Kane pauses, and then gives a bark of laughter.
The noise catches me so off guard, I glance up at him directly for the first time. He’s watching me, frustration and admiration warring in his expression. “Has anyone ever managed to talk you out of anything?” he demands.
A reluctant smile pulls at the corners of my mouth. “No.”
He steps closer and reaches up to tuck a strand of hair that I missed inside my cap. The edge of his thumb is rough from work and repeated scrubbing with the harsh soap in the engine room, but his touch is gentle and warm. Against the warning voice in my head, I tip my head toward his touch, like a cat seeking the sun.
“You are a good leader, a strong person. You don’t have anything to prove,” he says, tracing the line of my cheek.
Alarms are ringing in my head. This is dangerous. Letting myself feel. I can’t take it back, and it will hurt when it’s over. The kind of hurt I’ve worked hard to avoid for most of my life. “Who says I’m trying to prove anything?” I whisper.
“You. Every damn day. Like you have to show you deserved to survive.” He pauses, searching my face with his gaze. “Or like you have to give fate a second chance to take you because it screwed up the first time.”
It is a shockingly accurate summary of several ugly interior monologues that I’ve pushed down so deep that I barely hear the whispering in the background anymore.
The heat of embarrassment scorches my skin. How does he know me so well? What, exactly, does it say in those files? I feel exposed, like I’m standing naked in front of him but not in the mutual, private way that I’ve barely let myself imagine. No, this is the harsh, evaluative light of a clinical visit.
Stung, I step back from him. “Thanks for the assessment, doc.” My heart is beating too hard beneath my suit. I make myself take a deep breath so the alarms on my vitals don’t go off before I even leave the ship.
I expect Kane to push, to keep after me about my supposed death wish—why does everyone think that?—but instead he folds his arms across his chest, giving me a knowing look. “It’s too risky to go alone. You’d never let anyone else do that.”
I shrug, as best as I can in the tight fabric. “Because I’m responsible for the safety of my team.”
“Which includes you,” he argues. “You’ll have to go off tether. We won’t be able to pull you back if you get into trouble.” He rakes a hand through his hair. “And the inside of that ship is probably one big hazard. You could get caught in debris or tear your suit…” He pauses, his expression darkening. “Or worse.”
“Worse? Like what?” Suffocating from a microscopic rip in my suit before I could get back out to the LINA sounds bad enough. Not that that’s going to happen. I have multiple patches on me at all times when I’m out in a suit—we all do. Kane’s just being paranoid.
Or overprotective.I can’t decide how I feel about that. The needle seems to be caught between irritation and nostalgic appreciation. No one has cared that much about me in a long time.
Kane starts to speak, but Voller appears in the corridor, clomping toward us.
“TL’s not going alone,” Voller announces.
Kane hesitates, but then clearly decides any ally is better than none. “See?” he says to me. “Even Voller thinks it’s too—”
But then Voller pushes past us, dropping a couple more biohazard bags on the floor next to mine, and grabs his suit. “Buddy system, right?”
It takes me an extra second to process what he means, just because I can’t believe it, even with the evidence right in front of me. “No,” I say flatly. “No way. You’re not going.”
Kane steps in front of him. “If anyone is going with, it should be someone who’s got med training. You’re a pilot. What the hell are you going to do over there if there’s trouble?”
The needle tips toward irritation. “I can handle myself just fine,” I say to Kane. “Trouble or no.”
Kane glances back at me in disgust. “You’re the TL. You’re supposed to be smarter than this. No one goes into a potentially dangerous situation without backup.”
“You do remember that I’m in charge, right?” I ask.
“Exactly,” Voller says at the same time.
“Hell no,” Kane says. “Not you.”
But instead of throwing a punch, as I’m half expecting, Voller smiles pleasantly. Which raises my hackles. He’s up to something.
“She’s team lead and you’re second-in-command. You can’t both go,” Voller points out, far too reasonably. Never mind that any time the issue of command structure has come up in the past, he’s always pointed out that the pilot is “technically” also a second. Even though there can’t betwoseconds, even “technically.” Otherwise, it’s not a chain of command so much as a circle. “Lourdes is freaking out, and Nysus gets all cranky when he has to leave his tech cave.”
He’s not wrong.
“That leaves me,” Voller says. He sits down on a nearby storage crate to begin stuffing himself into the suit.
