Page 20 of Last Chance to Save the World

“I got a message from the Moon,” Mom says.

Ididn’t send a message to her from the station whileGlorywas waiting for landing sequences and clearance codes.

Riansent a message. Not to her, obviously.

But a message she intercepted or was forwarded. Perhaps from our mutual contact, Phoebe, the double agent on Rian’s team who’s only our friend as long as we share a goal. More likely, this is one of Mom’s contacts, someone loyal to her.

She has alotof friends.

Few people know the full extent of my mother’s network. Obscurity helps.

I feel a pang of sympathy for Rian when he inevitably figures all this out. He’s had his targets locked on to me so intensely that he didn’t even realize there was a bigger fish in my shadow. All those times he’s pressed me for who I worked for. It’s true; I take the jobs that come. But since Rian’s been watching me, my work has mostly come from one source.

All along, my client was my mother.

All along, my mother was Jane Irwin.

My mother was working secretly to facilitate change on Earth before my father even got sick. She used an older family name for a small level of anonymity, not knowing how quickly it would latch on. It started as an underground network to redistribute medicine to people who, like Papa, got sick and couldn’t afford treatment. But options were limited, and there was no black market for the meds thatreallyworked. Papa’s death from climate sickness—a death that could have been wholly prevented, had people like Fetor not been so adamant about seeing profits from the treatments and vaccines—broke something inside of both of us.

For me, every fuck I ever had to give was drained from my body.

But Mom couldn’t save Papa. So, she decided to save Earth instead.

I know it disappoints her, the way I won’t join her rebellion, the way I demand payment even when I work for her. But I also know that she, more than any other human in the galaxy, understands why I am the way I am.

And she loves me anyway.

Which means, even when I don’t want to get involved, for her, I will.

For her, I’ll save the world.

I’ll just also make sure I get paid—with bonuses—along the way.

“It’s almost time for bed,” Mom says. She leans in for a hug, and when her lips are centimeters from my ear, she whispers, “He’s going to betray you.”

I hold her tight. It really has been too long.

“I know,” I whisper back.

I’ve known since he came back with blue puff cubes in one hand and a guilty look all over his face. Not the exacts of the message he sent, of course, but I knew he had sent a message.

I had told him it was a risk for me to let him out of my sight on the station.

I lied, obviously.

Because he had never been out of my sight.

And the risk? It was never mine.

Fucking hell,I think, my arms still wrapped around my mother’s slender shoulders, thinner than the last time we saw each other in person.

I let him go because I wanted to see if, maybe, he wouldn’t do the thing he did.

I wanted to see if, given the opportunity, he wouldn’t betray me.

But he did.

“I’m working on something,” Mom says. “For you.”

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