Save The Darkness

She blinked, looked around sighed. Surrounded by smoke, by the life she was in, and of course, with Kienan. Yes, she thought. This is where I came in, isn't it?

She thought about Merrin's wife. For the past year and a half she had been Kienan's partner on dozens of missions. Mission of murder, sabotage, and outright terrorism. But they had all been the bad people--corrupt colonial governors, agents of rival crime syndicates--the sort of people who deserved to die.

And then she had seen Merrin killed just for speaking a belief counter to the wishes of the syndicate they worked for and every boundary and justification she had made in her mind had been annihilated like a house in the path of a tornado.

She looked at him and watched him sleep. Sometimes she had reached out in the night to touch him and felt the tension in his muscles. He slept like a hunting animal--always ready to leap out and strike if disturbed. Even in her arms, it seemed like he could never let go, like he could never find the peace she was offering him.

She stubbed out her cigarette and slid quietly out of bed, dressing in some of Kienan's cast-off clothes. As she left, she caught a glance of herself in the mirror. She looked at herself and glowered, running a finger through her hair, dyed from it's darker brown to look more like Kienan's. Her blue-green eyes shining back at her from the mirror held a question she had asked herself ever since the day Kienan had slain Merrin.

She quietly opened the door and exited the quarters. They had just bought this ship three months ago. The Silhouette, as Kienan had named it (after her, she remembered him telling her) was an older freighter, but one that she, Kienan, and their partner had been steadily working on bringing up to date. They still had a lot of work ahead of them, she mused as she walked along the corridor to the bridge. The ship's gravity fluctuated at the ship's maximum speed, and therefore you had to walk very carefully, lest one take a step the wrong way and float up to the ceiling and crack one's head open.

She walked to the bridge. Behind the controls sat a man clad in blue and white clothing, his dark-brown skin seeming more and more like a shadow in the spare light of the bridge. Another thing they'd have to work on, Silhouette thought. This ship's so dark all the time.

She touched the man on the shoulder. "You still up, Toriares?"

"Yeah," Toriares said. "The auto-navigation system's on the blink, so I'll have guide her back to Kuran manually. You guys should be asleep."

Well why aren't you?" Silhouette said, plunking herself down in a chair beside him.

"Well, I grew up in open space," Toriares said. "I'm used to the way time works out here. Day, night--it's all irrelevant. When's sunrise, after all? It's always dark in space."

"I guess," Silhouette thought. "Yeah, always dark. "I couldn't sleep anyway. Too much on my mind."

"The job?" Toriares said.

Silhouette nodded, turning her chair around to look for the pack of cigarettes she'd always kept on the bridge. "It . . .was different."