She was running out of oxygen.

  She held perfectly still, floating through the vacuum as she waited, quietly, for her end to come. She was sweating in the vacuum suit, she’d turned off the climate controls and focused all of the suits remaining power to life support.

  It wouldn’t be enough.

  She’d been on a spacewalk when the

  had exploded. She didn’t know why, but the blastwave had sent her spinning. She’d managed to level out the spin and call for help.

  But the nearest help, now that the

  was dead, was light years away.

  She was going to die, gasping for breath. The beacon on her suit would ensure that the rescue team would reclaim her body. She’d get a funeral, at least.

  Then, of course, they’d dump her body into the reclaimer like they did with everyone.

  But such was the life. Resources like cadavers couldn’t be wasted in a zero-sum environment like the cold reality of space.

  A part of her felt like crying. A part of her felt like laughing. A part of her just wanted it to be over.

  She closed her eyes.

  And she waited.

  She was running out of oxygen. It would be harder to breathe soon.

  She wondered if it wouldn’t be faster to just vent her suit and get it over with. It might be the cowards way out, but—

  What the hell was that?

  There was a door. A wooden fucking door in the middle of space. It was a big door, large enough for her to pass straight through into the old-style wooden tavern on the other side. And she was headed right for it.

  She could avoid it, of course, but what was the point?

  And…

  She swallowed.

  What if, whatever on the other side, it was here to help?

  There were strange things out there in space. They’d known that ever since the Rosaliths had destroyed Earth. The Grasshopper and the Atlians had confirmed that there were things science just didn’t explain away.

  Hope blossomed inside her and before she could crush it, she engaged her suits pneumatic propulsion system, wasting just a little bit of nitrogen which didn’t matter since she couldn’t breathe it anyway, and flying through the door just a little faster.

  The sudden grasp of gravity pulled her down, and she landed on her ass. The door slammed shut behind her, and she looked up to see a kindly old man cleaning a mug with a rag.

  He wasn’t wearing a vacuum suit. He was wearing a costume, like what the actors who played out scenes from old-earth would wear.

  “Welcome,” he said. “Would you like something to eat or drink, or would you like to change into something more comfortable first. I should have some clothes that will fit you if you want to get out of that spacesuit.”

  He motioned behind him. “There’s a room in there where you can shower and change, if you want. Or you can soak in the tub. Either way, you’re safe here, and when you’ve settled your tab, I’ll return you to somewhere safe, where you can rejoin your colony ship.”

  “What—what are you?” she asked. “Are you Atlian?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. I’m something older,” the Innkeeper answered. “Most of my customers don’t realize I’m anything special, but, well, I saw your story about to end, and I figured I’d give you the option of telling it to someone who would listen.”

  She frowned. “Is this old magic? Like the kind grams used to talk about? Do you trade in names and souls and—“

  “I trade in stories. And you keep what you give me,” the Innkeeper answered. “If you’d rather not risk it, I can put you back where I found you. But I’d much rather you accept my hospitality. I don’t like placing my potential customers in danger, but if you insist—“

  “No,” she said quickly. “I—I don’t want to die. If you promise to save me, I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “I’m sorry if this feels like I’m coercing you,” the Innkeeper said, sounding genuinely remorseful. “Old magic works a certain way, however. Saving your life isn’t free, and I need your story to work my power. It’s not my fault that I saved you from a dangerous environment, but without your cooperation it’s the only one I can return you to.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it,” she said. “Since I don’t know what rules you’re required to follow.”

  “The laws of hospitality, of course,” he answered. “Once you accept that you are my guest, I am required to protect you, and forbidden to allow harm to come to you. This includes from other guests and myself. There’s more to it. Old rules, old laws. Magic that runs deeper than marrow.”

  He set the mug aside and threw the rag he’d been cleaning it with over his shoulder. “But you’re skeptical. You come from a skeptical people. Even in the old days, before your folks left the world that birthed you, your ancestors would meet me and scarcely believe that I was anything other than a decent place to catch a bite to eat and catch up with old friends.”

  She swallowed.

  “Yes, that’s right. I’ve been around for a very long time, Silvana. Now. It’s your choice. Would you like to get comfortable, or would you like to eat first?”

  “What do you demand from me in exchange.”

  “Did I not say that?” the Innkeeper looked surprised. “Your Story, Silvana. My magic works on Story. And before you panic, note that I said Story, not Memory. You keep what you tell me, and I’m the richer for it. The oldest magic there is, Stories.”

  She swallowed.

  “Okay,” she said. “I don’t like that I don’t really have a choice in the matter. It’s death or I accept what you’re offering. But I choose life.”

  It wasn’t until she was in the shower, her vacuum suit sprawled across the floor, that she realized he’d called her by the same name her Grams used to use for her. She’d gone by Sil for forever. Nobody called her Silvana since her Grams went to the recycler.

  #

  ***

  “What kind of meat is this?” Sil asked suspiciously, poking it with a fork.

  “It’s pork,” the Innkeeper answered. “If you don’t like it, I have chicken, beef, goat, just about any kind of animal from your world that you can eat actually. I don’t actually slaughter them, they’re taken from memories of people who have passed through my doors and I make them real again.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I grew up on ration packs and hydroponics,” she said. Her mouth was watering from the scent. Aside from the perfectly grilled meat, there was grilled greens and mashed potatoes and some kind of purple thing she didn’t recognize.

  “What is this?” she asked, pointing at it.

  “Beets,” he answered. “Not everyone likes them, but I think you will.”

  She stared at her plate suspiciously. “And you just conjure this out of nothing.”

  “Not out of nothing,” he said. “Out of the Nothing.”

  He held out his hand, and a swirl of light and smoke obscured his vision before he was holding a standard issue ration pack. The kind that she could get by the carton at home.

  “If you’d rather, you can have this, of course,” he said. “I just thought you’d enjoy the food of your ancestors.”

  She swallowed her saliva, her mouth watering from the scent coming from her plate. “It’s just—It actually has calories and everything? It’s not just in my head?”

  “It comes from the Nothing, but it’s as Real as I am.” He smiled. “And almost as real as you are. It’s not Eternal, but it will last long enough to pass through your body and do the job of sustaining you.”

  She sighed. “Well I’ll just have to take your word for it.”

  She began to eat.

  And she almost wept at the flavor.

  She savored every bite, and the end of her meal came too soon. She unashamedly licked the plate clean, reluctantly setting it down and staring at it mournfully.

  Only for the Innkeeper to set a piece of chocolate cake in front of her.

  “Dessert?” he asked.

  She’d only seen things like this in pictures.

  When she had finished, she sat back, her stomach distended in the simple jumpsuit she had found waiting for her when she’d gotten out of the shower. She sighed, and, taking the mug that he’d offered her at the start of the meal, drank down the rich milky mixed drink that he’d called a mudslide.

  “So this is where we settle up, isn’t it?” she asked. “You want my Story, and I have to tell you it.”

  “Those are the terms of the bargain,” he answered. “The door home won’t open until you’ve settled your tab.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Let’s start at the beginning.”

  ***

  “To tell my story, I have to tell you the story of . It’s a colony ship. A new one, one of the first ones made since contact with the Atlians. We don’t have a set destination yet, we’re jumping through the wormholes that the Grasshopper left behind and searching for a place we can call Terra Nova and not look like idiots.

  “I was three when we started building her. I dreamed all my life of being part of the crew, but the competition was fierce. It started when I was nine years old and my parents let me apply for training and didn’t stop until I was nineteen and I was selected for advanced training in aviation. I’m a shuttle pilot. My skiff is—was—called the . I didn’t pick the name.

  “But yeah. So . With the psycho psyker kids ruling old earth and the elves refusing to let anyone whose family didn’t help them in some way during their exile so much as enter orbit around their planet, us spacers have been looking for a home to call our own.

  “The search has been going on for near three centuries now, but things changed when the Grasshopper came and ended the war with the Rosies and changed everything.”

  She took a sip of the mudslide and sighed. “I can’t blame the elves, and the kids have been through hell and back. There’s one point two billion spacers like me searching for a new home, and in that regards I’m not anyone special. Just someone lucky enough to get selected for .

  “Anyway, about three years ago they finally finished putting her together. It’s big. I mean, it’s as big as the , and that was built pre-diaspora when we thought we had near infinite resources. Before the Rosies. Before two hundred years of living on the edge of extinction.

  “You’d think that a species with one point two billion members isn’t close to extinction, but you’d be wrong. We were running low on supplies. Low on food, oxygen, fuel, everything. Every time a new mining consortium found a resource deposit it kicked the can a little further down the road, but we still figured we only had a hundred and fifty years before the old systems fell apart.

  “Before people began dying by the millions.

  “So the Grasshopper changing everything…yeah that’s something I wish I’d been alive during. But then, if I was that old, I wouldn’t have been young enough to be part of the crew of

  “So here’s the thing about the wormholes. We still haven’t mapped them all out. And they shift, sometimes. The Grasshopper left them behind, and whether he did that for us or the Atlians we don’t know for certain. The Atlians don’t care one way or the other. They won’t ride on our ships unless they’re one of the Soulships, and the Soulships don’t like being part of the Empire.

  “Strange that a ship can have a say in the matter of who owns it, but that’s the way things are these days. If a Soulship doesn’t like his crew, well, then the crew would be smart to get the hell off of it at the next port. Because whose to say that an accident is really an accident when the ship itself is out to get you?

  “And I’m getting off topic.

  “They worked real hard not to let whatever turns a normal ship into a soulship get onto . And it seems to have worked, thank the old gods. But because of that, I honestly have no idea where the hell it was built. Where its drydock is. And I’m not allowed to know, either. So once my training was complete, I was blindfolded, put in a cargo bay with the rest of the crew, and shipped for six weeks from the training base to who knows where.

  “And since I actually know a bit about astrorgation, being a pilot and all, I wasn’t allowed to see the stars again until after had gone through six jumps.

  “But it was worth it. I was part of history. .

  “All six hundred thousand of us.

  “Anyway, the search for Terra Nova began in earnest about eight months ago. And lately, things have started to go wrong. At first we couldn’t figure out what it was. It took a while.”

  She paused. “This drink. It’s been half full for a while now. Six sips or more.”

  “Not everyone notices. I find it’s easier to keep it half-full than pretend to refresh it, but I can preserve the illusion that your emptying your glass if you’d like.”

  “Just making sure I’m not crazy.” She laughed. “Or maybe I am, and all of this is just a hallucination as my oxygen starved brain shuts down.”

  “Believe as you wish, that’s not something I can convince you of and I’m not going to try.”

  “Right. So, anyway. Turns out the issue with things going wrong? It’s the wormholes. It’s so very, very subtle, but the more jumps we went through looking for Terra Nova the more obvious it became. It’s a zero point zero zero zero one percent deviation, but each jump causes things like steel and silicon to expand and contract.

  “You wouldn’t think such a small deviation would matter. But it does.

  “We don’t know how to fix it. We can’t keep up our search because who knows when the deviation is going to break something in one of the fusion reactors and cause a leak? We’re stranded.

  “So the higher ups, the captain and the commanders and all of the officers, decided to send me out in the to make contact with the Empire and request assistance.

  “And three jumps into my return to inhabited space, I had a bad feeling. I decided to do a full point inspection. It would take twelve hours, but I knew it was better than jumping through the next wormhole and blowing up on the other side.

  “But as I was searching the outside, I found something. It took me a while to figure out what it was.

  “Someone had put a gods damn bomb on my ship. Strapped it to the port side, under the wing. Mother fuckers sabotaged me. I reported it to and they acknowledged they’d received the message. I’m not sure if you know how interstellar communication works, but we’re not on the Hyperspace network. Can’t be, not with the Soulships dominating it. So we use paired quark relays.

  “They told me to try dislodging the bomb. I was on my way out to pretend I knew the first thing about bomb disposal when it went off and I was thrown clear of the ship. Two minutes later, the fusion reactor detonated and the blast knocked me out. Next thing I know, I’m spinning in the middle of who knows where the fuck and know I’m about to die.

  “And then you found me.

  “And here I am. That’s my story. Does that cover my tab?”

  “Yes,” The Innkeeper said. “So. Now’s the part where you decide what comes next. You can remain in my Inn, for a time. But the longer you remain, the less Real you’ll become. In about five years, you won’t be able to leave. About six years after that, you’ll fade into a memory.

  “Yeah fuck that,” Sil said. “Is there an option B?”

  “I return you to . And option C, I help you complete your mission by sending you to the Imperial seat.” He took his rag and began cleaning his mug again. “It’s your decision. You can rest in the room on the left of the stairs until you decide, and let me know in the morning if you’ll be spending another night, or which place you’d like me to drop you off.”

  “Neither option is perfect,” she said. “If there’s a saboteur on , I can’t be sure my message got through, and I have to warn them. And if I go to the senate, then I’m leaving my friends alone with the person who tried to kill me. Who might be trying to kill all of us.”

  “I can’t tell you what to do, and what I’ve offered is as far as I can stretch my abilities, Silvana. I’ve presented you with your options. Choose.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  She set her mudslide aside and, surprised to find that she was slightly tipsy, climbed the stairs. She collapsed into the bed, smelling the fresh scent of laundered cotton for the first time in her life.

  It was a good scent, and she fell asleep in minutes.

  In the morning, she made her decision. The Innkeeper wished her well, and she stepped out of his door into a crowded street, feeling the familiar grip of centrifugal gravity.

  She never saw him again.