With a loud click, the ‘F’ at the top of the machine popped up, and the chemicals in her blood logged one more vote for the venerable Freedom Party.
The clamps loosened soon after, and Molly withdrew her finger. She pressed it into her shorts, which were already spotted on both sides with brown dollops of dried blood. The Callite bent down and smiled as he removed the reader from the case. He laid it on the counter, and then dropped an “I Voted” adhesive healing strip on top of it.
Molly grabbed the reader and shook the strip off onto the counter. The stupid things just made her hands more useless.
“Thanks for shoppi—”
“Flank off,” Molly grumbled. She dropped the reader into her shop-ping bag of assorted fruits and hardware parts and shooed the Wadi to her shoulder. She stalked away from the booth, kicking up plumes of dust with her flightboots as she went.
All around her buzzed yet another dry, dusty village she couldn’t wait to get out of. And as soon as she found Walter and finished her latest project on the ship, that’s exactly what they’d be doing. For the past two weeks, they’d traipsed halfway across her birth planet looking for an old acquaintance of her mother’s: a Callite that went by the name of Cat. The ephemeral alien possessed an uncanny blend of notoriety and elusiveness. Everyone knew her, had recently seen her, but wherever they gestured, Molly and Walter found only another trace of her passing—another nod and extended arm pointing them ever after the mysterious woman. But now Molly had a solid lead on Cat’s whereabouts, even though she loathed where it was taking her.
High above the small village, another Bern ship tore through Lok’s atmosphere, its passage marked with a loud rumble. Molly fought the urge to look up, to see which direction it was heading. Like the other ships, it no doubt came from her father’s old place, leaving the rift she had failed to close. Whatever Byrne had done, it had been enough. Or, if her mother’s guess was right, it wasn’t the old rift they were coming through at all, but rather the new one Byrne’s body had made when it was zapped out of existence. Molly wasn’t sure which scenario made her feel more guilty. Either she’d failed to stop him from opening the old rift, or her life had been saved by the same act that now threatened the rest of the galaxy. Either way, a door to a very bad place was currently open, and Byrne’s fleets were pouring through. Her feeble, bumbling efforts to stop him had come too late and proved too little.
Molly walked faster as the ship roared up into orbit, her cheeks burning with the memory of her failure. She concentrated on looking straight ahead, ignoring the complaints from the other market-goers. Even though none of them could possibly know of her involvement, the presence of the ships filled her with a paranoid dread, as if the annoyed crowds might suddenly realize the fault was hers and descend on her in the form of an angry mob.