Hanna steered the spaceship with one arm, punching buttons, turning knobs, and flipping switches. Her other arm was wrapped tightly around her young son. His face was buried against her shoulder. He wasn't crying any more. His breathing had stilled. He was sleeping, but he still clung to her with his arms and legs that seemed so long and gangly compared to when he was a baby.
       Hanna didn't have the energy to cast another portal large enough for the spaceship to pass through, so she would have to find a place to hide in this dimension. A habitable planet. A mineral rich asteroid field. A nebula, thick with space dust, at the very least. Her magic wouldn't recharge without matter and gravity fields to draw on. Yet, so far, all she'd seen were stars, barren stars, and their gravity was too strong. It would overload her in her weakened state.
       Hanna shut down her spaceship's sensors and flew blind through the velvety darkness. She closed her eyes and felt Owen, her little boy, breathing against her. She let an entire universe fold down to the quiet space inside herself, and then she reached out with her mind, listening for voices in the darkness.
       She heard a murmur. She tilted her head, and she made out a cacophony of quiet voices, almost too distant to hear. A space station, filled with people. A pocket of atmosphere and gravity where soundwaves folded space, vibrating, tingling against her spatial magic sensitivity.
       Hers was not the right magic for this job. Owen's father's magic, blood magic, would lead him to any space station filled with people -- filled with blood -- like an arrow to a bull's eye. Like a bloodhound to blood.
       But Hanna had no choice. She could sense nothing else out here in the darkness. She had nowhere else to go.
       She turned the spaceship consoles back on, set a course towards the gentle, barely perceptible tug of gravity in the distance, and fell asleep as soon as the autopilot took over.
       "Mommy, wake up," Owen said, poking her cheeks and lightly touching her eyelids. "There's a fairy man on the viewscreen. He says, 'Welcome to the Darkness Bazaar.'"
       Hanna opened her eyes to see Owen's cherubic face much too close to her own. His beautiful eyes were filled with love and questions. He trusted her, but he sought answers. She squeezed him, looked over his shoulder, and saw the fairy man, frowning on the viewscreen. He had pointed ears, silver hair, and gossamer wings behind the flowing cloak he wore, but the scene behind him was clearly a top-of-the-line, bleeding-edge-technology control room. And when Hanna looked through the portholes beside the viewscreen, she could see the space station -- wheels spinning, tori turning, hanging in the darkness like a gyroscope lost in space. A space station without a star.
       Yet, even without a stellar -- or even planetary -- mass nearby, the gravity fields here felt rich and velvety. They soothed Hanna's spatial senses, worn raw by ripping portal after portal to escape her husband Brison.
       "What kind of realm is this?" Hanna asked. "No planets, only a wandering space station?"
       The fairy man's frown turned to a smirk. "You're lost." He seemed pleased. Apparently, the Darkness Bazaar was more comfortable with aimless wanderers than unexpected purposeful visitors. Perhaps, this place was hiding from something too. "You should dock."

       The fairy man met Hanna and Owen at their airlock. He explained that they were welcome to keep their ship docked at the Darkness Bazaar for as long as they liked. There were docking berths to spare. However, when she wanted to leave, Hanna would need to consult with the ruling council and log an appropriate debarkation route. She couldn't tell if this was for her own safety -- the gravity wells around the station were clearly unusual; she could feel it -- or if it was to help keep the station hidden. She guessed the latter.
       Inside the space station's docking ring, Hanna and her son found a twilight realm lit by flitting lightning bugs and glowing flowers hanging from twisting vines clinging to the bulkheads. As they walked past the strings of shacks and stalls lining the corridors, floral scents wafted on the thick, humid air. There was a musty smell underneath the more flowery fragrances that Hanna could almost taste. And although a sea of life crowded through the corridors, the noise was dampened. A peculiar hush pervaded as the vegetation absorbed most of the normal harsh echoes of a space station's metal halls.
       More of the fairy people -- delicately boned and very tall with colorful butterfly wings sprouting from their backs -- manned stalls with magical and technological wares. A vendor selling replacement robot arms -- upgrades with extra attachments -- stood alongside a shop selling potions and power crystals. Hanna wondered briefly if a transformation potion could hide her and Owen from Brison, but unless it altered their bodies all the way down to the blood, he would still find them.
       The Darkness Bazaar might prize its obscure location, but it wouldn't obscure the pull that Owen's blood had on Brison. She didn't have much time, a day at most, before Brison found them.
       Owen tugged on her sleeve and pointed towards a vendor selling robot snakes. "Can I have one? Daddy still has Jaame..."
       Hanna shuddered at the memory of the scaly, brown, sightless leech that Brison had told Owen was a pet. Jaame was not a pet. At least, it hadn't been Owen's. It was a blood bank that Brison used to strengthen his magic, and Owen had been a prized source of genetically-bound blood other than his own.
       Before Hanna could answer her son, a commotion ran through the bazaar. Fairies gasped and pointed at the arching ceiling that looked out on the star-studded night. Swirls of red spiraled in the blackness, looping and knotting, tangling and untangling. An explosion of blood in the vacuum opened the ragged mouth of a passage that cut through the layers of dimension.
       And Brison's ship flew through.
       He'd found her already. He'd found Owen. Hanna clenched her fists, fighting against the sour churning of her stomach, telling her to run, run, run. She wished she could cut the ties of blood that bound her son to that man.
       Owen hugged Hanna’s leg and looked up at her with pleading eyes. "Please, don't make us run again."
       "We have nowhere left to run to..." Hanna clung tightly to Owen’s hand, as if Brison had already stolen him away. Her body screamed at her to run, to hide among the stalls, but she stood flat-footed in the corridor. There was no point to running. She pulled herself together. She had to. For Owen. "Come on, I'll buy you a robo-snake after I get us... a snack." She led Owen by the hand through the crowd of fairies, over to the potions stall.
       She couldn't help glancing up at the sky, watching Brison's ship. She felt every creak and shudder of the vessel docking overhead, as she picked through the glass bulbs and vials. Finally, she found two labelled Cthonion. She didn't want to transform herself and her cherubic child into monstrous creatures with tentacles on their faces, but it was the only sentient alien species that she knew for sure used blood based on hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin. So, if the potions were truly transformative, not merely illusions (which they almost certainly were), then maybe, just maybe, Brison wouldn't recognize Owen in Cthonion form.
       It was a terrible plan, but it was all she had. Hanna tried to buy the potions, but the fairy selling them didn't recognize her credit chips as legal tender. She tried to barter, offering anything she had on her spaceship, and eventually the spaceship itself, but the fairy wasn't interested. He offered her a job; she could work for the potions. But Hanna didn't have time for that.
       Time ticked down, and Hanna considered stealing the potions. Before she could decide, time ran out.
       "Daddy has Jaame with him!" Owen cried. The boy twisted his hand, escaping Hanna's grip, and ran off through the crowd of fairies.
       Hanna cried out too, an inarticulate sound between an admonition for Owen to stop and a plea for him to come back. The boy didn't listen. He only had eyes for that blasted leech he thought was his pet.
       Standing in the berth where his ship had docked, in front of the re-sealed airlock, Brison had the damnable leech draped over his shoulders. It was longer than his arms, covered in crinkly brown scales like dried leaves, and instead of eyes, it had a triad of sticky red mouths, smacking and slurping, reaching toward the little boy who was jumping up and down, eagerly, in front of his father.
       Brison lifted the leech off of his shoulders and placed it on Owen's, beneficently as if it were a gift rather than a curse. The little boy wobbled under the weight of his pet, giggled, and clapped his hands.
       Hanna remembered how pale his face had been when she'd finally gathered the courage to run away. But here he was again, the leech's mouth latching onto his tiny neck. Owen smiled and squirmed as if the leech's bite was nothing more than a pleasant tickle.
       Hanna walked through the crowd in a daze, drawn inexorably toward her son. If she ran, alone, Brison wouldn't care. She could start her life over, but it would be without Owen. If she fought to save her little boy... She'd felt her blood boil and sting with Brison's magic before. It would be a horrible way to die.
       Horror, then.
       "Get that leech off of my son!" she shouted. The crowd of fairies cleared out of her way, avoiding the family drama playing out amongst them.
       "Jaame's not hurting me, Momma."
       Brison laughed cruelly and ruffled Owen's hair. He thought he had won, but the boy cringed away from his father and said, "Don't touch me."
       "I brought your pet to you," Brison said.
       Owen's voice got very small; Hanna could hardly hear him. "You yelled at Momma. I think you hurt her."
       Brison's face turned bright red. He'd never been good at hiding his anger. "Your mother--"
       Owen cowered, hiding his face behind one of Jaame's scaly coils. The leech's body pulsed with the blood it was sucking.
       Brison modulated his voice and tried again. "Your mother stole you from me."
       Owen peeked out between Jaame's coils, his little face contorted in confusion. He didn't understand the idea of being stolen. He wasn't a possession. That's not how his mother treated him, at least. Hanna could see these thoughts reflected in the bewilderment filling his eyes.
       "I have you back now," Brison said, holding a hand out to their son. "Let's go home."
       "Back to our own dimension?" Owen asked. He didn't take his father's hand.
       "That's right."
       "Not without Mom."
       Brison gave his son a withering stare, filled with scorn. He held up his hand and clenched it into a fist.
       Hanna, who had been helplessly watching their exchange, fell to her knees, doubled over in pain. The sound of her own blood buzzed in her ears. It was rushing and singing, fighting to free itself from the veins that held it in. Brison's intent was clear -- if the mother was in the way, get rid of the mother.
       "Stop!" Owen cried.
       And the pain stopped. Hanna gasped in relief. She'd never expected to experience another moment without pain again. A scream pierced the air, and she looked up to see Brison doubled over now, clutching at himself, as if trying to hold his blood inside. It was already leaking out of his nose and the corners of his eyes.
       Her son was doing this to him. Protecting her. Destroying himself. Owen's fists were raised above his head, clenched tight. Hanna could see the phantom of the man her cherubic son would become -- another cruel, cold-hearted blood mage, wielding the warm beating liquid of life itself as a weapon. She couldn't let that happen. He couldn't murder his own father. So Hanna summoned every bit of her own magic, pulling on the gravity fields and folds around her, feeling out the architecture of space. She gasped. The dimensions here were pressed together tightly like the pages in a book, instead of scattered like leaves on the wind. No wonder the Darkness Bazaar prized its privacy -- it was sitting in a hub between realities. She could tear a portal to any other universe from here with a fraction of the energy it usually took.
       Magic flowed into Hanna like a gushing stream. She crafted the gravity, sculpting it with her spatial sense, and ripped a man-sized portal through the layers of dimension into the space beneath her husband's feet. A special portal. A portal for only him.
       The portal looked like nothing more than a black shadow; a double of his own shadow, but darker, deeper. It was a Brison-shaped window into a black hole. Brison was sucked through in an instant’s flicker, as if he’d never been there at all. The dimensional-rip sealed itself back up like an opened book slamming shut.
       "Where'd Daddy go?" Owen asked, his hands falling slack at his sides. He looked small, scared, and harmless, but the vision of him like his father still haunted Hanna.
       "I sent him home," she said, trying to believe that in some spiritual sense it might be true.
       Owen nodded solemnly.
       The leech let go of Owen's neck and nuzzled his perfect cheek with its glistening mouths. The boy stroked its scaly head. "Can we... not go home?" he asked, uncertain. "I don't want to see Daddy again. At least... not right now."
       Hanna tried to take a step toward her son, but instead she stumbled and fell to her knees, exhausted from the power of the gravity magic that had flowed through her.
       A fairy woman with swallowtail wings rushed over and helped her up. "Are you all right?" she asked, wings flapping slowly behind her.
       "I will be," Hanna said, and the fairy woman nodded.
       Hanna looked around the fairy land inside this wandering space station. It troubled her that none of the fairies had come to her aid against Brison, but then that had also been true in her own realm.
       The intersectionality of the dimensions here in the darkness spoke to Hanna's spatial senses, amplifying her magic. She shouldn't have been able to cast a portal that quickly, even such a small one. She could get used to that kind of power.
       Besides, she had a job offer, assuming it was still good.
       Working for the potion vendor would give Hanna time to recover; time to decide what to do with her beautiful and terrifyingly powerful young boy.
       "How about we stay here?" she said.
       "Okay," Owen answered. He scritched the leech draped over his shoulders and said, "Will you still buy me a robo-snake? I think Jaame would like a friend."
       Hanna shuddered. Her son had been right; somewhere along the line, the leech had become his.