“Come with me.” He gestured with his head towards the cliff path. “You’re exhausted. You can warm up. I have food.”
He saw the indecision on her face—exhaustion warring with fear, duty warring with a desperate need to escape. He could see the fine tremor in her hands, the slight slump to her shoulders, and knew she was at the end of her strength.
“I—I can’t,” she said finally. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
Then she turned and slipped back into the storm-tossed waters with a fluid, impossible grace, leaving him standing in the crashing surf with his daughter in his arms and the scent of salt and honey fading on the wind.
CHAPTER 3
AVultor, a huge terrifying Vultor, living so close to the village. Diving deeper to escape the crashing waves on the surface, Ariella still found it hard to believe. The Vultor were the other alien race who had colonized Cresca and their relationship with humans was… troubled to say the least. There had been violent clashes between both sides, but although those had lessened over the past few years, each group kept to their preferred areas.
Despite the lack of recent violence, she was quite sure no one in the village would be happy that one was living so close and yet she’d heard nothing about him—which meant that no one knew about him or his daughter. Why not? And why were they living in such isolated circumstances?
I touched a Vultor,she thought as she swam.I stood in front of him and held his daughter and looked into his eyes and felt?—
What? What had she felt?
The memory of his warm fingers brushing hers surged up again, the shock that had run through her, electric and impossible to ignore.
I felt nothing,she told herself firmly.It was just the adrenaline of the rescue. I was cold and scared and my body was pumping chemicals to help me survive. It didn’t mean anything.
The lie tasted bitter, even in her own mind.And he was affected as well,a little voice said, remembering the way he’d gone still, staring at her with eyes that glowed like golden flames.
She swam faster, putting distance between herself and the cliffs, heading south towards the lights of the village. The storm was passing—she could feel it in the changing currents and the gradual calming of the water’s chaos. By morning, the sea would be almost peaceful again.
The lab materialized out of the gloom, all harsh angles and artificial lights. She surfaced at the end of the dock, hauling herself up with arms that suddenly felt heavier than they should have.
Tired,she thought.I’m just tired. That’s all.
She pressed her palm against the access panel for the lab, and the door hissed open with a wheeze of complaint. The interior hit her like a wall—warm, dry, recycled air that tasted of chemicals and old coffee. Familiar but not welcoming.
Her father was working in the main lab, hunched over his workstation, surrounded by the soft glow of multiple screens. His lab coat—the same one he’d been wearing for three days, judging by the coffee stains—hung off his shoulders like it belonged to a much larger man. He was a thin man, all angles and intensity, with the distant eyes of someone who spent too much time staring at screens and not enough time looking at people.
“You’re late.” He didn’t look up from the keyboard.
“There was a storm.”
“I noticed. The barometric data was fascinating. Did you feel the pressure differential at depth? I’ve been meaning to study how your inner ear compensates for—” He finally turned, and his eyes went immediately to the medical scanner on the counter. “Come here. I need readings.”
Not are you hurt. Not I was worried. Just data. Always data.
She didn’t move towards the scanner. “I’m fine.”
“Fine is not a measurement.” He crossed to her side, already reaching for the device. “Your oxygen saturation, your heart rate during the storm stress, your—” He paused mid-reach, and for one absurd moment she thought he’d finally noticed the scrape on her arm, the bruise forming on her shoulder from where the rocks had caught her. “Is that a new tear in your suit? Those are expensive to repair.”
“A wave threw me against some rocks.”
“Hmm.” He was already scanning, the blue light washing over her body while numbers scrolled across his screen. “Your lungs performed admirably. Ninety-seven percent efficiency even under storm conditions. Better than last quarter.” A smile flickered across his face—the same smile he wore when an experiment proved his theories correct. “You’re improving.”
I’m not an experiment,she wanted to say.I’m your daughter.
But she’d stopped saying that years ago. It never made any difference.
“I need to change,” she said instead, stepping back from the scanner. “Dry off.”
“Yes, yes. But first—” He was already typing, recording his precious data. “Did you find anything? The trench coordinates I gave you were promising. High probability of mineral deposits, possibly some of those crystalline formations that Merrick has been asking about?—”
Her stomach clenched at the name.
