Clo’s grin widened. It’d taken her ages to convince Kyla to let her go on a proper mission after Sher had dragged her back from Fortuna, traumatized and broken but alive. Sher had stayed with Clo as she healed from her wounds, comforted her when she woke up in the middle of the night with nightmares of fleeing Prince Damocles. It was Sher who lured her back to training, sweating out all her fear and anger and heartache.

When the worst of the grief had passed, Kyla had eased Clo back into work gently—surveillance, reconnaissance, the occasional tampering with a ship’s engine while planetside.

Six months before, Kyla had paired her with Eris for the first time. The other woman had been quiet and intense when she first came to Nova—a deprogrammed soldier from the front lines, Kyla said. She kept her head down, did her job, but didn’t offer up much in the way of herself or her past. That’d suited Clo well enough. She could get plenty sparkish herself when people pried too much into her background.

They’d found a good balance, the two of them. Clo could count on Eris not to do anything stupid that would get them killed. Quick with a blade, but didn’t like Mors guns. Kept to her silly anachronistic weapon, but Eris was sharp enough with it.

The others at Nova found Eris odd—the way she took everything in without blinking, how she kept to herself. How she spoke in curt orders. She wasn’t making friends, or at least not with anyone else.

The first few times, Clo had knocked on Eris’s door, holding up a bottle of moonshine from the mechanic’s quarters. They’d drunk in silence, mostly, watching the sunset over the golden sands of Nova. Each visit, each bottle, loosened a few more secrets. When the bottle was nearly empty, Eris once mentioned that the Empire had taken her siblings. Her whole family was nothing but a sacrifice. Clo had given the barest sketch of what happened to her in the slums. They’d clinked their glasses and killed the rest of the bottle. Let loose a few more details of the lives they’d left behind.

Clo would wake up with a sore head but the strange pride that Eris had chosen her. Before Clo quite realized it, Eris was her closest friend on that desert rock.

“Show me,” Clo said, gesturing to Eris’s tablet.

Eris settled beside Clo at her bare desk and tapped a few icons until she pulled up the mission particulars. “Challenging,” Eris murmured.

“My favorite,” they said at the same time, smiling at each other.

Kyla was going to drop them straight into enemy territory.