All in all, this life—despite the fact that they were rocketing toward an unknown but perilous fate involving some of the most ruthless criminals in the Known Universe—suited her better, she thought sadly, than court life had.

She thought back on all the daily rituals, every minute prescribed and proscribed to the point where they were all equally meaningless. It was odd how that former existence had faded from her mind, its vapidity paled by the immediacy of this ship, these people. Despite the unsettling nature of her situation, she woke in the mornings wondering what would happen, looking forward to whatever she would learn.

But even if they escaped the pirates, she could not have stayed. She had responsibilities as an heir. She halfway hoped that this all led to scandal, to her ousting. What would she do then? Surely Niko would let her stay. If that were the case, if it could be the case.

She had never thought of herself as ignorant. Not in a thousand years would something like that have occurred to her. After all, even before she could speak, she was being tutored, and that was a pattern continued throughout her life. Even nowadays when she was supposedly an adult, every day began with a briefing of Imperial affairs and the state of the universe as it touched upon her Empire.

Now she realized that she had spent most of her life in the same place. That hadn’t taught her that the world—the universe, really—was much larger than she had ever dreamed.

She wished she’d had a chance to see the space station before everything blew up. Back in the palace, there were very few nonhumans—and here it seemed they were the rule rather than the exception. The captain and the others spoke of things she had never heard, places she’d never been, customs that seemed strange.

She said to Dabry as he sorted through microgreens finally on the edge of readiness, rinsing them in a tank-shaped sink the ship had constructed, “Captain Niko used to be a Free Trader? What are those?”

“Being planet bound, you probably wouldn’t have encountered any,” he said. “Most of them spend their lives in space and never touch earth.”

“They trade, I assume?”

He laughed. A citrus smell sifted up from the bowl as greens accumulated in it. He proffered a sprig to her. “Yes. Anything and everything, carried from one point in space to another. If you want to find something odd, chances are they’ll be able to come up with it.”

She took the green sliver and crunched it between her teeth, savoring the sharp taste. “Are they all human?”

“No. They’re a family of choice rather than birth. Some—like Niko—are raised to it, but most people come to it later in life. They find that they don’t fit elsewhere and they go to the Traders.”