"Ow," grumbled Skavak for the twentieth time as Ky daubed kolto on the stippled, blistered skin of the blaster burn along his ribs.

"Stop being such a baby," she scolded, trying hard not to let her fingers linger on his skin or pay attention to the fact he was undressed from the waist up. "I didn't want to take care of this in the first place, but Rook and Beryl had work to start after they doctored me."

He sat on the medical bed, arm held up so she could get to his injury. He gazed at the top of her head while she worked and fought the urge to run his fingers through the inky dark strands falling across her shoulders. It didn't help that she was wearing next to nothing, only her shirt with the blood-soaked sleeve rolled up over the dermaseal patch on her forearm. One button fastened between her breasts permitted the fabric to gape open when she moved, revealing the V where her long legs met and a midriff ripe for kissing.

He cleared his throat. "Fucking bounty hunters, way out here of all places. The question is, how did they know we were here?"

"Timing does seem a bit convenient," Ky's voice drifted up from under his arm. "Maybe they were here on another job and happened to recognize us? Maker knows both our faces are plastered all over the bounty networks. I hope Rook discovers something when he slices into that datapad I swiped."

"Yeah, maybe." He flinched when she hit another tender spot. "I'm a little offended that your bounty is higher than mine and I'm a bag and tag while they want you still breathing, although now I can almost see why."

"Could be you've been slipping of late in your bad-ass criminal ways, as for me, I'm nobody special."

"Uh-huh," he grunted.

"That should do it," Ky said and slapped the kolto tube into his palm. "You can take care of your own damned bruise."

He placed his hand on her shoulder as she turned away, feeling her muscles tense at his touch. "Back in the cantina. How did you do that?"

"Little something I picked up in the arena," she shrugged.

"No. It was more than that. You knew what they were going to do before they did it, and dodged shit that had you dead to rights. Who are you really, Ky?"

"Just another piece of space trash trying to find her way." She slipped from under his grasp, gathered her clothes and headed toward the exit.

Skavak stared at her retreating back. A mystery for sure, but, damn, I'd still like to bite that ass.

A little over twenty-three days they'd been traveling when they exited hyperspace at the coordinates Skavak had set. Two extra days for the Rommeth IV layover on top of the additional two days they'd spent skirting the Redoubt to avoid any confrontation with the Chiss. Xenophobic to the point of paranoia and deadly averse to incursions into their territory, the blue boys were not to be taken lightly.

Skavak had been uncharacteristically silent after the cantina dust-up, a welcome relief, but also made Ky wonder what he was up to. Dynamics change when two people fight side by side and lives are on the line—an unspoken bond, a hint of respect. She would catch him staring at her as if she were now a curiosity and not just a potential fuck buddy. It made her damned uncomfortable. At least the verbal sparring was openly combative; silence too often held hidden agendas.

She'd questioned Rook about the datapad the night before their arrival on the Eidolon's doorstep. The droid had found nothing except a narrow band broadcast received by Handsome's little group from an unknown origin. Five separate planets had been named as possible destinations for the bounty marks but leaned heavily toward Rommeth IV. He'd also found no tracker attached to the ship and detected no unexplained outgoing transmissions from the ship either. Perhaps it was just a coincidence after all, and Ky had bigger things on her plate.

"So that's it," stated Ky from the pilot's seat, "the big bad ghost in person."

Beryl's ship, The Happenstance, hung, unmoving just beyond the rim of the entry point. Even from this distance, something in there tripped tiny trigger wires in Ky's senses, sending alarms blaring along her nerves. A trace of radiation, tainted with a twisting wrongness, tickled the skin of the ship, the edge of her mind and she dreaded opening herself up to what lay ahead.

"We going in or not?" prodded Skavak.

"Don't get your knickers in a twist. I'm just getting a feel for the place," answered Ky. "You have no idea what's in there."

"And you do?" he scoffed.

"Yeah, I do, so shut up unless you've got something useful to say."

The Promena Nebula emitted a faint glow at the far reaches of the starboard side of the Eidolon; a spectral lantern of kaleidoscopic colors promising a way through. It lied.

Ky scanned the instruments, noting minuscule fluctuations in their readouts, and they hadn't even entered the Eidolon yet.

She sighed and settled back in the chair. "Ok, this is how it's going to play out. I need all proximity alarms disabled, Rook needs to go to his recharge alcove and shut down. Beryl, you got the stims, gauze and analgesic I asked for?"

"Right here."

"I need you and Skavak to buckle up and stay quiet. You're gonna see things that aren't there, not see things that I can, and I don't know what physical effects you're gonna feel. The instruments will be useless, but I've got all the information I need right up here." She thumped her temple with her index finger. "If you've got any questions, keep them to yourselves. From here on out, it's my show, or we turn back now."

She took their silence as the go ahead and engaged the thrusters, entering slowly to gauge the depth of this well they'd all jumped into with both feet.

Entry into the Eidolon was akin to slipping through oil, leaving a slick, suffocating residue on the surface of the ship. Radiation prickled along the shields and needled against Ky's mind. Without intent or a sense of purpose, it merely followed its nature and pried ceaselessly at the corners of perception and sanity. It had no agenda but to adhere to the laws of its creation, restrictions that Ky was not bound to follow. She was not born of nature, but of something perverted, and nature held no sway over what she was capable of.

Her mind blossomed into opening petals of calculations and factors, untouched by illusion or subtle tricks of improbability. She saw direction and distance as pure numbers fostered by the foundation of gleaned knowledge and driven by instinct. The path opened as clear as if it had been paved.

She engaged the sublights and pierced through asteroid fields that weren't there, slingshot around the coronas of suns that her eyes could not see, but her mind detected in the minute ripples of fission expanding like heat waves in the desert.

The passage of the Rubicon occurred at the narrow straights between the gravitational fields of two red giants. The ship screamed under the ripping pressure, and she gritted her teeth, having merged with the tiny vessel from the beginning. Her hands had melded with the steering yoke, and the engines hummed like blood through her veins. They were one, a single bolt aimed and loosed at a target only they perceived.

She flew through the center of a phantom white dwarf and left the magnetics of solar systems far behind before easing back to thrusters to hold her place at the edge of a cosmic dust cloud. The swirling mists of particulates parted before her probing mind. Further and further she searched until the other side appeared like a fence constructed of sparkling ribbons of silk.

"Shh," she hissed when Skavak's voice broke through the walls of separation she'd erected around the being she'd become. Her fingers flew over the nav computer, and she rammed the jump lever forward opening a hyperspace window and emerging on the other side of the cloud. The yellow sun of the solar system they sought lay clearly visible a few parsecs away.

"I could really use that stim now," mumbled Ky, struggling to fight off the aftermath of her excursion into bizarro-land. "And the analgesic before my head implodes."

"You're bleeding," said Skavak, grabbing the gauze from Beryl and wiping under Ky's nose and blotting at her chin.

"Goes with the territory," snuffled Ky and cringed as a spike of pain rammed through her skull when the stim hit her system.

Skavak grasped her chin and turned her face toward his. "You need to take a break."

"No time," she jerked her head away and regretted the brusque movement when another jab of agony rampaged through her aching head. "I need to get this bird on the ground before the stim wears off."

She smiled when Skavak growled something about 'damned stubborn woman' under his breath but threw it aside as unimportant to her mission.

"The mind-bending radiation is less in this sector, maybe filtered somehow by that dust cloud. Please tell me you can both see the planet," said Ky when she exited sublight and eased into a high orbit around the second world from the sun.

"Yeah," said Skavak. "We see it, so what now?"

"The gravity's all wrong here," observed Ky. "Can't you feel it?"

"I'd say you've got the corner on that market," answered Beryl.

"Maybe a polar shift? Magnetics off kilter? I don't know." Ky tilted her head and slammed her eyelids shut as if blocking out all visual stimulus would help. "It's like there are holes in the gravity well, voids where huge chunks of land have been torn loose and propelled upward, the debris held in whirling vortices. I've never felt anything like it, but one thing for sure, this planet is unstable as hell."

"Can you make a landing?" asked Skavak.

"I've picked up an echo of the looping transmission. I know where I have to go."

"I'll take that as a yes, then," said Skavak.

"I need one of you to volunteer to switch the coolant flow in the engine room since there wasn't time to set up any linkage connection to the console."

"I'll do it," offered Beryl. "Rook and I did most of the installation, and I know my ship."

"It's gonna get bumpy so find some way to secure yourself," warned Ky then turned her attention to Skavak. "I can't explain how I do what I do, so don't bother asking."

"Fair enough," he replied.

"All set," Beryl yelled from the engine room.

Ky gripped the steering yoke and left orbit taking the ship away from the planet for two light seconds. She turned the ship around and engaged the sublight for exactly one-point-two seconds entering the planet's exosphere at a twenty-eight-degree angle and rode the momentum, trying to outrun friction through the layers of atmosphere. She burned from the heat building around the shields, crackled in the flames as she followed the curvature of the planet and fought the buffeting of the winds created by magnetic storms and geothermal upbursts.

Data scrolled across her mind, she was sensor and receiver; instrumentation encased in flesh. At five-point-six kilometers from the surface, she yelled, "Now, Beryl," and engaged the repulsor drive. The ship creaked and bucked and groaned in protest as the drive found purchase against the surface gravity. She skirted around the gravitational voids and used the thrusters to finally bring the ship to rest in a sheltered valley atop a high plateau.

The harness dug into her collarbones as she slumped forward. Arms lifted her from the seat, her head lolled on a shoulder, warm and firm and comforting against her cheek. "Corso?" she murmured and knew no more.