As the door shuts behind me, panic hits fast and hard to my gut. I take in a shuddery breath, resisting the urge to throw myself at the metal and pound on it until my hands bleed. It won’t help me. It didn’t help me last time I ended up locked away in a Gaian jail cell.

Despite all the shit I got into during my childhood on Gaia, I was pretty good at getting out of it, too, and I’ve only been locked up like this once before. I was barely seven, but age doesn’t matter when you’re an off-worlder caught with your hands in a rich man’s pockets. I was fairly confident the officers wouldn’t have the stomach to kill me, though, and there’s no easy way to ship an unwanted person off-planet. They would just throw me in a cell for a night, try to scare me. It worked, but not for the reasons they thought. It worked because that was the night we were supposed to leave.

My mother had finally saved enough money to gas up Fortuna and hire a skeleton crew to get us to Titan. She was to deliver what I later found out was a dozen crates of highly volatile Primus-tech grenades discovered on Gaia. But at the time, all I knew was that the ship was supposed to leave in six hours and I was locked up in jail. As I stared at that metal door, I was certain I would be forgotten on Gaia, and I would never see my mother or Corvus again—or Fortuna, or the stars I dreamed of every night. I screamed and hit the door for hours, and hours, and hours, until the skin on my knuckles split open and each punch left a bloody smear across the door. All the while, the guards laughed outside.

That same familiar terror sinks its claws into me now. I force myself to rest my forehead on the door instead of throwing myself at it, but my breath comes jaggedly, and that phantom laughter echoes in my ears.

“Momma won’t leave,” I tell myself. “She’ll find me. They’ll find me.”

But what if they don’t? What if they can’t? What if they don’t care enough to try? Momma’s already mad at me over the debacle of the landing, and soon she’ll have Corvus to replace me. Lyre will probably be happier with him in charge. The twins will miss me, but they’re too dumb and obedient to ever come looking for me themselves.

I think of last time, when I emerged crying and bloody-knuckled and terrified to find Corvus waiting. I think of the way he smiled when he saw me, one of his eyes blackened from a scuffle with a guard, and held his hand out.

“Let’s go home, Scorpia.”