Page 48 of Rogue Starfighter

“Everything I tell you is true.”

She laughed softly. “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone. We have time.” I should have refused.

“I named the Wraith,” I said.

Priya lowered her hands. “She didn’t have a name?”

“A hull designation. After Tavik died, I requested permanent assignment and changed it.”

“Why Wraith?”

“Because I intended to become one. No partner. No attachment. Nothing the enemy could use against me.”

“How’d that work out?”

I looked at the woman sitting beneath my thermal layer with her leg pressed against mine. “Poorly.”

“Good.”

“You are pleased to have destroyed a six-year operational strategy?”

“It was a bad strategy.”

“It kept me alive.”

“It kept you breathing.”

She knew the difference. Now, with her here, I did as well.

“Your turn,” I said.

Priya watched the planet on the display. “My mom used to leave me alone overnight when I was a kid. Sometimes longer. She had problems. I learned early that needing people was a great way to get hurt.”

Anger moved through me, immediate and useless. “How old were you?”

“Old enough to make cereal. Too young to be alone.”

“Where was your father?”

“Not there.” She said it without drama. A fact she had lived with for a very long time.

“I became the dependable one,” she continued. “Good grades. Good job. Calm voice. Forty airplanes could depend on me at once, and I didn’t have to depend on anybody. I thought I’d beaten the system.”

“Then you met Gina and Alisha.”

“They’re persistent.”

“Like you.”

“Exactly. And then I built a hot alien out of a character menu, in a game which was, apparently, the galaxy’s cry for help.”

Her hand rested on the console between us. I laced our fingers together, grateful when she did not pull away. The contact was simple. No desperate kiss. No sexual challenge. Just her cold fingers warming in mine while an enemy world filled half the sky. I had once believed needing another scout was a weakness. Tavik had taught me otherwise. Losing him had made me forget. Priya squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.

“We've got everything we need,” she said. “Let's get out of here.”

“Take us home.”

She brought the Wraith to the edge of the moon’s shadow and aligned us with the transit corridor command had marked as a blind route. We had what we came for. No one on Xandrax knew we had been there.