“Wha—” I begin.
His mouth closes over mine, warm and soft. His hands slide around my waist, pulling me tighter against him.
The heat of him surprises me, freezes me in place with my hands in the air for a second. Just a second. Then it’s like being lit on fire from within. The whoosh of thrusters catching more fuel.
I grab at the back of his soft T-shirt, trying to lever myself closer to him. If that were even possible. My actions ruck his shirt up, and the smoothness of his skin beneath my grasping hands nearly undoes me. I want to breathe him in, climb him, pull him inside of me.
That’s when he steps back, his breathing ragged, his blue eyes bright with affection and something darker. “Didn’t want to wait six more hours to do that,” he says, tracing a gentle exploratory fingertip across my cheekbone.
I stand there, head swirling and buzzy with too many thoughts and not a single coherent one among them, except:This is a bad idea.
His mouth—so recently on mine—quirks in a smile, as he seems to read my mind. He leans forward to press a kiss on my forehead before walking away.
“It’s going to be fine,” he says to me over his shoulder. “We’re all going to be fine.”
Even as dazed as I am, I’m still with it enough to wince. I wish he hadn’t said that quite so loudly or confidently. It feels too much like tempting fate.
15
8.0 hours on theAurora, 63.5 hours until commweb range
I inventory our food and water supplies. Twice.
I make a list of to-dos for Nysus, including asking him to look for some hacker-y method to access the coded captain’s log.
Lourdes finds her way into the transmission record for all outgoing communications. We can’t view the messages that were sent—they’re long gone. But she can see who was attempting to communicate with Earth and how often. I set her to making a list of the names that crop up most frequently. Maybe there’s a pattern.
Six hours isn’t a lot of time to rest. But it’s way too much time not to overthink. And I have so much to overthink about.
This place. What happened here. Whether we’re safe (enough) for the next sixty-some hours.
Kane.
That last makes my stomach bubble with both anticipation and dread, like I’ve stolen something I desperately want and now I’m just waiting to get caught. Waiting for the proverbial “other shoe” to descend from above and smash me into the ground.
Or, like when I applied for the transport captain job, knowing I wouldn’t get it, that I shouldn’t have it, but wanting that future—any future besides the desk-bound future Verux offered—badly enough to try.
It hurts to want things.
To keep my mind occupied and off the lingering sensation of Kane’s hands gripped tight on me, I make myself review the footage from the tablet again, even the finishedDunleavyepisodes. Looking for something, anything that stands out as a hint or foreshadowing of what’s to come.
But there’s nothing. It’s as if a switch flipped. One minuteeverything is normal—as normal as it can be on a reality show about spoiled, wealthy people on a ship full of spoiled, wealthy people; I mean, there’s an argument about vegan pâté—and the next, it’s a murderous hellscape with fancy leather couches and marble floors.
Setting the tablet carefully on the floor, I lean back in my chair and rub my eyes. I don’t understand it. I have to be missing something.
Maybe if I go over it one more time, paying more attention to the people and events in the background.
I’m reaching for the tablet when I hear the distinctclunk-clickof a door shutting down the corridor. I heard it enough times when we were going in and out of the suites earlier.
I check the time. Someone’s up early.
Kane.
The bubbling in my stomach intensifies, but I ignore it, giving my full attention to the tablet instead of my nerves that can’t seem to make up their mind about how they feel.
I end up getting sucked in, people-watching with the volume off. The server in that fancy dining room whose polite mask strains slightly at the edges when Opal sends her sparkling water back the second time. An elegant older woman in a fancy hat—it looks more like a green fabric-and-feathers sculpture—passes by their table, giving the camera a disdainful glare. A duchess of some kind, if I remember Nysus correctly. From Liechtenstein, maybe? In any case, if she looked down her nose any further, she would cut off her own air supply. Not that I blame her.
After a few minutes, though, I realize no one has come onto the bridge. Not Kane. Not anyone.
