Please, Leo pleaded with his eyes. Just try. For me.

With a grunt of reluctance Gareth dropped to his knees and grabbed a fistful, finally getting his hands dirty. Dr. Fender smiled at his two sons. “That’s my boys.”

Leo looked up through the skinny branches of the fledgling tree, squinting against the starlight that warmed his cheeks, feeling for the first time in a while that things could be better.

He dared to hope. Just a little.

Leo gazed beyond the hangar into the darkness of space, which still seemed so empty despite all the ships engaged in their deadly dance. He stared and waited, each passing minute stretching that sliver of hope thinner and thinner.

They had been here before, he and Gareth. Huddled together, shallow breathed and anxious, waiting, hiding, incapable of doing anything else. Sitting and listening to the sounds of gunfire mixed with the wail of alarms, the shouts of humans and aliens alike weaving their way up and down corridors. Hearts thumping in double time, wondering what was on the other side of the door or waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp. If whatever it was would find a way in, overriding the controls, or maybe just blasting its way through. If whoever it was would be friend or foe.

If they’d even be able to tell the difference anymore.

Within the hangar, everything was eerily still, even as the battle continued to rage beyond it. Leo watched through the cockpit but saw no sign of Kat or Zennia or any of the soldiers accompanying them. No sign of the Djarik either. It was as if they had boarded a ghost ship. And yet every distant explosion caused Gareth to jump, pointing Kat’s pistol at the corridor that led to the boarding ramp.

“We should be out there, helping with the rescue,” he said, trying to sound brave, almost pulling it off. “He’s our father.”

“Kat told us to stay here.”

“Since when do you take orders from pirates?”

“Since you sent me away with them,” Leo countered. “Besides, you saw what Baz did back there, and he was a pirate.”

He was a lot of things.

Leo thought back to a moment, not that long ago, sitting at the Icarus’s mess table after having failed to rescue his father the first time. Just he and Baz, talking about all the memories they had of home, everything they’d loved and had to leave behind. We could go on like this forever, Baz had said. Won’t change a thing.

But that wasn’t true. You could change. Nothing was inevitable. People could change. From soldiers to pirates, from pirates to heroes. From enemies to allies or the other way around. You could build a weapon to destroy a world. You could build a device to save it. You could learn to survive with what you had. Learn to live with what you’d lost. You could fill the holes, stack the stones, patch the cracks. Things are only broken till you fix them. Even Baz knew that.