“Just so you know, the ’berks are looking for you right now. They found us once and that’s when you used the time travel drive on the ship that you don’t know exists.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you break the flight stick off and stamp on the accelerator, the ship will fling you through time.”
I frown down at her, and then at the controls, and then back at her. This human knows my ship better than I know it. Fascinating.
“In the previous times,” I ask her. “Did we mate?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Nice.”
“Sometimes,” she says with a little grin over her shoulder, which makes me think she and I have been through many carnal incidents of one kind or another.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” I tell her. “I’ll need you to tell me as much as you can remember.”
“I’m telling you that your enemies are coming after you, and that they can come through time and space to get you.”
“They may be taking advantage of this ship’s time shifting drive,” I consider. “It might be prudent to swap this ship for a different vessel.”
“Won’t work. You changed the ship for a space shark and that did nothing. We ended up being caught even when we hid out on a refugee moon with billions of other aliens for months.”
“Really? How did that happen?”
“Uh.”
She looks suddenly shifty.
“Let me clarify the question. What did you do?”
“Why are you assuming I did something wrong?”
* * *
Ava
Zed quirks a brow at me. He doesn’t even bother to answer the question. He lets his handsome, green fearsome face tell me he knows damn well it would have been all my fault.
He only just met me, doesn’t remember a thing about me, and already knows me way too fucking well.
“Okay, I thought we were wasting our time. I didn’t know, then, that the monster would consume us and send us back in time again. I thought that we should do what our original plan was.”
“Which was…”
“To use the knowledge we had of the past to make money in stock markets and stuff.”
“Okay, well, that seems sensible.”
“It was, until I called all the authorities down on us and the time-void worm manifested and ate the whole of loser moon.”
He sighs. “You’re a handful, aren’t you.”
He doesn’t know the half of it, and I’m not telling him.
“Alright,” he says. “This time, we do things differently. I won’t try to sell you. I won’t use the time drive. And you won’t get us arrested.”
“We could sit here invisible on this planet and wait for it all to blow over?”
“We could, but I think it would be best to put some cloaked and subtle distance between us and our original origin. I’m going to take us somewhere we can lie low. You can go get cleaned up. I’m assuming you know where the bathroom is.”
* * *
This plan has been attempted before, but maybe we just didn’t try it right. I’m just glad to be back in his company. I blinked back into existence in the last seconds before I crashed into the troll planet, with no fucking idea what was happening. From there it was chaos, panic, and finally memory when Zed came to rustle my bushes. I feel safe with him, though arguably I have never been in as much existential peril as I am with him.
I shower and dress myself in some of the clothes left behind from the previous owners. A green dress with yellow flowers feels cheerful and hopeful. I need both of those things now.
“Where are we going?” I ask the question as I enter the cockpit, more respectfully and carefully than I usually would. This version of Zed is not to be fucked with.
“The quietest place I know, and the least likely place for anybody to look for me. Somewhere we can stay for a very long time without wanting for entertainment.”
“Oh cool, so like, a bar? Because that loser moon was very depressing and I don’t think…”
“You’re going to have to practice being quiet,” Zed says, interrupting me mid-sentence.
Offensive.
Rude.
Unacceptable.
I stop talking, but only because he has annoyed me. Stupid male. At this stage of proceedings, my commentary is probably the difference between him making it and him not. He’d better realize that I know a lot of things he doesn’t, or this is going to end badly.
* * *
“Here we are.”
We land in what I can only describe as a parking lot, because that is what it is. In front of us is a brick wall. Now I have to remember that what I am seeing might not be what is actually there. It could be too strange for my consciousness to encounter without the babel chip inserting a more comfortable reality for me to deal with.
“Where is it?”
Zed is sorting through a drawer in the ship. It contains all sorts of things, basically a junk drawer. There are rubber bands, batteries from several different civilizations, none of which probably hold a charge anymore. But that’s not what he’s looking for. Some ribbon from a long-forgotten present that was too nice to throw out coils its way out onto the floor, along with a paperclip stuck to a fridge magnet.