One: Nyota Uhura

In the bustling market in Stonetown, on the island of Zanzibar, a young girl stood in the slave pit and stared up at the hot blue sky. She was skinny and bruised, and while she was naked and chained and scarred like the others, she was unbent and her face was full of determination.

She had been marching for three months from her quiet, sleepy home to arrive on this island, where she was surrounded by the sounds of a thousand different languages being shouted all around her, stone buildings that stretched and wobbled up to the sky, the cries of skinny cows and donkeys tied together by rope and pushed through the crowded alleys, and the smell of spices and the ocean and the other captives.

Her name was Nyota, which meant star, she was roughly nineteen years old, and she had never kissed a man.

Nyota was being prodded awake. Gentle waves lapped at her body. It was still dark, so she must not have been unconscious for very long.

"Hey, the tide's coming in," a strange, lyrical voice said to her in Kiswahili. Nyota turned her head sluggishly, her exhausted body yearning for sleep and enjoying the feel of the wet sand and the gentle waves. She blinked up at the figure before her, wrapped head to toe in bright kangas. "Come on, get up. You look like you need something to eat."

The strange girl bent and pulled Nyota up by her arms. She retrieved Nyota's stolen kanga from the sand, and shook it off in the water. "I guess this will have to do," she said, pulling it around Nyota's torso.

"Who... who are you..." Nyota managed to speak, her head muddy and slow.

"Oh, my name's Gaila! I was just coming home from the night market and I saw you lying there. Couldn't very well leave you, could I?" Gaila's voice was bright and clear and Nyota blinked in confusion, exhausted, before she remembered that Penda was dead.

All her memories hit her at once then, and Nyota took a paranoid step back, clutching the shackle that remained on her left wrist to hide it from sight. "Leave me alone," she said.

"Well, okay," Gaila said, sadly. "If you want me too. But the tide's coming in and the beach hits the wall up there," she nodded up the beach, the route Nyota had planned to take before she collapsed. The city wall jutted out on the beach, the tide already reaching a foot up the wall. "It's pretty rocky there, you won't be able to cross. You also look like you could use a meal and a nice place to sleep. If you want to. I won't tell anyone." Gaila's eyes drifted down to the shackle on Nyota's wrist. "I promise."

Nyota looked at this girl, trying to ignore the tightness in her stomach and make a decision. Gaila was covered completely in bright blue and purple kangas, the skirts falling to her ankles, and her hair wrapped up, her face covered. Two bright blue eyes looked out at Nyota, who wasn't sure if she could trust them.

In the end, her hunger and exhaustion won out, and she nodded wearily. She tucked her left wrist under her kanga and let Gaila prop her up as they walked home.

It was dark, the only light coming from torches and fires inside the houses as they picked their way through the twisting, tiny alleys of Stonetown. Gaila spoke a bit, of nothing much, and occasionally stopped to making cooing and kissing noises at a paka – a cat - sitting up on a wall or peering out at them from the shadows.

Nyota let her eyes drift almost closed once or twice, following Gaila blindly. The streets were quiet, until they got to the sandy streets of Michenzani, where the buildings were higher and fewer between. Nyota tensed up as they passed groups of men on the corners, standing around big vats of coffee brewing over charcoal pits, but the men were friendly and called out to Gaila in greeting.

"We're almost there," Gaila said, as they got to the foot of a high, stone building. She opened a small wrought iron gate, and helped Nyota painstakingly climb three flights of stairs.

Nyota didn't register much of Gaila's tiny apartment just then - the girl led her to a soft, wide bed, something Nyota had never slept in before, and it was so luxuriously soft that Nyota fell asleep immediately.

Nyota ended up living with Gaila for three months before she could revisit her revenge plan. She needed that time to rest and recover, and she knew Penda would tut at her if she didn't let herself do that.

And there was so much to learn - finding out who, exactly, this star-man Nero was, and where to find him. And before that, just to get by on Zanzibar and find the information she needed - her Kiswhaili needed to be polished, and the more tongues she could master the better. But he was a star, and she despaired of ever learning his true language, so she could hear him beg for mercy.

Gaila was a different type of star-person than Nero, which Nyota had discovered the first morning she woke up in her apartment. Gaila was green-fleshed, and grew up on a sterile, controlled aether-ship far from Earth.

Gaila ran a stall at the night market in Forodhani, in the gardens near the House of Wonders, selling fish and fruit and vegetables prepared in the traditions of her home world. It was difficult to fake with Earth ingredients, she said, and the fish wasn't exactly right, but Zanzibar spices were so rich and tasty that it turned out great, and it was popular. Popular enough to make a good, honest living. Nobody knew Gaila's true ethnicity, well, hardly anybody, as she always kept herself completely covered outside the apartment.

"I knew I could trust you though," she said one night as they shared passionfruit and sat on the tiny terrace of Gaila's apartment, overlooking a small patch of grass where a young boy tied his goats every morning. "We're kindred spirits."

Gaila's apartment was small; one room, filled mostly by a wide, wooden Zanzibari bed. She had a mirror propped against one wall, dirty and cracked. A small window by the bed kept the room mostly dark and cool. The room opened onto a tiny terrace on the other end, with a grate keeping it private, where Gaila hung her clothes to dry. There was a drain on the floor of the terrace, and a collection of buckets. They would get water from a well at the end of the street. The terrace was also where Gaila cooked her breakfasts, using a tiny charcoal stove.

Nyota spent the first week alternately eating very slowly and sleeping in that wide, deliciously soft bed. At night Gaila would curl up next to her, as the bed could easily fit five people, and it wasn't long before Nyota quietly rested her bare arm against Gaila's, longing for the close touch of a sister. Gaila would smile at her sadly in the dark, and say nothing.

After a week, Nyota started venturing out into the world and getting her bearings. Her hair, the first time she tried to comb it, was matted and tangled and filthy. She washed it out on the terrace using a tiny amount of Gaila's washing water and one of Gaila's combs. It was almost to her shoulders now, and she had never had her hair so long. Penda would have liked it, to run her hands through it and tease her.

She got a set of kangas in deep red and black, swirling patterns that were only visible very close up. She took one rectangular piece of the pretty red black fabric, and pulled it around her hips, tucking it into a long skirt. She took the other piece and twisted it around her neck and chest, covering her breasts. Nyota pulled her long, straight hair into a ponytail and looked at herself in the small, smudged mirror Gaila kept in the room - after just a week of sleep and good food, she was a far cry from the half-starved girl escaping from slavers.

Stonetown during the day was a baking hot melting pot of people. It was noisy and fragrant and vibrant. Nyota went out with Gaila at first, but soon got used to going out on her own, trying out all the new words and new tastes, learning as much as she could.

While a star-girl like Gaila would stick out if uncovered, a woman of Nyota's colour blended in so well it was easy to hide from the slavers, especially after filling out and cleaning up.

There were so many men and women in Stonetown - from the Muslim Arab women selling elaborate scarves, some covered head to toe in all black, some only hiding their hair with bright kangas or flimsy see-through veils, to Indian women in bright saris and beautiful henna tattoos selling jewelry and watches; children of all types running about barefoot and shrieking; Arab men with moustaches and keffiyehs riding in combustion engine cars, elderly Persian men wearing kofias drinking coffee and playing bao on little wooden boards, shirtless black boys pulling in fishing boats in the afternoons and fixing up brickwork on countless walls and buildings; flushed, white foreign men in stuffy high collars and fancy hats; people of all colours pouring into (and out of) the cathedrals and mosques and Hindu temples.

It seemed, to Nyota, impossible to say exactly who a Zanzibari person was.

The white foreign soldiers, and many of the Sultan's local turbaned guard, carried the same shiny little weapon that Nero's men did - called phasers, Nyota knew now, or disruptors, depending on who you were asking.

"You don't want to get in the way of one of those things," Gaila had said. "It's not very pleasurable."

Amidst it all were an infinite amount of skinny little pakas running about, meowing at people, sleeping on the sides of roads, in the middle of roads, on tops of walls, getting underfoot and begging for scraps, adding to the general bright noise that was Stonetown.

The noise was mostly language, and when she made herself too full of anger about Nero, Nyota would calm down and listen to all the beautiful, lyrical words around her, talking to anybody who would humour her, learning just how wide and wonderful her world was. Words in Kiswahili, English, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, German...

But no star-tongues.

"What you need," Gaila said one day when she and Nyota were packing up their things for the stall that night. "Is a star-man."

"Pfft," Nyota scowled. "I don't need any man's help, especially not a star-man." She dropped a big jackfruit into her woven bag particularly hard. "It's men that got us into this to begin with."

"I suppose," Gaila said, wrapping a kanga around her hair and face, and securing it with a hair pin. "But men are the do-ers, Nyota, they're the ones who make the world go round and can get things done."

Nyota raised an eyebrow and said nothing, waiting by the door for Gaila to put her sandals on. They walked through the alleys as the sun set, towards Forodhani Garden and the night market. It had been three months since she awoke in Gaila's bed, and besides making a living helping Gaila at the stall and learning a passable amount of most of the languages spoken here, she wasn't any closer to finding Nero.

She looked sidelong at Gaila as they walked. Neither girl had told the other much about their histories, besides the basics. But Gaila must have gotten off those aether-ships and down to Earth somehow, and Nyota was sure a man had nothing to do with it.

It was busy that night, the garden illuminated by lantern light as dozens of people ran their stalls, selling mostly food - street pizza, fresh fish, fruit and sweets, but also jewelry and instruments and fine clothes. Gaila set up her stall near the far wall of the Garden. Nyota sat on a bench by the wall, feeding fish to the small group of pakas that had gathered by her feet. It was one of the small pleasures she indulged in here.

"Jimmy!" Gaila shrieked suddenly, setting her pan down on the wooden table and darting out from behind the stall. Nyota looked up to see her hugging a young man tightly. He was foreign - white-skinned and sunburned, with hair bleached light yellow from the sun. Nyota stood, suspiciously, and the young man caught her eye over Gaila's head.

"Who's your friend, Gaila?" he asked in rapid English, in an accent Nyota hadn't heard before. Gaila, obviously grinning underneath her headwrap, grasped his hand and squeezed.

"This is..." Gaila gestured at Nyota, and then trailed off, a little hesitant.

"Uhura," Nyota said, giving the name she had taken to distinguish herself from the naked, skinny, desperate girl that had arrived on this island.

"Uhura!" Jimmy said, friendly, in his clumsy accent. Nyota wanted to frown at the way he said the word, but he was so sincere she found she couldn't. "Jim Kirk." He held out his hand for her to shake. She looked at it, suspiciously.

Gaila filled the resulting awkward silence with laughter. "She's not going to fall for your tricks, Jimmy," she said, resting her head on his shoulder.

"Well that's okay," Jimmy said. "You're probably right anyway, Uhura, you shouldn't trust a guy like me."

Gaila laughed again, but Nyota was mostly puzzled as to why anybody would say that.

"How long as you working tonight?" Jimmy asked Gaila. "You girls should come visit me, we're beached not far from here. I'm lonely."

"No," Nyota said, firmly.

"Oh come on N, I've known Jimmy forever, he's fine."

"No, Gaila."

Jimmy shrugged. "That's okay, I understand." He picked a piece of pineapple off their stand and took a bite. "I'll see you round, Gaila. It was nice to meet you, Uhura," he inclined slightly, bowing to her with a slight flourish. Nyota raised an eyebrow. "And I would love to see you again."

Gaila wouldn't shut up about Jimmy the entire way back to the apartment that night.

"Where did you even meet him?" Nyota asked as she combed her hair out by candlelight on the tiny terrace.

"Oh, just at the night market," Gaila said. "He showed up one day and got some food from me. The other fish stalls made him sick, poor thing."

"Where's he from?" It was one of those instances where Nyota didn't want to talk about this person at all, but couldn't help herself. She hated it.

"America," Gaila sucked out the innards of one half of a passionfruit, handing the other half to Nyota. "Wherever that is. Oh, Nyota, it's so romantic. He fell in love with the wrong girl, and he had to run away from home."

"Yeah, whatever," Nyota scoffed. She emptied her passionfruit piece and tossed the hide over the side of the terrace.

"He stole a boat," Gaila went on, as she fluffed up the pillows on their wide bed. "He and his friend, Bones. You'll like Bones. We should see them tomorrow."

"He stole a boat?"

"Mmm hmm," Gaila smiled up at her as Nyota settled into bed beside her. "He's a very bad boy, that Jim Kirk." She closed her eyes, but Nyota stayed awake, scheming.