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The deeper they descended, the more Luci balked at the darkness.

The crater was so creepy. Inside, it looked as infinite as outer space. But it didn't have any of the distant light that filled the universe. It was simply nothingness. Empty, yet claustrophobic. It gave her an unnerving vision of a cosmos without stars. Floating in a sunless void, unable to see the end, to see if there was anything around her, to see if she was alone. The planets seemed so stable and solid, but they all depended on nuclear furnaces ripping atoms apart for light. One day, all the material would be used up, and the whole universe would sink into darkness forever …

Once, her older brother told her about an article he read. It said the human brain wasn't built to comprehend outer space. That's why they made up imaginary beings who lived in the sky and executed people who pointed out simple facts, like that planets orbited their suns. They needed to make themselves the center of the universe as a coping mechanism for how tiny and fragile they were. One day, evolution might advance humans to the point they could properly process the enormity of the cosmos, but until then they were stuck with their primitive mammal brains.

Back then, Luci had replied with a grin. 'Sounds like people just need to get themselves some better waifus. It's impossible to be worried if you've got good waifus.'

Standing on the raised aft deck, Luci lifted her eyes and peered over the main console. She didn't believe in the old kind of gods, but she did have a goddess she worshiped. The tall redhead stood on the narrow footpath below, her back straight and her chin up. With her imposing posture, she lorded it over the pilot's seat and the guy sitting it in, even though the ship belonged to him. Luci's eyes went down Philomena's body, stealing a glance at her breasts. They weren't big — hovering somewhere between a B-cup and a C-cup. But what they lacked in size, they made up for in softness, fluffiness, comfort-ness. Luci admired the way they flared out from that slender torso. Aerodynamic curves, enhancing their owner's confident figure. Every time the goddess's lips sucked in air and then delicately breathed it out, her boobs rose and fell inside the bra poking through her T-shirt.

I just wanna … rest my head on them. Let her stroke my hair. Brush it until I'm good and relaxed.

The soothing fantasy went through her head and washed her worries away, leaving her emptied and cleaned-out.

Then Blaze Corvo fired the thrusters. The deck rattled underfoot, and it traveled up through her legs and rattled her too. Her muscles tensed. Her stomach clenched. Her curled-up fingers wanted to grab the console to steady the shakes running through her body. On the console monitor, that Rin Bakuko-hater had split the screen into four quarters. Each quarter showed a camera feed, all of them aimed at the gray ground surrounding the ship. Flickering blue light flashed across the rocky land. Tendrils of exhaust flared out of the thruster nozzles and kicked against the planet's gravity well. Her ears picked through the sounds of the engine exhaust. She didn't hear anything out of the ordinary.

What if I'm wrong? What if the engines give out and we plummet to the bottom of the crater because I was careless? The machinery keeping us in the sky is so fragile, and … if one piece breaks, we'll be stranded in the darkness until we run out of food and starve to death.

Her fingers drummed on her cargo pants. Dug into the tough fabric. Loosened and relaxed. Drummed some more.

I don't want to go down there, she thought.

Come on, Luci. You've been to space a million times!

But this isn't outer space.

Blaze twisted the control yoke and banked the hovering ship to port. The deck tilted under their feet, and the dark horizon beyond the canopy tilted the other way. The ship's artificial gravity couldn't override the natural gravity of the planet. Luci's balance got knocked out of alignment with the world around them. She leaned to starboard to counter the suddenly-sloped floor, searching for the sweet spot that'd let her right herself. Below, as the ship swung out over the crater, Philomena teetered backwards like she'd slipped on a banana peel. She clawed at the empty air, her arms flying up, but then she hit the tipping point and toppled over.

Heart in her throat, Luci got ready to surge forward. Her hands tensed up, getting ready to catch Philomena before she fell over.

A vivid fantasy unfolded in Luci's mind. Slipping her arms around Philomena. Supporting Philomena so she didn't fall. Gazing in awe as Philomena twirled around and kabedon'd Luci against the canopy. Luci's squirming, sweating body became just a plaything in those commanding hands. They curled under her chin, forced her head up, ordered her to stare in astonishment at the tall goddess who'd decide her fate—

Before Luci could lift her feet, Philomena's shoulders struck the canopy. She whipped her arms out sideways and slammed her palms into the glass, bracing herself and breaking her fall. Giving Corvo a dirty look, she pushed herself away from the canopy and lunged for the pilot's seat. She grabbed the seat back to support herself.

Luci's now-useless helping hands went limp at her sides.

"Corvo, fly smoother!" Philomena said.

He brushed her off by saying, "If you don't like my flying, don't stand on my flight deck."

The ship swung out over the crater. On the monitor, the rim glided past the cameras and then disappeared. Now, there was nothing but darkness underneath. Darkness, forever. Nothing the ship could rest on, except the engines that Luci had okayed for flight. If those engines failed, they would be totally at the mercy of its gravity well, and drop towards a bottom she couldn't see. Into darkness so thick it felt like it would press into the ship like they were falling past the crush depth of a gas giant. The fuselage would crumple like a soda can, and they would all die when the broken steel crashed together and pulverized their frail, squishy little bodies. Her consciousness was like a little light, and it would be snuffed out and washed away on a tidal wave of blood-red agony, the steel tearing through her skin and bones—

Stop! This isn't like you, Luci.

It's this crater. It's doing this to me.

They say when you go into a sensory deprivation tank, your mind blurts out whatever to fill in the blanks. Humans aren't supposed to live in complete darkness. Even on the darkest nights, our ancestors still had starlight to look at. To wonder about. To keep them company.

But this crater is just nothingness, and …

She tore her eyes away from the darkness on the monitors and lifted them up to the flight deck, bathed in the artificial light humans made for themselves. Philomena and Blaze silently bickered over control of the ship through their body language; Philomena made her posture more aggressive, while Blaze made his own more relaxed to counter her. Meanwhile, at the console, Rsh growled to himself at the slapstick spectacle unfolding in front of him.

The starship hovered in the middle of the crater. The walls were so far away its landing lights couldn't shine on them. Black on black, its rim became part of the dark land stretching to the horizon. Then, Blaze trimmed the thruster output and lowered them into the void. Slipping into its mouth, the black ridge rose around them, eating away at the starshine. Although the artificial lights remained as strong as ever, somehow the shadow of the crater made the flight deck seem darker. Overhead, the hole showing the stars got narrower. Their only way out was shrinking. Through the canopy in front and to the sides, there was nothing but solid black.

For comfort, Luci gazed at the goddess she worshiped. But that comfort seemed to get lost in the abyss around them. Philomena's flushed apple cheeks and bouncy copper hair drifted out of Luci's feeble grasp until the black swallowed them completely.

She'll never love me the way I want, Luci thought.

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"Learn how to fly a ship, baka!"

The subtitles translated Rin Bakuko's Japanese into Galactic Standard, but annoyingly the white letters got in the way of her magnificent bouncing boobs. Like two full moons, every bit of rough weather the ship sailed through made them swing like they were orbiting her torso. They lifted her croptop up, gave a peek at the fold of skin where they met her ribs. Jiggling and jiggling and jiggling. Luci's sweaty hands just wanted to reach out and squeeze them. Rest her head on those silky cushions. Let the redheaded goddess bully and berate her, then reluctantly offer to comfort Luci while her blushing cheeks turned as red as her hair. Breathing hard, Luci sat on the floor of her bedroom, her eyes glued to the display screen—

"Hey, Luce?" her uncle called through the door.

Luci shot forward. Her fingers fumbled their way across the screen until they found the button to turn it off. Standing in front of it, still shaken from the shock, she blocked it with her body even though it was blank.

"Yeah?" she called over her shoulder.

"Ready to go?"

"Go where?"

"'Where'? Ha, did little Luce get hit on the head by a star?"

He had a deep belly laugh, and the door in the way made his voice even deeper. Although 'Did a shooting star land on your head?' was a common saying, Uncle Ramon always swapped the words around and used lucero instead of estrella, just to make a dumb pun on her name. That was the kind of guy he was. She loved him, but his sense of humor was really annoying.

"The market!" he called.

Oh, I forgot all about that!

She ran to the door. Other worlds had these things called 'intrapanels' that let you open doors and turn on lights, but here on Asilo they still used old-fashioned manual releases. She twisted the doorknob and threw the door open, revealing her uncle. He was a tall, hefty man with a wide chest and big shoulders. His hair was slicked back. A long, thick, neatly-trimmed mustache crawled over his upper lip.

"I'm ready," she said.

As they left their apartment building and stepped onto the dust-covered sidewalk, she asked, "Did you hear anything from my dad?"

Her uncle glanced away from her, out across the arid, rocky land of Asilo. El Diablo, the red giant the planet orbited, filled the sky and cast a crimson glow over the distant ridges on the horizon. The buildings were bare steel, blocky and squat, with flat, angled surfaces. They were mostly long and low to the ground, though some went as high as ten stories. They wore their steel structures on the outside, like wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Imposing, hardy, and fortified. They weren't pretty, like other worlds she saw on TV. But she got the sense they'd never crumble, no matter how much the barren land tried to tear them down.

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"He sent me a message on the starnet," her uncle said at last. "He's doing well."

"Is he … is he coming back home soon?"

"Ahh, we'll see, mija."

Sighing, Luci tried to make herself feel as strong as the buildings of her homeworld.

Her father and her uncle didn't really get along. Uncle Ramon was older, so he inherited the family business. Her dad got bitter and left home when he was a young man. Made his own way across the galaxy. That was not strange. Asilo was little more than a rock in space her ancestors had forced into becoming a home. Many Asileans ventured out to the wider galaxy to make money.

By the time Luci was born, he'd already returned home to Asilo. But, growing up, she sensed a weird wariness between them. A tense peace that was so easily shattered. Before her mom passed away, Uncle Ramon used to ask her what she saw in him. Sometimes he was joking, other times he wasn't. Sweetly, she would reply, 'He always tries his hardest to provide for his family.'

After she died, her dad demanded Uncle Ramon turn over control of the company to him, since — he said — he was the better businessman, and Uncle Ramon was running the company into the ground. Her uncle threw a lot of words back at him. Words like 'grifter' and 'con artist'. After that, her dad left home for good. To be an 'independent businessman,' he said. He asked Luci if she wanted to come with. Uncle Ramon refused, however, and her dad didn't put up much of a fight. So Luci stayed on Asilo, and went into the family business instead. Every time her dad came back home, he brought money with him, but Uncle Ramon refused to accept it. Eventually, he just stopped coming back home entirely.

"You know your dad loves you," her uncle said.

Staring at the dusty sidewalk, Luci said, "I know."

"He just … loves getting himself into trouble too. Haha!"

"Mhmm."

They fell quiet. Around them, the wind blew dust and carried the sounds of the city through the air.

"So! What were you all upset about last night?" he asked loudly.

"Huh?"

"After you came home from school. You moped so much I thought you were trying to season your paella with your salty tears."

"Nothing," she muttered.

"C'mon, Luce. You can talk to me about anything, you know."

She sighed. "There's this girl in my class, Maria. I asked her if she wanted to go on a date, but she said she doesn't like girls that way."

"Oh."

They walked in silence.

"Well, I said you can talk to me about anything, mija. Didn't say I'd have a reply though! Haha!"

Luci grumbled.

"Uh, are there any other lesbians in your class?" he asked.

"We don't keep a list or anything," Luci muttered. "Besides … she's got this long flowing hair and deep brown eyes and these pouty lips and …" She fell quiet, embarrassed to be talking about this with her uncle. "Is it weird to be a lesbian?"

"Course not. It's perfectly natural."

"Then why are so many girls not … like me?"

"Most people aren't left-handed, but that doesn't mean left-handed people are weird. They're just different, is all."

"But left-handed people don't need to find other left-handed people to fall in love with."

"Ahh … good point. Sorry, Luce, but you can't always get what you want. Everybody wants something different out of life, and you just gotta respect that, and … and look for someone who wants the same thing you do."

He stopped talking, and she didn't bother to start again. After a few minutes, they came to an open clearing with paved ground near the city's starport. Traders had set up stalls to sell stuff from across the galaxy.

"I got a message from a guy I know," her uncle said. "He said he's got a Pulpsen pump salvaged from a TX-58. Tonight, we'll head to the hangar and I'll show you how to install it. How's that sound?"

"Fine," Luci muttered.

"You want to come with me, or you want to look around?"

"I'll look around," she said.

They parted ways. Luci drifted through the crowded market. It was so tough seeing the stalls with all of these annoyingly-tall people in the way. But Luci was almost thirteen. Once she hit her growth spurt, she'd shoot up towards the stars and she wouldn't need to deal with this hassle anymore.

Any day now.

Aha! she thought. There we are!

She made a beeline for a stall selling anime stuff, fresh from Electric Heaven. Asilo wasn't rich enough to make its own shows, so most of the stuff they watched was imported from off-world. Anime was really popular, but Luci struggled to find stuff she was interested in. She didn't care about hot-blooded boys fighting everybody, and she didn't care about cute girls swooning over pretty boys.

Finding good anime is as rare as … as finding a date with a pretty girl! she thought.

Not that she had much choice, anyway. The stall had been picked clean already. There was barely anything, except a few stacks of manga sitting off to the side. She picked one up and gazed at the cover.

Cute girls, at least …

Huh?

A blurb went across the cover at an angle. She tilted her head to the side and read it, but there was one word, right before 'smash-hit sensation', she wasn't familiar with. Everybody on Asilo knew some Galactic Standard — they didn't subtitle stuff in Spanish, after all — but this word was new and exotic.

"Excuse me," she asked the merchant sitting behind the stall. "What does the word 'yuri' mean?"

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The starship eased itself down into the darkness. The scanner showed the space beneath them was clear, but they moved slowly anyway. Giving themselves time to react, in case something ugly popped into view on the camera feeds. Covered in cold sweat, Luci watched over Rsh's shoulder. Half of her wanted to stick with the slow, cautious pace. The other half want to just cut the thrusters and hurry to the bottom so they could stop dragging this agony out. No, scratch that. 99% of her wanted to fire the thrusters the get the hell out of here. The other two options were split between the remaining 1%.

"Three miles," Rsh announced, checking the scanner.

"How many miles deep is this thing?" she asked.

"Eighteen."

Luci muttered, "Oh, man."

"My apologies. Eighteen remaining. Twenty-one … in total."

Staring at the black camera feeds, Luci widened her eyes. Hoping a little bit of extra vision would let her catch something onscreen before it rammed them. That tiny little monitor was their only window to the underside of the ship. The space below their feet was a vast unknown, hidden by the solid deck. Starship construction suddenly seemed very strange to her — how come most ships had flight decks that looked up at the sky? Wasn't the space under their keep much more important? After all, that was the direction they'd fall if their engines failed. Why hadn't anybody ever thought of that before?!

Relax, she told herself. You're going stir-crazy, that's all.

Tilting her head back, she stared up at the disk of stars. So far away now. The crater swallowed them like a mouth. She could stretch her arms up to try and climb out, but the surface was so far out of reach now.

We're alone down here, she thought. Alone in the universe.

"What was that?!"

Philomena's sudden, loud shout sent shockwaves through the thick, tense, gloomy mood filling the flight deck. The waves tossed Luci about, made her heart pump, threw her into the world and demanded she start running for her life even though there was nowhere to go inside this sealed spaceship. Past the console, Philomena was bent over the pilot's seat, pointing at the camera feed on the HUD.

"I saw something!" she shouted.

Blaze replied, "I didn't see anything."

"Did you have your eyes open?!"

Lowering his voice into a gruff drawl, as if a cowboy accent would add more gravity to his words, he said, "You listen here, Philomena. I ain't seen nothing, and I had my eyes on the HUD the whole durn time."

When Philomena's jaw clenched, Luci wanted to reach out and caress it. Stroke her soft skin until she calmed down. Press her dark olive hands to that pink-white face, warm with live, and whisper that Luci'd always be there to help her relax. Support her. Soothe the stress out of her. And then she'd pucker her lips and lean in for a kiss, and Philomena would surrender to the heat of the moment, recognizing the strength of Luci's love …

It will never happen, Luci thought, with a pang in her heart.

"I have eyes like a falcon," Philomena snapped. "And I'm telling you— There it is again, see?!"

Something gray did fall past the lens. But it was so close it was out of focus, which meant it was very tiny.

"It is dust," Rsh said. "Dislodged by our engines."

The beautiful woman below twisted her upper body to look at him. A sneer twisted her lips up. They opened halfway, flapping around while she thought of a retort.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yes."

His guttural growl filled the flight deck, and she shied away from it. Instead of replying to Rsh, she turned back to the pilot's seat.

"Why didn't you just say it was dust?" she asked.

"I didn't see anything!"

Philomena's body motions got more aggravated and exaggerated. A tremor went through her, like she couldn't keep her arms still.

"Why didn't you see anything? Isn't that the pilot's job?"

Rolling his head to the right, away from Philomena, Blaze groaned out the starboard side of the canopy. The moment his eyes left the HUD, though, a nervous jolt went through her body. She snapped back, even though he hadn't made any threatening motions. Her elbows jerked into 90-degree angles, lifting her arms to waist-level and thrusting them out like she was trying to keep her balance. Her fingers curled down into claws, like she was desperate for something firm to grab hold of.

"Hey! Look where you're flying!"

"Ain't nothing down there, Philomena. You're just spooked, is all."

"And no more dumb cowboy accent either! From now on, you fly how I tell you to fly, and you stop when I tell you to stop, got it?"

"Let a man fly how he wants."

"I said, no more dumb—"

"SILENCE!"

Rsh's roar was so loud it boomed like thunder in the cramped flight deck. Being behind him, Luci just got a little startled and recovered quickly, but the humans below, who bore the brunt of his blast, both shivered with fright. Unfortunately, Blaze had his hands on the control yoke, and his terror was translated to the ship. It wobbled as his shaking hands pitched it violently.

"Ah, ah, ah!" Philomena yelped. She fell against the canopy again and grabbed one of the metal beams reinforcing it. "Corvo—!"

As Blaze tightened his hands on the yoke, he said, "Blame him!"

"Both of you, quiet," Rsh shouted.

Creases went down Philomena's neck, accentuating its slender shape, as she turned her gaze from Blaze to Rsh and back again.

Huffing, she said, "Don't blame me if something goes wrong."

"We've done been flying this here sturdy old bird since afore we even laid eyes on you."

Rsh's throat trilled wetly as another roar built up in his chest, and Luci braced herself for loud shout to pound her eardrums like a gong going off, while in her imagination she laid Philomena down and oiled up and massaged her back until all the stress and tension was kneaded out of her.

You will never find somebody to love, the darkness whispered to her. She breathed harder to fend off the weight crushing her chest, but it wore her down and tore her insides up.

"I don't need you looking over my shoulder," Blaze said, "telling me I don't know how to wrangle this here ship. We can spread our wings high and mighty just fine without your—"

Suddenly, the flight deck was plunged into darkness. The black fell over them like a shroud, burying them in the abyss. It wasn't totally dark; the dim emergency lights and the instrument panels were still online, and thankfully so were the engines. Blaze put an immediate stop to their descent. The hoverthrusters roared and rumbled the deck, reassuring Luci as much as they made her tremble. Blaze and Philomena craned their heads to look up at the unlit strips on the beams that reinforced the canopy, then looked over the console at Rsh.

"It's not my fault!" they said as one.

Then they glared daggers at each other.

You belong in the dark, a cruel voice teased Luci. It slithered right out of the near-total darkness like a snake and whispered right into her ear. You don't deserve to be in the light.

You're not good enough.

Cold sweat dripped down her face. Her hands shook at her sides. The darkness outside the canopy, it was all-consuming, it wanted to swallow them all up, but maybe that was for the best …

"It was Luci," Rsh said.

Although his voice had softened, it still made her flinch harder than if he'd bellowed right in her face.

"What?!" she asked, her face feeling like a swamp of sweat.

He was hunched over the keyboard, staring at the OS's event log on the monitor. "Earlier," he said, swiveling the bucket seat around to face her. "You turned the lights off."

She swallowed. "What about it?"

"When you turned them on … you set a timer."

Everybody was looking at her with disappointment in their eyes, even the redheaded goddess she desperately wanted to worship with her whole heart, and she couldn't deal with all their staring …

"Why don't I just throw myself out the airlock and stop being such a burden, huh?" she snapped. "Maldita sea."

"Rather extreme," Rsh said.

She was glad for the darkness now. It kept them from getting a good look at the waterfall of sweat streaming down her face. She swallowed a big lump in her throat, then shrugged in the darkness.

"Well, nobody's perfect, right? I mean, some people don't even like Rin Bakuko." Wryly, she asked, "Can you imagine that?"

Swiveling the chair around, Rsh pounded the mechanical keyboard and muttered something about humans under his breath. The flight deck's lights snapped back on. They seemed half as bright as before. She didn't know if that was true, or just her eyes playing tricks on her, but she did know she wasn't about to ask that Rin Bakuko-hater about it.

"We okay to keep going?" Blaze asked.

"I am," Philomena said. "I don't know about you."

The Rin Bakuko-hater said, "Yes. Perhaps it would be wiser if we … accelerated our descent. 'Take risks,' as our boss requested."

Philomena hummed merrily while she stood over the pilot's seat. However, Blaze got the last laugh when he trimmed the thrusters so much that the ship dipped violently, forcing Philomena to grab the pilot's seat before she got thrown off-balance.

Staring intently at the redhead below, Luci gripped the console tightly. The darkness outside the canopy whispered into her ear, You will never win her heart, ever.

"Four miles," Rsh announced.

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