deck, she also knew it didn’t matter. When a ship finally came back to look, they’d know she and her friends were in this piece. And she just had to help make sure they were all still here when it happened.

Jonesy and Trace set out from the airlock together, zigzagging down the main corridor in long, careful jumps. With a storage bay to find, and everything in it to ferry back if she could squeeze inside, Jonesy knew today wasn’t a day for walking or playing pretend, at least if they wanted to finish before dinner. She waited until the rest of the team was out of sight, then gave Trace their secret hand-signal—race you!

Trace swiped his hand no and tapped his helmet—Rook said no chances today!

Jonesy muted her music. “Just to the top of the concourse?” she wheedled over Amberius’s interference.

Trace glanced back toward the hideout, then flashed her a smile. “Loser babysits the sanitation cycles for our suits tonight?”

“Deal. And it’s your turn to count.”

She cranked her boomstep again and unclipped her suit’s magnetic grapple as Trace stuck out three fingers and counted down. At Zero! they pitched their grapples up the corridor, clicked off their mag-boots, and yanked on their wires, launching themselves away from the hideout.

Rook didn’t like them racing. He said it was too risky. He’d taught Jonesy to zigzag down corridors the safe way, jumping from handhold to handhold and looking carefully between jumps for sharp debris that could tear her suit.

Trace, though, had taught her how to use the mag-grapples they all carried to sling herself down corridors like a missile. The grapples were meant for anchoring yourself so that you could use both hands without floating away, or for rescuing yourself if you missed a jump. With practice and good timing, though, you could also use them to zoom around without ever touching a handhold, even around corners.

Jonesy wasn’t as fast as Trace, yet, and she’d definitely messed up her suit a few times racing him. She’d covered the repair patches with animated stickers of her favorite characters from Hollowdog Core and Misha’s Pirates, though, and she hardly ever had accidents anymore.

Besides, racing Trace in zero-G with her boomstep turned to 100 was really fun. As usual, he kept ahead most of the way as they corkscrewed and swooped toward the center of the station, but she caught up around the last few corners, and they were neck and neck when they reached the main concourse and changed direction, slinging themselves upward.

The main concourse had been the prettiest part of Canary Station, with floating sculptures and a big fountain and tall leafy plants and most of Jonesy’s favorite restaurants. She couldn’t count how many times she’d gone there for Crispin’s turtle sundaes with Cass or the Mad Wok’s pad thai with her mom and dad. It had always been busy, always loud with voices and music.

Always, that was, until the morning three years ago when the gray ship came.

Jonesy and Trace threaded the twisted beams and wreckage crisscrossing the tall, open space, flying past balcony after ruined balcony like a pair of the Cowboy-4 fighters that had defended Canary once upon a time. At the last second, they both grappled the topmost railing and swung over to land neatly on their mag-boots at the mouth of another corridor.

It was too close to say who’d won, but they called the race there without starting a tiebreaker leg. They’d run out of racing territory, anyway—this deck was a debris-choked maze of wrecked offices and service compartments—so they switched on their helmets’ hi-beams and zigzagged the Rook-approved way from there on. They found the storage bay a half hour later, right where Rook had said to look, with its door stuck mostly closed.

Trace turned to Jonesy, and she saw his lips move. She turned off her boomstep.

“Looks tight,” Trace said again over the radio.

“I think I’ll fit,” Jonesy replied. She slipped off her black backpack and left it drifting in the corridor while she tried to squeeze through the gap. Trace was right, though, and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t get her helmet inside.

“I’ll see what Rook wants us to do instead,” Trace said.

Jonesy looked longingly at all the boxes floating just out of reach inside the storage bay. “The door driver might just be broken. Maybe I can fix it.”

“Wouldn’t Rook have fixed it if it wasn’t trashed?”

“He might have been in a hurry,” Jonesy said hopefully. “Besides, I’ve got a new trick I think might work this time. It’ll only take me a minute to try.”

“Yeah, all right,” Trace said. “But just a minute, okay? Rook doesn’t like us wasting suit-time on stuff we can’t get.”

Jonesy rummaged in her backpack, which held her tools and two hand terminals: her yellow-with-stickers Pegasus and her dad’s white Ailon. She pulled out hers and linked up with the little computer in charge of the door.

Connecting your terminal to most things outside the hideout was a dumb idea, even now, because of the bugs. Rook thought they were probably military assault viruses, but nobody could be sure. You couldn’t look at them. They just took over whatever you were trying to look at them with, along with everything on the same network. Then you were in for a really bad day, because they were a huge pain to get out.

Whatever the bugs were, though, flooding the station network with them had been the gray ship’s first and nastiest move. They’d killed the station AI in seconds and made everything else go berserk or break. They’d made sure nobody on Canary could fight back.

The trouble was that, unlike the gray ship, the bugs never left. They’d quieted down since the attack three years ago, but they were still there, waiting. You could even hear them sometimes on the salvage team’s safe, analog radio links, whispering to one another in sinister bursts of not-quite-static.

Connecting to the door computers was usually safe, though, at least with a terminal as tricked out as Jonesy’s yellow Pegasus was now, thanks to Rook and Ryosuke. The bugs could only squeeze down so small, so they usually broke doors instead of living in them, and that was just what they’d done to this one. Once it would have meant game over, but last week she’d finally figured out a tricky way to access doors without working drivers.

She explained what she was doing to Trace as she worked, as usual, and as usual, Trace nodded along as if register scraping and Charbonov ping-bumping meant anything to him. That was okay, though. She nodded along the same way about pressure flanking and narwhal kicks and all the hundreds of players and coaches and franchises that came up when he talked wootball, too. Neither of them minded. It was just that kind of friendship.

Rebuilding the door driver took her five minutes instead of one, but Trace pretended not to notice, and when she finished and told the door to open, it did. Mostly, anyway, before the bugs broke it again with a soft, crackly hiss over the radio.

“Nice one,” Trace said. They bumped fists and floated into the storage bay.

Jonesy was smiling until she grabbed a storage crate and spun it around to read the label. “Oh, no,” she moaned.

Trace laughed. “Emergency rations!”

“Do we have to bring them back?” Jonesy whined. “Everybody will hate us!”

“They won’t hate us. They’ll thank us if Rook can’t fix the autocooker.”

“They will not!”

“Yeah, I know. But we still need to bring them back.”

Jonesy sighed in frustration and kicked off the crate of horrible emergency rations, sending it flying to the rear of the bay while she drifted back out through the door.

She knew Trace was right. She knew she shouldn’t be frustrated, because at least she was out here, as much a salvager as Trace or Hunter or Rook, and not stuck in the hideout where she was just the fourth-youngest kid in the crew. Until a few months ago, she’d been stuck helping Eva with the little kids during school—mainly Davenport Jr., who was basically still a toddler even though he was six. Eva had always thanked her for helping, and DJ was as sweet as six-year-olds came, but even a bad day on the salvage team made Jonesy feel more helpful than all Eva’s thank-yous put together.

Most of the time, anyway. Finding emergency rations when it could have been anything made it a pretty special bad day.

Behind her, Trace was trying to raise the hideout on the radio. “Jonesy got it open, and it’s rations,” he said. “If somebody could toss the yellow cargo sled in the airlock for us, that’d save us some time. Rook or anybody, acknowledge if you copy.”

Amberius hushed, rushed, and crackled as Trace waited for a response.

Jonesy let herself drift across the corridor, where a cracked window offered a good view of Amberius’s slow-churning march of yellow-gold clouds and string-of-pearl storms. She still liked to stop and watch them sometimes. She liked how pretty and peaceful they looked—and she liked how weird that was, since she also knew every little swirl and vortex was actually a titanic clash of hurricane-force alien chemistry.

“How—out—ind—someth—else?” came Hunter’s voice at last, barely cutting the noise.

Jonesy rolled her eyes and decided not to feel bad about the emergency rations. Rook would say thank-you even if nobody else did, and she’d get a big, sticky DJ-hug tonight no matter what. And if Hunter didn’t like them, he could try sucking on the raw autocooker inserts instead.

She still hoped Rook fixed the autocooker, though.

She was about to leave the window and start helping Trace when she saw something that made her forget Hunter, the rations, and the whole planet of Amberius, too.

“Trace! Trace! A ship! There’s a ship coming!”

Trace rushed to her side, and she pointed it out for him—just a dark speck gliding across Amberius’s vast yellow face, but it was visible without a scope, and in space terms that was practically close enough to touch. They freaked out laughing, high-fived so hard they both went flying away, then grappled back to the window to watch the ship fly in.

Except it didn’t.

Jonesy gave it half a minute to alter course before giving up and switching her suit radio to the emergency band. “Canary Station to any listener,” she cried into Amberius’s static. “We’re in distress—please acknowledge—please—”

Trace tapped urgently on her helmet until she switched back. “No way the suit radios will reach them if we can’t even raise the hideout,” he told her. “We need to get back into range and call Rook.”

“What if they’re gone by then?” Jonesy protested. “Oh! Wait, wait—we’re right by the command deck! We can hail them ourselves!”

“The command deck’s locked!”

“Not if we have this,” Jonesy said, pulling her dad’s Ailon terminal from her backpack.

Her dad’s terminal looked useless at first glance. It was locked, and although the screen showed a messaging client under the password box, it was open to a queue that never got messages. Jonesy carried it anyway, though, except when Rook asked to borrow it, because it still worked as a security badge for a few locked doors around the station.

“We should still call Rook,” Trace insisted. “You know that’s what we’re supposed to do if we see a ship!”

“Rook would just tell us to go to the command deck!” Jonesy pitched her mag-grapple up the corridor and yanked herself after it without waiting. “Would you rather bring back rations or our ticket out of here?”

Trace laughed and followed her. “Well, when you put it like that.”