Page 18 of Shadows of Stardust

Two heads of brown hair, two sets of green eyes. But while my face is round, cheeks full, the other is long and narrow, always just a little bit sad-looking, even with her smile.

Savannah.

My little sister. My best friend. The other half of my soul.

We’re just six and four in the photo, taken during the last month of our journey on the Bravo, the ship that carried us off Earth and to our new life on Severin.

I’m not sure who took it. Mom, probably, or maybe one of the other passengers, but it’s the last photo I have of me and Savvie.

There wasn’t a great argument to be made for extravagances like cameras when we barely had enough to eat on the hot, miserable desert world we were sent to after we left Earth, so this is all I have.

And it’s all I might ever have if I don’t find her.

It’s why I’m here.She’swhy I’m here.

Somewhere, hidden away on this beautiful planet, I’m going to find my sister.

I close my eyes for a few moments, replaying all the twisted, tangled events that brought me here.

My seven years of service with the Sol Alliance’s military. The blaze of an attack on some outpost moon deep in the Merixir System. A month of messages gone unanswered while I recovered.

After that, coming home to Severin to find the apartment I used to share with mom and Savvie empty. Mom had fucked off a few years earlier with some guy she met at Severin’s rundown spaceport, but Savvie had stayed.

She was supposed to be there.

Safe. Taking care of herself. Studying via a remote vidcomm institution to give her some skills she might leverage to get off-world. Using the money I made enlisted with the Sol Alliance to keep a roof over her head and food on the table.

She was supposed to be there.

But when I pushed the door open, shoulder screaming with my barely healed injury, the place was abandoned.

Everything else was still there. The furniture. Her clothes. Moldering food in the cupboards.

But Savvie was gone.

I spent my first weeks back on Severin searching everywhere for her, knocking on doors and looking up anyone she’d ever mentioned being friendly with. Dozens of dead ends led me to a friend of hers with nervous eyes and a smoke-raspy voice, who told me Savvie had gotten herself caught up in some bad shit. A bad male with ties to even worse company, mixed up in the kind of criminal underbelly that thrives in a hellhole like Severin.

Something had happened, something even the friend wouldn’t speak plainly about. After a few more weeks in taverns and alleys around the port, handing over credits I could barely afford to part with to get people to talk, I had as good of an answer as I was going to.

The male Savvie was tangled up with had been found dead a few weeks before I got back to Severin, a blaster shot directly to the center of his chest.

And Savvie had disappeared.

It might have swallowed me whole, the desperation of learning those horrible truths, if it weren’t for one more story. Told to me on a small landing strip just outside Severin’s capital city of Thervor, by a trader who’d seen a human woman climbing aboard a ship bound for Eritin II—a crime in and of itself given that no one but the small population who already lives here and the cast and crew of Mate Match are legally allowed on-world—it was the chance I needed.

It didn’t take a whole lot of thinking to figure out my next steps.

Apply for the show. Come to Eritin II. Break out of this place and find my sister.

A chance. Maybe my only chance.

I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, eyes locked on that picture, on Savvie.

I’ll find her.

Of course I’ll find her, and then all of this will have been worth it.

It’s been six excruciating months since getting the lead on where she might be and making my plan, and every single second that passes while I’m here and not actively searching for her digs itself into my gut like a knife.

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