“Are you sure she’s not there? Like, really sure?”

I could almost picture Jenna’s annoyed face as her words rang through Mikayes’ handheld device. “She’s not here, hasn’t been, and won’t be either! Now, stop asking useless questions and hurry up. The first ships are already setting off!” Where the vast majority with access to it opted to use their System for communications, Mikayes was the rare exception that didn’t.

Now, it allowed him to hold the phone at an arm’s reach away, realize that the rest of us could overhear their conversation, and sheepishly flip it shut.

“It’s not like I’m afraid of my fiancé or anything,” he tried to awkwardly explain. “It’s just that I, I don’t want anything to distract us from our work. We’re on a tight schedule and, well…”

Where our young employer’s voice trailed off, Kassem’s chuckled words picked up. “And you absolutely didn’t forsake a perfectly comfy position at your brother’s company to get away from her either, right? You simply enjoy being out here on the hot and sweaty frontier, hauling junk.”

The man sat on one of the crates we’d managed to secure over these past hours, fanning himself with his hat. The day was, indeed, scorching, and we’d spent all morning transporting whatever supplies we’d found to our ship.

Or rather, me, Georgie, and Colors had. Mikayes had spent the time bothering Jenna to make sure she (his fiancé) hadn’t showed up, and Kassem had assigned himself as our self-proclaimed cheerleader. “Use your legs young’uns,” and, “We don’t want any back injuries before the journey has even started,” remained his catchphrases as he kept giving us directions we didn’t need.

Even the box I was now holding had been handed to me by the man, before being carefully pointed towards the hover-cart we’d rented.

The vehicle had proved a necessity.

Whenever we were moving around, it would float above the dense crowd, and when it was full, it could be automatically sent off to our ship to be unloaded.

We were currently on our fifth and final load, and the markets were in full swing around us.

“Is this ‘fiancé’ someone I should be worried about?” I asked Colors as I slid my box onto the cart.

The girl had fervently insisted that she’d be the one to pull it around as soon as we’d rented it, and all morning, she’d been like an eager toddler running around with her oversized helium balloon.

At least it made her easy to find in the dense crowd, and she’d proved more than capable of keeping away any quick fingers.

The auction warehouses were rife with them, harassing us alongside shameless hagglers that tried to buy our things for half the price we’d paid for them. Some even tried to yank the things straight from your hands, yelling – or sometimes gurgling – out the price they were willing to pay for it.

Not that the Slobber Knuckles seemed to particularly care what people said or did, and anyone who carelessly approached our cart while Colors was around would end up staggering away shortly after, wearing a poignantly lost expression on their faces.

I’d seen a few of them mindlessly stumble into the crowd shortly after, fall over, only to end up snoring on their drooling faces as people trampled over them.

I wasn’t sure what she did to them, and it seemed best not to ask.

Now, the girl paused in tapping in the cart’s coordinates — it was nearly full again — to throw me a curious glance. “Are you the worrying type?” she asked.

“Life has taught me to be cautious,” I answered, wiping some sweat from my brow.

Perhaps I’d always known that Mikayes wasn’t some normal, up-and-coming merchant. He was too young for the funds he possessed. Even if everything we did was on a budget, participating in one of these Expansions wasn’t a cheap venture — especially not if you had your own stake on a virgin planet.

But Mikayes had never questioned me about my past. So, for these past months, I’d tried not to dig around too much out of courtesy. Then, yesterday, two names had been dropped that I couldn’t ignore. The first one was the Jark twins, eventual founders of the Jark Corporation and major stakeholders in the Velanovski enterprise. The other was Sin’vitri.

While it could merely belong to some local, influential banker, on the other end of things, well — my eyes glanced up through a rusted hole in the warehouse ceiling, showing the massive gate in orbit along with a Moon-eater slowly circling it — there were some far more dangerous people.

“Then feel free to be worried,” Colors said, nodding along with my wisdom. “No one will mind if you are. Except maybe Mikayes. He likes keeping those things all to himself.”

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“His fiancé?”

“Worry,” Kassem clarified, having followed behind me. His seat had just been stolen by Georgie – the furred man busy rounding up the last of our boxes before heading our way as well. “But worry is a valuable commodity in our line of work. When you put yourself out as brains, beauty, and muscle for hire, it only stands to reason to be cautious with who you work for. Or work with, for that matter…”

His dark eyes looked me over, the smile never slipping from his lips. “But you certainly seem capable, kid. It was actually one of the Georgie’s boxes I accidentally handed you earlier, but you carried it with such ease…”

“Oh, you mean the one you accidentally shoved straight into my only bruised ribs?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “You did it with such accuracy I almost thought you knew where I’d gotten injured and was just some spiteful old man trying to haze me.”

Kassem laughed. “If I knew, that really would’ve been spiteful, wouldn’t it? Nearly as spiteful as someone trying to play at being an innocent kid, prodding around with dangerous questions.”

“Oh, speaking of dangerous,” Colors lit up, having only picked up on that single word in our conversation. “Look at this, I found it on a sale earlier, and—”

Mine and Kassem’s reactions were near simultaneous.

Where I merely froze in place, however, letting my UI do the heavy lifting as she pulled out a tubular, archaic looking weapon from the cart, Kassem swiftly dodged out of shot, snatching the electron accelerator from her hands.

“Hey! That’s my extraterrestrial weapon,” she loudly protested, trying to get it back to little avail.

“If I let you keep this thing, I'm the one who’ll have to worry about extra-testicular cancer,” Kassem yelled. “The box, where the fuck is the insulator box you got this thing in?”

During their heated argument, neither noticed how I’d taken several steps back, letting those last few moments replay on my interface – my heart jackhammering within my chest.

If there’d been any of last night’s uncertainty left, it was now thoroughly erased. As much by my own effort as anyone else’s. Kassem himself had, more or less, confirmed that he was the man from the fighting pit. Throughout the day, he'd been anything but shy about his ‘scram, kid, you're in way over your head’ attitude.

He’d even been smug about the fact that he ‘knew’ what I was up to. The only problem was that he really didn’t.

It’d all started with the apple he’d tossed me at breakfast, coming my way at an impossible angle yet which I’d effortlessly caught without thinking.

He’d smirked then. “For someone so scrawny, you have good reflexes, kid. Ever thought about making it as a fighter? I’m sure you’d make quite the ruckus if you ever entered one of the pits around here…”

He’d probably intended to make me sweat, thinking he held one over me when, in reality, the playing field was dead even. Mostly, at least, if not for the fact that he’d seen me fight.

I, on the other hand, knew next to nothing about the man and his capabilities. All I’d seen was a ring, belonging to a group that I’d spent decades hunting yet never really understood. More so, there were four of them and only one of me, and each and every attempted scan my UI had made kept coming back empty.

The Slobber Knuckles was an enigma, and whatever their end plan was – whatever their connection to the Hand of Freedom was – I had no clue. All I knew was that the more I learned, the deeper my sense of unease grew.

The crew knew Mikayes better than I did. They knew his fiancé, and while I was the one who’d claimed it, they knew things about that Artifact which I didn’t.

I was treading deep water just being in their presence, but rather than abandoning five months of work and planning, I instead decided to pull Kassem out there with me.

“How so? Are you looking for some easy gamble while you kick it back with the big cigar?” The man had nearly choked on his own apple just then.

After that, Kassem knew that I knew, and our game of cat and mouse had officially begun.

“It’s dangerous out here on the rim, operating without a crew,” he’d said as we made our way towards the auctioning houses. “Especially as a kid. You never know which alley will spell your end, or which bullet will end up in your back…”

“It really is, but for some reason, I rarely feel alone out here,” I’d responded, letting my gaze wander towards a sky where my comrades of old hovered in orbit.

The Astral Fleet wouldn’t care if I disappeared in this life, but Kassem didn’t need to know that.

“Don’t get your hopes up, kid. Those men don’t care for insects like us.”

“True.” I’d laughed. “They really wouldn’t care about an insect like you.”

My game was simple. Where I was weak, I needed him to think I was strong, and where I was strong, I needed to seem weak. Rather than Kassem’s hard-ball approach of subtle threats, I preferred to remain soft.

As such, I’d simply slip up next to Colors, ask her an innocent question, “So, what were you guys doing yesterday?” and watch her squirm.

Between Acting, Lie Detection, and People Reading, every faint tell the girl had turned into blinking signals, and in every question she avoided, I found ten answers of my own.

This crew knew more about Mikayes than they let on, and whatever plans they had for him and this venture, I clearly wasn’t part of it. It’d been no coincidence that Kassem was at that pit. They’d been watching me ever since I set foot on this planet.

They’d wanted to test me, perhaps even get rid of me, and me willingly chasing after a drugged-up murderer had only made things easier for them. At least until my stupidity made them overconfident, thinking that they knew me. They really didn’t, but equally, I didn’t know squat about them.

With Kassem and Colors still arguing about the electron accelerator, I replayed that final scene one last time, leaving my earlier unease to turn into a beating drum.

I finally knew where it was coming from.

The questions Kassem had asked me throughout the day, the way he’d probed me, were all too familiar. And now, in that slowed-down replay, I relived the millisecond it took Kassem to recognize the scavenged military tech Colors had pulled out.

Even high-end arms dealers and smugglers wouldn’t have been as quick. Those were the eyes of a man who’d seen the radioactive weapon used in the past, and the way he’d swiftly stepped to the side to disarm the girl was no different from how I would’ve done it myself.

It was the way the Astral Fleet drilled their high-ranking officers to do it.

Either Kider Mill wasn’t the only deserter on this planet, or this rebel hole ran far deeper than I’d ever imagined.