“Khawla, the signal is very bad. Artek isn’t here, but perhaps I can assist. What do you need?” I asked, leaning in close to get a better read. Were they still at Thunder Rock, which I knew was pretty vehemently anti-human? They’d been in the middle of selecting a new Queen of their Clan when I’d been banished, but I doubted such unrest had resulted in a change of heart.
“We are trapped. We need help. The Queen will execute my younglings come morning,” Khawla responded. He could not bring himself to speak the last words out loud; they carried through the communicator as a horrified whisper. I felt like swearing too. I knew some Clans had it worse than others, some Naga females were much more aggressive and barbaric than others, but this? I’d never heard of a Queen going so far as to murder younglings in cold blood.
“I am too far away to aid you personally,” I said. “But I will contact Artek for aid. Keep your human and younglings safe.” The call dropped abruptly, and I could only hope that enough of my words had reached Khawla to assure him that I’d send help. I turned to Auby, urgency riding me hard. “How do I fix the outgoing booster? And if we can’t do that, how can I make the Burrower surface? We need to call for help right away.”
“This is the panel,” Auby said, and the two of us opened it and crawled in as far as we could to get to work. I allowed myself only a short moment to try before attempting a call to Artek anyway. When the signal struggled to come through, Auby and I worked harder until, finally, we reached him. I hoped it wasn’t too late.I hoped Artek could send help in time to rescue Khawla, his human mate, and his younglings.
Chapter 12
Felicia
I woke up feeling better and stronger, as if crying last night had helped me come to terms with some of the heavy stuff I’d been wrestling with. Okay, so my ship had been stuck in ice for a thousand years. That sucked. It meant that tearful goodbye with my dad really had been goodbye, and he’d died thinking I was MIA. That was horrible, and learning that the arrival of my ship had had such devastating results on the planet was worse. Levant was correct, though: it was not my fault. I had not purposely steered theFutureinto Serant’s North Pole to alter the axis angle of their planet. All of this was a miserable accident, and exactly the kind of consequence one could expect when playing with fire—or, in this case, a highly experimental, first-of-its-kind FTL drive.
Should there have been more safety measures in place to prevent this? Was this human arrogance at its peak? Yes to both, but I wasn’t the engineer who’d built the ship, nor was I the official who’d approved the test flight. I’d been the pilot, and I’d done all I could to salvage the mission when it went awry. There wasn’t anything else I could have done.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t more to the story than I knew. For that, I’d need to get the readings from the black box. It had been very unsettling to hear Levant describe the Stone Age-like, tribal manner in which most of his people lived—how the era of Calamities had not just changed their world, but their physiology in a way that was preventing them from rising back to their former level of civilization.
The nest was warm and soft, that’s what Levant called it: a nest. It was also empty, though I was certain I’d fallen asleep curled up in his arms and the warm, solid coils of his tail. Levant, the one constant in all of this, my first proof that aliens were real—had said I could freaking puke on him if that made me feel better. I had never met anyone like him in all of my existence.
Blinking slowly, I decided that today I was going to make it a good day. An easy day. No worrying for a while, not thinking of the past and the things I could not change. Enjoy the moment, learn about Levant, about aliens. Do the things that had made me want to test-fly theFuturein the first place. Discover. Perhaps, along the way, I could fall a little more in love with my alien too. Not that that part was hard.
When I rolled to the edge of the nest, I peered around the darkened control room in search of him. He couldn’t have gone anywhere; this was the only room, as far as I knew, aboard the Digmaster. He would not have left without me, that I was certain of.
His dark scales made him hard to spot in the darkness, but I soon discovered several long loops of his coils spread out across the floor. When I climbed out of the nest and followed his body, I found him lying headfirst inside an open panel beneath the console. He wasn’t moving, but his chest rose and fell slowly and steadily. Asleep? What had he been up to? Why was he sleeping on the floor?
“Levant?” I asked, and I touched his lower back, the highest part of him I could reach. Instantly, light burst from his scales, some of it partially obscured because he was lying face down, but much of it bursting brightly from the front of his tail. Slashes,swirls, all lit with a natural bioluminescence. He did not respond to his name, but a pink nose peeked out over his shoulder from inside the panel.
“He worked too hard, Felicia. By my calculations, he has not slept since he found you three days ago. Perhaps you should make sure he rests for a while.” Auby’s words made me gasp in shock. Three days? Levant was crazy, why hadn’t he grabbed some sleep for himself? What had he been doing in that hatch that was so important he couldn’t rest?
It was, I discovered, pretty damn impossible to move a fully grown Naga male on your own. I knew there was no way I could lift him into the nest, but I couldn’t even seem to manage to pull him free from the hatch. Which meant Auby was stuck behind him, the squeeze too tight for the small robotic calf to fit through. “I believe his horn is stuck behind a structural beam, Felicia,” Auby said. “It is a preposterously large horn. Perhaps I should saw the tip off with my laser cutter?”
“Ah, hold off on that for now. I don’t think Levant will appreciate waking up with half a horn missing.” No, I didn’t think he’d like that at all. Honestly, it would piss me off pretty badly if I woke up and discovered someone had given me a haircut. That was no different. It looked uncomfortable to lie like that, but there was no other option. I didn’t think he was cold, either, the control room was heated to perfectly livable conditions, but I fetched a fur and covered him with it anyway.
“What were you guys doing?” I asked Auby, and listened closely as the calf launched into a fairly incomprehensible explanation of how to fix a certain component on the Digmaster. What thatcomponent was, or what it was supposed to do, I couldn’t figure out from Auby’s explanation.
It did not take long for Levant to stir, his long body shifting along the ground, and for a coil to find my body on instinct and press against me. “Felicia, you are awake,” he muttered from inside the hatch, and then, with a bang and a curse word, he managed to extract himself from the tight opening. Auby trotted out after him, disheveled and wearing a grumpy expression that was incredibly cute. I had eyes mostly for Levant, though, the way dust clung to the black and green strands of his long hair. The way his eyes lit up with sheer pleasure the moment they saw me. Especially the way his lush mouth tempted me.
Did the Naga kiss? What a strange idea—that a species might not do that—but it was possible. I was about to find out right away, but Levant spoke first. “Are you feeling better, sweet mate?” he asked. I nodded right away, resolute in my conviction that today I was going to live only in the moment. Not think of the future, not the past.
“Good,” he said, his mouth curling into a satisfied smile and the ivory horn on his chin dipping toward his own throat as he lowered his head to mine. “I discovered there are bathing facilities on the Burrower. Would you like to test those?” Oh my god, he’d found a way to wash up? Did I ever! I knew I’d come out of stasis clean, but I technically hadn’t showered in over a thousand years. That was way too long.
We rose together, and I watched him carefully for any sign that he was unsteady on his tail. Three days without sleep wasn’t fixed by a catnap on the floor. He looked good, though, even with alien cobwebs in his hair. I glanced at Auby and discovered hewas washing himself like a cat, licking his paw and then rubbing it over his face and head. It was so adorable that I cooed, “Do all Vakarsa do that? Or is that just you, Auby?”
“I am a most fastidious model,” Auby answered, but that didn’t tell me much. Levant drew me with him to a wall across from where the nest was, and with a press of his hand, a panel slid aside to reveal a very narrow, tiny room with white walls and light glowing from the ceiling and floor. It was not tall enough for me to stand in easily, just like the control room itself, but there were steps leading down into what appeared to be a small, square bath.
“You sit in here,” Levant said, “and warm water will fill the receptacle to bathe yourself in. Ah, I have learned that humans prefer to wash standing up under a kind of rain, but Naga mostly bathe in tubs or pools.” How had he learned that? Now I was starting to wonder one of the big questions that had yet to occur to me: How did Levant know about humans, and how could he have my language in his translator device? As I’d learned yesterday, they werenotspacefaring—not anymore—and most of their society was not technologically advanced any longer, either.
“How,” I began to ask, but Levant interrupted me by doing something so tender it almost undid me. His hands cupped my face, palms textured but not rough. His forehead dropped against mine, so I felt the gentle nubs and ridges of his brows, not painful, just another layer of texture. My face heated as his breath ghosted over my skin, our mouths so close we were almost touching, almost kissing.
I saw the bright glow of his golden eyes and wondered what went on behind it. Did he want to kiss me as badly as I wanted to kiss him right then? I pushed into his grip, deciding to be bold in that instant. I’d lived my life being brave; what was one more moment like that? Our lips touched, brushing together, and our breathing mingled. It was soft, warm, pleasant, and then I touched the tip of my tongue to the seam of his lips, and everything exploded. Not literally, but it felt as if the whole world shifted on its axis again.
I’d forgotten his tongue was not like mine, but longer, narrower, and split at the tip. When I slipped mine into his mouth, we tangled and curled together, and then he did things no human man could. That tongue curled around mine and pulled gently, and that tug was echoed deep in my core. Then he swept his long tongue deep into my mouth, flicked it against the roof of my mouth, and pushed deeper.
“So this is mouth-mating,” he said when he pulled back after a moment that seemed to go on forever, yet wasn’t nearly long enough. “Artek described it in his documentation on humans, but I had not realized it would be so… pleasurable.” He kissed me again, appearing to be completely unaware of how in his thrall I was at that moment. So his, I couldn’t even begin to figure out what I wanted, and what he wanted of me.
“Mouth-mating?” I asked when he let me up for air the second time. We were both panting, and he seemed unwilling to go far, his forehead pressed to mine. “Kissing,” we call it. “Kiss. You kissed me, Levant.” I smiled when he repeated the words after me so seriously, he was clearly making it his mission to memorize them correctly.
My back was getting a crick in it from standing so awkwardly. That was unfortunate, because I would have liked to keep kissing him otherwise. Which was probably what led me to say, “Want to see if we canbothfit in here? Save some water?” It made Levant’s eyes sparkle like they were suns, his mouth curving sinfully. He knew that I was asking him to share far more than just a bath. My whole body ached and tingled when I remembered his kisses—the way his cock had felt against my belly before.
