Anyway, you aren’t here, and I seem to have to lose crap before I appre-ciate it. My parents, my reader, you, Glemot, Lucin … everything I really love gets snatched away. Or that’s what I used to think. Now I think the things that get snatched away are the only things I can truly love. Jeez … I hope that isn’t true. I hope neither’s true.
Well, i guess that’s my first entry. I think it sucks vacuum and I’ll probably delete the whole thing later and this keyboard is the worst. Anyway, we’re on the last leg to Bekkie, looking for an old friend of mom’s so we can get some kinda special fuel for the hyperdrive. So, I gotta go. And now I can’t stop typing, like I’m hanging up on you or something. This is definitely getting deleted.
I love you I love you I love you. Now be alive when I get there, ‘cause I’m
gonna kill you if you aren’t.
You know what i mean. -Molly
She looked over the entry and felt like a fool, every sentence clumsier than the one before. Holding down the function key with one finger—the pressure causing her pulse to throb up into her wrist—she hovered another finger over the “del all” button.
She stopped and wiped at her eyes. She powered the thing off, instead.
“Whatcha doing?” Walter asked.
Molly jumped, and the Wadi shot up to her shoulder, wrapping its tail around her neck and licking the air.
“Good gracious, Walter, don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“That wass my loud walk,” Walter said. “What’re you working on?”
“Oh, just writing some notes to myself.”
“Like a diary?” Walter peered over at her reader.
“No. And don’t you think of hacking into it. You’ve got enough gadgets to play with that you can leave mine alone.”
Molly knew it was pointless as soon as she said it. Keeping the little pirate out of anything electrical was like tugging against the pull of a black hole. He was gonna get in, and she probably just made it more tempting to tell him not to.
“How far are we from the next csity?” Walter asked. He crawled over the flight console and into the navigator’s seat. Cole’s seat.
“Not far. Another half-hour. See where it says ETA on the nav computer?”
Walter leaned forward and glanced at the dash. He nodded, and Molly told herself he probably didn’t need the lesson. The kid had recently done stuff with the ship’s missile systems that she didn’t think possible. He was worthless with a physical tool but a wiz with the digital sort. Then again, that may have just been due to laziness—
“There it iss!” he hissed, practically standing up in the nav seat.
Molly peered through the carboglass and saw it as well. Beyond the prairies and past a long stretch of dry dirt lay Bekkie. The town was nothing more than a wide and growing sprawl of hastily-built wooden structures, yet it was as cosmopolitan a city as Lok could boast. Which wasn’t saying much.