He carries Lucas around this apartment and talks to him constantly in Xylan and human both. He learned the entire human feeding schedule in about four days. He has opinions about Lucas’s sleep patterns that he expresses with the same flat certainty he’d use on a fracture in the east wall.
So here is my situation.
I live with a male who behaves in every conceivable way like my mate. He guards me, feeds me, sleeps beside me, and is raising a child who isn’t his as though the question doesn’t arise. He looks at me with his whole heart in his face every single day.
And by the only measure his species recognizes, I’m nothing to him. We’re not compatible.
It is the most bizarre situation any woman has ever been in.
Although, none of this has been normal. I came here to fix a power grid and instead I found a murder, lost a brother, had a baby on an alien mining planet, and fell in love with a seven-foot male who has never touched me.
Why would the ending be normal?
The alert comesat eleven-forty in the morning, four diurnals later.
I’m at the table with Lucas asleep against my shoulder and the level four hundred monitors up on three screens, because that’s how I’ve spent every waking hour for six weeks, watching a section of dead grid for somebody to come and touch it.
And somebody touches it.
I go absolutely still.
It’s small. It’sexactlyas small as it should be, because a competent being wouldn’t announce themselves — a diagnostic ping against the junction I built, gentle as a hand on a doorknob, checking whether the fault is real before committing to anything.
Then a second one. Then a request for the load history on that section.
“Cayzor,” I shout. “They’re reading my work.”
“Got it.”
Cayzor’s on the comm to Chief before I’ve finished describing what I’m seeing, and Chief’s on to Grytel, and Grytel, who has had a security detail on standby rotation for six weeks and hasnever once complained, has Minecorp security moving toward the lift bank inside four minutes.
And Leah is at my door in ninety seconds. She comes straight in, already reaching, and takes Lucas off my shoulder in that smooth practiced way she has, and my son doesn’t even wake up. “Go and catch him.”
The lift downto four hundred takes six minutes and I spend all of them being terrified.
Not of the operative. Of everything else, whether a false load path looks real enough to a stranger.
Cayzor stands beside me in the cage and doesn’t say a word.
Then, about four levels out, he says, “You built it well.”
“You don’t know that.”
“They’re reading it for eleven minutes now. A being who thought it was false would have stopped in two.”
Which is exactly the reassurance I needed.
The doors open. I don’t see it happen properly, because I’m behind Cayzor and Cayzor is approximately the size of a door, but I hear it — Minecorp security coming up the tunnel from the lift side, and then the Fever Brothers comingdownfrom the old shaft above, which nobody told me they could do and which I will be asking about later.
There are three of them at the junction.
Two are muscle, big, professional, armed, and they read the room in about one second and put their hands where everyone can see them, because they are outnumbered eleven to three by miners in a mine and they know exactly how that ends.
And the third one doesn’t move at all.
He’s old.
That’s the first thing. He’s old, and he’s Royal Pigment — I can see it from thirty paces, that particular polished quality, thedark as night pigment and fancy clothes. I’ve seen so many like him on Chronos. He has a tablet in one hand and he does not put it down.
