Lan blinked.

“Markus?”

Markus rolled his eyes and mumbled something else.

“What did you say?”

“I said fuck this!”

“Markus!” Aunty Floresta said. “You are talking to the captain.”

“Captain? Of what? Captain of shitty donuts? We should be helping the Empire!” Markus picked up his coat and walked toward the elevator.

Suddenly, Markus could not move. His entire body was swaddled within a green glow. He struggled, but the glow intensified until he was lifted into the air.

“Markus, that is your captain. And your mother,” Aunty Floresta said.

“Markus, I know it’s difficult to understand, but the Empire is falling to the Endplague. It’s far too dangerous to cont—”

“Then why the fuck are we building a stargate, anyway? What are we even doing here?” He was sobbing as his body went numb.

The glow slowly disappeared, as did Markus’s now-sleeping form.

“I transported him to his bed,” Aunty Floresta said. “In the morning, he’ll think this night was a dream.”

The boy was still a boy, but he was quickly maturing. Even his normal adolescent outbursts would be difficult to control. But if this developed into the Endplague …

As if Lanny didn’t have enough to worry about.

Why are we building a stargate? Floresta herself wondered that from time to time. Officially, they were building it for the gamma ray burst, but since they were safe and far from the Empire, was it really necessary anymore?

However, Lanny was the captain, and the captain did not have to explain all of her decisions. And the girl might make her mistakes, but Floresta was certain of this: everything Lan Tran did was for the family.

Since Markus was asleep, Lan put on her apron and went upstairs to take over his shift. She relieved Shirley and Edwin, who were helping the few customers that were there.

She looked out the window, into the sky. She remembered times like this on the starship, when everything was seemingly peaceful.

Yet, for the captain of a starship, or a donut shop, there was always research to do, courses to chart, crew reports to read. Even the smallest discrepancies needed to be located, then remedied before they became serious problems.

Lan Tran remembered how the store was with the Thamavuongs. On warm summer nights, people from the neighborhood would queue into the parking lot for yeast donuts, cake donuts, bear claws, their special Mexican chocolate crullers, and good old-fashioned sour creams.

The Thamavuongs had told her she might sell out early on Saturday, and when that happened, she should make second and third batches, because a heavy crowd on Saturday always meant Sunday would be busy, too. The Thamavuongs had told her that the reason people kept coming back to the Big Donut was that the taste was welcoming and familiar.

Lan had thought that one could not get more familiar than exact copies from a replicator. The sprinkled donuts were identical down to the last sprinkle.