shining like the stars

83

The console was not unusual to Galra ships; smooth plates that would shift their image to display holographic keys, activated by a palm print. Pidge ran her hand along the top of the console, feeling for the catch and popping the slot open that allowed her to plug her paladin armor directly into the console's mainframe and hopefully bypassing the manual palm print input.

"It's quiet," Matt reported, flipping the interior lock on the door instead of standing guard at its entry. The room had been abandoned, a guard's station not currently in use. "Too quiet."

He laid his weapon on the console and looked up at the large split screen display as Pidge typed input directly into the forearm console that her armor supported. "Yeah, I don't like it," Pidge said without looking up. "We haven't run across any drone soldiers either, just a handful of flesh and blood Galra. It makes my skin crawl."

"Most of them are probably at the games," Matt said, and the weird quality to his voice made Pidge look up finally and glance over at her brother. He wasn't looking at her, but up at the split screen covered in Galra writing. He didn't look over or acknowledge her, and the light from the monitor reflected off the front of his full-face helmet. The glare made the transparency moot, and Pidge glanced back down at her arm when the program beeped. "What was that?"

"Decryption check," Pidge said. "It'll start to auto-decrypt while its downloading, we can start filtering while it processes."

"No need." Matt tilted his head forward and popped the latch on his full-face helmet, setting it on the console itself. His hair was plastered down to his head with sweat, and, like Pidge, he wasn't wearing glasses with his helmet. "I can read Galra."

Pidge hesitated a long moment before saying anything else. Matt had slammed both of his hands onto the console and he was staring at the screen with a desperation she felt down into her bones. Prisoner transport lists, inventories, gladiators, injured, dead — they all scrolled past the screen faster than any human eye could read, never mind translate. "Yeah," Pidge said finally. "I can read Galra too, kinda, but not at that speed. You're not going to see anything that my programs can't pick out, Matt."

Matt bowed his head forward, hands still braced on the console's edge. Then he let out a long, ragged sigh. "You're right," he said after the exhale had passed. "I just ... gotta find Dad, Katie. I left him. I have to find him again."

She remained silent. There was a memory there, slipping out the window at night with a backpack and her newly-cut hair still in the wastebasket of the bathroom, her mother, exhausted, sleeping on the couch with the television still on. It hurt to leave her behind without telling her what she was planning, but she had to, if the Garrison had come around asking questions her mom had to not know what she had planned ... and that was leaving her mother to safety, on earth.

Not alone in an alien prison camp.

Pidge swallowed, as Matt looked up again. The violet light hollowed out his face, and he looked even older. "We'll find him," Pidge said softly. "Both of us. Together."

He looked over at her. It took a long moment but then he smiled, stepped closer and put his arms over her shoulders. "I still can't believe you're here, little sis," he said, as she hugged him back with her one free arm. "I keep thinking I've been dreaming, all this time, and I'll wake up right back where I started." He didn't move, and Pidge patted his back awkwardly after a moment.

"I gotta," she said, and he let her go so she could punch more buttons on the arm that was connected to the console. "Shouldn't be too much longer now," she said, as Matt picked his helmet back up off the console and put it on, before picking up the weapon he'd laid beside it. "What are you doing?"