It’s easy to become a stowaway. Just find a dark, safe, quiet place to hide, one where it finally seems no one will look for you. Curl up tight and wait long enough for sleep to find you instead, and hope that, when you wake, the world will be different somehow.

Wake to the shudder of engines. A roar alive in the walls all around you, and understand. Be too afraid then to creep out from hiding, when the world is noise and voices close by and nothing good has ever come of anyone finding you.

Wait again, until the sky stops fighting the engines and they ease into space’s smooth hum. Until it is too late to be anything but a stowaway.

Being a stowaway is far harder than becoming one. The crew is watchful, and the journey is so very long. But if you can just stay hidden, keep to those dark, safe, quiet places, nibble like a rat at the corners of the watchful crew’s supplies, then, one day, your wish will come true. You will open your eyes from yet another dream of being found, and the engines will be silent, and, when you creep out at last from the shadows of the open cargo bay, the world you see will be different.