Kavita stepped into the communication booth on Artemis Station and put on the glasses. An image of David Worthington, Immortal of Solar Standard, Inc., appeared in front of her, as if they were both standing in the middle of a black void. There was still a couple of seconds delay in transmission between Artemis and Earth; even the Immortals hadn’t found a way to warp space-time. Yet Kavita felt if anyone could, Worthington would find a way to break physics, to survive even the heat death of the universe, if it kept him alive or made a profit.

“Kavita,” Worthington said, with a smile of perfect white teeth, “I hope you didn’t go to too much trouble.”

It did indeed not only cost trouble, but also much too much money. The Standard Exx: Endeavor’s communications suite was fifty years obsolescent, and though Azul and Farah were the tech wizs, even Azul couldn’t recode their suite to accept these new protocols, not within the time span of a day. And Worthington wasn’t about to go out of his way to reschedule, much less find a fifty-year-old software packet or emulator. What Immortal would? It wasn’t worth their time, and time was money.

The two seemingly ageless beings stood across each other in the simulated entropic void. Yet Kavita wasn’t an Immortal, though the groundlings on Earth would think of her as such.

“What do you… you people call yourself?” Worthington said. “In the old Mandarin slang?”

“Làngrén,” Kavita said. “But no one else uses that term. Just us.”

“Ah, yes. ‘Wanderers.’ Do you know the original meaning?”

Kavita nodded her head, keeping her practiced smile, teeth gritted and grinding against each other all the while.

“Vagabonds. Hobos. Lechers.” Worthington chuckled, an old man’s laugh, even though he had the smoothed, slightly tanned skin of a twenty-something. Kavita surmised that underneath the waistcoat and suit coat, he’d even have an unearned six-pack, body fat engineered away and muscle grown-sculpted.

Kavita tensed up, but not at the veiled insult. She’d had this exact same opening conversation with Worthington several times already, at least about fifty-years ago, and another over a hundred. For her, these conversations were fresh in her mind. In her perspective, she only had them within a few years. But Worthington lived on Earth and had experienced the past few centuries second by second.

“But did you also know it was borrowed from the Japanese rōnin?” Worthington echoed from his own past. “Which in turn was borrowed from Chinese in the first place!”

“I did know that.”

“Yes, I do get that sense of déjà vu. Happens to us all the time.”

What must it be like, to be an Immortal, to endure the passage of time but to never age, never change. Were Immortals the closest to bored gods?

“About our contract, Worthington?”

“Technically null. Standard Exx, Inc. was restructured and dismantled while you were on your work trip.”

My work trip meant anyone on Earth I knew is probably dead now, Kavita thought.

“And the government rewrote the laws, so that the Endeavor and cargo belong to Solar Standard, the inheritor company, but your crew contract evidently remains with Standard Exx. Because the ship and cargo is property, and you are people. At least, that’s what my lawyers say.” He chuckled.

“Worthington, you were CEO of Standard Exx. You can easily honor the contract as CEO of Solar Standard.”

“I wish it were that simple, Kavita. I’m not sure of the details, but my lawyers say you’d have to get a governmental representative involved. I believe you need to file a suit. It’s honestly a bit beyond me.”

Kavita groaned, inwardly. No way this kind of law rewrite just happened without the Immortals’ approval or manipulation. On a practical level, a lawsuit would mean years in litigation. What little savings they had (the five market crashes while they were on their “work trip” tore apart their savings portfolio) wouldn’t maintain them. In fact, they’d save money reneging on the contract. “I know you went out of your way to talk to me–“

“My pleasure! I think about you a lot, Kavita, up there in the darkest black, surviving on your wits and hard work alone. You làngrén are a romanticized lot, amongst us and the groundlings. Did you know people make a living writing about your adventures?”

“I’m sure Quan could publish some of their journal entries. They’re the poet among us.”

The image of Worthington lost that lustrous smile and the tiny wrinkle on his brow marred his perfectly smooth face.

“Quan is one of my crew,” Kavita quickly replied. “You haven’t met them. A good Supply Officer. Trust them with my life.”

The pause caused Kavita’s heartbeat to double. Not every Immortal would have a one-on-one with a contractor. (Even though, she 20% suspected Worthington was an AP, Artificial Personality, since she had never met him in the flesh.) In this way, she had a privilege the other làngrén didn’t have. And to lose that privilege by accidentally making Worthington feel stupid or uninformed…

“Ah. ‘Trust them with my life.’ You are truly straight out of those romances.” The image stood still and for a moment, Kavita thought it had crashed or she had been set on pause. “Let me buy out that contract. I’ll have my people send you the details. And I think I might have a new one for you. Let’s keep in touch.”

The glasses displayed a “Call Ended” message, but Kavita didn’t let out a breath until she left the comms booth.

~~~

The Endeavor hauler had seen better days. From the automated shuttle, which wasn’t exactly brand spanking new itself, Kavita could see the damage her ship had endured in its fifty-year long trip to the Oort Cloud. This last trip, when they were out of the solar system but not yet at the Cloud, Kavita thought they’d be corpses in their sleep chambers. One of the nuclear batteries stopped producing power and instead produced waste heat. Farah saved their lives, made the kludge, anchoring the offending battery on a pylon several hundred yards back, rigged a system to radiate the waste heat away, making the hauler look like a lollipop. Because of that kludge, the Endeavor might be worth scrap, barely. Maybe they could get paid to crash this somewhere on Earth where the groundlings could shipbreak it.

The shuttle docked with their airlock, and as she felt the rumble of pressurization, she turned to thank the pilot, but forgot it didn’t have one. How long until we’re automated? Are five protein and glucose computers in sleep chambers and life support really cheaper than an AP and a few robots?

When she entered the Endeavor, Kavita found herself barraged by the complaints of her irate crew and wished she was an emotionless, rational AP. By the time she got them to shut up, Kavita had determined at least three issues:

First, Farah, who shaved her head before each contract and whose hair was now a curly mop to her shoulders, blamed the Firmament for being a class-J ship, with a more powerful burn and larger cargo capacity. This allowed the crew to waste their spare fuel to reach the inner solar system before them, dumping their cargo first and flooding the market.

Second, Quan, the aforementioned poet, whom Azul joked they could use their cheekbones to cut wire, blamed the làngrén network for not warning them about the Firmament. The Endeavor could have taken a less elliptical orbit, arrived much later, when the market had settled.

Third, short and stocky Azul, always managing to pick up all the current curse slang in the few short days before each new contract, kept calling Worthington “birthed from the slimy womb of compost trash” in that Mandarin-English mix làngrén used. This is why no one let Azul into the comms suite. Yet they all agreed that Worthington’s contract buyout was less than minimum market rate, barely enough to resupply for another contract run.

This kind of bitching and moaning wasn’t uncommon amongst làngrén. Kavita and her crew have had been with each other in cramped quarters long enough that they knew each other inside and out. It wasn’t uncommon for a làngrén crew to form a bonded polycule; the additional labor of managing emotions was nothing compared to having to watch one of your own float a damaged nuclear device into space with the Sun a tiny dot in the black. As captain, she did her best to stay out of it despite the invitations in order to be the neutral mediator.

Kwame, tall and scrawny (every làngrén crewmember was either skinny or short due to weight restrictions on a hauler) still took up a bit of space in the airlock. His normally brilliant smile was absent as he read his mobile. This signaled to Kavita that her crew was really in trouble. He tossed her his mobile and she quickly read.

“Worthington’s new contract from Solar Standard,” Kavita said. “On one of those newer, class-J ships Farah was bitching about.”

Kavita could see Farah sticking out her tongue in her peripheral vision, but the realization dawned on each one of them right at the same time. Even in zero-G, Kavita’s stomach dropped.

A class-J ship could only take three crew.

~~~

“This is a death sentence,” Quan said.

“Stop being so melodramatic,” Azul grumbled. “The two left behind still get to live out their lives on Earth. With the class-J ship, those two would see the others in about thirty years.”

“Right, thirty years is a lifetime, a lifetime of clawing for scraps with the other groundlings.”

“It’s no shame to be a groundling,” Kwame said. “We were all groundlings before we became làngrén.”

“Groundlings subsistence farm on bacteria-poisoned soil. They mine trash piles and sift through leachate sludge,” Quan said.

“The difference between us and groundlings,” Kavita interrupted, “is that we control our life and work. No one is being left behind. We haven’t made any decisions. We haven’t figured out all of our options.”

“You think you can get a personal relationship with another Immortal that fast?” Farah said. “Why don’t you sleep with Worthington to seal the deal?”

“I don’t have time. I have too much on my hands trying to keep this crew going.”

The Immortals had their own social circles, their own staff, groundlings who managed to cross that barrier, live adjacent to immortality. They died as quickly as groundlings, but at least they could have some luxuries. But Kavita had heard Immortals were turning away to automation and appointing their ever-growing families into key positions. It was a wonder that Worthington dealt with Kavita personally, perhaps an old-fashioned sense of nostalgia. Like those written romances, Kavita was simply a side character in his life, someone to provide color for his existence. “I can find us another contract. Trust me.”

“We have free room and board until Solar Standard claims the ship and cargo,” Azul said. “After that we’re burning our last payout. Reentry costs to Earth are ridiculous, and rent elsewhere is at a premium.”

The clock was ticking.

~~~

Kavita had worked too hard to escape being a groundling. She started off as a shipbreaker with her extended family, years marked not by the seasons but by shipfalls. They sailed through the ocean mire, the plastic density high enough that the wrecks floated, at least for a little while, as the superheated hull turned the salt-water-plastic into a cloying, stringy, sticky steam. Not every shipfall could be salvaged. A wreck in the middle of the deep ocean couldn’t be hauled close enough to dry land. A wreck on land would blast a crater and be a molten, radioactive mess.

Kavita had just had a couple of cousins drown recently, the wreck suddenly taking on water and plummeting down into the dark. The water drag pulled them too deep and they never found the bodies, nor the wreck. Her family mourned that night and the next morning went back to scavenging; they couldn’t afford to miss a day of work. For weeks, at night she lay outside on her bedroll, staring up at the high-altitude brown-yellow cloud smoke reflecting the lights from the ground, remembering the stories of a star-filled sky.

The next shipfall, Kavita took point, and even her aunts and uncles wondered at her sudden zeal as she climbed on top of the atmosphere-scoured hull to clamp on towing cables, burning the soles of her boots. She jumped into the water without an air tank to clip on the tarps, keeping water from flooding the hull. Again, no one had time or energy to talk her down or understand her impulses.

When they beached the wreck, Kavita went straight into its guts, found the computer hardware and tore out the core. “This is my payment,” she said to her family and never came back to shipbreaking.

She found Quan, known for their ability to find the bits and parts to reassemble anything, to find the right people who knew the right people. With their help, Kavita got the computer core up and running for ship logs, tech manuals, and navigation data.

“I don’t think any of this is valuable,” Quan had said.

“It’s valuable to a ship crew. And I want to form a crew.”

Quan never said why they had joined up. Was it the day-to-day struggle to trade for food? Was it the intensity in Kavita’s eyes? Whatever the reason, they recruited Azul, who could sift through the software. Azul simply said to Kavita, “I want to leave this fucking graveyard of a shitty planet.” From there, Quan unearthed Kwame, math wiz, and asked him if he could learn orbital mechanics. Kwame smiled his signature smile, shrugged, and said, “Numbers dance for me.”

Kavita found Farah herself, since she knew her from her shipbreaking days, and the five of them saved, starved, scavenged more tech and software, studied, and practiced on the emptied wrecks. None of them, other than Kavita, had any close living family, and they had no reason to stay on Earth. When Kavita told her family her plans, no one tried to stop her, since she also stopped leaning on them for money or food. “If you can survive on your own, then you have our blessing.”

“Thank you,” she said, “but I’m not on my own.”

The next step leaned on Kavita, and she spent her savings on comm time, made appointments with secretary APs, and sat on hold (and thus burning up her comm minutes). She felt like a rusty escaped worker trap, wiry, ready to lash out and snare an opportunity, vibrating with purpose.

She slept listening to làngrén comm traffic, basic radio and not digitally encoded for 3D projections. She learned the names of the ships and crews, the names of the companies that owned them, the terms and slang warning each other of one problem or another. Until finally, she heard their opportunity: The crew of the Standard Exx: Endeavor died by decompression. Hauler to be scrapped.

She immediately pinged David Worthington, then CEO of Standard Exx, and gave him their pitch. They were a full crew, self-trained on class-E ships, and could make the Endeavor spaceworthy again. They could pay their own passage into orbit, and all Worthington needed to supply was oxygen, food, materials for repair, and a contract.

And against all hope, he accepted their deal.

~~~

Everyone shook their network trees, placing pings and leaving messages everywhere. Each shift, one of them floated toward the comm suite (even Azul, they were that desperate), met the other who either shook their head or shrugged, neither message encouraging. The làngrén network lit up in the electromagnetic bandwidth. Of course they were all competing against each other. Usually each crew would use the network to warn the others of market shifts or odd contracts, to plan different routes, or to find contingency solutions; sometimes a contract negotiation with an Immortal also included endless negotiations with another làngrén crew. Everyone doing their best to even out the meager payouts across the network, like stretching noodles, careful not to break them.

Even the crew of the Firmament passed the message along. They didn’t bother with an apology for undercutting them; air time and comm traffic costed money. Kavita couldn’t hold a grudge against the Firmament anyway. She would have done the same to them, if she had the opportunity or the need. Like now.

She was leaning her head back in the comm suite, legs hooked in the fabric straps to anchor her for a back stretch, rubbing her forehead. If tension could be harnessed into energy, they wouldn’t need that damaged nuclear battery hanging behind them. A casual “hey” above her from the entrance caused her to open her eyes, to see Azul and Quan hovering there, hands interlaced but faces solidified in stoney preparation, and Kavita knew exactly what they were going to say.

Amongst làngrén, the phrase “go to ground” meant more than returning to Earth to become a groundling shipbreaker or a scrape farmer, earning just enough money for maybe a small meal for the day. “Go to ground” meant the longing to be chained by gravity, to be imprisoned by the smoke-choked sky, to trade the freedom of the black for the safety of solid earth. To the làngrén, “going to ground” meant the end.

Kavita imagined Quan and Azul endlessly fighting, laughing, digging in Earth’s poisoned soil, tightening toward only the two of them, so isolated compared to their five-person crew. They’d have safety but their possibilities would be so narrow. They could start a family, but their children, and their children’s children would have nothing left to look forward to but endlessly fighting, laughing, and digging in Earth’s poisoned soil.

Kavita thought of all the other pitches she had, the pep talks, the follow-the-Captain-through-hell speeches she had heard, but to be honest, this was perhaps the most rational decision these two could make. “I’m giving you my payout and savings.”

Quan smiled. “Kwame and Farah already offered.”

“And you’ll take mine.” Kavita couldn’t risk a smile. Any movement on her face could launch tears.

“We won’t forget you.” Azul laughed. “But who knows… maybe you’ll meet our children or grandchildren. We’ll tell them how much of a hardass Auntie Kavita was.”

Was, Kavita thought. We’re already thinking of each other as dead.

~~~

The Solar Standard: Golden Horizon was indeed a top-of-the-line class-J ship. Sleep chambers with a much marginally lower chance of death. More efficient fuel burn. Smaller components for less mass. More efficient nuclear batteries. The crawlspaces and living compartments, however, were also significantly smaller, barely room for two people at a time in some spaces. Kavita had worried that this change, the cramped quarters, and the loss of their two crewmembers would increase tensions. Yet they all grew closer in a way from the loss, while also feeling a shadow fall over them. The playful nagging and ribald jokes trickled to a stop, yet they clung tighter to each other in the glittering black, as if trying to leave grasping fingermarks on their hearts.

Golden Horizon’s twenty-five-year run meant they did keep in touch with Quan and Azul, their messages little ships-in-bottles waiting for them when they got out of sleep. An info dump of thirteen plus years of change: indeed, a family, struggle with work, even the scavenging of the Endeavor after it had plunged into the plastic-mire of the ocean. A decade being out of touch wasn’t so unusual for people, even with networked comms.

But again, the payout from this run didn’t leave much time for visits. Massive inflation and a change in demand. Now precious metals were scarce. The crew of the Golden Horizon had no choice but to accept the next contract, even as Kwame said that the rush for precious metals would collapse the market. The làngrén network portioned out a schedule, and since Kavita’s crew wasn’t in such dire need, they ended up near the end, adding a few extra years in sleep to their route to give the earlier crews some market advantage.

“Azul,” Kavita began, in their last comm exchange. “If we take this contract–“

“You will take this contract.” Azul’s long, gray and white hair had a silvery sheen to it, but Kavita knew she had oiled her hair specifically for this call. She knew they couldn’t afford such luxuries regularly. “There isn’t any work for you three down here.”

Kavita couldn’t help but follow the lines on Azul’s face, her skin several shades browner for being in the sunlight for decades. You are beautiful, she wanted to say, but instead said, “But then we’ll be together.”

“For only a few years, and then both Quan and I will be gone. I’d rather know that you three will be up there in the black, living forever.”

The three of them did do a few more runs. For them, it felt like only a few years, but for the groundlings, a century. They lost touch with Quan and Azul’s descendants, not for the lack of trying, but because databases go out of date and file formats change. Kavita could have hired someone to hunt them down or she could have done the legwork herself, but that would have taken either money or time, neither of which she could afford. And inevitably, the next contract required the use of the new class-Q ships: two crew and automated bots. This time, Kwame was the one who decided to leave.

“I want to know how Quan and Azul died. I want to meet their grandchildren.”

“They won’t know you,” Farah said. “It’s not like we’re legends passed down through the ages. We are ‘làngrén,’ wanderers, strangers to the groundlings.”

“They’ll understand my love for their founders. And through that, they’ll know me.”

“And I thought Quan was the poet,” Kavita said.

“But we love you,” Farah said. She glanced at Kavita, but the captain couldn’t bring herself to look either of them in the eye. “We know you.”

“Then you have to know that it’s my time to go to ground.”

“Kavita…” Farah whispered.

“I’ll talk to Worthington,” Kavita said. “The Golden Horizon is still a good ship, even if it’s over a hundred years old.”

Though the technology had changed several times, the cost of using the comm suite at Chang’e Station seemed to have risen. Worthington remained perhaps the only stable, unchanged thing. No, not unchanged. With the transmissions’ image resolution, Worthington seemed even younger than Kavita remembered.

“But did you also know it was borrowed from the Japanese rōnin?” Worthington echoed from his own past. “Which in turn was borrowed from Chinese in the first place!”

“I did know that.”

“Yes, I do get that sense of déjà vu. Happens to us all the time.”

Kavita’s plea also repeated itself, only with different names, and Worthington got the same furrowed brow when she mentioned Kwame, and even though she let slip the talk of love and family, Worthington chuckled the same and said, “You are truly straight out of those romances.”

Back at the Golden Horizon, Kavita sat in the comm suite and found herself switching on the airlock comms.

“Don’t be mad at your captain. That’s not healthy or helpful,” Kwame said.

“She could have had the decency of seeing you off,” Farah growled. “You leaving isn’t a betrayal–“

“She sees it as a loss.”

“How would you know what she feels? She’s as cold as the things we mine.”

“You know that isn’t true, Farah. Take care of our captain. I’ll be watching the skies for you.” When the two shared a deep, desperate, goodbye kiss, Kavita shut off the comm channel.

The two continued on a few more runs, the APs handling most of the drudgery. Kavita and Farah spoke of the others, but Kavita never brought them up herself. Soon, Farah stopped talking about them altogether, and the atmosphere inside the ship turned as cold as outside.

So it didn’t surprise Kavita that Farah decided to leave, even though the new class-R ships still held two crew.

“I’m obsolete.”

“You’re obstinate, all right.”

“No, the hardware and software has changed so much. I could barely keep up on software with Azul when she…”

Was alive. Kavita let desperation cast a cutting edge in her voice. “You can’t leave. The others are gone. You’re all I have left.”

Maybe not so cold, after all. “Then come with me. Come back to Earth.”

“And struggle? Suffer down there and die?”

“That’s what’s happening up here! It’s always one more contract. We’re always struggling.”

“We get food. A home of our own.” Kavita grabbed Farah’s hands, holding them tight. “At least we have the hope of a good contract, a good payout.”

“Hope? Is that what’s driving you?”

“Yes.”

Farah shook her head. “You can have a better crew. A younger one. Someone vibrant, not tired dust like I am.”

Kavita kissed Farah hard, almost biting, hoping to leave a mark that would last as long as the wound Farah was leaving on her. She left anyway, the airlock hiss maybe an accusation.

In her conversation with Worthington, one almost unconscious, preprogrammed, Kavita accepted the contract for the single-person class-T ship, the crew all APs. She even said, “It’s because I’m a rōnin, a masterless warrior. The black my battlefield.”

This time, Worthington blinked in surprise. “I feel that you can really read my mind, sometimes. This is why we work well with each other. You are truly straight out of those romances.”

~~~

A couple of runs in and the kiss remained etched into her memory. Not because she loved Farah more than the others, Kwame, Azul, or Quan, but because Kavita inadvertently made it a single act of her feelings instead of the slow, steady trickle of love when they were still her crew, still alive. Even Farah’s last message, “I know you’ll blame yourself but we all know that you did everything for us. We know what we meant to you and what you meant to us,” did nothing to change Kavita’s heart or mind. Farah’s voice had become weighty, layered by sadness and time, smoothing out that fresh sarcasm. Kavita didn’t recognize that voice anymore.

Kavita woke from the dreamless sleep, but the fogginess never left her. She spent the days out in the Oort Cloud letting the APs do all the work; before going into sleep, she had already plotted out a long, looping course, years way out of spec, to settle on an incredibly remote cometoid. She sat in the comms booth, flipping through messages, reliving her mission logs (Immortals didn’t care about these things, but the làngrén did their best to hold a database of mission and navigation data), and approved AP queries.

She did her best to program the personalities. The APs acted too much like the Immortals each one was patterned after; the irony of the most servitor of creations, Artificial Personalities with no will of their own, no desire, no needs or wants, looking and talking like the endless, ageless rulers of the solar system was not ignored by Kavita. But she was no software wiz, and the best she could do was give them random bursts of dialogue. She would sometimes drop the interval to minimum, letting the APs chatter nonsense, turning the local comms channel into babbling white noise. Sometimes she would mute the APs, turn off all the lights, and simply float in a corridor, half asleep, lucid dreaming of floating in the black forever.

She woke. Eyes blinking in a pitch black… no, she could see the outlines of the corridor paneling, each rectangle a control or interface, not a square inch wasted in this class-T ship. Above her, panels flashed angry, panicked red, and she reached up with an arm weak with sleep and slow to move, as if its mass was increased by sadness.

“Report.”

“Captain Kavita Singh,” the Worthington AP said, “one of the nuclear batteries has failed.”

“How? This is a class-T ship.”

“Sometimes throwing a stone across a pond can be–“

“Set random dialogue to zero, please. And repeat last answer.”

“Class-T ships have sacrificed certain safety systems for lighter mass. APs, however, have a list of protocols for any maintenance issues. Protocols include–“

“Stop.” A strange impulse took hold. She ignored the safety warnings and her fingers flew across the control panel, calling up a làngrén AP software crack. She scrolled through various files, until she found, under the emergency protocols, that life support could be cut off if market profit exceeded the cost of hiring new “organic” crew.

“Start. What is the current market profit compared to Solar Standard employee costs?”

“Solar Standard holds their employees to the highest standards. The company respects the value of their employees in turn.”

“That’s not an answer,” Kavita said. “Wait, but I’m not an employee. I’m a contractor. Does that count?”

“No.”

For several moments, Kavita floated in silence, until bubbles started forming in her chest, right underneath her solar plexus. They came out in spasms, and she realized she was laughing. The APs joined in, and that only caused her to laugh harder, her abdomen constricting her lungs until she gasped for air, digging her nails into the paneling. She finally managed a whisper, “To think that deep down inside, I actually thought Worthington cared…”

“Captain Kavita Singh,” the Worthington AP repeated, “one of the nuclear batteries has failed.”

The memory of Farah’s fix for the Endeavor was still fresh, even though it was maybe a decade ago from her perspective. She could almost hear, feel, Farah’s explanation when she had floated out there. But then she did the math and realized in Earth time, in Worthington’s time, in groundling’s time, Farah had disconnected that old nuclear battery, welded a pylon along the back end, and anchored it to the other end with some heat transfer material over three or four hundred years ago.

And even though Farah was perhaps still alive right now, by the time Kavita returned to Earth, she would be an old woman waiting for death. And for Kavita, maybe another contract and another conversation about rōnin. Why open old (new) wounds over a dying battery (and who could afford the comms cost)?

“Captain Kavita Singh,” the Worthington AP said, “shall we begin the protocols for the failed nuclear battery?”

The word yes choked in her throat and the AP continued its blank smile awaiting a response.

“Shall we begin the protocols for the failed nuclear battery?”

“Captain Kavita Singh?”

“Captain Singh?”

“Kavita?”

___

Copyright 2024 Monte Lin