Chapter 1
Zeke
This woman, Meeka Tanners, always smells like rain water, rocket fuel, and something sweet that always lingered long after the other two faded. Brown hair cut to the perfect length, perfect makeup that didn’t match the stained mechanic jumpsuit she was always sporting when she made her way to my ship, touching the controls I had set to my optimal standards.
She bent over the center console, right in front of me, slowly. She always moved so slow. She brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“Zeke, you should really consider a career change.”
“Should I? To what?”
“Just spitballing here, but maybe mechanic?” She flipped through radio channels until she found something that made her hips rock in a way I couldn’t look away from.
“Mechanic? You mean with you?”
She looked back at me over her shoulder. “That could be a benefit, yes.”
“You’d be asking me to give up my autonomy, my freedom.”
She pulled a lever, the lights went low. She rose, slowly of course, and made her way toward me.
“What’re you up to?”
I heard the sound of her zipper, then the sound of clothes against the floor. Before I could react she was straddling me. Her warmth bloomed across my lap. “It’s our third date isn’t it?”
“Have these been dates? I—”
Her mouth engulfed mine, her tongue greedily seeking mine. It felt so fucking good. She felt so fucking good. I pressed my right hand firm into her back, she moaned softly into my mouth. My mind sputtered as blood rushed. Three kisses. Same reaction each time. She broke the kiss, lifted her hips. Her hands found me through my jeans.
“You know, I could ride you like those primitives used to ride those mechanical bulls. Remember, from the archives?” She rolled her hips when she said it. The pink of her underwear darkening as she moved.
Oh my damn.
I nodded. I couldn’t find any words. I couldn’t take my eyes off that wet spot. I knew what was underneath. I wanted it. So bad I was in physical pain. I tossed my head back, squeezed my eyes shut. Recalled the words of my dad.
You’ll know when you know.
Fuck you dad. I know okay?! I know I want to fuck Meeka. I want to put her through this spaceship floor.
I looked up at her, hips rolling against my erection, the dark spot spreading. Her hand on my chest for stabilization.
Just one taste, just one!
Every nerve ending, every pounding inch of blood pressure, every thread of biological wiring that evolution spent millennia perfecting—all of it, screaming yes.
But there was nothing behind it.
No spark. No jolt of something deeper than heat. No moment where the world narrowed to just her and I could feel the gears of the universe click into place the way Dad described it. That night at the casino when Mom walked in wearing a dress she’d borrowed from a friend and he forgot how to count chips.
I saw her and the whole station went quiet, Zeke. Like someone turned the volume down on everything except her.
I’ve been waiting for the volume to go down my entire life. With Meeka it stays the same. Loud, chaotic, full of static.
Not with someone I don’t love. She doesn’t deserve that. To be used.
I mustered all the strength I could, fought my every instinct and pushed her away.
“Zeke? Don’t do this.”
My hands were on her hips, forcing her away, holding her away. “I can’t Meeka. I just don’t feel a spark.”
“You what?! I can feel the spark! I was just grinding on the spark. If you give me two more minutes I’ll show you stars.”
Stars?! Jesus...no, no.
“I can’t Meeka.”
She stopped resisting. Climbed off of me. Snatched her suit from the floor.
“This is so fucking annoying. Do you know what I’m offering you? Do you know how many men are courting me? How many suitors I rejected for you?”
I didn’t know. I knew she was beautiful, sexy, intelligent — and funny, genuinely funny, the kind that doesn’t try. She could make me laugh mid-sentence without breaking stride. I didn’t know why she liked me. Why she visited my ship every other day. Or how we’d gone from drinking buddies to dry humping, to whatever the fuck just happened.
“I didn’t make you do those things Meeka.”
“That’s not the point. You know what they say about you right? What they call you?”
Of course I know.
“They call you ‘the man with impossible standards.’”
Yup that’s me. Apparently.
Give me a fucking break. My only standard is I want to find love. The kind my dad found with my mom. The kind where I see a girl from across the room in a dress that doesn’t belong to her and the world goes quiet.
I’ve never wanted to have sex with a woman more than I want Meeka in my life. Through the fucking floor. But the world doesn’t get quiet when I see her. Time doesn’t stop. My breath doesn’t catch. As much as I want her, I know I’d spend the rest of our lives thinking,
Is she the one.
“Yeah, I’ve heard.”
“It’s insulting Zeke. Not to brag but, I’m pretty awesome. Head mechanic at Jericho Industries, never married, no kids, and I’m an absolutely mind-blowing fuck. Also not a brag, a review.”
Fuuuuuck!
“Meeka—”
“Save it Zeke.” The anger in her voice almost masked the other feeling I heard. Disappointment. Something I was so used to hearing and seeing from women I could pick it up even when I didn’t want to, and right now I really didn’t want to.
She got dressed in silence. I decided not to watch, it felt wrong after what went down. She left without another word, without another look.
The door hissed shut behind her.
Dammit!
I banged my hand against the chair. The sweet fragrance she always left behind was sticking to me stronger than usual. The thought to chase after her, to apologize, to give her what we both wanted nearly won out. A phone call from Pops kept me in my seat.
―――
I answered the call trying not to sound frustrated.
“Wassup dad?”
He gave me his usual toothy smile. He still had the gap between his front teeth that he refused to fix because Mom said it made him look unique. The truth: Dad was a shameless flirt and the gap made it so women didn’t take him seriously. A secret Mom had let slip seven years ago at a Christmas party after Dad had fallen asleep. Behind him I could see the kitchen of the apartment he and Mom had shared for thirty years. Same apartment. Same station. Same woman. He’d never needed anything else and he’d never understood why I couldn’t find the same thing.
“Ah you know, just checking in? How’re things?”
I looked down at my still throbbing erection.
“Same old same old.”
“Business still booming?”
I looked back at my inventory. Or lack thereof.
“Gangbusters pop, gangbusters.”
“That’s my boy. So uh, you find a woman yet? Or man, I don’t judge.”
Three questions and now we get down to the truth of it.
“Still on the hunt pop. I thought I found the one. Like she made my love solid.”
Dad laughed in that way he always did. Like an old cartoon villain. More of a cackle than a laugh. “Solid? Boy you crack me up. Just say she made you horny. Why try to be poetic?”
“Fuck you pop. I’m just trying to have what you and Mom have. I still wait for the volume to turn down. For it all to go quiet when I see her. Like you said it did for you.”
Dad cleared his throat. “Well you know son, what me and your mom have is special. Once in a millennium type stuff.”
“So I should just give up? Just settle?”
“You’re thirty-five son.”
“So? Mom was forty when she had me.”
“Well hell, you got me there.” He leaned back in his chair, rubbed a hand across his jaw the way he always did when I’d cornered him. “Maybe the problem isn’t your standards, son. Maybe it’s the zip code.”
“I just feel like there’s no girl on this planet for me, pop.”
“Well fuck son, search somewhere else.” He said it like he was ordering lunch. Like it was the simplest thing in the world. “Anyway, I gotta go, your mom’s in the kitchen again. Don’t touch that woman!”
The call disconnected.
I sat in the pilot’s seat and stared at the dark between the stars and wondered if my father was a liar or if I was just broken.
Neither answer was comforting.
―――
I don’t remember dozing off. I remember drinking, a lot. Singing off-key to heartbreak music, shouting Meeka’s name from the side of the ship like that would fix anything. Then nothing. I woke up with a headache from hell. Stumbled into the bathroom, splashed some water on my face and tripped on my way out. The floor was cool so I lay there a while, one cheek pressed against the metal, thinking about absolutely nothing because my brain had filed for divorce from the rest of my body.
A chime from my delivery system forced me to my feet.
One new message.
Thanks for taking this delivery. I’ve tried literally every other service and no one would touch it. Can’t say I blame them. Sector 7, yikes. The war between the Yanak Federation and the Ishtar Alliance is next door. I told my aunt moving there was stupid. Anyway, I’m willing to pay whatever but only upon delivery. And this is time sensitive. One month. Sounds like a lot but trust me it’s not. Good luck. Hope you don’t need it.
The fuck? I’m not going to Sector 7. Is this spam?
I scrolled through my job listings and froze when I saw the big red check indicating I’d taken the job. A binding contract. I wouldn’t be able to accept any other work unless the client canceled or I completed the job, or failed.
Shit.
Drunk Zeke had signed me up for a suicide run. Drunk Zeke, who apparently had the decision-making skills of a concussed toddler, had committed sober Zeke to flying through a warzone for a client who couldn’t even get a real shipping company to take the job.
I began typing a response to the client. No way was I risking my life for some random package.
But my fingers hovered over the keys.
Dad said search somewhere else. Out there, nobody knew my name. Nobody looked at me with pity shifting behind their eyes. Nobody called me anything at all.
...fuck it.
I opened the job details. The package was in Sector 4. No problem. One jump away. Relatively safe. Just to be sure I checked the intergalactic network. No recent reports of hostile activity in Sector 4.
Amazing. The first good news in days.
What am I even picking up?
A kreen.
There was a picture included. A small humanoid type thing with wings. Old texts would have called it a fairy.
Female. Wings intact.
The fuck? Am I supposed to catch one? Are these things even real?
I recalled the details from the customer’s note. One month to deliver.
Because it’s a fucking capture quest.
I closed the job listing, leaned back in my chair, and pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes until I saw stars. Not the kind Meeka promised. The kind that mean you’re making a terrible decision and your body is trying to warn you.
I ignored it. That’s what I do. I wait for a feeling that never comes and I ignore every warning that does.
I fired up the engines, plotted a course for Sector 4, and flew toward the worst decision of my life.
Or the best one. But I wouldn’t know that for a while.
―――
Sector 4 was a bust.
Three days on a backwater moon, trudging through marsh that smelled like sulfur and regret, chasing sensor pings that turned out to be birds. Alien birds. Loud, ugly, aggressive alien birds that had no wings, no humanoid features, and absolutely no resemblance to a kreen.
I did find a local trader who laughed when I showed him the picture.
“Kreen? Here?” He wiped his eyes. “Kreen haven’t been spotted in the inner sectors in decades. You’d have to go further out. Way further. Past the Yanak border, past the dead zone. There are uncharted worlds out there. Surveyed decades ago, marked as empty, forgotten. That’s where wild things still live.”
“Past the Yanak border,” I repeated. “As in, through the war.”
“Why do you think nobody else took the job?”
I should have turned around. Filed for contract abandonment, eaten the penalty, gone back to my life of quiet humiliation in a sector where at least the birds didn’t try to bite me.
I pointed my ship toward the black instead.
Two days out, the stars thinned. A week out, they were scarce. The Yanak border was a wall of sensor noise and warning beacons that screamed in three languages to turn back. I threaded through a gap in their patrol routes that cost me two sleepless nights to calculate, and by the time I cleared the dead zone on the other side, I’d been flying for twelve days and my ship was running on stubbornness and fumes.
But the sensors were pinging.
Something was out here. On a planet that shouldn’t be on any chart.
It was green. Aggressively green, even from orbit, like the whole surface was alive and breathing. No outposts, no stations, no signal traffic. The database flagged it as uninhabited. Surveyed decades ago, marked as devoid of intelligent life, and forgotten.
The sensors said otherwise. The sensors said there was something down there with a bio-signature that matched the kreen profile.
I started my descent.
That’s when something went wrong.
The nav system glitched first. A flicker, then a cascade of errors I’d never seen before. I was running diagnostics when the port engine coughed, sputtered, and died. The ship lurched hard to the left and I grabbed the yoke with both hands.
“No no no—”
The starboard engine followed. Two dead engines and a navigation system feeding me coordinates in a language I didn’t recognize. The ship dropped out of controlled descent and gravity took over.
I aimed for the least dense patch of canopy and prayed to whoever built the inertial dampeners that they did their job right.
They did their job mostly right.
The crash was violence. Metal screaming, trees exploding, the harness cutting into my chest as the ship tore a scar through the forest floor. Something cracked—the hull or my ribs, I couldn’t tell. The world spun, flashed white, went dark, and then settled into a ringing silence.
I was alive.
I knew this because everything hurt.
I unbuckled the harness with shaking hands, crawled through the crumpled cockpit, and shoved the emergency exit until it groaned open. Air hit my face—warm, wet, thick with something floral that had no business smelling that good on a planet nobody cared about.
The ship was done. I didn’t need to be an engineer to know that. Meeka would’ve known exactly what was salvageable, what could be patched, what was gone forever. But Meeka wasn’t here. Nobody was here. That was the whole point of a planet marked as uninhabited.
I stumbled forward, away from the wreck, and my boots sank into soil so soft it felt like the ground was swallowing me gently. The canopy above was dense enough to filter the sunlight into green-gold shafts. Everything was alive—vines climbing, insects humming, the rustle of things I couldn’t see moving through the underbrush.
Beautiful. Lush. The kind of place that makes you forget you just almost died.
Then I saw her.
She was standing thirty feet away, between two trees with bark the color of rust. Still as a statue. Watching me with eyes that looked like someone poured the galaxy into them—deep, swirling, lit from within by stars that shouldn’t exist inside a person.
Pink skin. Not blush pink. Not sunburn pink. Pink like it was the color she was always meant to be, smooth and catching the filtered light in a way that made her glow. Two long antenna rose from her hairline, curving gently backward, twitching almost imperceptibly. Cotton candy blue hair fell to her mid-back, tangled in places, wild in a way that said she’d stopped caring about it a long time ago.
She wore some kind of combat uniform. It might’ve been sharp once—structured, military. Now it was torn in places, patched in others, held together by improvisation and stubbornness. Through the gaps I could see scars. Deep ones. The kind you earn, not the kind you survive by accident.
Her body was toned. Tight. The body of someone who fights to stay alive every single day. But there was a softness to it too, in the curve of her hips, in the way her shoulders sloped when she wasn’t squaring them, and she wasn’t squaring them right now because she wasn’t threatened by me.
She was curious. Maybe disgusted.
My throat bobbed. My skin went hot.
Something in my chest did a thing it had never done before. Not with Meeka. Not with anyone. Not in thirty-five years of waiting and wanting and wondering if I was broken.
The volume went down.
The whole universe went quiet—the hissing wreck behind me, the insects, the wind through the canopy, all of it—until the only sound left was my own heartbeat hammering against my ribs like it was trying to break free and crawl to her.
Oh no.
Oh no no no.
Her face twisted. Her antenna flattened against her skull. She looked at me the way you’d look at something stuck to the bottom of your boot.
Then she spoke. No—she didn’t speak. Her mouth didn’t move. But I heard her, clear as my own thoughts, sharp as glass pressed against the inside of my skull.
“...what are you?”
And I had no idea how to answer, because I was thirty-five years old and I’d just fallen in love for the first time, and she was looking at me like I was the worst thing that had ever crashed into her life.
Dad was right.
You know when you know.
