Unacceptable.

Kinfild wouldn’t leave without them. Jace wouldn’t let him. He sprinted down the hill as fast as he could, and Lessa followed close behind.

The starship’s hull rattled, and the machinery tacked onto the outside shuddered. The vessel lifted up off the field. Air thrummed, and a wake of wind blasted the grass flat beneath it. The tail fin vibrated, and the wire rigging strained to hold it upright.

When Jace reached the bottom of the hill, the starship’s landing struts tucked up into the vessel’s body with a mechanical whir. He ran as fast as he could, leaning into the gale. Ash soured every breath he took.

The starship kept rising. When Jace reached it, the bottom of the hull was just above his head. He leapt and clutched onto a rusty pipe. Lessa jumped right after him, and she gripped onto a panel on the ship’s bottom.

“We need to get inside!” Lessa yelled over the rushing wind and roaring thrusters.

Every second, the ship climbed higher. The engines roared louder, vibrating Jace’s bones. A wisp of smoke and ash blew down from the smokestack, choking him with its acrid stench. He coughed, but kept his grip tight. The ground was now five—no, six—meters below. His legs swayed, and his stomach dropped.

They had to get inside the starship before the air thinned out too much. Looking down at Lessa, he yelled, “How do we get in?”

“Most starships have an airlock hatch on top! We need to get up there!”

The edge of the hull sloped outwards, but there were enough handholds. He clutched onto a clump of copper wires and pulled himself up—until a surge of electricity sparked through it. He pulled his hand away just in time, but the flashing arc of electricity left blue and black stains in his vision.

Avoid the copper. Got it.

He climbed from grates to tubes to taped-on equipment. He took a gamble and jumped to a set of pipes, then pulled himself over the rounded upper edge of the hull. Lessa scrambled up soon after. They both gripped onto a length of rigging—thin metal cords that helped support the tail fin—to keep themselves standing.

Jace spared a look down. They soared as high as a bird now. He’d never been so high before. He’d never even flown in an airplane. His stomach rose up to his neck, and he pressed his eyes shut for a second, setting the feelings aside.

Lessa looked around, her mouth gaping. “Up here…it’s amazing!”

“Lessa!” Jace yelled. “The air’s not getting any thicker!”

There had to be a hatch somewhere. Machinery and tubes clung to the top of the starship’s hull—greebles. Steam shot out of a vent, and sparks leapt from a coil of wires. In front of the smokestack was a circular hatch. “There!” he yelled.

He dropped to his stomach and crawled alongside a thick tube. His foot pressed against a slightly-raised dish, and when he pushed against it, it snapped. A puff of golden sparks and rust followed.

Not good. This ship was a hunk of garbage; a death trap.

He inserted the tips of his boots into a sturdy grate—not the finicky, flimsy equipment—and pushed himself forward.

When he reached the hatch, he could barely breathe. Lessa’s face was pale as well, and the flame at the tip of her tail guttered.

With a grunt of exertion, Jace pushed a lever in the center of the hatch. The metal door flung upwards, nearly smashing him in the chin. Beneath it was a tube and ladder. He hauled himself into it, and Lessa followed seconds later.

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Together, they pulled the hatch shut. The chamber was cramped and unlit. If it wasn’t for Lessa’s tail, he wouldn’t have been able to see. Air rushed in through vents, replacing the thin upper atmosphere with thick, breathable air.

Then the floor opened up. It slid out from underneath them and dropped them down inside the engine room. Jace landed in a crouch on the perforated floor.

Everything was orange. A fire as bright as the sun burned behind them, puffing clouds of ash up into the smokestack. Above it, pistons pumped, gears spun, and axles whirred. Smoke clouded the air and everything smelled like grease.

The small kyborg—Aur-Six—perched between a cart of starcoals and the boiler. He held a shovel in his machine arms. The moment he saw Jace and Lessa, though, he stopped shovelling the coals into the fire and spun on his tracks to face them.

Jace held out his hands. “Uh…hey there, little guy.”

Lessa, however, let out a gasp. “A worker kyborg! Finally! I’ve always wanted to see one, and—”

Aur-Six nattered angrily in his robotic language.

“Woah, woah,” Jace backed away. The door to the main room of the starship was just behind him. He pulled a switch on the wall, and it hissed open sideways.

Aur-Six rushed towards them with his shovel, but before he could reach them, Jace and Lessa jumped out of the engine room. The door slammed shut behind them, but the kyborg kept banging against the metal.

“Aur-Six, you fool of a kyborg!” Kinfild exclaimed from the cockpit. He sat in the pilot’s seat, but he looked over his shoulder and down the hallway back at them. His face cycled through anger, annoyance, then frustration. “You two!”

Jace offered a smile. It didn’t work.

“If there was anyone in this galaxy who I expected to climb aboard a moving starship, it wouldn’t have been you two.” Kinfild pulled a lever beside the pilot’s chair. A thud ran through the ship, and the vessel maintained its ascent without his hands on the yoke. Then, he stood up and marched across the ship towards them. He grabbed his staff—it was leaning against the wall—as he walked.

Jace stepped back, fearful of what Kinfild was about to do to them, but the Wielder only used his staff to rap on the door of the engine room. “Aur-Six, quit your banging, or I’ll sell you for scrap when we get to the next kyborg market!”

Aur-Six stopped.

“Why are you two here?” Kinfild demanded. “I gave you an order, Mr. Baldwin, and it’s for your own good!”

Staying quiet might work. Kinfild couldn’t throw Jace off the ship; they were thousands of feet up, and the fall would kill him.

“Are you just going to stare at me?” Kinfild pressed his staff down against the deck. “Answer, boy.”

“I’m not waiting around any longer,” Jace said softly. “I need to get powerful, and that means I need to come with you.”

Kinfild grunted, then turned to Lessa. He raised a finger, clicked his tongue, then said, “And I know why you came along...”

“So you’ll let us stay?” Lessa asked. “Come on, it’ll be fun—even if you are a grumpy old wizard-jerk!”

“It seems like I’ve got no choice,” Kinfild muttered. He beckoned with his hand and summoned them to the front of the ship. He sat down in the pilot’s seat again and grabbed the control yoke, then pulled the lever beside his chair. “One of you can sit there.” He tilted his head to the copilot’s seat. “And the other”—he pointed behind him with his thumb, where a third seat was nestled into the wall—“can take the transmitter operator’s seat.”

“Take the copilot’s seat, Mr. Worldjumper,” Lessa said, nudging Jace towards the seat. “I’ll just take the…what did you call it? You know what? Nevermind. I don’t need to remember, so I’ll just...” She dropped down in the transmitter operator’s seat.

Jace slipped into the copilot’s chair. His feet dangled above the sloped front window, and an entire board of controls lay before him. He couldn’t read any of the labels; they were in a foreign script of some kind.

“Crash harnesses on,” Kinfild instructed gruffly. He pulled a leather belt out from the top of the seat and dragged it across his body to a buckle at the bottom of the chair. Jace and Lessa did the same.

With one hand, Kinfild grabbed the control yoke, and with the other, he reached over to a large brass dial between the seats. He pulled the brass handle on top of the dial, shifting the clock-like interface to a different segment.

Jace raised his eyebrows.

“Engine Order Telesignal,” Kinfild said. “It sends speed orders to Aur-Six. I just told him to charge the hyperdrive. Our hyperdrive, not your core.”

They climbed higher and higher, piercing through the planet’s upper atmosphere. The sky darkened, and even the bright stars glinting in the viewscreen seemed dim. Below, the soft curve of the planet spread out ahead. A distant ring of rocks and debris orbited the planet’s equator. His mouth slipped open.

Then a high-pitched dissonant tone blared through the ship. Jace’s head whipped around. “What’s that?”

Kinfild narrowed his eyes. “An alarm. Not good—that’s what it is.”