“You were born on Lok, weren’t you? How old were you when your pops took off?”

“Six. And yeah, I was born here. Almost on the other side of the planet, though.”

“Yeah, I know the place. Hell, maybe you were too young to remember, but Lok is a crazy place. There’s shit in the water.”

Molly looked over her shoulder at the receding pool of light by the dumpster. She spit to the side, the taste of the water from the hose already nasty with the hint of someone else’s blood.

Cat laughed. “Little late for that. Besides, it takes a lot before some-thing goes wrong. And the city probably treats their shit.”

“You cuss an awful lot,” Molly pointed out.

“Yeah, well I fell in with some Drenards and I’ve been to hyperspace. Kinda narrows the expletive vocab, you know? Gotta go with the archaic shh— stuff.” Cat cupped her hands around her mouth. “Little man,” she hissed. “Next left.”

“You’ve been to hyperspace?” Molly felt her heart skip a beat; she hurried up beside Cat. “I—that’s why I came to find you. I need to get there myself.”

“What? Why’d you wanna go there? That place’ll give you one helluva migraine.”

Molly wasn’t sure what her mom wanted her divulging, but she felt like she was already erring on the side of un-caution just by being near the alien.

“My dad’s there,” she said. “Maybe a friend of mine as well.”

“Mortimor? What in the galaxy’s he doing there? Thought he slunk back to Earth years ago.”

Molly shook her head. “I don’t know.” She followed as Cat turned down another side-alley. “I’ve been told we need some special fuel.”

Cat laughed. “Yeah. That, and a hyperdrive that don’t exist. Speaking of which, you wanted to know what was in the water?”

“I have the hyperdrive, I think.”

“What?” Cat pulled Molly to a stop, right in the middle of the narrow side-alley. Molly looked to the side and saw Walter’s diminutive silhouette framed by another well-lit and busy street.

“You have the hyperdrive?”

“The hyperdrive?” Molly repeated. “I don’t even know what that means. But according to this Byrne guy, I think I opened the hole above Palan that my mom escaped from.”

“Your mom? Parsona? Ain’t she a little . . . dead?”

“The ship,” Molly said, realizing it would be easier to introduce them than explain it.