Nar'eth came suddenly awake to the steady, insistent trill of an alarm buried somewhere in the prowler's instrument panel. She was disoriented and sick to her stomach, and the noise was hurting her ears. Most of her was still lost back there in the long, strange dream of snowy places and old women, and she rubbed her dark eyes and sat up, blinking two or three times at the almost meaningless array of dials and gauges and computer displays.
    And then she looked up and saw the planet, a great half-circle of muted reds and browns and wide blue oceans, the silvery glint of high clouds and the flash of a northern polar cap, a planet where there should be nothing but the light of far-off stars and the perfect black emptiness in between. Maer had stocked the prowler with enough food and water for ten solar days, the time he'd told her it would take to reach the destination that had been programmed into the ship's auto-navigational systems. She wasn't sure how long she'd been asleep, but it couldn't have been more than a few arns, a day at the most.
    Which meant that something had gone wrong, a glitch in the software or a mechanical malfunction that had thrown the prowler off course, that had allowed it to wander into this planet's gravitational pull.
    Or Maer had been lying to her, after all.
    But why? Why would he go to all this trouble just to frell me over when I was frelled to start with? Why would he bother?
    The voice that answered her sounded a lot like her mother, Jexanna, and just a little like herself. Because he's a Peacekeeper, it said resolutely, sounding very sour and sure of itself. Because, until you're dead, there's always a way to hurt you more.
    Nar'eth nodded her head, then checked the seat's safety restraints and, because she was too afraid to close her eyes, and because shutting them only made the nausea worse, she watched the blue and brick-red planet growing larger and larger as the prowler fell. In only a short while, a few more moments ticked off quick by the ship's chronometers, it had swallowed her whole.

* * *

    "It's a sort of jewel," Ress'lan had told her and smiled. "A precious green jewel," and when Nar'eth had looked skeptically from Ress'lan back to the star runner's portal, then up at her other sire, Corsin had smiled, too, and told her yes, it was true.
    "The whole galaxy is speckled with jewels," he told her and glanced at Ress'lan. "And they're precious, dear, because they give us life."
    She'd just turned six, and her sires had taken her with them on a trip from the surface of Sezerin to its single, small moon. There was an experimental agricultural base being constructed there, so the trip would be work, mostly, but they'd managed to convince Jexanna it was a good opportunity for the child to see something more of the world that had become her home planet after her mother's exile from Sanctuary.
    "We live on a jewel?" she asked, no less skeptical than she'd been before Corsin agreed with Ress'lan. "Who wears the jewel?"
    "The universe wears the jewel," Ress'lan replied and shifted in his seat so that Nar'eth had a better view through the portal.
    And that was her earliest memory of seeing any world from space, the green-gray silhouette of Sezerin stark against the void, her sire's precious gem, a sugary bit of candy that might fit easily between her thumb and forefinger, a living beacon in the endless night.
    "Then what about the moon? Is it a jewel, too?" she asked, and Corsin coughed and shook his head.
    "More like a rock," he said, and Ress'lan scowled.
    "But we're working on that," Corsin added.
    A few arns later, when the runner docked and Nar'eth followed her sires through a short, transparent tube leading them from the landing bay to the station, she saw that Corsin was right. The moon was a rock, a dusty grey wasteland stretching away on all sides, lifeless and empty, the loneliest place she'd ever imagined, and she suddenly wished that she'd stayed at home with her mother.

* * *

    The prowler came to rest just beyond the mouth of a small canyon, touching down gently among the tall reeds and crooked, stunted trees growing near the edge of the river that had carved this narrow, winding cleft through the rocks. The sun was low in the western sky, and Nar'eth guessed it would be dark soon. During the descent, she had forgotten the sick feeling in her belly, too amazed at the world rising up to meet her to be ill, the plunge through clouds stacked like cities made from snow, the dizzying carpet of colours below her gradually resolving into the familiar forms of mountain ranges and deep valleys, shorelines and scrubby forests. Ress'lan would have called this place a jewel, she thought, but Ress'lan was dead, murdered by a Peacekeeper. She usually tried not to think of him or Corsin, who was probably dead, as well. But sometimes that was like trying to stop her heart from beating or trying not the think at all. She'd lost them both two cycles ago, when a PK patrol intercepted and attacked the star runner that had been carrying her family from Sezerin to the even more remote Tarndairai. They were lost to her now, and her mother had taught her long ago that it wasn't healthy to cling to lost things.
    She sat in the cockpit, listening to the hisses and clicks of the ship's hydraulics, the long, low-pitched whine from the turbines as the prowler's engines powered down and shut themselves off. She looked over the control panel again, but everything was in Sebacean, which she couldn't read, and the translator microbes nested at the base of her brain were no good with written language. Somewhere, she guessed, there was a release switch for the prowler's canopy, but making sense of the myriad of toggles and buttons and touchscreens was impossible. Any choice would be guess work, and for all she knew she'd only end up reigniting the thrusters or blowing an ejection seat or something even worse. So she sat still, listening to the ship, watching the slow, dark river flowing past and the canyon walls and the limbs of the gnarled trees swaying slightly in a breeze she couldn't feel.
    "Maybe I'll die in here," she said out loud. Her voice seemed very big in the cockpit, but it was better than silence. And she wondered how it would happen, if the ship's life-support systems had shut off and she'd soon run out of air, or if she'd have plenty of fresh air, but run out of food and water when Maer's provisions were gone. She imagined dying of thirst with the river right there in front of her. Maybe, she thought, there will be a storm, and the canyon will flood, and I'll be washed away and drowned. That seemed even more ironic than dying of thirst, so she figured it was probably more likely to happen. She wondered how long the prowler would float.
    There was a sound like a squeaky door, then a particularly loud hiss, and the canopy seal popped. It opened slowly, rising to let in warm, alien air that smelled like wild and growing things, like mud and the river; Nar'eth took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the clean, rich air. It had been almost a whole cycle since she'd been imprisoned on the Velbidar, almost a cycle since she'd smelled and tasted the atmosphere of any planet, since she'd felt wind on her face. Locked in her cage in the command carrier's labs, she'd believed she never would again. There was a pungent, sweet odor that must be flowers or fruit, and she wondered if it was summer here or spring, or if this world even had summer and spring. Maybe this was winter.
    "What happens next?" she asked, speaking very softly, unbuckling her restraints and not taking her eyes off the steep walls of canyon and the river, the sky and bright orange orb of the afternoon sun. What happens next is that you get out of this frelling ship. What happens next is you get as far away from this ship as you can.
    "And then what?" Most likely, this was a Sebacean world. There might be Peacekeepers here. Or maybe there was no one here at all, only animals and the crooked trees, and she would spend the rest of her life stranded here alone.
    You worry about next when next comes along, she thought, trying to coax the voice inside her skull to sound as firm as Jexanna would. You worry about next when it happens.
    Maer had told her there would be a survival kit in the ship, though he'd also told her that it was nothing she would need. Nar'eth found it tucked into a space next to the seat, a bright yellow cylinder with a simple catch. Inside was a tight roll of bronze-coloured, reflective fabric like the blankets from the lab, and a few boxes that she thought might be medicine. And there was also a three-pronged laser knife, just like the ones the PK soldiers carried on their belts. She had no idea how to use the weapon, but the chunk of black metal felt heavy and reassuring in her hand. She could figure the how's of it out later on. She closed the canister again and dropped it out of the open cockpit. Then she wrestled the small crate of food cubes and water from its space behind her seat. Enough for ten days, a lot longer if she had to make it last, if there was nothing to eat here. She dropped it into the reeds as well, careful that it didn't land on top of the black cylinder.
    You don't even know what's out there, Jexanna whispered in her head, and Nar'eth agreed. But she was pretty sure the prowler could be tracked. A homing signal might have been activated when the ship wandered off course, and she didn't intend to be anywhere nearby if a PK retrieval squad came looking for it. Better to hide somewhere in the canyon or in the marshy land that spread itself wide below the canyon, where the river fanned out and split up into dozens of smaller, sluggish streams.
    Nar'eth climbed out of the cockpit, looked back once at the now mostly darkened instrument panel, and then jumped gracefully to the ground. It was soft and muddy in the reeds, and she sank up to her bare ankles in the cold goo, but even mud was a wonderful thing after all that time in deep space, all that time locked away inside sterile walls of steel and plastic. There was steam rising from the underside of the prowler, steam that smelled like oil and spent fuel, smells that reminded her too much of the Velbidar. She gripped the handle of the black survival canister in her left hand, the lugbar of the heavier, more awkward crate in her right, and slowly she dragged both from the reeds and muck to higher, drier ground. The mud fought her all the way, sucking at her feet and the containers, and once she startled a legless reptilian creature hiding in the underbrush. It bared its teeth and made an angry, clicking noise, but quickly slithered away towards the river. The insects were less wary however, and their bites left itchy blue welts on her grey skin.
    By the time she reached the rocky place beyond the edge of the marsh, the sun was swollen huge and red, beginning to set behind the rim of the canyon, and the air was already growing cooler. She sat down in the sand and gravel and stared back at the stolen prowler. Maybe, she thought, the mud will suck it down, and if they come looking, they won't find anything at all.
    Nearby, an animal called out, a sudden, shrill sound that made her jump. A moment later, another answered it from much farther away. She opened a package of food cubes and listened to the two beasts calling back and forth to one other while she ate. When she was done, she drank some water, then put the rest away and took out the foil blanket. There were probably better places to fall asleep, but she was too tired to start looking for them now. Nar'eth wrapped herself in the blanket, hoping it would make her feel safer, hoping the two animals weren't hungry, or if they were, that there were better things to eat here than her. She held the laser knife tight, trying not to tremble, and, as the sun slipped below the edge of the world, she watched the stars winking into view overhead.