He’s lying. Damn it, he’s lying to me. And he’s doing it because it hurts him too much to admit the truth: We just saw Harl for the last time.
Lyro rubs away the fresh tear from my cheek with his thumb and then takes Lele from my arms. He stares down at her for a moment, the tight muscle of his jaw softening. Then he opens a cupboard next to me and puts her inside.
My jaw drops when he latches the door. “You can’t keep her in there!”
“Just for takeoff. I don’t have an infant restraint system. I’ll make one before we land, I promise.” He takes something from a hook above my head and puts it around my neck. “Here. This is yours.”
I look down at the spiral shell and the two fuzzy feet sticking out, and I can’t help smiling. “Hey, Elvis.”
“He missed you,” Lyro says roughly, taking his place in the pilot’s chair so I can’t see his face.
Someone did.
“I missed you, too,” I say to the back of his head. “I dreamed about you every night.”
“Alara—” Anything else he says is drowned out as the ship tips up, and I’m pinned back against the wall for a few long minutes, until we exit the blanketing fog. The ship shoots out of the atmosphere, and there’s only a few seconds of silent relief until we plow into a dense crowd of rocks and ice.
R’Hiza’s rings. The things that protected the base from detection were the end of it, and we’re still not free of them.
Lyro effortlessly maneuvers the ship through them, like it’s a video game level he’s played a hundred times. When we emerge on the other side to the dark expanse of space, I let my breath out. Then I scrabble open my harness and unlatch the cupboard where Lyro stored Lele.
The little pink tadpole is asleep with a smile on her face. I almost hate to move her. I scoop her up as gently as I can, and Lyro is there when I turn. “Where should I put her?” I ask in a whisper. “I know you didn’t expect a baby.”
His lips twitch into a smirk as he stares pointedly at my waistline. “Not so soon, anyway. I’ll figure something out. Take her through the cleansing unit while you wait. It should help clear any smoke out of her lungs until we can get both of you to a healer.”
He holds the door for me and shows me how to work the controls, and when Lele and I are alone together in the hum of the sonic chamber, I let out a huge breath.
We’re safe. We made it out. And it probably wouldn’t have happened that way without Harl and Lyro.
“Your fathers are heroes,” I say to her sweet, peaceful face. “Kings, both of them.”
When we’re as clean as we’re going to get, I shut off the cleanser and find Lyro in the middle of setting up a genius baby-bed solution. He’s modified a cupboard into a kind of Murphy bed that acts as a crib when it’s open and a safety seat when it’s closed.
“I put a tablet in it so we can see her from anywhere in the ship,” he says, showing me the screen propped to capture a view of the sleeping area.
“You’re a genius.” The man made a freakin’ car seat and a baby monitor while I took a shower. I give him a quick kiss on tiptoe and then lean to place Lele in the furs he’s used to line her nestlike sleeping spot.
“I heard what you said about me in there,” he scrapes out. He fists my ponytail, and as soon as Lele is out of my arms, uses my hair to pull me into his arms. For a split-second, I tense, worried that he’s going to be mad I referred to him as one of Lele’s dads. But then he says, “I’m no king, Alara. With you, I am just a worshipper on my knees.”
With another comm in hand, he walks me through a narrow doorway and pushes me back into a deep pile of furs that takes up the whole room. I groan as their plush softness envelops me.
“I missed these.”
Lyro freezes where he stands. One hand braced on the door frame, he stares down at me. “I took them all.”
“Yup.” I giggle.
“I even took that ragged old fur Oljin loaned you.” He sounds disgusted, skin a white-and-gray sludge with black, angry threads laced through it.
“I know.” I’m so full of love for him, it feels like I’m going to burst. “Why would you leave any behind? You planned to take me with you, so you took all the furs, too. It was fine,” I assure him, when his scowl only grows. “You gave me your cloak. It was super warm, and it smelled like you.”
He sets the comm on a shelf and drops to his knees between mine. “Don’t do this.”
“What?”
“Pretend I did something good. Alioth knows it was only selfishness.” He slides his hand into the open side seam of my trousers, caressing over my bare skin. I shiver under his touch. “I gave you my cloak because I wanted you marked as mine. Wrapped in my scent. I thought nothing of your comfort or safety.”
“You did,” I remind him, smiling to myself. “But you knew I could take care of myself.”
