By Daniel Bradley 

The skin on the back of my knuckles was peeled back, cracked and shiny with wet and drying blood. Some of it was mine. Some of it had belonged to the man on the floor, looking up at me from behind a broken nose and the fading spark of a fight in his eyes. I hadn’t wanted to hit him, but I told myself the same lie I always did, that I did it for her. 

Iris nudged me on the arm with a cold barrel, unfired as of yet. I took it from her, stealing one moment to catch a flash of annoyance from her face. The man on the floor had taken me by surprise, ambushing me from the corner. He didn’t need to have made this so difficult, but he made me drop my gun. For once, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and I didn’t want to have to carry his blood out of here with me, caking the cracks of my knuckle skin like powdery glue. 

“I’ll shoot the next person who moves,” Iris said. 

I didn’t say anything, just letting the knuckles talk from wrapped around the handle of my plasma pistol. 

We were robbing a fuel depot. Not the kind of place a person might imagine a hold up like this, but we needed reaction mass. Antimatter, if we could get it. Iris and I were on the run. Not just from an armada of empire ships racing across the system to catch us, but because we’d been hopping through the years on the back of relativity, hoping to someday pop out of near light speed in a place where enough of the river of time had passed that our faces didn’t mean anything to anyone anymore. 

All of this running done with the last person I had once ever wanted to see. 

“Give me a reason,” Iris told the crowd of workers. 

The man I hit stayed on the floor, rolling to the side as the pain in his nose drew him into a fetal crunch. He let out a whimpering cough. 

I walked up to the counter. The woman behind it looked like she was in her mid-forties. She had a sad lacquer of distrust over her eyes, like she didn’t care and wasn’t surprised that the universe brought a robbery to her work today. She would comply, because as far as I could tell she just wanted Iris and I to hit the gas and split out of the system as fast as possible. She wouldn’t be wrong. As soon as we were gone, if she gave us enough fuel, she wouldn’t hear about us again in her lifetime. 

“I don’t have enough to get you across the galaxy,” she said. “But I can buy you ninety years if you promise you won’t kill anybody.” 

“That ain’t up to you.” Iris pointed her pistol at the woman’s right eye, pointblank. “Give us what you got to pump seventeen.” 

“Whatever you say, lady. But if you kill anybody, I’ll overload the mass and blow your ship.” 

“With antiprotons?” I said. “Don’t be stupid. You’ll kill everybody.” 

“Maybe I’d be a hero.” The woman turned a valve, and a mixture of phase lubricant and antiproton solution flooded through the pipes and into my ship. Yes, my ship. My ship and a centuries-long wake. 

“You’ll keep that line open till the meter reads full,” Iris pointed to the controls with her pistol. 

As the barrel lowered, the woman grabbed a ballistic shotgun from below her counter. Iris brought hers back to eye level with the woman, but the woman ducked, hot plasma from the pistol shooting through the rusted metal wall behind her like a welder through steel, but six times as fast. The gaping hole dripped and glowed with scalding material. The smell was like a plastic house fire. 

Before the woman could right herself and point the shotgun at us, plasma from my gun dropped her in a heap of burns and regret. The shotgun went off, blocked by the think structure underneath the counter. Someone must have thought to themselves that “You know what? Maybe we should rate the plating here for shotgun blasts. Someday a woman might try to fight for her life under here and the metal will be the one thing that saves her.” 

Now my conscience was getting bloody knuckles. I still wasn’t good at this. 

“We’re getting out of here!” Iris shouted, whipping the now hot end of her pistol’s barrel across a man’s face. “Anyone who doesn’t want to get barbecued like the bitch here gets kneeled against that wall right now!” 

I couldn’t see the woman behind the counter, but I knew what I did to her. I prayed she was dead. 

The workers complied, filing against the wall. 

“Hands behind your heads, feet crossed behind,” I told them, my voice not trembling enough. “Make this easy on yourselves. You know who we are.” I put myself right behind them, forcing their ankles to cross where they were kneeling. It would be a difficult position to get out of without falling on their faces. 

One mad muttered under his breath something I couldn’t understand. 

“What’s that, goggles?” I asked. 

“The Star-Crossed Lovers,” he mumbled again. 

“The what?” I asked again, this time grabbing him by the gray-specked hair on the back of his head. His neck kinked backwards, and he groaned. His eyes were huge behind his googles. 

“The Estill Bandits!” he wailed. 

“That’s better,” I hissed in his ear, and let him fall on his face. 

“Sensitive much?” Iris teased. She was looking at the meter under the valve where our fuel passed into our ship. Once the meter read full, we could get out of the rusted depot. It took a ton of fuel to get our ship to near light-speed. The antimatter wasn’t the issue, it didn’t take much for propulsion, it was the engine that contained the reaction that needed the special solution. 

Sirens and spotlights interrupted our hold-up. A deep voice over a loudspeaker shouted instructions. They gave the usual spiel, “Halt. You are under arrest.” Empire United, blah blah blah. The mannerism of police in force hadn’t changed much in the years Iris and I had been on the run, and the technology stayed the same too. That was most likely an issue with the galaxy being such a spread-out place. But we couldn’t seem to outrun our story. Every time we surfaced, people knew who we were. 

“We’ve gotta go,” I said. “Shut it off.” 

Iris was wild-eyed, the kind of look I’d grown to dread in her. She grabbed some credit chits from the drawer and threw me a sack of cleaning supplies. 

“What the hell are these for?” 

She smiled, “We’re out of dish rags.” 

“Shit.” 

“We can beat ‘em through the utility shaft. Come on.” 

We climbed, taking advantage of the station’s weak spin gravity to pull ourselves over pipe and under until I fired out a panel that led into the hangar. My ship was nearby, strategically placed for our getaway. She was an old piece of crap, but a fast one. I apologized to her, the ship, on the regular for ruining our time together. 

“Iris, did you close the valve.” 

“Sure did.” 

My stomach felt uneasy. I could hear the cops closing in on the pump station we just left. They were sorting through the victims, trying to see which way we had gone. The utility shaft led a dozen different places, so we had a few moments. 

“I’ll get the line, you get her started,” Iris ordered, shoving me onto the gangway. 

“I should leave you here,” I said, pushing her arm away. 

“You won’t.” She shook off the mean bandit for the lover’s glance, relaxing the muscles around her eyes like a hungry pup. “You need me as much as I need you.” 

I pulled myself onto the bridge and buckled myself down. The weak gravity would make me bounce around, but I needed to boot the computer without any vertigo. The nerves of needing a fast getaway had my stomach now in full whirl, about ready to eject pasty ration puke all over the controls. We hadn’t even had time to grab some decent food. 

“It’s ready,” I heard Iris say over my shoulder. “You’re gonna want to punch it.” 

A red fuel alarm was flashing in the corner of my eye. I didn’t bother to check why. A few more switches and the hum of my engines started us hovering. 

“I said punch it!” She swatted the back of my head. “The line isn’t dry.” 

“The line isn’t–” I suddenly realized what she meant. She hadn’t closed the valve. We were about to set off the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. 

I punched it. 

The station exploded in the rear view. A few hundred innocent people and dozens of empire ships succumbed to antimatter and matter frenching out the tubes. As we accelerated on our course, I got up from my seat in a daze. Acceleration at one and a half g’s meant I could walk, and that my walk felt as begrudging on my body as it did on my soul. I did it for her. I did it for her. One lie, one step at a time to cryo so that I could sleep off my guilt, wake up in another time when only the great grandchildren of those people might still remember me. 

Iris was changing into her cryo suit, ready to sleep away a few years of our time, fifteen-ish, or something like that. I hadn’t checked the numbers thoroughly. I just plugged in a destination, Theros, and told the ship by what rate to accelerate. We would roll into the next system about a century of time later. It would be just enough; the biggest time jump we’d made yet. I watched her for a moment. There was a time I would have killed to see her like that. Now I had killed, and I hated myself. 

I would have lied to say that there wasn’t an element of romance to our conquest of the stars. The body count was high and so was the admiration. Every time we surfaced, our accounts flooded with whatever the quantum equivalent would be for a message in a bottle, multiplied by a thousand or so. Kids studied about us in school. Women proposed to me over text on a screen. “Marry me, star-crossed boy, find rest in my harbor.” 

100… 

I started to countdown in my cryotube, the top still open. It would close when I needed it to. For now, it was a flat bed, nothing fancy, but comfortable. I was about to spend over a decade in it, dying for a sweet time, lost to all thoughts and dreams. I would float in the stars an innocent man, innocent because I couldn’t remember a plethora of terrible things. 

“What are you doing lying down so early?” Iris placed herself next to me on the cryo bed. She felt warm, but distant, her suit slippery next to mine. Her arms reached around me, bringing my thoughts to simpler times. 

99… 

We met when I was a rock hauler, slinging minerals at high risk for big paydays. I worked on a crew of eleven on a ship that could have fit forty. The work cycles were backbreaking, but possible, and I always had something to look forward to when I came home to the moon of my birth. Iris had dark hair with red highlights, a defiant grin she wore like a mask at a party, and two eyes that could have belonged to a goddess painting. I thought I might do anything for those eyes. I loved them and hated them all at once. 

 We’d flirt when I’d come home. She was just a kid out of school, working at her dad’s hopper joint. She’d run the numbers and help him in the back with the rigs. The old man was a piece of work, an asshat with a manatee frame and a drinking liver hard like petrified dung. His prices were hard to beat, though, and his daughter was the ghost of my dreams. 

“You took the ketamine already?” Iris saw me drifting, tranqued up, counting back from 100, seeing how long I could sit in bad memories until the drugs knocked me out and the cryo tube could close and begin its work. “You piece of shit. I hate you. I hate that you did this to me.” She started to hit me, but I was too deep in memory’s jet stream to care. 

I thought about the first time we spooned like this, back at my place. The hum and smell of the air recycling came back, the gentle turn my stomach made whenever she touched someplace new. I couldn’t hold onto that memory for long, though. Soon enough I was back at her dad’s place, the last night I ever saw him. 

98… 

The old man was holding a pipe wrench. Iris had her back turned to him, hugging the ground, blood on her right-hand leaving prints on the polymer tile. She was sobbing. Her shoulders shook and I could feel her tears inside me, melting little holes, bursting little pockets of hot air that reached my ears, making them hum, and my eyes, turning my vision a shade of red. 

The old man laughed through the next part, a blurry haze, flashes of anger and swinging fists that ended with me holding the pipe wrench, the curved end of it dripping with pieces of hair and a few other things that might have been skin. He kept laughing, high or drunk or both, sunk in a pool of his and Iris’s blood. 

Iris started dating me after that. We never saw her father again. I never found out if he died. She never told me. 

97… 

After a while spent apart, I came back from hauling rocks with a surprise, a ship I bought from a retired runner who claimed to be almost a thousand years old. 

“Sure, she’s an ancient thing,” he said about his ship, “but she’ll get you anywhere. Shit. They say those interstellar relays they’re building will make near-lightspeed irrelevant, that slipspace is the future, but I say it’s all just another railroad, civilization creeping where it should leave the wandering man alone. A ship like this makes you immortal. That’s freedom.” 

“How much for it?” I asked him. 

“What you’ll owe me? Not more than you have. I like you. What you’ll owe the universe. Hell. Nothing more than your soul. But who has need for one of those anyway?” 

 I paid him almost everything I’d saved. He signed the title over to me and I pitched over to Iris’s place like one of those lizards that can skip over water. It was a long shot, but what if she’d come with me, what if we could get away from that sand blasted moon forever? 

Maybe there was some part of me that should have known better. Maybe two adults bonded over trauma and broken faces shouldn’t end up together. I couldn’t say. I couldn’t know anything about myself in that moment after I opened the door and saw her in my apartment. She had a man inside, both of them half-dressed and carrying on with the energy of two teenagers in an after-dark hangar bay. She looked surprised to see me, that wasn’t a shocker. Most of what killed me, though, was that she seemed to look relieved, glad to be caught. 

I slammed the door and walked away. I didn’t plan on ever going back, not even to grab my stuff. I just wanted to fade, to take my ship and find whatever place she couldn’t reach. I had the means to do it. All I needed was the strength to not pull an Orpheus and look back. 

97… 

“Wait!” she called after me.  

I kept walking. The residential corridor seemed miles long. Every step was like a dream, one of those nightmares where the inevitability of the thing chasing you is stronger than whatever force your legs can make. 

All the sympathy in the world couldn’t cure my hurt. Why couldn’t I get away faster? 

96… 

On the cryo bed, Iris was calling me names as I drifted to sleep. Too bad. Too bad the only thing I could think of doing to her after all that was deny her my love. I could feel my consciousness fading, the euphoria of the drug making everything seem alright. My mind wanted to finish the memory though. 

“Stop!” she started to cry.  

I could feel her tears the way I always did, but I kept my back to her. “I’m leaving.” 

“Take me with you.” 

I turned around, dark humming in my ears, flushing blood to my capillaries. “I’m not coming back.” 

We stared at each other. Two people far apart, so many stars between us. The man she had in the apartment came out, putting his shirt on. He started to say something, but I couldn’t hear him. I just kept looking at the girl to wrecked my universe while she cried. 

What I didn’t know about both Iris and I, right from the beginning, was that I wasn’t the only one who could get angry, who could ride the tides of violence. I also didn’t know that she had a gun in her hand, a ballistic pistol that was small and could be concealed. She raised it to the other man’s face and pulled the trigger. He fell like a doll made from straw, slumping to the polymer floor with surprise tattooed on his face, a testament to his last thoughts. 

Smoke from the gun hung in the air, whispering toward the recycling vents like a secret we couldn’t keep. 

“Now you have to take me with you,” she said softly. 

95… 

Iris got up from the cryo bed. My side felt cold from her distance. My consciousness at last gave way to the drug-induced sleep. Farewell to the century. Farewell to the callow shine of these wrongs. 

There’s no dreaming in cryo. When I woke up, it was like I just fell asleep. It was also dark. There was no light out the window but stars of deep space. I was also weightless, the ship not accelerating anymore. It was agonizing to wake up like this, trapped in the present and on the run from memory. My mouth was dry, but the rest of me wet. The suspension fluid that kept me cold and ageless had been swept away.  

The cryotube opened. I undid my restraints, letting myself drift upright, uncomfortable in my jumpsuit. I took it off, drifting wet and exposed in the bay of my ship. Iris slept, her tube still closed. In a compartment, I found a towel and some fresh clothes, years unworn. 

I shouldn’t have been awake. The ships logs weren’t being straightforward about what the hell went wrong. In the back of my mind, I remembered a flashing light, a problem with the fuel when we took off. I had kept ignoring it, too much faith in the old thing, too much weight on my need to fly into the future. The woman at the counter. She turned the valves. She started the mixture. Was this some last revenge? If it was, she was good. My ship had woken me up, though. We didn’t explode in the middle of the galaxy’s deepest void. 

Hungry, I drifted through the ship, hand over hand on padded grips, leaving the lights low. Iris wouldn’t know about this. She wouldn’t know how we almost died by a hiccup in the reactor fuel. She’d stay in her dreamless sleep. When she woke up, it would be time to rob someone again, for the thrill she seemed to enjoy. We were such fools. The galaxy wouldn’t forgive us. Our legacy would never leave us. Finding some rations, I forced myself to eat some flavored paste. It palated as nasty as it ever did. 

There was a decision to make, and since the ship woke me up, I became the master of fates. I could drive on, bringing the ship back into acceleration, and hope that whatever the woman did to the fuel didn’t incinerate us. Or I could force us up to speed all the same and hope that the fuel erased us. Worse ways to go gently prodded my imagination. The only other alternative would be to shoot a hole in the ship, suck away the atmosphere so that we died now, adrift in our tomb. No use in starving to death. I would do it for… 

No, I realized I didn’t care. If we blew up, I’d do the universe a favor, I’d do Iris a favor. If we made it, maybe the plan would work. Maybe I could learn to love her again, to forgive her and myself. My wrongs her wrongs. Both of us murderers. Both of us souls on a rack. Either way, it was all about her, my little lie.  

I wander back toward the bridge, kissing Iris’s cryotube on my way, wishing I could see her eyes once more the way I used to. She looked at peace in suspension. I envied her and her sleep, longing to go back there myself, sleep being the only peace the universe could offer someone like me.  

The controls on the dash flashed the same warning, but I punched the acceleration with renewed determination. The ship inched into acceleration and let me settle into the pilot’s seat. I didn’t want to go where we had been going, though. There was enough fuel to change our course to another system a few more years away. We’d have to drift longer, once near lightspeed. More time would pass. If we lived, it’d be the will of the stars.  

If we died, well, I did it for her. 

The End.