No Sky Left
By the time Orla Quinn saw the blood on the boarding glass, she already knew Earth was trying to keep her. It always had - with grief, with debt, with the red-brick kitchen in Belfast where every goodbye tasted like over-steeped tea. The man wiping his split lip with the back of his hand was only the latest method.
The departure hall for North Atlantic Launch Terminal Three had been built to make poor people feel grateful. Forty metres of glass, chrome so polished it showed you every flaw back in your own face, screens big enough to announce the future like gospel. ORBITAL COLONY INTAKE - FINAL BOARDING CALL pulsed over the gates in soft blue letters while below them mothers cried into coats, children pressed sticky palms to security dividers, and two men in grey launch security uniforms hauled a shouting passenger away from Gate C.
Orla adjusted the strap of her duffel higher on her shoulder and kept walking.
That was the trick with leaving, she had decided. You did not perform it. You did not sanctify it. You did not turn around every thirty seconds and check whether your old life had begun to miss you yet. You picked up your bag. You locked your knees. You walked straight at the thing that frightened you most and behaved as though the choice had already become ordinary.
Easy enough in theory.
Harder when your entire body knew you were a daughter of rain and brick and low skies, not metal and vacuum and the black indifferent dark.
A child barreled across the polished floor in socks, nearly colliding with her. His father snatched him back by the hood with a muttered apology. A woman at the coffee kiosk was crying too quietly for anyone to comfort her. At the far end of the hall, a group of intake families had gathered around the view wall where the orbital ascent shuttle waited upright beyond the glass like a silver blade.
Orla did not look at it for long.
That was when someone caught the boarding band at her wrist.
Not a tug. A yank.
She spun, pulse detonating, and found a man in a freight jacket gripping the thin smart-fabric strip that marked her as cleared for launch. He was gaunt, wired, maybe fifty, maybe younger in the cruel way hunger and fury could age a face.
“You don't need this more than I do,” he hissed.
For one clean second, the whole world narrowed to his hand on her and the savage animal panic that rose in response.
Then another hand appeared in frame - larger, bronzed, utterly steady - and closed around the man's wrist.
“Let her go,” a man's voice said.
Not loud. Worse than loud.
The stranger in the freight jacket sneered without turning. “Mind your-”
There was a quick, ugly twist. Not theatrical. Efficient. The man gasped, dropped Orla's wristband, and went to his knees with a broken-off cry.
Orla stumbled back a step and looked up.
The man holding the intruder's wrist had the sort of face artists ruined by trying too hard. Dark hair cut close at the sides, mouth made for insolence, a straight nose that had been broken once and healed into a more dangerous version of itself. His station blacks sat close to a hard frame, all functional lines and no vanity, with COLONY TRANSIT OPS stencilled at the chest. A faded scar disappeared under the collar at his throat.
His eyes, when they lifted to hers, were a deep winter grey.
“You all right?” he asked.
It was absurd that the answer caught in her throat.
Because she was frightened, yes. Because he'd moved like violence with manners, also yes. Because there was blood on the glass and alarms in her bones and something in his gaze had landed on her with the blunt, astonishing force of recognition, though they had never met.
“I asked a simple question,” he said.
“I heard you.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Good. I'd hate to think the future had taken your hearing before it took your common sense.”
The thief swore at both of them from the floor. Two terminal officers arrived and lifted him by the elbows while the dark-haired man handed the intruder off with a brief, cutting summary. He did it without looking away from Orla for more than a heartbeat.
That was not helping.
She straightened her coat, angry at the flush rising up her neck. “You could have warned me before you started breaking bones.”
“I didn't break it.” He glanced at the man being dragged away. “Sprained at worst. He'll recover in time to make somebody else miserable.”
“Comforting.”
“I try.”
One of the officers asked if she wanted to file an assault statement. Orla said no before the question had fully landed. The last thing she wanted was paperwork, delay, or some bureaucratic excuse to leave her planet-bound for another six months. The officer gave her a tired look that suggested she'd just declined a rare luxury and moved on.
The dark-haired man tipped his chin toward her wrist. “Let me see.”
She should have refused on principle. Instead she held out her arm.
His fingers were careful where they touched the inner skin of her wrist, checking for bruising where the smart-band had dug in. Careful, and warm, and devastatingly at odds with the rest of him. A pulse started hammering under his thumb as if her body had mistaken him for an emergency.
“You're fine,” he said.
“That's fortunate.”
His gaze lifted again. “Is it?”
A laugh almost escaped her, which felt like treason. “Do you flirt with every woman who's been nearly mugged under your supervision?”
“Only the ones who look at me like they're deciding whether to slap me or say thank you.”
“I haven't ruled either out.”
“Good,” he said softly. “Keeps things lively.”
He released her hand. The absence of it was immediate and ridiculous.
Around them, the hall resumed its movement. Boarding chimes rolled through the terminal. A queue began to feed through Gate C, all nerves and luggage and bright little acts of courage. Orla swallowed and dragged herself back into her own life.
“Thank you,” she said, because her mother had not raised her to be mannerless under pressure.
“There she is,” he murmured, as if he had been waiting for the civility all along.
She narrowed her eyes. “You are very pleased with yourself for a man in a uniform.”
“It's not a uniform. It's a warning.”
That earned it - a real laugh, sharp enough to surprise them both.
His attention flicked to the gate display over her head and something in him changed. Not vanished. Focused. The dangerous looseness went away; what remained was precision.
“Which intake group?”
“Botanical systems.”
One brow lifted. “Hydroponics?”
“Among other things.”
“Book-smart or hands-dirty?”
She tucked a loose strand of hair behind one ear. “You asking for my qualifications or trying to work out whether I'd survive you?”
“Still deciding whether you'd survive orbit.”
“And?”
“That depends who signed off on your manifest.”
He reached for the slim tablet clipped at his belt before she could ask what that meant. His thumb moved fast over the screen. Whatever he saw there made his mouth flatten.
“You've been reassigned,” he said.
“No, I haven't.”
He angled the screen toward her. Her name glowed back in pale blue:
QUINN, ORLA E.
EARTHSIDE INTAKE - BOTANICAL SYSTEMS
TRANSFER HOLD: DOCUMENT FLAG
Her stomach dropped.
“This is wrong.”
“I know.”
“I cleared everything two weeks ago.”
“Apparently somebody in Intake decided to discover bureaucracy this morning.”
“Can they un-discover it?” she asked.
His eyes met hers again, and this time the humour was gone entirely. “Not unless somebody with access likes me enough to pick up when I call.”
“Do they?”
“No,” he said. “But they fear me, which is often more useful.”
He touched two fingers to his earpiece and turned slightly away, speaking in a low clipped stream of code and authority that made nearby staff start moving without being asked twice. Orla stood very still, trying not to think about how close she'd come to losing the only seat she'd managed to buy herself with three years of overwork and one catastrophic decision after another.
Her mother would say if it's meant for you, it won't pass you.
Her mother had never tried to leave a planet.
The man listened, cut someone off, spoke again. After ten seconds he said, “No, you can tell Harker I'm the reason,” and disconnected.
“Well?” Orla demanded.
“You're cleared.”
Relief hit so hard it made her briefly light-headed. “That was fast.”
“I can be charming under pressure.”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
His mouth twitched. “You'd be surprised.”
A boarding tone sounded again - more urgent now. He stepped closer, dropping his voice.
“Listen to me carefully, Orla Quinn.”
The sound of her name in his mouth should not have mattered. It did.
“There've been two manifest breaches this morning and one cargo tamper in loading bay four. Could be panic. Could be sabotage. Could be people desperate enough to stop playing by rules they never got to write. Either way, stay inside the controlled queue. Do not stop for anyone between here and the ascent lock. Do not hand your bag to anybody. If I tell you to move, you move. Understood?”
Her skin cooled. “Is this a bad time to admit I hate being ordered about?”
“Only if you plan to do it slowly.”
“Arrogant.”
“Alive,” he corrected.
The gate lights shifted from blue to amber.
She drew a breath. “Fine. I understand.”
He held her gaze a second longer, as if checking whether she was made of the kind of courage he could rely on in a crisis. Whatever he found there seemed to satisfy him.
“Good girl,” he said absently, already turning toward the gate.
Heat flashed through her so fiercely she hated him for causing it.
Then he looked back and realised exactly what he'd said.
For the first time, he actually lost a little of his composure.
Orla folded her arms. “Say one more thing and I will absolutely let somebody else mug me out of spite.”
A sound escaped him - the rough beginning of a laugh, surprised and low. “That would be a waste of a decent boarding band.”
“You are impossible.”
“So I've been told.”
He tapped the badge on his chest with two fingers. “Soren Vale.”
There it was at last. A name for the trouble.
“Orla Quinn,” she said.
“I know.”
“Cocky.”
“Prepared.”
He moved with the crowd then, not in it but through it, the way some men carried authority so naturally that space made room before they arrived. Orla found herself following because of course she did. Because survival was clever enough to disguise itself as obedience. Because she was not stupid. Because she had looked into Soren Vale's face and understood, in one stupid traitorous pulse, that he was either going to save her life or ruin it in a way people wrote songs about.
Possibly both.
The queue fed through biometric scan, baggage gate, final seal. Beyond the glass tunnel the shuttle towered white and silver against a hard April sky. Belfast weather would have spat rain at a day like this out of principle. Here the sun burned clean and merciless over the coast, bright on the sea, bright on the steel, bright on all the people pretending not to be afraid.
Orla pressed her palm to the scanner. Green light.
A woman two places ahead began to cry in earnest. Her husband kissed her temple and whispered something into her hair. A teenage boy in colony cadet greys was sick neatly into a paper bag. Somewhere behind them, a baby started wailing with the raw betrayal of someone too young to consent to history.
They shuffled forward.
At the threshold into the transfer bridge, the lights cut out.
Not dimmed. Died.
For half a beat, silence.
Then the emergency klaxon hit.
People screamed. The bridge doors slammed halfway and jammed. Red strips ignited along the floor. Somewhere ahead glass cracked with a sound so sharp it seemed to split the inside of her skull.
“Down!” Soren roared.
The queue broke apart in chaos.
Orla dropped by reflex as bodies surged around her. Somebody crashed into her shoulder. Her duffel went skidding across the floor. A woman fell against the divider with a cry. Overhead, a shower of sparks burst from the bridge ceiling and rained hot over the crowd.
“Soren!” a voice shouted through static.
“Pressure breach section two,” another answered.
Orla looked up in time to see a hairline fracture running white through one side of the transfer tunnel glass. Not broken. Not yet. Beyond it the launch gantry hung over open air and a drop violent enough to make her stomach turn inside out.
A child was standing three metres away, frozen in the centre of the lane while his mother screamed from behind a knot of pushing bodies.
No one else was close enough.
Orla moved before the decision finished forming.
She lunged forward, seized the child under the arms, and hit the floor just as something metallic tore loose from the ceiling and smashed into the wall where his small body had been. He sobbed once in shock and clung to her neck.
“That's it,” she gasped. “I've got you. I've got you.”
A shadow fell over them.
Soren, crouching, one hand braced on the deck as if the shuddering bridge were a living thing he intended to wrestle into submission.
“You deaf as well as difficult?” he snapped.
“You said move if you told me to. You hadn't told me anything yet.”
A flash of white teeth. Fury and admiration mixed together in one savage bright line. “God help me, I nearly like you.”
He took the child from her arms and shoved him toward a transit medic. “Get him to lane B.”
The bridge shook again. This time harder.
A scream went up near the cracked glass.
“Everybody to the inner rail!” Soren shouted. “Heads down. Hands on the deck strips. You do not run unless I drag you.”
Panic made people stupid. That much, apparently, was universal across centuries and technologies. They surged anyway, trampling luggage, each other, dignity. An older man lost his footing and went down under the crush. Orla threw her shoulder into the crowd, helping haul him upright with another woman she did not know.
Soren was everywhere at once - hauling a jammed door, barking codes into his comm, grabbing a frightened girl by the chin long enough to force her focus, then shoving her safely toward the inner lane. He moved like a man who had rehearsed disaster so often he no longer considered it exceptional.
A second officer sprinted up. “Bay four explosion. They think it was manual.”
Sabotage, then.
Soren's expression did not change. “Seal the freight spine. We launch now.”
“We're not cleared.”
“We are if staying kills more people than ascent.”
The officer stared one precious second too long.
Soren leaned in. “That was not a suggestion.”
Things happened fast after that. Emergency personnel split the queue. The transfer bridge doors were forced wide by hydraulic override. Groups were bundled toward the ascent shuttle under a wash of red light and shouted instructions. Orla found her duffel kicked against a wall panel, grabbed it, and nearly went to her knees when a hand caught the back of her harness.
Soren again.
“Stay with me.”
“I am starting to feel bossed about.”
“Develop a taste for it.”
He propelled her up the final boarding ramp with one hand at the small of her back. Even through layers and panic, she felt the heat of that touch like a struck match.
Inside the shuttle, noise narrowed into a violent metallic order: restraint checks, crying children, buckles, hissing seals. The cabin smelled of recycled air, machine oil, fear. Orla stumbled toward the nearest free seat only to have Soren yank her sideways.
“Not that row.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“Compelling logic.”
He shoved her into a crash seat near the bulkhead and dropped into the harness beside her, fingers flying over the restraint lock.
Only then did she see the spidered fracture in the viewport on the opposite side and understand.
“Oh,” she said faintly.
“Exactly.”
He tightened the last strap across her hips. His face was very close now, all hard concentration and the kind of self-control that looked expensive.
“Listen carefully,” he said over the rising engine whine. “Once we clear tower, there may be turbulence. If masks drop, use yours first. If we lose cabin pressure, breathe when I tell you. If anybody screams in your ear, ignore them unless it's me.”
She swallowed. “Comforting again.”
“You keep surviving. I'll work on my bedside manner.”
The shuttle jolted. Somewhere in the cabin, somebody began praying in Spanish. Another voice joined in from two rows back, then another in Arabic, and then the engines struck full ignition beneath them and every language disappeared into force.
Orla had expected acceleration.
She had not expected violence.
The earth let go of them like a body throwing off a fever dream. Her spine slammed into the seat. Her vision blurred at the edges. Outside the small unbroken segment of viewport, the gantry dropped away in a blaze of white flame and ocean light.
Her hand found the edge of Soren's sleeve.
He looked down at it, then back at her face.
“Didn't take you for clingy, Quinn.”
“Shut up.”
He turned his arm just enough that she could grip properly. It should not have felt tender. It did.
They punched through cloud in a blur of vapour and thunder. The shuttle rattled. Warning lights flashed amber across the cabin. Somewhere forward, an automated voice announced a minor guidance correction in a tone so calm it became insulting.
The correction became a savage sideways lurch.
Gasps cracked through the cabin.
A panel blew from the ceiling.
Then the world went wrong.
The shuttle dropped.
Only a few metres, perhaps. Enough to make a cabin full of human bodies remember every old animal fear at once. Enough to tear a cry from Orla's throat before she could stop it.
Oxygen masks slammed from the overhead channel.
Children screamed in earnest now. An alarm rose, sharp and continuous.
“Eyes on me,” Soren said.
She did not realise she was panicking until he said it. Her breaths had gone thin and fast. Her fingers were numb around his sleeve.
The cabin lights flickered blood-red, then white again.
“Soren-”
“Eyes on me, Orla.”
She obeyed because his voice left no room not to.
“Good. Breathe in.” He demonstrated it, absurdly calm. “Hold. Out. Again.”
Around them, the shuttle shook hard enough to make the harness cut into bone. Someone across the aisle was sobbing that they were going to die. A mother fought one-handed with a child's mask while trying not to lose her own.
Orla dragged in air. Held. Let it go.
Soren watched her mouth, counting with her without making it obvious.
There was a bruise-dark steadiness to him that should have been impossible in motion. It reached her anyway.
In. Hold. Out.
Again.
The shuttle righted in a scream of protesting metal.
A cheer tried to rise and died under the next warning tone.
“Tell me something true,” Orla said, because if she did not speak she might break apart entirely.
One side of his mouth lifted. “You don't make anything easy.”
“That isn't comforting.”
“It's true.”
Another shudder. Smaller this time.
He looked at her for one measured second, then said, “Here's another true thing. Fear is only useful if you can make it carry something.”
She stared at him.
His gaze dropped once, swiftly, to her mouth and back. It was almost nothing. It was enough to alter the temperature in her blood.
“Carry what?” she whispered.
His answering voice was low enough not to belong to anyone else in that cabin.
“Someone worth reaching.”
The engine pitch changed. Higher. Smoother.
The worst of the turbulence had passed.
But the thing he had just put between them did not pass with it.
Orla became acutely aware of every point of contact in the narrow space between their seats. The line of his shoulder against hers. The strength in the forearm she still held. The heat of his thigh where the crash harness had forced them too close in the violent first seconds of ascent. She thought, with pure furious clarity, that attraction in a crisis was probably the stupidest instinct the species had ever evolved.
Her body, unsurprisingly, did not care.
“Do you say that to all the frightened women?” she managed.
“No.”
“How reassuring.”
“I wasn't trying to reassure you.” His gaze held hers. “I was trying to stop you forgetting yourself.”
The shuttle crossed the edge of atmosphere.
The change was subtle at first. The violence gentled. The heavy crushing force eased enough for lungs to work properly again. The white blaze beyond the port darkened into indigo, then black shot through with impossible light.
Earth curved below them.
Blue and white. Vast. Mercilessly beautiful.
A broken sound escaped someone in the row behind. Not fear this time. Awe.
Orla looked down at the world she had just left and felt grief strike in a clean bright spear under the breastbone. For her mother in the kitchen doorway pretending not to cry. For the city that had taught her how to make home out of too little. For the version of herself that had believed staying, no matter how much it cost, counted as loyalty.
Soren's arm shifted under her grip.
She loosened her hand at once. “Sorry.”
He looked at the faint indent of her fingers on his sleeve. “Don't be.”
The shuttle rotated toward transfer vector. Applause broke out in ragged pockets across the cabin; people laughed with the weird relief of those who had not quite believed in later and had been delivered into it anyway.
A pilot's voice came over the cabin speakers, thin with static, announcing successful ascent and pending docking with colony transfer vessel Carrick. Passengers were instructed to remain seated. Medical triage would meet them on rendezvous. Operations appreciated their cooperation during an “unexpected departure event,” which was bureaucratic language for we nearly died and are too embarrassed to phrase it cleanly.
Orla let out a breath that trembled despite her best efforts.
Soren unfastened only long enough to reach across and retighten a loose strap at her shoulder.
He did not need to touch the place where her neck met her collarbone.
He did.
Barely.
Her eyes lifted to his.
For one suspended second, with the black of space opening around them and Earth falling away beneath, his face lost the final guard it had kept. What she saw there was not flirtation. Not exactly. It was recognition stripped to the nerve. Something that landed with dangerous certainty, as though the future had arrived early and neither of them appreciated the bad manners.
Then his comm crackled and the moment broke.
He sat back, all discipline again. “Welcome to the worst decision of your life, Quinn.”
She should have said something clever. Something armed.
Instead she heard herself ask, “And yours?”
His mouth tilted, tired and devastating. “Mine happened long before you boarded.”
The shuttle sailed on into the dark.
And because fate had an ugly sense of timing, Orla believed him.