“That’s because they’re only half as tall as you.”

“Joke all you want,” Boo said, “but ever since I was banished from Quel, I’ve been looking for something. I thought that by traveling with Bastian I might find it. Every planet, every port, I would ask myself, Is it here? Is this the place? But the answer was always no. Eventually I got used to being on the move. Bastian, Kat, Skits—they became my family. But this place is making me wonder. Maybe there’s something else I’m meant to do.”

“Lifting rocks?” Leo said incredulously.

Boo shrugged. “There are worse things. Piracy is not exactly a profession to be proud of.”

Leo couldn’t argue with that, but he also didn’t like where this was going. “I mean, sure. I get it. But you can’t actually stay here. Not now. Not with everything that’s going on.” He turned so that he could look the Queleti in the eyes. “What would Baz say? He needs you. We need you.”

I need you, Leo thought. I need all the help I can get.

Boo poked one of his fingers through the singed hole in his Yunkai, another reminder of a laser blast that had nearly sent him plummeting off a bridge to his death. “I can’t go home, Leo. My clan will never take me back. Which means I’ll have to find a new one. We all have to stop running eventually.”

Leo kicked at the dust and thought back to what Baz had said in that cantina on Vestra. Something about owning some ramshackle oasis of his own, somewhere to quietly spend the rest of his days. He remembered Kat mocking the captain, telling him it was impossible. That even if the universe would let him, Baz could never settle down. Clearly Boo felt otherwise.

“It’s just so quiet here,” he said, shutting his eyes and tilting his furry face to the breeze. “I see now why Crayt chose this place.”

Leo nudged him with an elbow. “All right. How about this: you help me save the Earth and get my family back, and after that you can come back here and stack all the rocks you want. Deal?”

Boo seemed to consider it for a moment. Then he stood up and offered Leo a hand.

“Let’s just finish what we started,” he said.

When the sky growls, it’s time to come home.

—Orin proverb

Any Port in a Storm

LEO HAD NO IDEA HOW MUCH LONGER THEY WORKED. At some point his watch started fritzing again, cycling through programs, randomly shutting off or rebooting, showing him the time in London and Tokyo and Meridian Bay on Mars. According to the solar cycle of the rapidly spinning Celeron Seven, they’d been building this cistern for forty-seven days; in Tardusian time, they’d been at it for three and a half seconds. Leo could tell by the horizon of this planet, however, that it was getting late. The air had cooled considerably, making him wish he’d brought Kat’s jacket.