Young Writers Society

The boys gave Ellipse space over the next few days. Well, no. Tejal avoided Ellipse like she was under quarantine, and Focci sought her out whenever possible, so really it was Ellipse creating space, and the boys fumbling their way around her. Nonetheless, Ellipse managed to keep out of any and all conversations that extended beyond “it is your turn to steer the ship.”

How it took four days for the boys to combine their efforts on her when they had joined forces on the fold generator almost immediately, Ellipse could not figure out.

“Hey, so Ellipse,” Tejal said. He floated near her shoulder, hands free of tools and metal bits for once. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind sending-

“No.”

In the several seconds of silence that followed, Ellipse steered the ship around a small hunk of rock that looked uncannily like charcoal.

“Uhh, are you getting emails from that Randi Abe guy still?”

Ellipse shook her head. “Nope. I turned off all the wireless stuff in my watch as soon as I got back on this ship.”

Under his breath, Tejal muttered something about Focci being better at this, and then he cleared his throat and tried again. “Are you worried that people can track you through your watch? Because only the receiver can get that information easily. Otherwise you have to go through the owner of the email server.”

Twisting her face into a scowl, Ellipse turned away from the window and pinned Tejal with a glare. In the low, blue lights of the cabin, his face looked more paler than it probably was.

“Although I guess anyone determined enough could hack the server, yes.” Tejal let out a sigh and rubbed at his neck. “I have some pretty strong deodorant you could try, if you’re worried about the tubai? Plus, those hunters have to get an outside appraisal on scent before they can legally take you in.”

Ellipse kept glaring.

“Though it’s not uncommon for teams to have an unregistered tubai member, I guess,” Tejal admitted.

Wow Tejal, Ellipse thought. That was very encouraging.

“But still!” he tried. “I doubt anyone is tracking you through your messages. Even if more bounty hunters are trying to peg you as Elliott Bei, they’d have to actually know your email address in order to hack into your location data, and that’s not something you can just guess.”

With a click of her tongue, Ellipse turned back to the window.

“Why are you so freaked out about this anyways?” Tejal shouted. His voice broke at the end, squeaking higher in desperation. “You’re not Elliott Bei. I saw your papers. And honestly, the more upset you act about this, the more I suspect that you did at least something wrong. Maybe you’re not her, but obviously you have something to hide.”

She had done nothing wrong, ever. There were no secrets. There was no crime. Clenching her jaw, Ellipse tightened her grip on the joystick and tried to take deep breaths.

“Look! If you’re so worried, we can get Focci to scramble your location data.” Tejal put a hand on the chair and pulled himself forward so he could talk right into Ellipse’s ear. “And trust me when I tell you this: me and my parents aren’t going to arrest you if you committed a crime for just reasons.”

Ellipse snapped. Her lips curled back in a snarl, and she jerked the joystick as she whipped back around to glower at Tejal. “Listen,” she hissed. “My life story is none of your business. Butt out and find some other way to test your generator.”

Tejal’s mouth dropped open, and his eyebrows rose, and the cabin’s blue lights reflected off of a new sheen over his eyes. Suddenly, Ellipse regretted speaking at all.

“I guess I thought…” Tejal trailed off and looked away, and a frustrated sigh escaped his lips. “Nevermind.”

A few moments later, Ellipse felt him push off of the back of her chair. Then the curtain at the cabin door rattled open, and Tejal left her alone.

It was better this way, she told herself. She had never wanted to be Tejal’s friend, and he was the son of two bounty hunters who were after her. Besides, no one would turn down the millions of dollars that were at stake in Elliott Bei’s bounty, regardless of Ellipse’s identity or why the younger Bei had fled Andra-Media.

Faintly, she heard Mouthbot reciting translations of Trade Siren in her voice, but Ellipse tuned out the noise and just drove, pushing the ship faster and faster, until the pilot interface forced her to put on a touch of backwards thrust and slow down. Once she switched with Focci, she was going to blast a siren lament on her trumpet and improvise new lines up an octave, and then she planned on playing scales until her lips turned numb and Focci screeched at her to stop practicing the alphabet already.

Ellipse swerved the Conics around a series of rock chunks, probably remnants of two asteroids colliding, and fiddled with the dashboard until the flight calculation visualizations popped up on the window. Neon colored arrows and dashed lines layered over the backdrop of stars outside, and Ellipse squinted at the bright pink arrow for her current flight path. She probably needed to make a slight angle adjustment.

As she tapped on the joystick, trying to get the arrow on screen to swing exactly towards the Tubai System fold monitor’s big, white dot, the curtain rattled again. Hoping that she looked busy, Ellipse ignored whoever had just entered.

“Tejal tells me you two fought,” Focci sang, his rhythms too perfectly even and his notes a little too in-tune.

She leaned closer to the window and nudged the ship towards the left.

“I hope you realize how important the generator is to him. This has been his dream for years.”

Well, Ellipse’s freedom and safety were pretty important to her too. She was not about to give that up, even she had been travelling with Tejal for a couple months now.

“It is important to me too,” Focci continued. “This machine could put all four of my brothers through school and get my mothers out of their crumbling house. It is the one opportunity I may ever have to do the ground-breaking coding I have always wanted to do but never could, because Spec Corp runs every tech industry in my system.”

Okay, solid arguments. But Ellipse was not about to give up her dreams for anyone else’s.

“I understand that you may not want to help,” Focci said, suddenly floating right at Ellipse’s side, “but the least you could do is tell us why. You know why the generator is personally valuable for me and Tejal, and it is only fair that we understand why not helping us is valuable to you.”

The boys knew exactly why. Ellipse had been attacked by bounty hunters days ago, and that team had threatened to come after her again, and every time she weighed her own freedom against the dreams of her crew members, her side weighed more.

“You are not Elliott Bei,” Focci argued, as if he had read her mind, “so why are you so afraid?”

Ellipse’s hand shook on the joystick, and she brought the other to rest on top, but then both of her hands were shaking. And then she realized that every part of her, from her ankles to her shoulders to her teeth, quaked.

Well, she thought, Focci was not a bounty hunter, and she did not have to be specific. This was the least she could do. With a shuddering sigh, Ellipse took her hands off the joystick and let them shake in her lap.