He held her gaze for a second. Something shifted between them. Old. Familiar. Dangerous. Then he cleared his throat, stepping away from their suddenly very close connection.
This was not a place he wanted to forget where he was or the crazy, chaotic strangeness all around them.
Best to pay attention and be alert at all times, until they were safely back in the ship.
“All right,” he said lightly. “So. Alien market, floating people, talking light-beings and a shared hard pass on the tentacle display. But on the bright side, the crystal flash drive has been collected. And we know where we’re going, right?”
Madelaine hesitated a second, as if only catching on that they were standing in a crowded alien market on a planet she’d only visited once before with a pressing errand to take care of, so sharing any newfound personal feelings would have to wait.
“Yes. We follow the coordinates listed on the flash drive to find the artifact we seek.”
“Is it dangerous? Are the stickery trees as friendly as the microbial dirt?”
“Not sure.”
“We’ll hope for the best. And I’m guessing we have to cross the microbial dirt to get there?”
“Yes. But that’s not a problem. We’ll grab the item from the locker and then, hopefully, the clue will give us the information we need to find the next piece of this mysterious puzzle.”
Jack nodded once.
“Good.”
He glanced around the marketplace, taking it all in—the color, the chaos, the impossible. Then he smiled.
“I want you to know that even though I’ve had to extend this bachelor auction date by an exponential amount of time, I gotta say, this is a whole lot more interesting than mowing someone’s lawn.”
Madelaine huffed out a quiet laugh.
And just like that, it felt like they were them again. The them before she left Alienn. Even if everything else in the universe had changed.
They left the marketplace as quickly as possible, stopping only at the ship long enough to ensure no one had breached the hatch. They locked everything back up and exited the ship.
Madelaine pressed her thumb into the oval on the back side of the flash drive. The other side swirled around into words.
She held up the drive to him. “What does it say?”
“Locker Delta Echo Seventeen,” he read. When she removed her thumb, the locker number disappeared in a swirl of light and unrecognizable symbols.
“Good. That’s also what I read upside down when I looked the last time. Let’s go.”
The locker field sat nearly a mile beyond their parked ship. The four-wheeler would have made their trip much speedier, but the microbial dirt wouldn’t have liked it.
They climbed a slight incline, then down the other side, losing sight of the marketplace behind them. Keirios became stranger the farther they walked. The landscape changed dramatically.
Massive stone spires rose from the living ground. Strange floating lights drifted over the path in front of them. The violet sky deepened toward evening and Jack hoped it didn’t get too dark.
They climbed another small knoll and down the other side until, finally, through what could only be described as a forest of tall stickery trees on both sides of the path.
Eventually, they reached a broad clearing. Hundreds of lockers stood in neat rows along one side of the microbial pathway, like a communal package pickup area. Some were built into stone. Others floated several feet above the ground. A few appeared to be made entirely from crystal. It was as wild and chaotic as the marketplace.
“What is this place?” Jack asked.
“It’s the Keirios Neutral Storage Grounds.”
“Okay. Glad to hear the word neutral in there.”
“You and me both.”
