Chapter 1: Moving Day CHAPTER 1 Moving Day
“Pars-1 was one of the first exoplanets colonized by the Interstellar Alliance for mineral dominance, thanks to its “super-Mercury”-style iron core. The solar system’s sun was declining, slowly expanding into a red giant. This allowed Pars-1 to be habitable enough for iron mining, though only in certain areas.”

—Ali Reza Farzad, A Brief History of Pars-1

There is nothing worse to a twelve-year-old than the words, “We’re moving.”

After seven years, it felt like I had just gotten settled on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s many moons. When we had left Earth, everything had felt so rushed and frantic. We’d had to escape, and fast. It had taken me ages to make friends as a five-year-old “terrestrial” with my shoddy cotton clothing and old-school Earth lingo. But now that I had friends, had my routine down at school, had a life, we were moving again.

“Pars-1 has very unique geology, Rostam jan. It’s one of the biggest mining colonies in the IA,” Maman joon said to me, as if that made everything better.

“And it has a theme park! Ferrous Land, I think it’s called,” Mamá chimed in.

Ferrous Land. Wow. Could a worse name for a theme park exist?

I didn’t care how cool our new planet supposedly was, I was not happy. I watched glumly, forehead against the glass, as a space elevator lifted us away from the surface of the place I called home. What about my friends, Jason and Oceana? How was I going to find BFFs like them?

The djinn in the space elevator held his arms out wide, smiling at the dozens of passengers aboard. Space elevators were gravity lifts that djinn moved to get to and from the spaceships docked above our atmosphere.

“I hear Pars-1 is very nice,” the djinn said unhelpfully, his eyes glowing red as he manipulated the glass cube higher above Cassini, the capitol city. “They say it has a beautiful desert. Like home…” His eyes went misty, as if remembering something.

“A desert,” I said flatly. “Great.”

“Humans of clay, djinn of fire, working together so we all grow brighter!” was the nursery rhyme everyone in the Interstellar Alliance learned. This djinn was probably just an ifrit, a lower-level djinn who helped transport humans around this moon.

The rings of Saturn stared back at me as we were lifted to the space port. I couldn’t imagine looking into the sky and not seeing them anymore. Our new home wasn’t a moon like Enceladus—it was a planet. There would be no giant rings in the atmosphere to orient me, no brown and white swirls from Saturn to help me feel at home. Apparently, this new place didn’t even have a proper atmosphere, which meant no clouds or bright sky.

I looked down at Cassini, the city I’d called home for seven years. It was so teeming with life; skyscrapers poked through the pink clouds and flying cars zipped and zoomed all over. Everything looked teeny-tiny from the space elevator, and I couldn’t tell if the ache in my stomach was from the gravity changing or from the homesickness already taking over.

“Are you sure we have to go?” I asked my Maman joon one last time. I’d asked her hundreds of times before, but even now, I hadn’t given up hope.

“Rostam.” Maman joon clamped a hand over my shoulder. “It’s been decided. Do you know how many strings we had to pull to get onto this shuttle? Do you even know how lucky we are?”

The elevator dinged, and my family and a couple other passengers shuffled out of the cube. “Are we lucky, though?” I said, turning to my parents. Was I stalling? Absolutely. Anything to keep me in the warm glow of our solar system as long as possible.

“Rostam,” my Mamá said in a warning voice. She rolled the R in my name like a thundercloud. Mamá rarely lost her cool, but when she did, it was not fun to get caught in her storm.

I sighed and slunk into the waiting area outside the elevator lobby, my parents right behind me, as if to make sure I wouldn’t escape. This was the biggest space port on our moon, a permanent docking station miles above the city. Maman joon came here whenever she had to travel for work. Already, the gravity lift that had taken us up was plunging back down to the Cassini Spaceport to get more passengers. Gulp. There goes my escape.

If I squinted, I could see space elevators over Dunyazad, Shahrazade, and Moshiri, the other major cities of Enceladus, all with spaceports like ours. A webbing of satellites twinkled over us like a silver net. I could even get a good look at Saturn’s other moons like Tethys and Calypso, each with its own clusters of cities and elevators. It was my first time seeing my home from this angle. It made me miss what I was leaving even more.

Maman joon chivvied me from the spaceport into our jetway. The walk to our space shuttle felt unnatural, like I was dunking my head underwater, unsure of when I’d get the chance to breathe again. Here we go. My stomach swooped.

A space attendant led us to the passenger entrance, and I tried not to wail with disappointment as we boarded. It wasn’t even a nice shuttle, like the sleek Barnard YVX that I used in my flight simulations, or an exploratory Trappist CH6 with emergency EVA suits. This was just a regular old rusty SR911 that probably still had a joystick! Whatever favors Maman joon had pulled for this ride were clearly not worth it.

I kicked a piece of metal under my foot and the paint flaked off. Yeah, I’d like to be back in Cassini, please. I couldn’t wait to become a pilot for the Interstellar Alliance one day and have a sleek ship of my own. Nothing like this death trap.

Mamá was already settling into our seats, wearing pajamas and one of those face masks that supposedly fought the radiation damage your skin got during interstellar transit. I reached into my pocket and felt the mushy sandwiches she’d packed for us earlier. Traveling forty light-years away just wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be. Why couldn’t we have sprung for an upgraded shuttle?

“Welcome, passenger!” an Interstellar Alliance droid announced from the bulkhead. I balked. Usually, an IA representative was a human, not a robot. There were hundreds of IA reps all over the city, helping with anything from crossing the street to giving you a ticket for flying too fast. The Interstellar Alliance was our government, but it was weird not to see a flesh-and-blood representative onboard. I squinted at the droid.

“You must be Rostam Zamini, yes? You’re the youngest soul aboard this spacecraft,” the droid said. It was white, made of carbon fiber, with a round, pixelated face that looked surprisingly lo-fi. On its chest was the lotus leaf symbol of the Interstellar Alliance. “I’m Officer Bahram, calling in from Ganymede. I’ll be moving to Pars-1, just like you!”

Ah, I realized. A remote. This droid was controlled by a Pars-1 officer from their HQ on Jupiter’s biggest moon. Bahram wouldn’t actually be moving to Pars-1 with us, just overseeing things. I sighed again. Not even the people who governed Pars-1 wanted to live there.

“Can I help you get seated?” A space attendant asked, reaching for Fred—my stuffed snow leopard—and motioning to put him in the overhead compartment.

I yanked Fred back by his plush black-and-white fur. He was the only friend I had left in this cruel, heartless world. “Get lost,” I hissed.

I usually kept Fred in my backpack, but there was nobody on this godforsaken ship to make me feel embarrassed for having a stuffed leopard even though I’d just turned twelve. Anyone who was leaving Enceladus for the outer rim was probably a loser anyway. I didn’t care if passengers on this tin can knew about my secret stuffed animal.

I’d had Fred since I was a baby. No, scratch that, from before I was a baby, since the hospital had been the one to give him to me. Besides, I was so short people probably thought Fred was an age-appropriate toy. Bleh.

At least being tiny was good for long flights like this, where I had a lot of room in my shuttle seat, but terrible when you were a twelve-year-old surrounded by everyone else’s growth spurts at school. There was no way I’d be able to compete with my new classmates on Pars-1, who were probably fed fortified protein bars every meal and chugged synthetic plant milk to grow into huge kids who could help with the planet’s iron mining.

I was not looking forward to it.

I stood next to my seat, avoiding the gargantuan task of sitting in it. I knew that the second I was buckled into my harness, there was no going back.

“Rostam,” Maman joon growled, her brown eyes flashing. “Sit. Down.” She looked uncomfortable and kept glancing over her shoulder to make sure people weren’t staring.

My heart raced. My knees started to get shaky. I could feel my body get uncomfortably warm. This was it. My entire life, my whole world, was about to become a distant speck through a space shuttle window.

I made one last plea. “Please. I am begging you! Jason’s already decked out one of his guest bedrooms for me so I can live there. His parents already said yes. Now I’ll just head back to the spaceport, and I’ll see you both at Nowruz,” I said quickly, hoping my smooth talking would bamboozle my folks into letting me return home.

It had taken Jason and Oceana years to stop bullying me and become my friends. But now that we were a solid group, my parents were uprooting our lives again. Better to just stay in Cassini, even if it meant not having my moms there. Maman joon was speechless, probably awed by how much my words made sense. Mamá’s eyebrows were practically in her hairline, equally impressed.

I began grabbing my stuff. The cargo bay doors were still open, which meant I could waltz right off this rust bucket and never look back. I took one last look at my parents, sure this would be a tearful goodbye.

But instead of nodding and agreeing with my plan like reasonable people, they looked murderous. Maman joon’s face had gone from bright red to a dark shade of purple.

“If you can’t sit in this shuttle then you’ll never become a pilot and fly one!” Maman joon whispered furiously in Persian, thinking she was being discreet. A couple people on the shuttle who spoke Persian looked over. A teen girl smirked.

“I’ll never pilot something as decrepit as this!” I shouted back in English, elbowing my way to the exit. There was no way I was staying on this thing. There was a train station just outside the space elevator that I could take home.

“Rostam! Regrese inmediatamente!” Mamá screeched. So long, suckers! Have fun on the outer rim!

“Young man, please—!” a space attendant shouted, their crisp white suit starting to wrinkle.

“This is most irregular!” Bahram chided. Who cared? I was almost out the door. FREEDOM!!!

Then, a tired voice that sounded like gravel rumbled behind me. “You can ride in the jump seat, if it’ll make you sit down and shut up.”

I froze, halfway off the shuttle. A huge, imposing man loomed over me, his Interstellar Alliance uniform twinkling in the bioluminescent lighting. I gulped. Judging by the badges on his jacket, he was the pilot of the shuttle. He looked like he’d seen the ends of space—that was how deep the crags in his face were.

He scowled back at me, his offer hanging in the air.

I knew Jason and Oceana thought it was stupid that I was moving somewhere with slow signal and only one spaceport, but neither of them had ever ridden in the cockpit of a space shuttle before. Even though we all wanted to become pilots for the Interstellar Alliance, we hadn’t had many opportunities to fly on official IA flights. My heart rate started to slow, and I felt the first twinge of interest since Maman joon had mentioned we were moving to a new planet.

Finally, I had something good happen to me! My friends would be jealous of this, for sure.

I weighed my options carefully. Riding in the cockpit might just be worth moving to nowhere.

“Deal,” I said to the grizzled pilot standing in front of me.

He sighed and motioned to the cockpit. The entire shuttle clapped sarcastically back at me, glad we could finally be on our way. Mamá sighed, her face mask slipping down a bit. Maman joon shook her head, clearly disappointed in her disappointment-of-a-son, clearly not mad but definitely… you guessed it. Disappointed.

I couldn’t wait for the talk we’d have again later, the one about how I should be “grateful” for this “opportunity” and how I always have to “cause a scene.” But for now, I was just going to enjoy my upgrade to the best seat on the spacecraft.

The attendant helped get me buckled into the jump seat, the little fold-out seat behind the pilot and co-pilot chairs. It squeaked loudly as she lowered it. I was probably the first person to use it in a while.

“Want me to put that little guy in stowage?” the space attendant asked again, gesturing to Fred.

“Fred stays with me,” I replied firmly, clutching his plush body even tighter.

She nodded solemnly back at me. Finally, she could tell how important Fred was. I stroked his ears anxiously. Fred was afraid of the dark, and I wasn’t about to stick him in some dusty stowage compartment, which was probably just a converted weapons chamber. This ship was so old I wouldn’t be surprised if it had fought in the Interstellar Wars.

The space attendant exited the cockpit and revealed the co-pilot sitting next to the old, weathered captain who had said I could ride up front with him. I gasped—it was a djinn! Probably a marïd, since our ship was making a bigger Wish than the ifrits who transported us around Enceladus could handle. The djinn grinned back.

“Salaam, dude,” she said.

I’d never actually met a marïd face-to-face before. They were like the other deev of the world; a class of beings who weren’t human but who worked with humans. We always saw deev working on new buildings or terraforming the uninhabitable parts of Enceladus, but from far away. Now I had the chance to actually talk to a marïd, the most powerful class of djinn in the galaxy.

Her name tag said “Mitra.” She didn’t look much older than me, though she passed the height requirement for becoming an IA pilot (I still had three inches to go).

“You’re gonna take us to Pars-1?” I asked.

Mitra grinned at me, her eyes flashing red for a second. “Sure am, pesar. Why? Having second thoughts?”

“Are you two done jabbering?” the captain said, swiveling a harsh blue eye toward me. “We’ve got a lot of light-years to cover.”

I gulped. “Yes, sir.”

“It’s Capitán Otaválo to you, kid. Space attendants, please prepare for Wish,” he barked, uttering the last part into the ship’s loudspeaker.

I sat back as the ship undocked from the Cassini Spaceport and looked out the reinforced window to my home. Enceladus was so beautiful and bright, so full of life. In the distance I could see the moons of Titan and Mimas twinkling back, those other inhabited moons full of their own cities and people. It had taken over a thousand djinn to terraform those places, and almost one million Wishes. Now we were moving somewhere that hadn’t been terraformed at all.

My heart lurched as the ship veered into open space. It was really happening. We were going to Wish forty light-years away to some no-name exoplanet, and my whole world was going to change. For a second, I regretted sitting in the jump seat. I wanted to hold my moms’ hands as they told me it was going to be okay.

I was going to miss Enceladus a lot.

The ship came to a halt, my home now a small circle through my window. The big brown and yellow paint strokes of Saturn’s surface hovered consolingly over us. Goodbye, world.

Nearby, other ships in Enceladus’s orbit all docked by their own buoys, waiting to Wish to other destinations that were probably way cooler than ours. Aboard each ship was a djinn like Mitra, though they were probably less powerful ifrits for smaller trips. Pars-1 was one of the farthest planets in the Alliance. I bet we had the only marïd for miles.

“Marïd 1, Wish away,” the spaceport tower crackled into the cockpit speaker. I flinched. Mitra was Marïd number one? As in, the first djinn ever to work for the Alliance? I analyzed her again, searching for anything that revealed she was over three thousand years old. Nothing, except a couple freckles, thick brown hair, and pitch-black eyes.

“Marïd 1, Wishing SR911,” Capitán Otaválo growled into his headset. “Collar check,” he barked to Mitra.

Mitra sighed and pulled aside the neck of her white IA uniform. There, underneath her pilot’s jacket, was an iron collar. I recoiled as Capitán Otaválo nodded, satisfied. Mitra’s copper skin and dark eyes suddenly turned ashy gray, her skin’s yellow undertones going blue.

“What is that thing?” I asked Capitán Otaválo, horrified.

“How do you think we controlled these djinn in the first place?” The old man chuckled, turning back to me.

My jaw dropped. This was how we worked with djinn? I thought we just rubbed a lamp or something! I knew that iron was bad for djinn, but I didn’t realize we used it to control them. I had always been taught that djinn didn’t mind working for us, that they were happy to colonize space too. Djinn always generated more power for Wish than they could for themselves, and it was by teaming up with a human that they could do amazing things.

Was that why the planet of Pars-1 was important? Because it had a lot of iron in it?

I made eye contact with Mitra, but instead of saying anything, she just gave me a dead-eyed stare. Maybe being an IA djinn wasn’t as glamorous as I’d thought.

Capitán Otaválo got out his Wish log, a black leatherbound book that recorded all the Wishes Mitra had done. It was important to keep track of them since djinn could only promise three Wishes. Every time you got to your third Wish, you had to Wish for three more.

“Alright, according to your last ship, it looks like you’re on Wish two of cycle ten thousand five hundred and seventy-six,” Capitán Otaválo read from the Wish log. My mouth went dry. That meant Mitra had completed 10,576 Wishes times three.

Mitra said nothing, her face impassive.

“Mitra of the Maranjab, I Wish for you to take me to–” Capitán Otaválo froze, double-checking the leather-bound book in front of him. “Wait a second, you’re on your third Wish!”

Mitra’s face remained blank. Capitán Otaválo took a shaky breath, then said, “Mitra of the Maranjab, I Wish for three more Wishes.”

Mitra sighed and popped her gum loudly. “It is done.”

“You tried to put one over on an old man, huh?” Capitán Otaválo roared. “All you djinn are the same. Always looking for a way out. And I bet once I used up all my Wishes you would have slaughtered every soul aboard the second you were free!”

Mitra’s familiar grin flashed back, as if she had been pretending all along. “Can’t blame me for trying.”

The captain took another steadying breath then looked at me. “I’d appreciate it if you keep this between me and you, kid.”

I nodded, too shocked to say anything. I thought that when djinn reached the end of each Wish cycle, it wasn’t a big deal. I thought they wanted to work with us.

I looked back through the porthole window that revealed the passenger cabin. Everyone looked calm, nobody realizing how close they’d come to freeing an angry djinn. The IA droid sat in the front row, chatting with a huge man in overalls: probably a new worker for the planet’s mines.

“Mitra of the Maranjab, I Wish for you to take us to Pars-1,” Capitán Otaválo said, voice firm. I watched as he carefully marked the Wish in the logbook.

“Your Wish is my command,” Mitra said.

Her eyes started to glow. She placed her palms on the surface of the dashboard, right on top of two imprints built into the panel. The panel began to glow orange, as if recognizing her fingerprints. Fire suddenly appeared, licking her arms in a smokeless flame.

I felt my own palms start to sweat, my stomach roiling. I clutched Fred even tighter. I was too young to remember what Wishing had been like last time, and all the flames sparking from Mitra’s body weren’t exactly comforting. Djinn were made of fire, but I’d never seen that fire in action before.

I kept quiet, holding Fred as tightly as I could. IA pilots had to be tough and ruthless. That was how they commanded respect in the first place. I squeezed my knees together to keep my legs from trembling.

“First real Wish, huh?” Mitra laughed, noticing me shake. Her hands were still glued to the dash, her iron collar turning red-hot. Bits of fire had started to climb up her throat.

I was too busy watching the spreading flames to correct her. They danced down her torso and legs, but Capitán Otaválo just sat back like this was completely normal.

Then Mitra herself started to turn bright orange, and I got the feeling that she was enjoying this. Fire was her original form, since djinn pretended to look human for our benefit.

Her flames spread to the windshield, then to port and starboard, and then they began roaring until the whole front console was engulfed in heat-free flames that tickled my body. I forgot to breathe.

“Don’t blink, or you’ll miss it!” she cackled.

Suddenly the heat started to feel unbearable. Sweat poured down my forehead, and my eyes stung with the salt.

Dimly I heard Capitán Otaválo mutter, “Show-off.”

I gasped. Flames were crawling all over me! Fred turned into a little fireball in my hands. I quickly dropped him.

“That’s enough, Mitra!” Capitán Otaválo yelled.

Mitra laughed, her fiery eyes rolling into the back of her head. Her eyes were now two slits in a column of flame where Mitra’s human form had once sat, her arms and legs now thrashing tendrils. Maman joon had said that Wishing felt like your limbs were falling asleep, but this was way more traumatic. The flames prickled painfully now, the walls of the ship becoming hazier as they shimmered with heat. It was getting hard to breathe, and my body scrambled for oxygen that didn’t seem to be pumping through the cockpit anymore.

“ENOUGH!” Capitán Otaválo roared, yanking the collar around Mitra’s throat.

She screamed, and I couldn’t help it. I squeezed my eyes shut into one long blink.

“Couldn’t handle the heat, huh?”

I cracked an eye open. The ship was flame-free, without a single scorch mark. Did it look like it needed a new paint job more than ever now? Yes, but somehow, I wasn’t covered in burns. I looked out the window—Enceladus was long gone, replaced by a huge asteroid belt that looked nothing like the one that hung out between Mars and Jupiter back home.

“You were supposed to take us to the planet!” Capitán Otaválo shouted angrily, looking out at the new solar system.

“There’s Pars-1.” Mitra pointed to a tiny planet in the distance, bored. “I did what you asked.”

“Yes, but I meant take us onto the planet!” Capitán Otaválo blustered. “Now we have to navigate through this asteroid belt!”

“You didn’t specify,” Mitra said blandly, the collar still secure around her neck, her human form crystal clear. I looked past her and rested my eyes on our new sun, glowing from the dashboard. It looked considerably bigger and darker than the one I was used to.

“It’s a red giant. About fifteen times the size of your old sun,” Mitra said to me in a surprisingly calm, noncackling voice as she followed my gaze. “They say it’s got a couple hundred years left on it.” She scratched at the iron collar on her neck, like the past minute of being a terrifying inferno had never happened.

I picked Fred back up and leaned forward in my jump seat to get a better look. Mitra was right—this sun looked like it was about to fizzle like a bad bulb.

“Space attendants, please prepare the cabin for tactical maneuvers,” Capitán Otaválo barked into the comms panel. “Can’t believe I have to put up with this. I’m leaving you on this planet and getting a new djinn as soon as I can,” he spat.

Mitra yawned.

This asteroid belt was massive and looked like the hardest level on my space simulators, times a thousand. I’d known Pars-1 was inside an asteroid belt, but I didn’t think I’d ever have to deal with it.

“Can’t you just Wish us closer to the planet?” I asked Mitra.

She smiled devilishly. “Can’t. I’m out of juice. I’ll need to recharge for at least twenty-four hours after a Wish that big.”

“Hold on!” Capitán Otaválo shouted.

I watched as he slammed down the fuel mixture on the ship from “lean” to “rich” and throttled the engine. Loud noises clunked throughout the shuttle, as if it wasn’t used to having to actually fly anymore. Suddenly, we were weaving between two huge redbrick asteroids, both the size of the largest skyscrapers on all of Enceladus. Fred’s eyes threatened to pop out of his head from me clutching him so hard. We squeezed past the giant rocks, and I forgot to breathe.

Jason and Oceana are gonna flip, I thought satisfyingly. Then: If I live to tell them.

Just as we threaded the needle between those two huge rocks, Capitán Otaválo plunged the ship forward and under another boulder that came sailing at us from out of nowhere. He was dipping and diving like the archival videos I’d watched of the old space wars, back before there was the Alliance, when each country on Earth had made a mad dash to claim different parts of our solar system and hired pilots like Capitán Otaválo to get there first. This guy was the real deal.

Even still.

“I changed my mind!” I screamed. “I don’t want to be in the jump seat anymore!”

Capitán Otaválo tsked as I clutched Fred for dear life, watching between my fingers as we barrel-rolled between rocks that came charging out of nowhere. He dodged a rock slab that was happy just hanging out in the middle of space, relaxing, as if it wasn’t about to kill a ship full of innocent passengers like an iceberg.

“The trick to navigating through asteroid belts,” Capitán Otaválo grunted, “is to imagine you’re an asteroid too. If this wasn’t a passenger ship, I’d turn off the gravity simulator. Floating in the cockpit helps you duck and weave better.”

Who cares? I wanted to shout. Just shut up and save our lives!

“Directions like up and down, left and right; those are all mental, kid,” the captain said, his eyes darting around to different obstacles. “Out here, there’s only space. Everything’s on equal footing. Remember that, and you won’t get disoriented.”

I peeked into the passenger cabin and had to blink multiple times. Half the cabin was asleep, with Maman joon reading a book and Mamá already sobbing over some telenovela. Even Bahram, the IA droid, had powered down. Can nobody tell we’re about to die? I wanted to scream. I squinted, trying to get a good look at Maman joon’s novel. It must have been a real page-turner if she couldn’t tell we were seconds away from getting flattened by a rogue asteroid.

A Brief History of Pars-1, the title read, and I shook my head in disgust. Leave it to Maman joon to be enthralled by a history book. That’s why we were out here in the first place, because Maman joon was so good at her job that the Pars-1 Energy Board had hired her to investigate alternative forms of energy for when their sun inevitably got weaker.

Maman joon said it was a huge honor, but it didn’t feel like one.

I turned back to the dashboard and felt my jaw go slack as a small brown planet loomed before us: Pars-1.

“So, what’s the deal? You visiting family here or something?” Mitra asked, putting her feet on the dash while Capitán Otaválo sweated and swore next to her.

She looked like a human girl again, though her eyes still flickered with red flame. What was it called when you were both terrified of someone and wanted to be exactly like them? Because that was how she made me feel.

I sucked my eyes away from the thin gray atmosphere that hovered around the planet. “Nah, my Maman got a new job here. Home sweet home.”

Mitra sighed. “Bummer.”

“I know,” I replied, my shoulders slumping. “Huge bummer.”

“Could be worse,” Mitra added, pointing out the dashboard to a small moon. “You could be stuck on one of Pars-1’s moons.”

I recoiled, looking at a crumbling gray sphere that looked like it had a chunk taken out of it. I could see a small settlement on top of it in the distance.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling only a little bit better. “At least there’s that.”