Jake and Leina trawled the hangar, trying all of the ships. None were open, and there were no keys kept anywhere nearby.

Jake shivered, and wiped some of the curry sauce from his t-shirt. He needed to sort this whole situation out, it was getting draining.

“I think we should leave it for tonight,” he ventured. “We’ll come back at the same time tomorrow.”

Leina knew she couldn’t change his mind so she nodded, and they got back in her hover-car. She dropped him back at his quarters where Kait looked at him in confusion.

“Where’ve you been?”

Jake walked straight past him, he wasn’t in the mood to talk. On reaching his room he felt quite down. He’d tried to escape, and had failed. There was no way he could leave with Leina. She just wanted to have sex and create chaos. He didn’t want either of those things, not with her anyway. He was starting to have some really weird feelings. Not just that his fear of girls was starting to subside a tiny little bit. Not just that he knew he was starting to like Jaska, but that he needed to stop Leina and tell her that. Even though he’d not purposely encouraged Leina, he needed to be really clear that he wasn’t interested. His fear and insecurity was starting to give way to feeling a little guilty about leading her on – even if it was probably funny and normal in the weird Crawkling society.

And on top of all of this, his rescue attempt hadn’t worked. He just wanted to travel to Imdor to meet Joel, and get out of here.

He could feel the usual voices inside his head telling him he was useless, a failure. He could feel a couple of weeks of solitude locked up in his room coming on. Resigned to it, he turned his door handle and slumped into the room.

“Jakey, I didn’t think you were coming back!” said a gruff female voice. “I’m sorry I shouted at you, it was just a computer game.”

He saw the funny looking green girl lying with her arms open on his bed and smiled. He suddenly knew exactly what he wanted.

“Jaska! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”