“Eat now. It’ll be hours until then, and I can’t deal with your grumpy attitude all day.” I gnaw on my bar and try to hold my breath at the same time. The smell is the worst part. Otherwise, the three-layered rations are a little too hard and chewy, but I’ve gotten used to their dank, sweet taste.
“What do you mean, hours?” he demands, ignoring the bar I hold out to him.
“I have to work first.” I try offering him one of the cakes instead, but he pushes it away in annoyance.
“My ship is more important than whatever menial task they’ve assigned you.”
“It’s not, actually. My work is really critical.”
Lyro crosses his arms over his chest. “I doubt that.”
It’s true. Without my help, the Frathiks might go extinct. From what Harl has told me, most of their females were killed when their planet was destroyed, and the few that were left quickly realized that their eggs struggled to develop properly in space. The hatch rate of females declined precipitously because the female embryos needed planetary gravity to develop.
Stuck in space, the Frathiks focused onproducingeggs, not raising them, hatching only a few males and saving the rest until their people could secure a planet. That’s where Rose came in. She successfully raised a few eggs for them over the years, including Harl’s egg.
The two of them came up with the idea to bring more human women to this star system to help with the Hatching, now that they have far more eggs than the remaining females can sing for. But I’m the only human who made it all the way to this experimental facility, so a lot is resting on my shoulders.
My first instinct is to explain all this to Lyro, but I think of his foot coming down on Elvis. Lyro doesn’t give a shit about other people’s problems. So I just shrug. “You agreed to help me as a condition of your freedom. If you don’t want to, you can go back in the holding room. We don’t have to be enemies, but if you prefer it that way, it’s your choice.”
He stares at me for a long minute. Then he picks up the kwasa cake. His mouth pulls down as he chews it, and he washes every bite down with water, but he eats it.
“Happy now?” he spits when he’s done.
“About what?”
“You’ve had your revenge for the floor. That was disgusting.”
“I didn’t mind the floor,” I tell him, giggling. “It was fine.”
He wipes his mouth with the edge of his cloak. “Well, I minded the firstmeal.”
Chapter 6
Lyro
For some reason, she doesn’t hate me, which makes me hate her a little bit more, especially because she has the scent of that Frathik male on her face. He’s obviously in love with her. When she kissed his face and he closed all eight eyes, I nearly slaughtered them both.
I want to leave this place. This facility, this planet, this frixing star system. I want to be done with all of it. But I can’t leave until my ship is repaired, and my ship needs a lot of repair. Lena is holding it hostage until I do her bidding, the clever little villain. Curiously, that makes me hate her slightly less.
“We’re wasting time. Show me this pet project of yours.”
She turns those pale blue-and-white eyes on me. They are fringed with tiny hairs as white as the hair on her head. “Are you going to stomp on it to teach me a lesson?”
“Probably. That will leave more time to fix my ship.”
She gives me a slow, sad smile. “I hope you don’t. It would be hard to forgive you for that.”
I snort. “I don’t need your forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness isn’t for you. It’s for me. I have to live with you for a long time.” There’s an ache in her voice, and absurdly, I wonder if it’s for the Frathik who loves her. Perhaps she loves him in return and regrets that her soul is bound to mine.
Well, I have a simple solution for that problem that begins and ends with my sharpest blade. It’s a pity my uncle and his Frathik minions have already confiscated the weapons from my ship, or I could solve it for her right now.
Though as I watch her ragged garments and too-big boots traverse the passage in front of me, I don’t like the idea of seeing them stained with blood. I am not sure I could push the image out of my mind the way I can with other things.
Perhaps you should answer my prayers and save us all a tragedy, Goddess.
Lena leads me to a pair of frosted glass doors. Pausing in front of them, she asks, “Can I trust you?”
