Page 113 of Shadows of Stardust

“Here,” she says, gesturing to a path leading off the main route through the village, swerving back toward the riverbank.

“Going to toss me in and let the river monsters have me?” I try for a joke, but it falls flat, even if I do see the corner of Savvie’s lip twitch.

She shakes her head. “I… let’s just sit and talk.”

A few dozen meters down the path, another dock juts out into the water. There’s a bench at the end of it, a quiet place to sit and watch the river flow.

Savvie steps onto the dock’s planks, but I hesitate, glancing back the way we came.

“Is Zandrel going to be alright with…” I trail off, realizing I’ve already forgotten the name she called the huge, imposing, emerald-scaled male who interrogated us when we got here.

“Arrik,” she says, and for the first time since I’ve been here, she smiles. “Yeah, he’s mostly bluster.”

I know that look. “And who is Arrik… to you?”

She laughs softly. “It’s part of the story I need to tell you. Come on, sit with me.”

This time, I follow. We both settle onto the bench, and again, I wish I was better able to enjoy this place. The beauty of it, the tranquility. The slow meander of the river and the birdsong above, the lush jungle filled with dense canopy and flowers.

“I’m not sure if I know where to start,” Savvie says softly as soon as we’re settled.

“Let’s start with how the hell you got off Severin,” I say, but my tone still falls just to the left of humor. Too brittle, too much like resentment.

Savvie cuts me a sidelong glance. “On a transport ship.”

“Whose transport ship?”

“Arrik’s.”

“And you, what? Just stuck your thumb out at the port and hitched a ride across half the sector?”

“It wasn’t like that,” she shoots back, then her expression falls, grows guarded. “I… didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t stay there. On Severin.”

Dread growing heavier in my stomach, ears ringing with the story Savvie’s friend told me about the bad male she was mixed up with—the one with the blaster hole in his corpse—I ask the question that needs to be asked.

“What happened?”

For a few long moments, she doesn’t answer me. She looks out over the river, eyes unfocused and far away, like she’s no longer here on Eritin.

In those moments, I hardly recognize the woman sitting beside me. In the tense, weary set of her features, I struggle to find any similarities at all to the girl who slept next to me every night on the Bravo, the tear-stained face that came to the port to see me off for my enlistment, the sister in the photo I’ve stared at for hours and hours.

But maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. She was so young when I left for training, and I only got a few weeks of leave everyother year during my enlistment. Sure, we exchanged messages all the time while I was gone, but that’s not really the same, is it?

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that I barely know her anymore.

“Do you remember Xelan?” Savvie asks, interrupting those thoughts.

The bottom of my stomach twists again. “Yeah, I remember him.”

Savvie huffs a soft, humorless laugh at the venom in my voice. “Well, he and I were… kind of a thing. During your last deployment.”

“Savvie,” I breathe, entirely unable to keep the older-sister admonishment out of my voice. “What the hell were you thinking? He’s such a piece of—”

“You think I don’t know that?”

This is new, too. The sharp resentment. The jagged edges I’ve never heard in my baby sister’s voice.

“And this is my story to tell,” she continues. “So let me tell it.”

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