Asher’s mouth moved against the back of his neck, like he was saying something into Levi’s vertebrae that his voice couldn’t carry.
The distant roar of the purge reached them through the sealed bulkheads — muffled, enormous, the sound of a room becoming an oven. Nine creatures shrieked in Cargo Bay Two, dying in temperatures Levi had ordered, loud enough that they could hear it.
Levi pressed his palms flat on Asher’s forearms, counting in his head for when the gravity would kick back on, still stroking Asher’s skin because he didn’t know what else to do. He had seen many different versions of Asher. Asher angry. Asher jealous. Asher delighted. Asher poorly-timed with his horniness. He had a procedure for each of them.
He had no procedure for this.
His mouth had gone dry. His own pulse was up, climbing to meet Asher’s, and somewhere underneath the tactical part of his brain that was tracking the time, a much smaller part was thinking:I don’t know what this is.
Whatever this was, it scared Levi worse than Asher’s hands ever had.
The gravity came back like a slap. The floor arrived all at once under their feet, making Levi’s knees buckle from the impact, but Asher’s arm absorbed the drop and held him upright. The lights stuttered on — amber first, then white, then amber again. The ventilation coughed and whined and resumed. The ship lurching back to life around them, every system restarting atonce, the shudder of a machine that had been dead for ninety seconds remembering how to work.
Asher relaxed slowly. Each finger released from the beam first, then his arm pulled away from Levi’s chest, reluctance visible in every joint. He straightened up, drew his sidearm, and adjusted his stance.
His hands were shaking.
“Asher?” Levi turned, lifting a hand toward Asher’s jaw, filled with a need to comfort him.
Asher turned away from him before the contact landed, lifting the walkie to his mouth. “Owen. Report.”
Levi’s hand stayed in the air a second longer than it should have.
Asher had never done that before.
“Purge complete,” Owen said. “Cargo Bay Two is sterilized. Nine confirmed kills.”
Levi let his hand drop and pressed back against the wall. The metal was still cold from the blackout, the chill seeping through his jumpsuit into his shoulder blades. His knees ached. His sternum hummed. His ribs were sore where Asher had held him too tight for too long, and when he breathed in, the air tasted like recycled metal and something burnt. Asher was three feet away with his sidearm, his shaking hands, and his back half-turned, and Levi was registering the distance like a temperature change — like the cold of the metal at his back.
He’s recalibrating. It’s a tactical pause. He’s fine.
The smaller, newer thing under the tactical thought was harder to look at. It was the part that wanted the contact to land. The part that was now noting, with a kind of clinical horror, that he wanted it for himself and not for Asher management. He wanted to comfort Asher, to feel him calm under his touch, because even if he didn’t know what the problem was, Asher was his constant. His everything, at this point.
Don’t think about it.
Nine down. Two left. Tyler gone.
“Everyone regroup at Engineering,” Levi said into the handset, his eyes burning and his throat aching as Asher began to move without looking at him.
What did I do wrong?
12
Consequences
Wekillednineofthem.
That’s what he kept telling himself on the way back to Engineering. The plan had worked, nine creatures were dead, because Levi looked at a schematic and saw the strategy game underneath.
Games don’t hand you the win at the two-thirds mark.
Asher walked beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, but not touching. Levi kept noticing the gap the same way he noticed the vibration earlier, registering as information he didn’t know what to do with yet. He was used to Asher touching him all the time, even when it was inappropriate.
Asher wasn’t touching him at all.
Please tell me what I did wrong.
They found Zoe in a corridor near Deck Four, face sideways on the ground with her eyes open. The extraction was identical to every other one he had seen: uniform peeled, skin separated, the spinal column removed. She’d been dead for a while, before the alarm, maybe.
