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Abe fidgeted with the straps of the backpack he'd meticulously packed with things they might need (Band-Aids) and things they definitely wouldn't (Kaleisha's tarot cards). He was Chinese American, tall enough to rest his chin on the top of Cleo's head, and bouncing on the balls of his feet so rapidly that his floppy black hair was getting in his eyes.

"Actually," he whispered a little too loudly, "I think this would be the perfect time to turn back, if we wanted to."

"Yeah, isn't this the part where Cleo says, That was easy... Too easy?" Ros said. They tucked a long ginger curl behind the ear that wasn't adjacent to their undercut, a smile masking the on-edge jitters that Cleo knew they were hiding. "And then a bunch of robot ninjas jump out to foil our plan?"

Cleo winked at Ros as the last gate—blazoned, as all the others had been, with the grayscale sunrise of the Erebus Industries logo—slid open with a metallic clunk. "Don't worry. Fighting robot ninjas is the first thing they teach you in engineering school."

Kaleisha smacked Abe lightly on the ass to shove him toward the gateway. "You're not getting soft on us, are you, Yang?"

"I've always been soft, and you love it."

"I do."

Behind their backs, Ros made a gagging sound. Cleo mimed a dry heave back. "Can we focus on how I just hacked the last gate open, you nasties?" she whined as Abe kissed the top of Kaleisha's head. "It was very impressive, probably."

"Extremely impressive." Abe cut Cleo off with an easy ruffle of her curly brown bob. "I'm going through first, though."

"Very sexy of you," Kaleisha said, and she took Ros's hand, who took Cleo's hand, and tugged them all after Abe and into the wide-open launch complex at the center of the Erebus space center.

And there it was, looming over them like a skyscraper, steepled black against the starry sky: Providence I. The other three stopped just inside the wall to stare up at the thing, so Cleo stopped too, and did the same.

Oh, it was beautiful. Probably the most beautiful thing people had ever built, Cleo thought, just as she had when she'd first seen it on TV all those years ago. Everything about the spaceship was darkly glittering ceramic quartz and gracefully curving lines; it was sheer artistry, the way the wide, winged base swooped upward into the delicately pointed nose. It was right in front of her, just like she'd always impossibly dreamed, and it stirred something she hadn't realized she'd forgotten—not just a feeling of wonder, though of course she was in awe of it. There was something rising in her throat that she hadn't quite felt since she was a kid, watching the lead-up to the launch on TV. Hope, maybe. Faith in humanity, even.

 

"Alright, gang, Operation Space Heist is a go," Kaleisha said, knocking them all out of their reveries. "Let's roll."

Cleo blinked away the tears that were threatening at the corners of her eyes and quickly stopped fingering the logo on the arm of the old, thrifted NASA jacket she'd stolen from her dad when she went to college. "Who's corny now?" Kaleisha lovingly flipped her off.

They all speed-walked toward the ship, very aware of how exposed they were, trying not to crunch their feet on the twenty years of accumulated trash and leaves that drifted across the tarmac. Abe's head swiveled like an owl's, but no floodlights flickered on, no speakers screeched at them from the nearby mission control tower, and no beefy guards emerged from the darkness. If this had been a government site, the security might have been a little tighter. But all-but-defunct private companies didn't spend precious dollars on their long-abandoned mission centers. Cleo almost told Abe to chill, but she knew her friend—he had an impeccable mental map of their surroundings, thanks to all his research, and he would never chill while there was even the slightest possibility that they were in danger.

Plus, the place was kind of spooky. Full of history and grief and the shadows thrown down by the clouds as they crossed the moon.

"Lots of ghost energy," Cleo whispered to Ros.

Ros snorted, which belied the fact that they were looking even paler than usual. Cleo knew Ros well enough to recognize the telltale sign that they were internally flipping out: sarcasm. "Space ghosts?"

"Space ghosts."

When they reached the base of the Providence, Kaleisha stood aside and waved Cleo toward the entrance to the external elevator tower that still stood clamped to the side of the ship. Another outdated keypad, more old-ass software. Cleo cracked her knuckles and dove into the code. She'd broken more complex encryptions in high school. She deciphered the initialization vector in seconds.