She tore down the westward corridor at full speed, imagining what the wind might feel like in her face, a sensation few had ever experienced. The atmosphere wouldn’t allow it.

Even with its harsh climate Vask was at least a place where she’d been able to find work, which was more than she could say for the other worlds that orbited the dwarf star Pangema. Her family had fled Scella after civil war had erupted to determine control of the tiny, cold planet’s limited resources, notably destroying most of them in the process. Her father was in the government and had been able to secure extrication for her mother, herself, and her younger brother, Aeshua. They were transferred to Drev, a large aqueous moon orbiting one of Pangema’s fat gas giants, where they waited for her father. He never made it off Scella.

Their accounts were supposed to have been transferred to them on Drev, but it didn’t happen. Back on Scella, a new government was formed, and its members stole from those who’d been part of the old government. Their mother managed to talk her way into one of the few jobs in Drev’s recycler network while Naecia cared for Aeshua. Still, there wasn’t enough to live on.

Before they’d fled Scella, her father made her promise to step into his shoes if something happened to him, to make it her responsibility to care for the family. At the time, she’d considered it just one of those things parents say to distract their children from the trauma of separation – to redirect their energy toward a long term task. Looking back, Naecia recognized that he knew he wasn’t going to make it off the planet. She wished she’d understood that then. She might have made a point to remember his face. It was forgotten now. A sick irony as she had easy recall of so much that she’d never experienced at all.

Naecia had affixed her name to every job posting that she could and one day it was called. Pipefitter. Off planet. Along with droves of others, she accepted the post and emigrated to the seared badlands of Vask to work energy generation, hoping to make enough to send back to support her family. She hadn’t brought much with her on account of the cost of extra mass – just some clothes and the toy amulet Aeshua had forced her to take. At the time she’d wanted him to keep it. Now she was glad he’d gotten his way.

Fitting pipes together, how hard could that be? she remembered thinking. That was one severed finger – the middle digit on her left hand – and three shirt sizes ago. The work was grueling, but for some reason her body had taken to it. She’d added muscle like a rutting brymlack on a torpgrub diet.

A yellow alert flashed in the base of her starshield. A valve error at the southwestern corner of her territory – literally the farthest possible point from her current location. “Define the error,” she said.