“No, but that’d be something nice for us to hook up.”

“Yeah, let’s make that a priority. I’ll lock the cockpit from the outside. Keep an eye on things.”

“That’s all I can do,” her mother said.

Molly nudged the Wadi to its favorite spot behind her neck and keyed opened the door. She snuck out, locked the door with her captain’s codes, and then hurried toward the cargo ramp.

The mute oaf stuck his head out Cole’s door and saw her leaving. “Hey,” he said, proving to be not quite as mute as she had thought. He pointed at her, obviously trying to think of something else to say, while Molly jogged down the boarding ramp. She weaved through the stables, around and under the parked ships, and headed toward Pete. Hopefully he could help.

Before she got close enough to ask, however, he called out across the dusty lot, his hands cupped around his mouth: “Scottie and his boys find you okay?”

“What?” Molly asked. “It’s not okay they found me! Did you tell them where I was?”

“Hell, I called right after you checked in. Them boys been looking for your father for some time.”

“He’s not with me!” The Wadi scampered down the back of her shirt with the outburst, sticking its head in one of the baggy pockets on Molly’s cargo shorts.

“That’s right! You told me that didn’t you?” Pete smiled at her and pulled his hand out of his coveralls. He had a toothpick sticking out of his fist, the exposed half dark purple. He put it in his mouth and used his tongue to slide it to the other side.

“I want them off my ship,” Molly told him.

“Well, now, you’ll have to talk to them about that.” Pete leaned to the side and somehow spit a stream of dark juice past the toothpick. A long trail of the stuff hung from his lower lip, thick as molasses. He reached up and swiped it away with his palm, then rubbed it on his coveralls.

Molly looked at the stains covering him and wondered just how much of Pete’s coloration was actual grease. If any.

“I tried to tell them to go,” she complained. “But they wouldn’t listen.”

“Could be they think it’s their ship,” Pete said flatly.

“What? Their ship? That was my father’s ship and now it’s mine!” Molly looked down at the Wadi as it tried to curl itself into her pocket. Its tail swished in the air, then disappeared.

“Well, now.” Pete spit again, dribbling it right down the front of his coveralls. The maneuver seemed to save him a step or two. “What I heard was your daddy owes Scottie some money. You never know with interest compoundin’—they might have a claim on her.” He nodded toward Parsona. “Besides, why’d your daddy give such a fine ship away? How old are you?”

“Where’s the sheriff’s office?” Molly asked, ignoring the questions and cursing herself for allowing a tangle of lies to develop.

“Directly on Main,” Pete drawled.

Molly turned and headed off in the direction of town.

“But he’s gonna tell you just what I said,” Pete hollered after her.

ѻѻѻѻ

Molly followed the busiest road into town. She preferred the thick plumes of dust from the traffic and the catcalls from the vehicles’ occupants to the unknown of quiet streets. Especially with so much dangerous politicking in the air.

Most of the cars on Lok were large-tired buggies suitable for travelling between towns with no interconnecting roads. They passed by in one of two speeds: slow—the people trying to sneak away from the trouble they’d just caused; and fast—the ones about to effect their own.

Ignoring offers for rides and things less-pleasant, Molly kicked at rocks along the shoulder and fumed over the idea of those brigands being on her ship and likely going through her things. The Wadi rode along across the back of her neck, its tiny claws gripping her shirt and a little flesh, its head lolling with her gait. Grumbling to herself, Molly walked past rows and rows of politicians smiling down from their posters and banners, all of them promising her something for just a few drops of blood.

She stopped at the outdoor counter of the first cantina she came to and bought water for herself and the Wadi. She chose her left pinky for the vote, even though it was swollen to the point of uselessness. Her new strategy was to sacrifice one digit completely so she could heal up the rest.

After paying, her Wadi curled across her forearm, leaning sideways with its back against her chest. Molly dripped water into its mouth, then took some for herself. Walking like that caused her to flash back to planet Drenard and that hot, arid, and dusty hike they’d taken together. The comparison of that horror-filled day to her current annoyance lifted her spirits somewhat. As long as she didn’t look up at the fleet in orbit, she could pretend things weren’t quite as bad as they could be.

Another buggy roared past, kicking a plume of chalk into the air. Molly could hear the powdery dirt crunching between her teeth, could feel it turning into a film of mud in her mouth. She took another gulp of water and tried to fight off the panicked sensation she sometimes felt in crowds—the need to run and escape from the noise and commotion, seeking the vacuum of space.

As she made her way into the center of town, her complete dearth of vivid memories of the place struck her for the first time. She seemed to remember visiting Bekkie with her father several times, but they were just memories of memories of memories, built up over a longer lifetime of forgetting. The only building she recognized was the tall church, its several spires sticking out over town. And even its familiarity was likely no more than a recollection from an old photograph, or a postcard that she’d seen more recently.

The noisy traffic gradually ground down to an even noisier standstill around the central square. Buggies with trailers unloaded goods, while Sisyphean storekeepers swept dirt back into the streets, and pedestrians milled about through the gridlock amid a chorus of bleating horns. The town had a familiar odor and sound, a boisterousness that touched her nostalgia, but it also seemed bigger and more crowded than it had before.

Perhaps it was the political rallies, which Molly could hear in several directions. They mostly consisted of large groups of people chanting names or terse phrases that somehow captured an entire (and mostly vapid) platform. Or maybe the larger crowds had something to do with the Bern fleet. Perhaps rural Lokians had come to Bekkie in hopes of an affordable ticket off-planet, only to find the strange ships overhead weren’t allowing anything of the sort.

Then again, not that many people in the crowd seemed to be looking up, at least not beyond the posters of smiling faces, all promising something. While Molly stressed about her family and friends and what seemed to be a looming disaster of galactic proportions, everyone else was worried about whether or not their candidate would be in power when it all came crashing down. What little politics she’d followed on Earth—a planet that never felt enough like home to get invested—seemed magnified and uglier on Lok. In yet one more way, the planet she had been born on felt incredibly foreign to her.

One thing she could remember about Bekkie, and something that hadn’t changed, was the paucity of non-Humans in Lok’s capital. After living on Earth with all its diversity for so many years—and having spent the last two weeks in the poorer countryside—Molly felt abnormally surrounded by her own kind. Oddly enough, it made her feel more conspicuous. She felt like the only alien in town, surrounded by nothing but Terrans, and therefore unable to blend in.

The sensation brought back a clear childhood memory of Bekkie, an emotion, really. As a kid, she’d only known a handful of people, all of them Humans, their faces blurred by time. She could remember a trip into town with her father once, how she’d expected to see so many new races, and how disappointed she’d been to see so few.

She wondered if that’s where her fascination with aliens came from. The flight out to Palan had been so exciting—that long queue of diversity strung out just for her like a parade of exoticness. But did that make her a xenocist in a way? Pining for some exhibitionistic display of otherworldliness? Celebrating a thing just because it was different?

In the shops she passed, she did see a few Pherons and Callites working, usually with a smock on and some cleaning or serving prop in their hands. Both of their home planets were just a jump away from Lok, providing a nice source of cheap labor. The more Molly looked for them, the more she saw—but she really had to seek them out. They blended too well with their environment, partly because of their camouflaging uniforms, and partly because they seemed so less kinetic, less boisterous, than their Terran counterparts. They seemed perfectly content—or trained, perhaps—to fade into the layered background to which they’d been relegated.

A loud crunching sound interrupted her scanning of the crowd; Molly looked down to find the Wadi eating the lip of the water bottle, the vessel sucked completely dry.

“No.” She pulled the plastic out of the Wadi’s mouth and moved the animal to her shoulders; she waved down an older couple passing by.

“Do you know where the sheriff’s office is?” she asked them.

“Almost there,” the gentleman said, eyeing the Wadi with some curiosity. “Everything okay?”

“Do what?” Molly asked. The man’s genuine concern had thrown her off guard. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”

“Just keep going and it’ll be on your right,” his wife said.

“Thanks. Both of you.”

The pleasant exchange felt odd after a few days of bad run-ins, mostly with shopkeepers. It reminded her that not everyone in the galaxy was evil scum out to kill her, take her blood, or destroy the universe. She wiggled her shoulders, trying to work some of the tension out of her body. She knew it wasn’t good to let other people’s rudeness dictate how she felt. She kept that in mind as she weaved through the crowd for another block. Finally, she spotted a building ahead with bars across the windows and recognized the painted silver star hanging over the door. Molly kicked her flightboots against the jamb, dislodging the chunks of caked dirt deep in the treads. She pushed her way inside.

The door hinged back with a creak, and bells jangled overhead. The office inside looked like a huge shoebox hewn out of rough lumber. Two shafts of dust highlighted the place, the particulate matter so dense in the morning sunlight that Molly considered ducking under them. In the back sat a table, pressed up against two of the shut cells. A prisoner in each cell sat close to the bars, their hands poking through and holding fans of cards. A young man sat at the table outside the cells. He wore a vest over a buttoned-up shirt, and a gun hung from his belt. Molly nodded to the three figures as she closed the door, setting off another racket from the bells.

Someone cleared their throat to Molly’s side. She turned and squinted through one of the shafts of dust to find a man appraising her over a folded newspaper. He sat behind a desk, leaning way back in his chair, his old herder boots propped up on a smattering of loose papers. When he pushed his hat back with a solitary finger, Molly felt like looking around for the holo cameras. The entire scene was so cliché, it had moved from comical, directly to spooky.

“No pets,” the man said. He shaped his hand like a gun and aimed it at the Wadi.

“She’s trained,” Molly said. “She won’t be a problem.”

“Better not.” His thumb decocked, and his finger came up a few inches with the imaginary recoil. He blew across the tip, smiled, and then holstered it away. “What can I do for you?”

Molly approached the desk, fighting the urge to swim through the shaft of lit dust with her hands. She glanced at the group of men playing cards, their faces slowly turning to follow her movement across the room. She noticed the walls were papered with election posters, rather than wanted posters. The only giveaway was the smiles; otherwise, even the actors would probably have been the same.

“I, um, have a problem with some men, Sheriff . . .” she bent forward and tried to read the name on his star.

“Browne,” he said for her, looking down at the star as if he needed to be reminded. “And I ain’t much help on marital disputes. Unless you need a lesson on starting a few.”

One of the card players chuckled at this, and the Sheriff shot him a look, as if prisoners could have fun, but not at his expense.

“No, it’s nothing like that. I just pulled in today, and some people claiming to be friends with my father—”

“Scottie?” Sheriff Browne interrupted. “You come in on Parsona?”

Molly swallowed. “That’s right. And I—”

“Can’t help you,” the Sheriff said. His newspaper flapped back up in front of his face, and his hat sank down a few inches.

“Can’t, or—”

“No pets, ma’am. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“But I—”

“No pets!”

The Wadi’s head recoiled from the outburst. Molly reached up and rubbed its back, trying to soothe it. “Could you at least tell me where I might find someone?” she asked. “I’m looking for . . .”

“Ain’t no tourguide, neither.”

“. . . a woman, a Callite that goes by the name of Cat.”

The newspaper came down, just low enough to expose Browne’s eyes.

“Cripple Cat?” he asked.

Molly looked to the card players. The other lawman gave her a huge smile. She turned back at Sheriff Browne. “Uh, I guess. I just know her as Cat. Or Catherine. Do you know where I can find her?”

The Sheriff pulled his feet off the desk and shot forward as his boots fell heavily. Molly took a quick step back.