On the next landing pad, Elva battled her own engine. Like Clo, she worked alone—but unlike Clo, it wasn’t by choice. Elva’s skin was stippled with swirls that branded her as different from Clo or the other Tholosians at Nova. The markings fell down Elva’s neck like stripes and curled around her collarbones. She had told Clo that the pattern followed the lines of cell development in the skin.

Clo had become very familiar with those dappled marks one night in her bunk. Their intimacy hadn’t repeated itself, instead giving way to an easy friendship. One mechanic to another.

Elva was one of the few Evoli in the resistance. Her people had been at war with the Tholosians for over five hundred years, the two empires competing for resources across their separate galaxies as their populations expanded. With the Tholosian resource-rich planet Charon experiencing a mass die-off as a result of an asteroid strike, the Empire’s food stores were strained to support all their citizens. They were desperate to conquer the farming planets owned by the Evoli.

Elva’s knowledge was vital to the resistance; the Evoli tech she wove into the machines made them sing. Though the Tholosians at Nova had been deprogrammed of the Oracle’s influence, superstition ran deep, and some still whispered that the Evoli were majoi, especially their leaders, the Oversouls. Sorcerers that knew your every thought and emotion. They claimed no secret was safe. That they’d eat children, sucking the marrow from their bones.

Elva didn’t even eat meat.

“Elva!” Clo called. “Can I borrow your welder? Mine’s sunk!”

The woman nodded, crossing over to pass it to Clo. The sun highlighted the darker dapples in her red-gold hair, throwing her features into sharp relief. They were a pretty people, the Evoli. Taller, almost ethereal, even when covered in engine grease. Unfair.

“You need a hand?” Elva asked, her Evoli accent soft.

“Nah, I got it. Just need to threaten her a bit more.”

Elva flashed a grin and loped back to her work.

Clo reconnected the wires, even though she’d already done it three times this morning. Maybe if she tied them up extra tight. Her fingertips were callused and nicked with scars from endless hours in machines. Clo climbed out of the engine and swung herself into the cockpit, grunting as too much weight hit her bad leg. She had a hole in the left knee of her trousers—Kyla would be right brackish when she saw it—and the dull silver of her prosthetic caught the artificial lights. She rubbed the part where skin met metal. She could never tell how much pain was physical and how much mental.