Geekerella (Starfield #1)(56)

“Yep. Certifiably not ax murder-y.” She shrugs. “At least I think so.”

“Well, thank god.” I swallow the lump in my throat. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain this to Carmindor. He did sound nice. Sweet. A voice I could listen to for hours. But would he ever want to listen to me?

I glance down at my phone and suddenly my blood runs cold. “Oh my god,” I whisper and jerk up to my feet. “Oh shit.”

Sage glances over at me. “What?”

“It’s ten after nine.” My hands start to shake. I stuff the cosplay uniform into my duffel bag and loop it over my shoulder. “I’m so late—so late. Can you take me halfway home?”

Sage shambles to her feet and salutes. “I’ll get you home faster than Greased Lightning.”

With heart pounding, I fly up the stairs after her. We’ve worked too hard. The con is tomorrow. I can’t ruin this now.





LAST TAKE, I THINK. DON’T RUIN IT.

“And…action!” the director yells. The set plunges into deathly silence. The crew looks on. Then we’re moving like a machine: graceful, precise, well rehearsed, in the moment. The green screen fades, the boom disappears, the camera becomes a thought in the back of my mind.

I step into Carmindor at the helm of his ship, the good Prospero. I’m here, in command of my crew. And shit is about to go down.

“Forty-two clicks to the left,” I bark to Euci, “and ignite!”

“Aye!” Calvin replies at the head of the bridge, his fingers twitching just enough to ease the ship to the left. And in that moment, he’s not the jerk B-lister with a perpetual chip on his shoulder but the Federation’s best pilot, my best friend, and navigator of the Prospero. Three Nox ships are coming in from our starboard, and we have thirty percent power left. There’s no one else I’d trust to get us out of this mess.

The helm of the Prospero goes quiet as we wait for the three red dots blinking on the screen to fall off, but they keep pursuing us toward the Black Nebula. It looms against us, the size of three suns, swirling, catching, inhaling everything, growing larger with each atom broken down and absorbed. The galaxy’s only hope of stopping it is aboard this ship.

Another torpedo slams into our back hull. Red lights flare across one of the screens. Euci flicks it away.

“Four clicks faster,” I order.

“We’re already shaking apart as it is,” Euci warns. “If we get too close—”

“I said four clicks!” I snap.

He twitches his head slightly—a throwback to the show’s Euci, who always tossed his head to the left whenever he knew Carmindor was wrong but did as his captain commanded.

A boom mic hovers above us, the gaping eye of three lenses staring from just off the bridge. One of them, on a pulley, draws closer.

In front of me the navigation panel glows like an oversized keyboard. Beside me, Princess Amara wrings her hands nervously.

“Ah’blen,” Jess says, and the word fills me with a strange sort of longing. A reminder of Elle. I push it down.

Not now.

“We can do this,” I tell her. “We have to.”

“We’re going to die—we’re all going to die if you get closer.”

Another missile slams into the back of the Prospero, destroying one of the thrusters. The ship careens out of warp-speed. Everyone is thrown forward with the invisible weight of our descent. The princess stumbles against the controls and catches my hand. She squeezes it tight, and our eyes meet.

One second.

Two.

The set is quiet. We’re quiet. The stars, in all their mass and all their time, orbit us. She smiles timidly, and as Carmindor, I know she is the only star in the sky I care about. Red lights flare across all the screens. Warnings boom through the speakers. One more hit and Prospero will be space trash.

“You know what I have to do, ah’blen,” she whispers.

“No, I won’t let you—I can’t let you. There has to be another—”

She kisses my forehead. “I hear the Observation Deck is nice this time of year,” she tells me, and then she slips her hand out of mine and leaves the bridge.

Watching the show, this is where I scream at the TV. Call Carmindor stupid. Because this is where the princess looks back at him, this is where she waits to see if he’ll try to change her mind, waits for him to look back at her. But he doesn’t know that he’s supposed to look at her. He’s trying to decide if his soul could survive killing his entire crew for the sake of the universe. If he’ll be damned in the afterlife. If, in the next universe over, he’ll get another chance.

He looks back a heartbeat too late, and she’s already gone.

I hold on to the scene, looking at the last place I saw her, the last place I’ll ever see her, and then—

“Cut!” yells the AD. “And that’s a wrap!”

Euci—I mean Calvin—pumps his fist into the air as the crew cheers so loud it rumbles the makeshift set. I lean back against the captain’s command module and drop my head back, closing my eyes. I stand amid the triumphant hoots from the crew, the congratulations from the other actors, relishing it all.

You only get one shot, I remind myself, trying to hold on to as much of Carmindor as I can. Just for a little longer.