"Ikal! Get back here, boy!"

Ikal ran into the brush, sweat streaming from his palms as he ran from the torchlight into the darkness. He refused to go back and listen to that man anymore. Whatever his mother said, that man was not his father, not his true kin, a stranger to the tribe, an outsider who didn't belong. His heart raced in his chest as he pushed past a frond, and the jungle's darkness wrapped around him. In the sudden quiet, crickets chirped, and a soft wind blew across his bare chest.

The jungle around their village was as deep and dark as the sky above in the dead of night. However, if he saw glowing orbs in that darkness, they weren't part of the lined Constellations in the sky but likely a creature staring out from its hiding place. Ikal knew he shouldn't be out alone in the forest at night. He knew it was dangerous and that running out into the night was stupid, but he didn't care.

"I've done it before. I'll do it a hundred times more," he whispered as he picked his way through the trees and roots toward his hiding spot.

It took him a good bit, so much so that he had forgotten the argument that had sent him running out into the night by the time he reached his spot. He didn't stop moving, though, even as his lungs burned in his chest and his legs went as floppy as wet vines. The path to his spot was familiar enough that he didn't have to worry about tripping or falling. He knew every step from the countless times he had run out to watch the Constellations above.

He knew the various snakes and creatures that stalked the forest, and they gave the village a wide berth. That was why he had his secret spot at all. He didn't go toward the old ruins, not because it was forbidden, but because he didn't wish for his father—his real father—to see him cry. No, he went the right path toward the coast and the cliffs that looked out over the sea.

As he approached the edge, the brush cleared up, and he found the small clearing of grass that ended sharply on jutting stones that poked out over the ocean. With a sigh, Ikal sat down on those stones, wrapping his arms around his knees and taking a few deep breaths with his head down. He still needed to calm down from the fight. That was why he had run out here, to begin with. It was a way to get away from James—a way to get away from his mother.

"He's not my father," Ikal whispered, blinking the tears out of his eyes as he sat there on the cliff's edge.

It took him a while before the tears stopped running down his face, and he held his head up to get a clear view of the night sky. He sniffed as he watched the stars. They twinkled in the night sky above him like they had on almost every night before. When James had come to the island and started telling his outlandish stories, he imagined what was out there. James told stories of warrior women tribes, giant lizards, and even monsters that spawned from a dark mist. He had seen everything.

"He's still not my father," Ikal said, rubbing at his nose and looking to the side. "Even if he's taken mother, he won't replace father."

"No one's here to replace him, boy."

Ikal jumped at the words, dropping forward and away from the tall grass behind him on instinct. He nearly fell forward and off the cliff entirely, but a strong, calloused hand grabbed his shoulder and gently but firmly pulled him back. Ikal started to run, but that hand held him planted on the spot. James had found him, and he knew he wouldn't get away so easily.

"You shouldn't go running off into the forest, Ikal." James positioned him on the ground and then plopped down beside him, the man's long, skinny legs stretching out on the stone. "You know it makes your mother worry."

"I know the jungle," Ikal said, crossing his arms and looking away.

James was a foreigner and, before all his time out in the sun, had the pale skin of a sick man. However, after the last few years on the island, he had taken on the bronze sheen. However, he did not grow the proper coat that all the other villagers had. In fact, the only fur he had was the white hair on his head and his short beard. Everything else on him was completely bare. Whatever kind of creature he was, he was nothing like Ikal's people.

"Familiarity doesn't mean safe." James sighed, shaking his head before reaching up and adjusting his glasses. "Look, Ikal. I know the situation with your mother, and I makes your life strange, and I know I don't help things with the way I am, but I want you to know that—"

He paused, and Ikal turned to see what was wrong.

"Did you see that?" James asked, pulling one hand from his long black cloak and pointing at the sky. "Up there!"

Ikal narrowed his eyes. James was clearly trying to distract and put him off his guard. There would be nothing in the sky, and James would use it to make a joke to get in his good graces. He knew it was coming because James had always tried something like that to distract him.

"You're not fooling me again," Ikal said.

"No, look." James stood up, his wooden sandals plopping on the ground as he pointed to the sky. "I've never seen anything like it!"

"Alright," Ikal gave in and looked to the sky.

The Constellations were gone—the lined figures, such as Pisces, Leo, and Orion, had disappeared from the sky. They had been replaced by glowing balls of twinkling lights, completely unconnected to anything else. Ikal's eyes jumped across the sky in frantic sweeps, going this way and that as the connected worlds of old had disappeared completely. Whatever he was looking at was nothing like he had ever seen before.

"It's the nightsea," James said, dropping his arm. "How is this even possible?"

Ikal didn't know what James was talking about. James had always called the night sky the Dark Meridian and had tales aplenty about it. Now, he was calling the sky the 'nightsea' and just stood there with his jaw gaping wide. James thought about running but thought better of it. Something was wrong.

"What does it mean?" Ikal asked.

"I don't know."

***

Alex stood on the deck of the Nighthawk, sipping at a coffee as he looked over the massive screen wrapped around the angular hull in front of him. He had a good view of the space in front of the Nighthawk from the bridge as they sailed out into the nightsea. Ahead of the ship, hundreds of tiny dots of light led the way out toward the Twelve Kingdoms, what some people called the Core. Alex took another sip of his coffee.

"Being awake matters more than it being bitter." Alex sighed.

"Did you say something?" Mari's voice crackled over the comms.

"No," Alex said. "I'm just surprised how much distance there is between Dry Turtle and Grim Aegis."

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"Current distance to Grim Aegis will take us one week's travel," Mari pinged.

Mari was the reason he was on the deck while everyone else was asleep. They needed to keep Mari in the ship's 'operation room,' which the manual had called the small hole she was currently tucked and sealed away in beside Alex's feet. Alex had looked inside several times, and it was a terrifying thought to be in the dark, hooked into a bunch of wires. Even if Mari was an android built to operate the ship's navigation, no one deserved that.

So, he made sure she was never alone while the ship was in flight. If he were in her situation, it would be what he wanted. Granted, if he were in her situation, he wouldn't be human, not that he was sure he was human anymore.

"Pull up the ship," Alex said. "I want to take a look at it."

The screen in front of him changed, showing the Nighthawk from the external cameras on the ship. Alex wasn't sure exactly how they worked and how much of a relationship they had with the digital cameras he was used to back on Earth. Everything in this world of empty space with occasional bright islands full of life that the residents often called 'Erth' was a mixture of what he would consider magic and science.

The Nighthawk was a long tube of a ship. It was something that reminded Alex of submarines. The entire ship was painted a dark blue, not too different from a moonless night sky. Its bridge, where he was standing, was on the front nose of the ship, raised and armored with tiny windows that he assumed had their own cameras contained inside. Behind the bridge was a flattened deck where someone could walk out and stand on the back of the ship on a flat surface. The entrance was out of the back of the bridge and up a set of stairs that went behind the bridge. On both sides of the ship, there were two long pontoons that functioned like the lodestones on other ships to allow it to fly, both through the sky and the nightsea. Finally, on the very end of the ship, there was a large golden cone lined to look like a drill. He still didn't know what that did.

All in all, it was a weird ship but a good pickup from a random island on the far end of the First Quadrant.

They had just come out of a repair yard in Dry Turtle, and the mechanics there had brought the ship back up to operational order. The Nighthawk had been left running at the bottom of a dried-out lake for over three decades if the message and information they had received were correct when they had found it. That was a lot of time for rust and decay to eat away at the ship, and that didn't count the fact that it had been hooked into an island core as well as a source of power.

All of it, including Mari, had been a plan from some old explorer who had found a new world. He had promised a path out of the Erth and beyond the reach of the tyrannical Scions that ruled it and their attack dogs, the Military Police. That was why they were heading to Grim Aegis. That was why they had picked up a rhyming knightly prince who promised them passage. Everyone on his crew saw it as a path forward to their own goals. Alex wanted to find a way back to Earth, and new islands beyond the reach of the Military Police were the best possibility he had seen in years. It beat his older methods of randomly hoping to find unclaimed island cores on the Fringes to gather piecemeal information.

He finished looking over the ship and sighed.

"Alright, you can turn it off," Alex said, taking another sip of his coffee with a curling lip. "Still bitter."

"Why are you drinking it then?" Mari asked.

"To stay awake," Alex said. "I wish I knew the recipe for Coke, even if it's horrible for me."

Who knew, though, maybe one day he would run across an island that had discovered how to make soda and convince them to export it to the rest of the Erth. It was a fleeting dream, maybe even more unlikely than him making his way back home, but if he could pursue one, why couldn't he do the other? He swirled the brown coffee in his mug. Maybe he could give it all up and just open up a soda business on an island. It would be easier.

"But then, who would get up to hijinks on random islands?"

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Alex looked up from his coffee. "What's that?"

"There are several ships approaching," Mari said. "Eight-o-clock position."

Alex sat his cup down, jumping into the ship's pilot seat. In front of Mari's raised platform, there were five seats. A central seat was a large chair with two arms that had orbs on the end. To the left and right were four sideways-facing seats with their own clear glass screens. Alex climbed into the central seat and got ready to take control of the ship. The experience pulled his senses into the ship's sensors, so he didn't want to tap into that until he had to.

It was a surreal experience.

"Are they coming for us?"

"It appears so. Several smaller ships have launched from one of the main ships. Putting it on screen now."

The screen in front of him flashed, and Alex saw five main ships in total. One was a frigate, built with a wooden hull and large, light sails that old ships favored. One thing he had noticed across the nightsea was that there was always a mix of old and new, and that frigate was the perfect example of it. Beside it were two more modern-looking ships. One was golden and shaped like a deformed diamond. It had a protruding bridge, like the Nighthawk's bridge, and several pointed pieces stuck off its body. The other was a metal-hulled ship that was shaped like a US Navy cruiser. It had a small light sail setup along its back, and the helm was on the forward part of the ship. If Alex didn't know any better, he would assume the ship was with the Military Police since it matched their designs, but then he saw the black flags with a skull and crossbones flying from the two more traditional ships.

That told him all he needed to know.

"Pirates," Alex said, leaning forward and grabbing both orbs. "Wake everyone up, Mari. Things are about to get bumpy."

As he touched the orbs, Alex's senses merged with the ship. At the same time, he opened his gate. Lightning thrummed through his body from his heart, sending shocks with each heartbeat to his fingertips. That power then flowed into the ship through the orbs, and in moments, he and the ship were one shared experience. He saw the ships approaching out in the nightsea and saw the ten smaller objects that had detached from the cruiser.

They were each roughly the size of a person and appeared to be open suits, each carrying a person wrapped in massive arms. They blasted through the air with cables attached to them, and Alex guessed what they were. They were boarders. They would try to land on the ship and wrap it with the cables. He smiled as he focused his mind. He wasn't about to let that happen.

"Rail Shotgun," Alex whispered as blue lights flared around the Nighthawk.

The Nighthawk didn't have a weapon system, per se. It was weaponless, except that a person who touched the orbs of the central seat could use their curse to conjure larger versions of its power outside of the ship. Alex's curse in the first grade was simple magnetism. It allowed him to manipulate metal objects freely. The second grade of his curse allowed him to conjure metal objects. The Nighthawk amplified both, allowing him to manipulate larger objects and create more metal than he normally could.

Soon, relatively small bits of coin-shaped metal appeared from the blue lights. Alex sent them flying off with magnetism accelerated speed, right at the approaching suited figures. As he did it, he spun the ship around, the pontoons humming louder as he pushed the engine. He couldn't see his shredding attack's damage to the approaching suited figures, but he didn't care. He needed to address the approaching ships first. If he could cripple their crew to prevent a boarding altogether, that was ideal.

"They're pirates," he whispered, leaning forward into the orbs, forcing the ship to go faster. "Don't pity them. They won't have it for you."

The three ships split apart, the wooden one sailing forward to meet him while the other two took off on side tangents. Alex knew the other two would be coming for him from behind, but he didn't plan to stop. He focused on his gate again, calling electric lights around the ship. He focused on the wood frigate in front of him and smiled.

"Rail Gun."

A long metal spike appeared next to the ship and shot out, accelerating with his magnetism out toward the frigate. It tried to turn, and Alex saw the cannons on the side as it did. He threw the ship down, bringing it below where the cannons could hit as his spike slammed into the frigate's hull. There was no explosion, but he saw the spike pierce the frigate and send it tilting to the side. He had to have hit something important because the ship slowed down until it began to drift.

"One down," he said, shooting forward and not stopping for a while before he turned around.

He could run, but there wasn't a place to hide nearby where he thought he could lose them. He would need an asteroid cluster, like Death's Yard, or a set of islands if he wanted to hide. The main problem with the nightsea was that it was mostly empty space between islands. It wasn't a place where you could hide once attacked. Alex licked his lips as the yellow ship burned its engines hot to try and catch up with him. The cruiser appeared to be gathering what was left of its crew. There was a chance that with two ships disabled, the cruiser would need to help out its friends and leave him alone.

"One more, then make a break for it," he said.