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chattering teeth. "All perfectly normal."
    Suddenly the weight is gone. My insides lurch as gravity shifts. The room spins. Please, please, don't let me get sick.
    Then I forget about my stomach entirely as a field of stars opens up across the wallscreen. In one corner looms a gray, pockmarked surface, more detailed than I've ever seen, even through Dad's telescope.
    "The moon!"
    "Yes, one does tend to run into such things in space," says the Ringmaster. His smile drops away. The gleam in his eyes catches me like the flare of a comet across the sky. "What do you think, Beatrix? Are you glad you came along?"
    My heart is too full. I feel like a tongue-tied little kid. I'm such a dork. I can't even speak—all I can do is stare, at him, at the stars.
    And then at the sleek black arrow racing onto the screen. "He's back!"
    "Drives full up, Ringmaster," calls Nola.
    I lean forward as blue light flares along the nose of the Mandate ship. "He's shooting at us!"
    "Too late," says the Ringmaster. "Say goodbye to the Earth, Beatrix."
    I get one glimpse of a blue and white marble hanging against the blackness of space. Then everything melts: the stars and the bridge and the ship about to shoot...
    ***
    I blink crud from my eyes. I'm still in the chair on the bridge, but the straps are gone.
    "Do you feel okay?" Nola's voice buzzes in my ear.
    "Sure. If 'okay' covers feeling like you've been dunked in glue and held upside down for a few days." I groan.
    "Jump sickness is always worst the first time. You'll get your space legs quick enough."
    "So I guess we got away. Where's the Ringmaster?"
    "Oh, you know. Well, actually you
don't,
being new. The Ringmaster never stays in one place very long. He knows the Big Top better than any of us. Always off doing something." She shrugs. "He asked me to take you on a tour. If you feel up to it, that is."
    "I am the uppest of the up. If I spend another minute in this chair, I'll grow a drink holder."
    "Good! What do you want to see first? There's the common room or the biohabitat or the infirmary or—"
    "Can we see outside? Can we see real space?"
    "The viewing deck it is!"
    A few minutes later, I'm gripping the viewing deck railing and taking deep breaths. I am
not
starting my new life on the Big Top as the girl who faints at the first sight of space. But it's so huge, and I'm so small. Yet at the same time, here I am. In a spaceship! In the middle of it all! Wherever that is.
    "What system is this?" I ask. "I don't recognize anything."
    Nola taps into a small console along the railing. Lines of blue alien gibberish fly up across the transparent bubble of the viewing deck, labeling each of the stars. "Oops!" She taps a few more buttons. "There, can you read that?"
    "Um. Yeah." Most of the stars don't even have labels, and those that I can see are nothing but strings of numbers and letters. "We must be pretty far from Earth if they ran out of names. Are we even still in the Milky Way?"
    "Oh, no. That's all part of the Excluded Territories. We're back in Core space now, all quarter-million inhabited systems of it. But here, we can zoom out." She fiddles with the console. The blue lines dance around, reforming a sort of inset star chart. Squinting, I see a tiny blob in the corner labeled
Milky Way.
The larger area is now labeled
ACO 3627.
Good thing I did my last science project on the Great Attractor. At least I recognize something out here.
    "We're in the Norma galaxy cluster? We just traveled 250 million light-years? This is one fast ship. Like, impossibly fast. How do you beat light speed?"
    "It's more like bending space than going really fast. And we're not sure exactly how it works," admits Nola. "The Tinkers and the Mandate knew how, and this is a Tinker ship. The only one left, as far as we know. Most everything was destroyed in the War. There are a couple of Mandate ships kicking around, too, we think."
    "You think? I thought they were, y'know, your big ancient enemy."
    "Yeah, but they