1
Resetting Romance Options
Themaintenanceshaftsmelledlike recycled air and hot metal, and every time Levi exhaled, the sound of it came back at him off the walls.
He moved on his forearms, knees dragging against ridged flooring, shoulders brushing both sides of the shaft at once. The emergency strips bathed everything in amber. Thirty feet ahead, maybe, was the next junction, and behind him, close enough that Levi could hear every controlled breath…
Asher.
Always Asher.
He’d been behind Levi since they changed places at the last junction, after Asher nearly got his shoulders stuck in a section that was maybe two feet across, and remained close enough that his knee had caught Levi’s heel twice. Both times, his fingers wrapped around Levi’s ankle before Levi could process the contact. Not to help. It was like he was letting Levi know it was just him, still with him.
It was comforting in a way. A deeply fucked up way, but comforting nonetheless.
He kept moving and tried not to think about what he’d done in the pod bay. Not the killing — he’d never stop flinching at the killing, but it had become expected somewhere around the sanitarium. The part that sat wrong was quieter than that: Asher had looked at him afterward, five bodies on the polished floor, and the expression on his face wasn’t satisfied or angry. It was helpful, like he’d held a door open. Like he’d done something considerate and was waiting for Levi to notice.
And Levi had looked at the bodies and saidlet Jasper goand that was it. That was his whole response to the murder of five people.
Don’t think about what that makes you.
Something buzzed in his chest — low, not quite a sound, more like a vibration that had gotten lost on its way somewhere else. He was about to chalk it up to two hours of crawling on his forearms when the creature behind them shrieked, and the sound warped through the shaft’s acoustics into something almost musical. Levi’s forearms tightened and he pushed faster, and Asher’s hand found his ankle again — one brief, firm squeeze — and released.
I know. I’m moving.
The junction appeared: three shafts converging in a small hub, barely large enough to turn around in. Levi pulled himself into it, pressed his back against the curved wall, and breathed.
Left. Straight. Right.
He had no idea which one to choose. Two hours on this ship, and his mental map was a single corridor, the pod bay, and this shaft. There’d been a schematic on the wall of the crew quarters he’d seen for maybe four seconds before the alarms started, and he remembered enough to know they were in the lower decks,somewhere near engineering, which told him nothing about where they should be going.
In the sanitarium, we at least had time to learn the building before it tried to kill us.
Asher pulled himself into the hub a second later. He filled most of the cramped space, and he shifted Levi to one side with a palm flat against his sternum, looking at the three options with the same expression he’d probably use to pick a restaurant.
“There.” He pointed right, already moving.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.” He glanced back at Levi, and even in the amber light, there was something in his expression that wasn’t quite a smile; it was warmer than that, something that showed up sometimes when he looked at Levi and seemed to catch even Asher off guard. “Come on.”
Levi followed.
The right shaft sloped down and then opened without warning into a proper corridor. The ventilation cover was already hanging open, and Levi hopped down onto a real floor, white LED strips overhead, brushed metal paneling, room to stand. He braced his palms on his knees and let his spine remember what straight felt like.
Okay. Ceiling. Light. Air that doesn’t taste like my own lungs. I can work with this.
Asher dropped down behind him and sealed the panel before Levi finished his first full breath. Then he turned Levi around and did what he always did, and Levi made himself hold still for it.
Asher’s gaze moved over him and his fingers came up without preamble to brush the torn elbow of Levi’s jumpsuit, checking the scrape beneath. Then his hands moved to Levi’s collar, thumbing the edge of the fabric back just enough to look at the bite mark, making sure that was still there too.
“You’re favoring your left knee,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
“I didn’t ask.” His thumb stayed at Levi’s collar for a moment longer than necessary, and then he let go. Satisfied. Or satisfied enough…with Asher, it was hard to tell the difference.
The corridor stretched in both directions. To the left, a sealed bulkhead with a status panel blinking amber. To the right, an open passage, maybe sixty meters before it curved out of sight. Placards on the walls read C-DECK - MAINTENANCE in stenciled military lettering. A fire extinguisher sat in a wall-mounted bracket, and beside it, a laminated evacuation map behind scratched plexiglass, too far away to read from here.
