Page 19 of Shadows of Stardust

But I’ve got to play this smart. Wait for my one best chance. I can’t make any rash decisions now, when I’m so close, even if I’ve got a goddamn warrior of a guard breathing down my neck.

I’ve studied and planned, learned the layout of the planet and the fastest route to the small settlement some fifty kilometers from here which houses Eritin’s only full-timepopulation. If Savvie’s anywhere on this planet, that’s where she’ll be.

In through my nose, out through my mouth.

Once, twice, again.

Quell the panic, find my center, try not to think about all the ways this could go wrong.

Though I’ve been mentally framing this as my nextmissionfor months, I can’t keep up the pretense. Not now. It’s been my way to keep some mental distance, to stop myself from falling into the spiraling trap of panic and dread that’s never far from the corners of my mind.

Breathe. I need to breathe.

It’s something one of the Sol Alliance shrinks tried to teach me how to do during the handful of appointments I had with her during my recovery.

She was nice, but always in a hurry, overseeing dozens upon dozens of patients in the crowded field hospital on the perpetually muggy jungle world it had been stationed on.

It’s not her fault I left there so broken, even though the doctors deemed me healed.

It’s not her fault that the worst thing I’d ever been through was happening to me right on the tail of the second-worst. There wasn’t time to examine the way I felt about my scars or about being discharged from the only life I’d known since turning eighteen and enlisting.

The only thing that mattered was finding Savvie.

In. Out. In. Out.

I’ve only made a little piss-poor progress in calming myself down when a cheerful metallic chime jolts me right back to the present.

Standing on shaky legs, I stumble back out into the main room. The small vidcomm screen mounted to the wall next tothe front door blinks ominous green. I touch it, and a message pops up.

I read it once. Then again. And again.

Each time I do, my throat gets tighter and tighter.

I’m going on a date tomorrow.

6

Zandrel

Roslyn is already off the beach when I clock in for my afternoon shift.

I kept tabs on her all morning through the holoprojector in my watch. She was holed up in her bungalow while her producer and her Volbherran friend darted in and out, getting her ready for her big date.

There are no camera or audio feeds in the bungalows themselves—some uproar and a cast strike addressed those privacy concerns a couple seasons back—but production still gets creative with how they position cameras to film through windows and near doors to capture contestants coming and going. Sensors on the doors and windows also trip with motion, and so far there’s been nothing.

No suspicious activity from her accommodation. No attempts to escape or otherwise break the rules.

At least, not yet.

Beyond that, she’s been at sea all afternoon with the Vas-Greshiran—Rhevar, I keep reminding myself, the name I looked up on the cast roster this morning—out on a hover designed specifically for leisurely travel over Eritin’s tranquil ocean.

Basking in the sun, I’m sure. Getting the sort of sparkling, dreamy footage Mate Match’s audience loves to live vicariously through.

She’s not likely to get herself into much trouble out in the middle of the ocean with a small army of hovers capturing every moment of her interaction with the Vas-Greshiran, so I spend the time pretending to do my job while conducting research on my comms band. I queue up a few different feeds on the holo and flip through article after article about the human species.

For having such a new and relatively tiny cosmic footprint, there’s a surprising amount of information about them available on the universal comms databases.

Much of it comes as no surprise, or merely confirmation of what I’ve already known or suspected.

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