Theo stepped closer with a shake of his head, looking over the dash of Axel’s control station with interest. “No, thank you. I find they don’t agree with me. What does that button do?”
Axel glanced at the dash, crowded with buttons of varying size and color, then back up at Theo and said with a wry tone, “Which button?”
Theo stepped close enough to touch the dash, his fingers hovering over a row of candy-colored buttons glowing faintly against the chrome. “All of them.”
Axel’s answering smile was as swift as it was bright, lighting up his face until he glowed like the dash. He dropped his boots to the floor and scooted closer to the buttons, eyes twinkling up at Theo. “You ever flown a class nine freighter before, Doc? Don’t tell the captain, but it’s easier than it looks. C’mere, I’ll show you a few things to get you started.”
He wiped his cheese powder–coated fingers on his tight-fitted gray trousers. Leading Theo’s fingers to a pale-blue button, he started a lesson on basic navigation and instrument flight that Theo found as intriguing as any lecture he had ever attended.
Axel, it would seem, was a born instructor. Theo had a feeling the pilot would not take that as the compliment he’d intend it to be, so he kept the thought to himself.
After a quarter hour of engaging lessons and intermittent supervised button pressing, Theo built up the confidence to start asking questions. “How many of you are there?”
Axel winked up at him as he guided Theo’s fingers through a complicated code sequence. “Can’t you tell? I’m a singular sensation, baby. One in a million. Often imitated but never repeated. The real deal.”
Theo bit his lip through a burst of laughter. Axel’s confidence was so overblown it went right past irritating into endearing. He could relate to that. “I meant to inquire about the crew. How many people are on Captain Park’s Crew? I’ve been exploring all morning and hardly come across a single soul. Though there is every possibility they may be avoiding me. It has been known to happen. Why, when I joined the faculty, professors practically made a sport out of ducking down hallways to get away from me.”
Axel shrugged, leaning back in his seat as he watched Theo slowly repeat the sequence with only one correction necessary, all the while switching idly through three different attachments at the end of his arm with a muted click and whirr. “Just the four of us—five now that he’s brought you on board. You already met everyone down in the loading bay. Don’t tell me you forgot Boom because I wouldn’t believe you.” His face assumed a dramatic far-off look. “She’s the terror in the night that haunts the dreams of wicked men, the scrape of metal down an abandoned hallway, that creeping sensation on the back of your neck when you hear footsteps in the dark.”
His eyes flitted up to Theo, gleaming with amusement at his shocked expression. “But seriously, she can be scary as shit, so let the captain deal with her if you get on her bad side. Also, don’t get on her bad side. Like, ever.”
He shuddered for effect.
Distracted from the buttons, Theo considered the small crew. He thought of all the closed doors down the winding corridors. “So few of you for such a large ship.”
Axel scoffed, fingers flying across projections over his screen. “She’s a big girl, but nothing I can’t handle. Never met a girl who didn’t fall for my irresistible charm immediately, and this ship is no different. Besides, what more do we need but an incredibly talented and handsome pilot, a terrifying security chief, a dedicated engineer, and, of course, our fearless leader?”
After closing out the screen he’d been working on, Axel turned to Theo. “Oh, and you. I guess we needed a pretty face on the team. I’m more dashing than pretty, myself.”
Theo tossed his hair back from his face at the compliment. He knew he had a pleasing countenance, but it was always nice to hear.
A quick snap of his fingers and Axel pointed at Theo. “Oh shit, no, you’re the brains, aren’t you? Well, we definitely needed more brains on the crew. We’ve been pretty heavy on the brawn. Captain Park is, like, 70 percent brawn, 30 percent scowl, 0 percent fun.”
The assessment earned a grin from Theo as he deemed it accurate, if incomplete. One must take into account Captain Park’s other qualities. Such as his steadfast dedication to his mission, or his strong, capable hands. Or his thick, beautiful— The point was, Jun was much more than brawn with a scowl.
Theo observed over Axel’s shoulder as the pilot squinted at a scrolling stream of data on one of the remaining screens. “Boom and Marco, they’re siblings, are they not?”
Axel nodded distractedly, fingers nimbly working across the screen. Theo watched in fascination as he flipped his arm to a stylus attachment and sketched out a diagram next to some calculations.
“Isn’t it lovely that they get to work so closely together? I have a twin brother, back home. We do everything together. Sometimes I wonder if we delved so far into academia just to be able to stay close, why we keep working in the same place even though our areas of interest differ so greatly. I miss him terribly, actually. His absence is like a stone in the bottom of my shoe, painful and constant and difficult to ignore. Are Marco and Boom anything like us, do you suppose?”
Axel gestured absently, frowning at his data as the numbers changed more and more rapidly. “Something like that. Captain couldn’t have hired one without the other; they’re a package deal. Paranoid, you know? Neither one will let the other out of their sight, too afraid to be separated again. Probably because they used to be Disconnects, grew up on one of those nature communes. You know the type. All
