All of Us Pirates Would Have Been Martyrs - Part One

Yan was exhausted by the time that Halen finally let the three apprentices go. If she hadn't been nurturing a quiet and confusing hatred of him inside her heart, it might have been a less trying time, not having to attempt to keep her face still, trying to obey orders that felt wrong only because they were coming from the wrong type of person. Halen clearly knew that Yan was struggling, though, to his credit, he didn't single her out for special annoyances when teaching the three of them to handle a gun.

The most interesting part of the day had come when Halen had shown the three apprentices a kind of simulation room, a place that almost hummed with a sense of being full of the power. In it, Halen showed how the room could create a replica of anything that was programmed into it, including automatons of people. He indicated that he would make the three apprentices use it to practice fighting against moving targets.

At the end of the day, Halen took a good long look at the three of them, least moderately more well versed in the use of guns, and said, "Good. It's a start, at least."

None of them were the type to react well to that faint praise-- Yan because of who it was coming from, Kino because she seemed to hardly react to anything, and Sid because his pride prevented him from doing so. Halen seemed to understand this and laughed at them as he dismissed them. "We're done for the day. If you want dinner, there's a staff cafeteria two floors up and down the left hallway. Can't miss it."

The three apprentices stumbled out of the simulation room past him and he watched them go then left in the other direction. Yan felt his power moving through the air, though, following them as they left. It put a shiver down her spine and she tried to ignore it.

The cafeteria that Halen had directed them to was a clean and bright place, decently populated with uniformed Stonecourt staff of various types. The three apprentices didn't really blend in, but no one bothered them, and they all got dinner on trays at the long serving counter, then sat down. The cafeteria was furnished with stiff plastic, colorful and utilitarian, that made it look about two decades out of date. Yan practically crammed her burger into her mouth as soon as she sat down, having just realized how hungry she was. They hadn't had lunch, and time in the sub basement gyms had seemed as squishy as it often was aboard ships. There was no sense of how much of it had passed.

"What did you think of that?" Yan asked, once she had eaten enough that she could think straight. She put down her burger and wiped off her hands so that she could try to sign for the benefit of Sid.

He rolled his eyes at her and signed, "No point in signing when she--" he jerked his head at Kino-- "is here."

"Just trying to be polite," Yan signed back.

He grinned at her. "You're too nice for me."

"What are you saying?" Kino asked.

"You'll just have to learn sign," Sid said aloud, leaning back in his chair, propping his legs up on the seat next to Kino. "It's a superior language."

Yan tried to get the conversation back under control. "Do you two like Halen?"

"I will listen to what he has to say," Kino said, which was a measured response if Yan had ever heard one.

"He seems fine. Scary, though."

"He's trying to scare you to make you listen," Kino said. "He thinks you're too impulsive."

"Who, me?" Sid asked. Even if his expression screamed innocent, his general attitude was anything but.

Kino took his question as one deserving of an actual response. "Yes, you. They noticed the way you were acting."

"And what way was I acting?" Sid was getting a kick out of attempting to rile up Kino in the same way that he had tried to push Sandreas and Halen's buttons. Yan couldn't tell if Kino was falling for it, or if she was playing her own game. She seemed calm.

"You were trying to figure out how much power they'll let you have when you talk to them," Kino said, even tone and placid expression, looking somewhere out over the top of Yan's head. "They won't let you have real power. That's why Halen had to show you that he could hurt you."

Sid wrinkled his nose. Some of the fun had gone out of the exchange, since Kino was being serious. "So?"

"You should be more careful," Kino said. "Be less obvious."

"But I like being obvious," Sid said. "I've never understood the point of being subtle."

"Kino's probably right," Yan said. "I'm not going to try to make them mad."

"You're taking her side?"

"I'm not-- it's not-- ugh." Yan gave up and shook her head. "At least let us get used to the apprenticeship before you start purposefully annoying our boss."

"He didn't seem that annoyed," Sid said.

"Well, don't push your luck too hard. At least not until we learn more about what they're actually like."

"Why do you want to push them?" Kino asked.

Sid shrugged, seemingly unable or unwilling to answer the question.

"I guess I understand," Yan said. "It's good to know what the rules are. If you don't know right away, you have to experiment to find out..." She trailed off and ate some fries. "I guess I can just get ready to watch you get in trouble when you do something stupid."

Sid made a rude gesture.

"Hey, you'd better cut that out," Yan cautioned. "We need to have a professional image."

"Not until we're actually in charge. That will be when I can start worrying about being a professional."

"You think you'll be in charge?" Kino asked, appraising Sid.

"You think you're going to be competition for me?" Sid leaned forward abruptly, and Yan shoved his shoulder back to stop him from getting ketchup on his cassock.

"It's not a competition," Yan said.

"Only one of us can be First," Kino said, then took a sip of her soda as though that wasn't something that Yan had been avoiding thinking about at all costs. She didn't want to know what happened to the two apprentices who did not succeed at becoming the next leader of the Empire. It seemed like a dangerous thing to think about.

"It's too early to say things like that," Yan said, trying to diffuse the tension that was between Kino and Sid, with Sid glaring hard at the calm Kino across the table.

"What would you be like as a leader?" Kino asked.

This was a startling change of topic, which left Yan floundering for a second. "I don't know," she admitted. "I don't know the first thing about leadership. I guess that's what an apprenticeship is for. I... I just hope I can solve problems, keep the Empire running, not make people mad..." She smashed a fry between her fingers, then wiped them off on a napkin, troubled by Kino's question. She didn't know how to answer it, and she felt like that was a failure, that Kino was maybe looking for something specific.

"I think my first priority would be to increase colonization," Sid said. "Everybody likes more planets. And I'd get rid of pirates, just for you." He grinned at Yan.

When Sid mentioned colonization, Kino's face had a minute change, like there was some kind of visceral negative reaction that she was trying to stifle. Her hands were under the table, but her cassock sleeve was stretched in such a way that it was clear she was tugging on it hard, almost ripping it apart.

Yan remembered something that Kino had said earlier, something that had left her mind over the intense training session that Halen had put them through. "You were on Falmar, you said?"

"Yes." Kino didn't look at Yan.

"I'm sorry."

"I lived," Kino said.

"What was it like?" Sid asked.

Kino's gaze snapped to him, and he flinched back at the unexpected intensity of it. "Why do you want to know?"

He splayed his hands and shrugged. "Just curious."

"I was six. My mother took my father to the doctor in town, and neither of them ever came back. We had to go to Hanathue. Is that what you wanted?"

"I'm sorry," Sid said, with a seemingly genuine apologetic expression.

"It's fine. I lived." Kino turned to Yan. "Your family's ship, were they there?"

Yan felt guilty when she answered, even though she had also only been six at the time. "No, we were doing mining runs. I don't think we would have even heard of what the Guild was doing until it was already over."

"Oh. I think it was the Promise of Fortune that I was on."

Yan wracked her brain. "That's the Astreya family, right?"

Kino shrugged. "I don't remember."

"I'm glad that the Guild was able to help," Yan said. "You aren't mad at First Sandreas for that, are you?"

"Why would she be mad at Sandreas?" Sid asked.

"Because he was the one who ordered Falmar into quarantine. The Guild broke it when they took people out," Yan explained. "I guess not everybody knows that whole story."

"Only the Guild really talks about it," Kino said. "It was a long time ago."

Sid narrowed his eyes. "Are you mad, then?"

Kino didn't answer for a long second. "I'm glad that I was not responsible for condemning a planet to death."

Yan nodded. If the plague had spread along with the refugees off of Falmar, it could have killed the entire population of Hanathue, and a good chunk of the Guild along with it. The Guild had taken that risk, but Sandreas had made the opposite calculation.

Yan shook her head. “It’s his job to make difficult decisions.”

Kino looked at Yan. “And when it’s your job?”

“You don’t have to be so intense,” Sid said. “We literally just started. Give us a chance to get used to the concept, at least.”

Kino didn’t say anything in response to that. Yan was torn between the two of them. On one hand, she agreed with Sid that she didn’t have the qualifications or information to have that kind of weight hanging over her head. On the other hand, though, Kino was right that this was going to be their job, and they should start thinking about the worst case scenarios as soon as they could. Then again, it’s easy to think something ahead of time, and change at the last minute. Yan put a halt to that train of thought before she gave herself a headache. Sid was right, she couldn’t think about that kind of responsibility now.

After a moment of awkward silence, Yan changed the topic. “Did you have a good summer?”

“It was fine,” Sid said. “My family’s annoying, though.”

“What about you, Kino?”

She shrugged. “I stayed at the Academy. I was a ward of the school until I came of age, so they let me stay over the summers.”

“Oh,” Yan said, unsure of how to respond. She felt like if she had known that Kino had nowhere to go, she would have invited her to the Iron Dreams with Sylva. Of course, that was too late now, and she had barely known Kino at all before, probably not enough to make extending such an invitation a socially acceptable thing to do. Still, she felt bad that Kino had been at the Academy by herself. “That must have been kinda lonely.”

“It’s fine.” Kino shrugged. “There was one interesting thing that happened.”

“Oh?” Yan asked.

Kino pulled her phone out of her pocket, flicked through it for a second, and slid it across the table towards Yan and Sid.

Her old text message history was displayed on the screen, these particular messages being to and from “1st S”, which Yan assumed was Sandreas. The image at the top of the messages was hard to understand at first, but as Yan studied it, she recognized the top of one of the desks that came standard in Academy apartments, on top of which were several small… She couldn’t quite tell. They were round black things, with a shiny spot at the front, with a short wire sticking out behind. Each of them was about the size of Kino’s fingernail, and her hand was pinching one.

The message below the image said, “I request that you respect my privacy, please.”

And the reply from Sandreas read, “Acknowledged.”

“What are those?” Sid asked.

Kino slipped her phone back into her pocket. “Cameras.”

“They’re from…?” Yan asked, not quite wanting to say anything out loud in this crowded dining hall, aware suddenly that she was definitely being watched by someone.

“Yes. In my room.”

Sid frowned deeply, a troubling change from his usual jauntiness. He turned to Yan and signed, “In my house?”

“Maybe?” Yan shrugged helplessly.

“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Sid demanded of Kino.

“I didn’t have your off planet contacts over the summer.”

“Why are you telling us now?”

“If I didn’t, I would be complicit.”

That answer didn’t seem to sit well with Sid for some reason. He clenched his fist. “And are those in our new place?”

“I don’t know,” Kino said.

“So what should we do about this?”

“I don’t care what you do.” And with that, Kino began gathering her belongings and standing, the conversation over, now that she had no more information to impart. Yan was grateful to Kino for the warning that she should be aware of being watched, but she, like Sid, had no idea what to do with that information. She would just keep an eye out, she supposed.

As the three apprentices left the cafeteria and navigated their way towards the staff entrance of Stonecourt, Yan realized that this conversation had provided her with more questions than answers. What did Sandreas hope to learn from spying on his students? How much information had he gathered on her, and what did he think about it? How had Kino found the cameras? Kino had said that she didn’t have Yan or Sid’s off planet contact information, but not that she didn’t have an ansible card-- an odd statement that had placed hooks in Yan’s brain. It was a whole box of unpleasant mysteries that had just been opened, and Yan took each thought, examined it, and then shut it away until she felt more prepared to think about it.

They made it outside of Stonecourt, into the thick late summer night air. It had rained while they had been indoors, but the sky was clear now, revealing the last dredges of sunlight on the horizon and the first flicker of stars above. The staff entrance of Stonecourt was a guarded gate in the wrought iron fence, and the three apprentices left together, starting out underneath the just-illuminated streetlamps.

“Yan!” a familiar voice called as they emerged. Across the street, standing up from where she had been sitting on a bench, Sylva was frantically waving at Yan. Kino stopped, though Sid plowed on, somewhat oblivious, until Kino caught his arm. He must not have been employing whatever mechanism he used to understand spoken speech at just that moment. Sylva crossed the street at a jog, hardly looking both ways and causing a car to come to a slightly affronted stop.

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“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Yan said. “Why didn’t you text me?”

“I figured I’d surprise you at the end of your first day of work,” Sylva said.

“You know Kino and Sid, right? This is Sylva Calor, my friend from the Academy.” Sylva was, of course, aware of Kino and Sid. Yan tried to put an inflection in her voice that cautioned Sylva not to be rude to the other two apprentices.

Kino nodded and Sid smiled. “We had Master Katrin’s sculpture class together,” Sid said.

“Ha, I’d forgotten about that,” Sylva said. “Yeah.” She looked at Sid and Kino as though she wanted them to vanish. “Hey, you want to get dinner?”

Yan felt slightly helpless. “I just ate,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Oh.” Sylva’s disappointment couldn’t have been clearer. “And you’re going with them?”

“We were just going back to our apartments,” Kino said.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“No, no!” Yan said. She didn’t want Sylva to feel ignored. “I just didn’t know you were coming. I wouldn’t have eaten already if I had known.”

“It’s fine.”

This conversation was horribly awkward. Kino seemed unaware of the tension in the exchange, and was just staring absentmindedly up at the sky. Sid, though, had his eyes on Yan, looking at her as though he wanted something from her. Yan had no idea what that could be.

“Look, sorry for abandoning you guys,” Yan said to Kino and Sid. “But do you mind if I…?”

“You don’t want to help me find the cameras?” Sid signed to her. “I get it.”

Sylva narrowed her eyes. “What are you saying?”

“It’s nothing,” Yan said. “I’ll help you later, Sid. Or Kino can.”

“What?” Kino asked.

“She’s not as fun as you are,” Sid signed. He clearly enjoyed the fact that Sylva didn’t understand what he was saying, and that it made her frustrated. Yan didn’t like this. She hated feeling split between her oldest friend and her new coworkers.

“If you don’t want to hang out with me--” Sylva said.

“No, I do,” Yan tried, feeling pathetic. “I have to…”

Sid grinned at her. “Let’s go Kino. Yan apparently has more important things to do than hang out with us.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Yan said, but Sid was already traipsing off down the street, with Kino in tow. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she called after them, but neither of them turned back towards her.

Sylva had her hands on her hips. “You could be more assertive. Don’t let them push you around.”

“I am being assertive,” Yan said. “Are you mad at me?”

“No,” Sylva said, but that was the most obvious lie in the world.

“Do you want to get a coffee or something?”

“Sure. Fine,” Sylva said.

It was a stiff and awkward silence that descended upon them as they walked through the gathering dark of Yora streets, Sylva half a step ahead of Yan. There was none of Sylva’s usual lively conversation to distract Yan from her thoughts. So much had happened during the day, she was unable to focus on one thing, jumping from one instinct to the next with every footstep she took. In an effort to calm herself, Yan tried to clear her mind and time her breathing and steps, sinking into a quasi meditative state. Her power rose up around her, coming easily to the surface as it always had, and she spread it out in an ever expanding bubble around herself, passing through the air and the trees and the parked cars that lined the street.

Connecting with the universe in this way felt peaceful to Yan. She enjoyed the sense of losing herself, and finding the light of life in the people around her. There was the bright flare of Sylva, just a step ahead as she always was. All around, through the buildings and the street, there were strangers passing by unaware. Yan’s power passed over them and through them, out in a bubble until her concentration could stretch it no further, and then pulled back into herself. She repeated this exercise several times as she walked, like a stretch that cleared her mind of her personal concerns and replaced it with simple awareness.

She became aware, after several minutes and turns, that one of the presences she felt was following her, or at least going in the same direction for an improbably long time. This realization broke her concentration, and she lost the pleasant sense of being one with the universe. It was replaced with growing paranoia, and she kept glancing back over her shoulder, stumbling a little each time, as though her pursuer would be stupid enough to show themself. It was likely, of course, that whoever was following her had been sent by Sandreas, but that knowledge didn’t calm her anxiety any.

Sylva noticed Yan’s change in gait and stopped. “What’s the matter with you?” Sylva asked.

Yan shook her head, not wanting to worry her best friend. “Nothing, I’m just tired. A lot happened today.”

Even as she and Sylva found a cafe to sit down in, and they both had a coffee (and a sandwich for Sylva), Yan couldn’t shake the sense of wrongness, and it carried through into her conversation, spoiling it and making Sylva annoyed with her. It felt even worse when they had to part, with Sylva walking off towards her own apartment in a different part of the city, leaving Yan on her own to return to her new place.

They had never lived apart from each other since meeting, so it felt new and terrible for Yan to say goodbye and watch Sylva go. It was like negotiating a whole new relationship between them, to which there were rules that Yan didn’t understand and didn’t know how to learn.

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The next morning, Yan woke up long before her alarm, perhaps because she was unused to the empty silence and size of her new apartment. It was a nice place, well furnished and very secure, with a secret room hidden in her closet that she presumed was for use in emergencies or for keeping important documents safe.

She knew she wasn’t going to be able to fall back asleep, so, rather than staring blankly at the ceiling and wasting her time, Yan decided that she should do something useful. Her first thought was to find the cameras that were probably hidden somewhere in her apartment, but after scouring the place top to bottom, she found no evidence of them. This forced her to conclude that either the Imperial security who had bugged her apartment were better at hiding things than she was at finding them, or that Sandreas had had his fill of spying on his apprentices. The first seemed markedly more likely, which was an uncomfortable thought.

By time she had finished pulling apart every nook and cranny of her apartment, Yan had worked herself up into a real hunger, and the sun was finally coming up over the horizon, peeking past the buildings of Yora and into her large living room window. She didn’t have food in the fridge (she hadn’t yet had a chance to go grocery shopping after moving in) so she resigned herself to leaving and finding breakfast at a coffee shop. She would have time to loiter and still make it to Stonecourt on time for another round of “training” or whatever she was about to face today.

The morning was chilly and damp, the first smells of autumn in the air. Still, it was invigorating, and Yan’s worries about Sylva and her awkwardness from the night before fled her mind as she tramped along the sidewalk.

She muttered a morning prayer under her breath. “Oh God who splits the night from the day…” Out of prayerful habit more than anything, she sent her power out around herself once again, feeling the different tang of the morning air sing in her awareness. There were fewer people out at this time of day than there had been the night before, which only made the follower she had more obvious.

She wasn’t surprised that someone was on her tail, but she was moderately annoyed and wondered if there was anything she could do about it. The walk had invigorated her, and she felt like she had absorbed some of Sid’s willingness to push back against her new boss, as well as some of Kino’s clear paranoia.

Yan came to the coffee shop she had been aiming for, and she stepped inside, jingling the bell over the door. It was still a little early for the morning breakfast rush, so there were only a few people in the store. The employee manning the counter looked up as she came in, taking note of Yan’s uniform cassock. People dressed in her uniform weren’t exactly a rare sight around Yora, but they weren’t exactly common, either, especially the further one got from the Academy itself. Before she went up to the counter, Yan took a glance out the store window and cast her power out, hoping to catch a glimpse of her pursuer. No such luck, as the person was behind a brick wall from her, in the alley next to the building, probably with some kind of eyes on the entrance to watch Yan as she came out. Subtle, but annoying.

Yan ordered a coffee and bagel, then sat down at a table near the window, nibbling her breakfast and thinking. She wondered if her follower knew that Yan knew they were there. On one hand, Yan had been casting her power out, which she figured a sensitive would feel. But, on the other hand, her follower might not be a sensitive, and Yan had been pretty fastidious about not looking over her shoulder like she was being followed. She had tried to act normally.

If, she thought, her watcher didn’t know that Yan was purposefully trying to escape, she might be able to get away. Well, it was worth a try, anyway.

Yan finished her bagel, then went back up to the counter. “Do you have a bathroom?” she asked. “And, uh, sorry if this is weird, but can I have a bag?”

The woman gave her a long look, then handed her a paper bag for takeout orders and directed her to the back of the shop, where there was a single stall bathroom. Yan wasted no time in pulling off her cassock and cape, leaving her dressed in a crisp white button down and black slacks. Still pretty visible, but certainly less than the cassock. She folded her discarded clothes neatly and jammed them inside the bag. She considered if there was anything else she could do to change her appearance, but, looking in the rather dingy mirror, she decided that there wasn’t. It wasn’t as though she had enough hair to change the style of it, nor did she have makeup or glasses to put on or off.

Yan sent out another pulse of power. Her tail was still waiting in the same spot outside the restaurant. Excellent. She pushed open the bathroom door quietly, then looked both ways to see if any of the employees of this place were observing her. They weren’t.

Further back in the cafe, past the bathroom, was the kitchen, partially obscured by flapping plastic strips dangling from the doorframe, and humming with the sound of an industrial fan. Yan took a steadying deep breath, then pushed her way through the plastic flaps, into the humid kitchen area. She was in luck; the back exit was propped open with a chair, with the fan vainly trying to cycle cool outside air into the hot kitchen.

No one paid her any mind as she walked as confidently as she could through the kitchen, then out the back door, ending up in the alley opposite from where her tail was waiting. She hustled through the alley, resisting the urge to break into a run. There was no need to call attention to herself.

It felt liberating to have freed herself from her spy, but constantly checking if they had returned put her into even more of a paranoid mood. She worried that, since they may have been set on her for her own protection, she might be in some kind of danger. She also worried that someone would be mad at her for the trick she was playing. But then again, she had been alone in Yora so many times and nothing bad had ever happened to her. Besides, this trick would never work again, she was sure, so she might as well try to enjoy it while she could.

Yan made a long looping circle, going in the wrong direction for several blocks, then turning towards Stonecourt, but walking around it in a wide radius in order to approach it from the “wrong” direction. By the time she eventually made it to the staff entrance in the back, she was worn out from her several kilometers of brisk walking. It was lucky that she had taken her cassock off, since she would have been very sweaty had she kept it on.

When she made it through the security checkpoint, though, Yan realized that the jig was up. Halen was waiting for her in the staff entrance lobby, leaning against the wall with a smile. Even though he was dressed only in a dark suit, Stonecourt staff recognized him and gave him a wide berth. Yan tried to avoid him, too. As soon as she saw him, she tried to duck away down a different hallway, but Halen followed her.

“Ms. BarCarran,” he said as he came up behind her. He was clearly amused. “I would be very grateful if you would accompany me.”

“What do you want?” Yan asked, turning to face him. She would have crossed her arms, but she had her bag of cassock tucked underneath her armpit.

“I think it would be nice to get better acquainted with Aymon’s apprentices, since we’re going to be working so closely together.”

Yan didn’t see a way out, so she said, “Fine.”

Halen smiled widely and put his heavy hand on her shoulder, steering her down the hallway. After a while, they left the interior of Stonecourt, and Halen led her into the courtyard that she had glimpsed outside of Sandreas’s office window the day before. It was a cleverly designed place, with trees and hedges positioned in a quasi maze, restricting sightlines. With the cheerful morning twittering of birds and the burble of distant fountains, the place seemed much larger than it was in actuality.

Halen sat down on a stone bench with a tree at his back. He took up a shocking amount of bench space, and he gestured for Yan to take a seat next to him, which she reluctantly did. He folded his hands across his lap, and Yan noticed for the first time that he was wearing a plain gold band on his ring finger. Halen didn’t say anything for a long minute and just stared up through the leaves of the tree.

Finally, just as the silence was growing unbearable for Yan, he spoke. “Did you enjoy your walk this morning?”

Yan wished immediately that he had not spoken. “It was fine,” she muttered.

“There are easier routes to take to Stonecourt, you know. The reason you’re in the apartment you are is because it’s a straight line, less than a kilo.”

“I wanted to get a coffee,” Yan said.

“I see. And then you wanted to walk all the way down to Terlin street, which is about a kilo and a half out of the way.”

Yan let out a frustrated huff of breath. “Stop watching where I go.”

“It’s for your own safety,” Halen said. “Your escort called me in a panic, you know.”

“That’s not my problem.” She was being a little too rude. She should tone it down. “Sorry.”

Halen laughed. “You don’t have to apologize. I’ll admit I’m a little impressed that you got away.”

“You still knew where I was.”

“My friend, if you want to avoid being tracked, you might want to leave your phone at home.”

“We’re not friends,” Yan said, but that was more to cover up the stupid feeling of that blatant oversight.

“It will be a long five years if we aren’t.” He sounded somewhat melancholy about this. “I’m certainly willing to be, you know.”

“I find it hard to believe that I could be friends with a pirate,” Yan said.

“I haven’t been a pirate for more than twenty years,” Halen said. “It would be very difficult for me to claim to be one now.”

“It’s in your blood,” Yan said. “Literally, I mean.”

Halen chuckled. “You can hardly hold what my parents did to me in the womb against me, can you? It’s hardly their fault for wanting a strong child.”

“I thought that only natural children could have the power,” Yan said.

“Clearly, that is not the case. But you wouldn’t hear about pirates with the power, would you? And genetic modification is illegal, for the most part, so you don’t hear about that, either…” He shrugged.

“Are there other pirates with the power?”

“Almost certainly. You know how there’s a higher than average incidence of spacers with the power; I’m sure pirates do the same.”

Yan felt the tips of her ears heat up in half-embarrassment at that. “Yeah.”

Halen looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “You know something about that?”

“My uncle paid for my mother to… you know.” Yan said. “Buy genetic material. For me.”

Halen laughed. “So, we have something else in common then. Test tube babies, the both of us.”

“I’m natural,” Yan said. “Not-- they didn’t mess with my genes.”

“Natural adjacent, maybe,” Halen said. “There’s no shame in it.”

“I suppose,” Yan said.

“Any idea who your father is?”

“Someone with the power, I’d assume,” Yan said. “Which narrows it down a lot. But other than that, no, I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”

Halen nodded. “Probably a good choice.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Yan said, scuffing the ground with her heel.

“You’re right. You have your family.” Halen was silent for a long second. “Mind if I ask what your family is like?”

“Why?”

“I’m curious about Aymon’s apprentices. And I’m curious about you the most because we have some things in common.”

“We don’t,” Yan insisted. “Being a spacer is nothing like being a pirate.”

“Tell me about it, then.”

Yan scowled. “I don’t know. What is there to know? I lived on the Iron Dreams , my mother raised me until she died, then my uncle and his wife took me in. Then I went to the Academy. I know how to fly shuttles and dogfighters; I know how to work in the greenhouse; I can do repairs, spacewalks…; I got to jump the ship this summer.” She couldn’t help the twinge of pride that entered her voice at that. The fact that her cousin and captain had entrusted her with the responsibility to use the precious and dangerous stardrive, to jump the entire ship and crew across space, that had been a real joy.

“Good job,” Halen said. “It’s too bad you have the power.”

“What?”

“If my captain had let any of my cousins fly the ship at your age, they probably would have been on track to be captain,” Halen said.

“Oh.”

“Did you ever think about that?”

“Sometimes,” Yan said. “I mean, if I was frustrated at the Academy, I’d think about leaving every once in a while. Daydreams, mostly.”

Halen nodded. “Would you have wanted to be captain?”

Yan stared out across the courtyard, watching some birds dive over the rows of hedges. “Probably,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter now.”

“I figured I might have been captain of my ship, one day,” Halen said.

“What ship were you on?”

“It was called the Bluebeetle .”

“Was?”

“It was destroyed, years ago. Before I came to work for Aymon.”

“I’m sorry,” Yan said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. She really was sorry; she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to think of the Iron Dreams being destroyed. It was too much to imagine.

“As am I,” Halen said. “I miss it, even today.”

“What happened to it?”

“It was hunted down, by the Fleet.”

“Really?” The Fleet rarely bothered hunting pirate ships, and this was a major point of contention with the Guild, who considered that was the Fleet not doing their due diligence to protect free trade within the Empire.

“Well, we were manufacturing stardrives,” Halen said, very blase. “That could hardly be allowed to continue.”

The world narrowed to a point in Yan’s vision, that same panic she had first felt when Halen appeared in the restaurant rising up in her chest again. “ You were making stardrives?”

Halen laughed at her obvious discomfort. “That’s another reason why you don’t hear about many pirates who are sensitives. Most of them get themselves killed trying to do exactly that. But yes, I was making stardrives.”

“How?”

“I’m not going to describe the process to you,” Halen said. He studied her for a second. “You might be able to do it. But I wouldn’t want you to try.”

“I wouldn’t,” Yan said. “I promise I won’t. Don’t tell me how.”

He shook his head. “I don’t expect you to ever need to. You could figure it out if you looked.”

Yan shook her head. “If I was able to do it, the stardrive makers would have offered me an apprenticeship.”

Halen’s lips quirked up a little. “Perhaps,” he said.

“How did you survive, if your ship was destroyed?” Yan asked, trying to deflect away from herself.

Halen sighed. “It’s a long story. I might tell you all of it someday. But the short version is that I was on a shuttle, far away. I was actually making a stardrive at the time. My family would drop me off in the middle of nowhere, so that I couldn’t destroy the ship if I messed up, and they’d come and get me a week or so later. When they didn’t show up…” He shrugged.

“Were you near a station or something?”

Halen’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “No,” he said. “I really was in the middle of nowhere. And I ran out of food.”

Yan tilted her head, curious. Shuttles weren’t capable of interstellar travel, so, to have survived, Halen must have been found, if not by his own ship, then by someone else. “Was there someone else looking for you?”

“Eventually, yes. But not then. The Fleet thought that their stardrive maker had been destroyed when they destroyed the Bluebeetle , I believe.”

“Then how…” Yan trailed off.

“I had been making a stardrive at the time,” Halen said, voice somewhat wistful. “I was able to get it to jump.”

Again, Yan tried to stifle the immediate fear reaction that she felt in her gut. She couldn’t really picture it, herself, alone in the middle of space, just on a shuttle with a stardrive. Shuttles weren’t capable of doing the computing that jumping a ship required. Shuttles weren’t physically designed to jump like ships were. Stardrives… Yan had no idea how one could make a stardrive work without the intricate interplay of computer and ship and navigator that jumps usually required. It terrified her, to have Halen discuss this-- what seemed like a miracle outside of her comprehension-- so casually. She tried not to let it show on her face or in her voice. “That’s very impressive.”

“What are you afraid of?” Halen asked suddenly.

The fear twisted in her gut. “I’m not,” she lied.

He looked at her. “You’re not a good liar.”

“How would you know?”

“I can’t give away all my secrets yet, Yan,” Halen said with a slight smile. “You could ask Aymon.”

Yan frowned. “How much have you been spying on me?”

“Some,” Halen said. “The watcher was for your own protection.”

“I’m capable of protecting myself.”

“I’d say I’ll believe that when I see it, but I think that you’d be compelled to demonstrate. I don’t really advise you trying to get away from your escort again.”

“I don’t like not seeing who’s watching me.”

“You’ll meet her soon enough,” Halen said. “I figured I should give you a chance to get settled before introducing new people into your life. How did you realize you were being followed, by the way?”

“I like to meditate,” Yan said. “I was just casting my power out randomly, and noticed that the same person was behind me for too long.”

He laughed. “Effective, if lucky,” he said. “How’s your range?”

“Bigger in space,” Yan said.

His mouth turned up in a smile. “Isn’t it always?”

“I’m not going to tell you what my range is, so you can have my follower stay just outside it.”

“I would never do such a thing,” Halen said, but he was obviously joking. “You can have your secrets, too, Yan. I’m sure we’ll both find out a lot about each other soon enough.”

“Maybe.”

Halen stood from the bench and stretched, his huge form blocking out the sun, and the ring glinting on his finger. “We should head back inside. It’s about time to get started with your training.”