Dragon Pearl(13)

The person in front of me was clearly a spacer. The sleeve of their suit was covered with tiny enamel pins, one for each of the worlds they had visited. Jun and I used to make a game of memorizing the different pins. I’d never been able to remember more than just a few of the most famous worlds. Now I spotted some I knew, though, like Madang, fabled for its gardens. And Cheongok, mostly ocean with scattered archipelagos, where the descendants of dragons sent their children to learn the art of weather-craft. The spacer had even visited Jaebo, known for its staggering wealth, where the rulers of the Thousand Worlds governed from the Pearled Halls.

Jun had always wanted to visit every one of those worlds. When we were younger, he’d been glued to the holo shows that showed glimpses of life elsewhere. I’d sit by him, enthralled by the stories he spun about traveling together as we squinted at the staticky images. If only I had enough jades to book a tour and see them all myself! It wouldn’t be the same without my brother, though.

I looked away from the pins, reminding myself of my goal: getting to Jun’s ship. I double-checked my Charm, just in case. The license, when I fished it out, still listed me as Kim Bora, so I’d have to get used to answering to her name.

“Come forward, citizen, and present your identification,” the security inspector snapped from her booth.

I flushed. While I’d been woolgathering, my turn had come. I approached and showed her my medallion.

The inspector scowled at the ID. I started to sweat. But she waved me through the doorway scanner. I heard a faint hum. “Nothing amiss,” the inspector said. “Please continue.”

Dizzy with relief, I emerged into the brightly lit foyer and paused to get my bearings. The spaceport was busier than I’d expected. Jinju wasn’t exactly a popular destination. Spacers only stopped here to resupply on the way to more interesting places.

People paid me little attention as they bustled back and forth. Eateries promised the best food in the outer rim, which I doubted, but the smell of vegetable fritters made my mouth water. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day. It was tempting to grab a bite, but I knew I shouldn’t delay.

Elsewhere, shops hawked sad-looking souvenirs, such as pieces of cloth embroidered in the local style. When I looked at them up close, I could see the stitching was crooked. I wasn’t great at fancy needlework, mostly because it wasn’t something I had time for, but I did do a lot of mending.

I headed for one of the digital information kiosks along the wall. Below one of the display screens, someone had scratched graffiti with a knife. It said, in unsteady letters, don’t play dice at nari’s. What looked suspiciously like a blotch of dried blood underscored the word dice. Well, that advice was easy enough for me to follow. I wasn’t good at playing dice, and Charm didn’t make me any better at it, as I’d discovered as a child.

Too bad I couldn’t simply look up the last known location of my brother’s battle cruiser. That kind of information wouldn’t be available on a public kiosk. I could, however, check a galactic map to see if anyone docked here was headed toward the Ghost Sector. If a lot of Space Forces ships were in that area, maybe the Pale Lightning was among them. The closer I could get to the battle cruiser, the more clues about Jun’s disappearance I could gather. At least that’s what I hoped.

I hated the idea of my brother being anywhere near the cursed Fourth Colony. I thought back to his message: Together we’ve been exploring a new world, just like Dad. Was that why he had mentioned Dad, because he had somehow gotten involved with ghosts? I shivered at the thought.

I asked the kiosk for a list of commercial transports that had room for a passenger and might be willing to leave tonight. Just my luck, only one starship was headed anywhere near the Ghost Sector in the next several days: the Red Azalea. It listed its next major stop as a big space hub, Gingko Station, at the edge of the sector. That would work. Once there, I might be able to find out more about the Pale Lightning’s current location.

I checked the Red Azalea’s safety record and reputation. It was a freighter, not a luxury cruiser, but that wasn’t such a bad thing—it would be easier for me to keep a low profile on a freighter. The kiosk indicated that the captain—Captain Hye—was willing to take on “working passengers” and that she could be found at . . . oh. Nari’s. Apparently Captain Hye liked to gamble during her downtime.

Fine. I pulled up a directory of the spaceport and memorized the directions to Nari’s gambling parlor, as well as the Red Azalea’s current berth. Then I took a deep breath to steady myself and headed for the stairs to the upper level.

Even if I hadn’t consulted a map first, finding Nari’s would’ve been easy. As I approached, I heard the clattering of dice and the sounds of shouts and laughter, as well as the faint strains of sinuous music. A surprisingly tasteful statue of a three-tailed fox stood next to the open doorway, one paw upraised as if in greeting. In the lore, fox shifters gained tails as they aged—up to nine, anyway—as a reflection of their power. I once asked Mom why I only had the one tail, and she told me not to be so literal. The statue gave me pause, though. Most people thought foxes were bad luck, so why would a gambling parlor put one up on display?

I stepped over the threshold to find a tall, broad man lurking in the dim light of the foyer. A bouncer, I assumed. As he looked me over, a diminutive woman came up to greet me. She wore a sleeveless dress of fine silk, and I could just make out an elaborate tattoo of a fox and a pine tree covering most of her upper left arm. “Welcome to Nari’s,” she said, smiling as if I were a particularly delicious snack.