“She knows Gaia best,” Momma says. The reasoning deflates my ego, but I’ll take what I can get. “Any other questions?” Lyre opens her mouth again but closes it. She presses her lips together and shakes her head. I smirk at her, and she pretends not to notice.

“Good,” Momma says. She reaches over to squeeze my shoulder, and when I meet her eyes, she holds them for a long moment before turning away. If not for the tightness of her grip, I would almost think this was a rare display of affection, but her eyes send a clear message: Don’t fuck this one up, Scorpia.

I watch as she leaves us to hop into the government-issued hovercraft without another glance back. Two moments later, the cruiser rises above the ground with a mechanical roar; one more, and it’s gone in a cloud of dust, zooming toward the gleaming Gaian capital city that’s barely visible on the horizon. I keep watching until the craft is only a speck in the distance, my gloved hands clenching at my sides. When I shake myself out of it, I find all three of my younger siblings staring at me. Right—I’m in charge now.

“Wish we had a nice cruiser like that,” I say.

“They didn’t even look at our cargo,” Lyre says, frowning.

“We’ve never been in Levian without Momma.” Pol taps his fingers on his blaster. “Are we gonna be okay?”

“Don’t be a baby,” Drom says, shoving her twin. He shoves back. I step between them, holding my hands up. With these two, a playful scuffle can all too easily turn into a bloody brawl.

“Hey, relax, we’re gonna be fine.” I force a smile, trying to ignore the pressure bearing down on me. We better be fine. “Leave the thinking to me, all right? I’m the one in charge.”

I don’t voice the real question that all of us, myself included, want to ask: What are we supposed to do if she doesn’t come back?

The clunker, as we refer to our four-yard-long, several-decades-old hovercraft, barely fits all our cargo, let alone any passengers. It also takes three tries to start and rises into the air with a loud and concerning whine from the engine. The flat, rusted vehicle hovers around my shoulder level, trembling like it’s considering giving out at any moment.

The struggling machine is hopelessly outdated, a big metal contraption that resembles a raft one might find floating on Nibiru’s waters. It has a bulky engine outfitted with solar panels on the back end, a steering wheel at the front, and little else in the way of utilities. The vehicle doesn’t even have a roof, leaving both cargo and passengers open to the wind and ever-present sun.

But at least it can fly. Probably.