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“Oh, so it’s a touch kind of thing.”
“I suppose so. I do not often touch others. They find contact with me unsettling.”
“Really? How unusual.” She sat back and sipped her tea. “I must be a bit of a freak, or you are holding your aura back.”
He paused. “I am holding it back as much as I normally do on the ship.”
“Do you ever let it loose?”
He tilted his head again. “When I am activating a new world that the Ap’lo send through, I let it loose.”
“Whoa. What?”
His eyes crinkled. “This is a private conversation.”
“Ah. Right.”
“What else do you want to see?”
She swallowed. “The stars? I haven’t actually seen stars since before the asteroid hit.”
His eyes widened, and he said, “Really?”
“Really. I was so hopeful that things would work out and I could travel the stars with family and see all the wonders, and I saw four walls and a chair with a bed that came out of the wall and a food dispenser that spit out water and ration cubes.”
“Finish your water and tea, and we will go see the stars.” Devran nodded.
Aya looked at him, and he was serious, so she started chugging. Devran chuckled when she finished and shot to her feet. “Now?”
He got up and offered his hand to her. She touched his wrist, and they walked away while she wiped her lips and chin.
“We have fabric for that.”
“I know, but I was in a hurry.”
He chuckled again, and they made their way out of the commissary and into the hall. Time to see the stars.
Chapter Four
Aya was excited. One of the things that she thought was so natural when you were off world wasn’t. Devran was offering to show her the stars, and she was going to do it before he changed his mind.
She tried not to haul him away, mostly because she didn’t know where she was going.
He chuckled. “You seem eager.”
“This is the one thing that I wanted from the moment our skies clouded over and the stars disappeared.”
His features sobered as they walked to a lift tucked into a corner of the hallway. They stood together, facing the back was what they were doing as they rose high in the ship.
He tapped something on his free wrist, and he smiled. When they suddenly rose to face a clear door, she found herself facing a dome being exposed by a retracting cover. In the distance, she saw colours she couldn’t name. Devran walked with her to the clear dome, and he stood beside her as she looked at space for the first time.
“It is full of so many things.” She could see worlds spinning, asteroids, meteors moving.
“It is. Do you want to know the direction of your home world?”
“Uh, yes?”
He chuckled, put his arm around her, and pointed directly above them. “It is that way. In my ship, it is about two months’ travel without slipping through dimensional spaces. In a standard vessel, about six months.”
