“I’ll give it to you for two thousand.” On Gaia, that’s approximately what one would pay for an old, beat-up vehicle like my family’s clunker, a reasonably fine piece of art, or a hell of a lot of alcohol. On some of the other planets, it’s a small fortune. When Shey doesn’t respond, I lower my eyes to her. She’s staring at me with her lips pursed, all hints of possible flirtation gone, if I didn’t imagine them in the first place. “Fine. Eighteen hundred, because I like you.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Shey says, her expression unchanging. “I’ll give you one thousand for it.”

I let out a surprised laugh.

“Is that a joke?”

She says nothing.

“Okay, look, I know you don’t have much experience with this sort of thing, but surely you can appreciate the time and effort that go into an operation like this,” I say. “Not to mention the danger it puts me in. Do you know what I had to go through to get this thing off Deva?”

In truth: not much. Obtaining the plant cost me precisely one sandwich, handed to a local child who dug it up for me. The strangle-vines grew like weeds on the outskirts of his village, and its people had to hack them away once a week so the plants wouldn’t invade the fields and kill their crops. The most difficult part of the process was hiding the plant from my family. My mother immediately decided that the strangle-vines were useless, but I thought of Shey and her credits the moment I saw it.

“I will give you one thousand and no more.”

“Then I had to check on it five times a day on the journey,” I lie, continuing with my wheedling tale as if Shey hadn’t spoken. “It didn’t do well in the ship’s climate. Probably why one of them has never made it to Gaia alive. You hear what I’m saying? This is the very first, one and only, Gaian creep-crawler.” I point a finger at her for emphasis. Judging from her unimpressed expression, it’s considered a rude gesture in Gaian culture, but I’ve had enough of their many rules right now. “And you could take it home today.”

“Indeed,” Shey says. “For one thousand credits.”

“You know what, that reminds me, I didn’t even mention the trouble we ran into with Gaian customs! They boarded us, scoured the ship. I would’ve flushed the plant if I hadn’t known how much you’d love it.”

“One thousand.”

My still-pointing finger wilts, and I let the arm fall to the table with a thud.

“You’re supposed to barter, not just keep repeating the same number. Haven’t we been through this before?”