Aesira swallowed hard, then finished her drink. “I don’t...” She set her cup down. Other than Nora and Nev, she didn’t have friends. Kamari, she supposed. But making friends while in the Order was almost impossible. She and her squadron were reassigned to different areas of the country every few months. There was never time for any sort of relationships to take root. Never time for somewhere to feel like home.
She glanced at him and in the rigidness of his shoulders and pinch of his mouth. Maybe he wasn’t proud of his past either, and that was something she could relate to.
“I don’t like what youdid,” she said, “but it seems like you don’t like what you did either and that matters.”
His shoulders relaxed, like he had been holding his breath waiting for her answer. She had seen firsthand the lasting effects of all manner of drugs created by chemists. Had seen how they ravaged Novaria like a plague. Seen them change people into unrecognizable versions of themselves. Destroy lives. Reputations. Families.
She also arrested many smugglers of the drug who showed very little remorse. They were nothing like Stone. They wouldn’t sit here with bated breath confessing their sins. “Does you being achemist have something to do with why Vic was so angry with you?”
“Ah, that.” He smiled over the top of his glass. “Birdie, Bee, and Patch had been running under Vic for a few years before I showed up. They took me under their wing, made sure I had a place to stay, food to eat. I was ten, I think.” He frowned into his cup. “Anyway, we ran together for two decades and Vic would keep us running until there was nothing left of us, if we didn’t get out. We saved up, stole a ship, and took off, leaving his well-oiled drug routes suddenly without four runners. That’s why he’s pissed at me.”
She swallowed the last dregs of her wine, savoring the sour taste on her tongue. “Yet you took a chance to meet with him knowing how angry he’d be.”
“I wasn’t worried about Vic. He puts on a good show, but he’s an old man. I knew we’d be fine.”
“Your confidence precedes you, Odega.”
“Something else you’ve noticed about me, Commander?”
She didn’t hide her smile this time. “Anyway,” she said in an attempt to steer the conversation away from the list of things she’d noticed about Stone Odega. She watched Stone, his eyes shining from the moonlight or the drink. His flushed cheeks and clenched hands. The scar that ran alongside his face. The cluster of stars inked on the side of his neck.
The alcohol numbed her fingertips and the tip of her tongue. She forced a smile before glancing back to the desert as the ship sailed silently above the ground. “I’m not perfect either, you know.”
Stone gasped. “The great Commander Zeliath has flaws?” He bumped her shoulder with his and all of the blood in her body came rushing to her cheeks. “I’m not convinced.”
Was that a compliment?More likely the alcohol.
“I’m not so great, as you put it.” The crawler's dead eyes and haunting words flashed behind her eyes. “I’ve hurt people in ways I’ll never forget.”She could hear them now, their screeching voices tugging at her ears, but Stone sat unphased and she ignored them the best she could.
“Maybe the two of us,” Stone said, bumping her shoulder again, “have more in common than we thought.”
There was something comforting about that. About finding someone who could not be more opposite from her; in their upbringing, in their professions, and still finding commonality. It made the world seem less big. Less overwhelming.
“We’re human, after all,” he said. “We’re made of mistakes and regrets and even if there’s nothing else about us that’s the same, it’s a relief knowing that at the end of the day, we as humans bear the same burden.”
She tilted her head to the side and pretended not to study the lines of his face or the way his scar traveled to his lips. “What burden?”
He smiled and she would later blame the wine but in that moment Aesira could admit to herself that maybe Stone Odega was a little bit handsome and maybe he’d gotten under her skin more than she liked to admit.
“The burden of maintaining our humanity when the world makes it so easy not to.”
Fourteen
Aesira
Days of endless desert traded with jagged red rocks. A heavy mist clung to the craggy mountain peaks, offering limited visibility to the outpost below them.
Aesira cupped her hands and blew into them, warming the frost from her fingertips. In Novaria, the elevation was higher but the land was still temperate. No extreme drops or spikes in temperature. Nothing like the heat of Vargah or now the frigid air of the Whispering Mountains.
“If those crawlers don’t kill us, surely this cold will.” Nora wrapped her hands around a steaming cup of tea.
“Once we’re on the ground, we’ll warm up.” Aesira rubbed her hands together. They sailed straight through the day and now the moon was lighting the way for Aquila to dock at the next stop.Dire, Stone had called it. A tiny speck on the map, and the last known civilization in the west.
Aesira’s armor held in her body heat well enough that she waved off a cloak from Bee. Deciding it would only get in her way should a need for her weapons arise.
“Almost there,” Stone said from behind her. They spent their rotations together the last two nights, just as he’d said.
He was patient, teaching her how to fly while they made simple conversation. The weather, Vargah, finding Desmond. She was finding his company more and more comfortable. Actual friendship, as Stone liked to remind her. Except when his hands met hers on the wheel of the ship, his callouses scraping against her skin, sending tiny thrills down her spine. Or when he laughed at his own stories and Aesira caught herself leaning into the sound, savoring it.
