“We could just go down there, you know. Food tastes a whole lot better when you’re actually eating it,” he said.
She dragged her head around to face him, and as her vanilla-blonde ponytail skated behind her, he caught the wild scents of azara and orange blossom.
“After you,” she dared, cocking her hip as she shifted her body towards him. Her forearm grazed his arm, and his gaze dipped to meet her static. It was the same as this morning. With every touch or brush, the air around them fizzled and stirred. Something had been awakened between them.
He considered what had changed since the last time they’d been back here in the Hideaway and onboard the Academy…
Everything, really.
“No need to rush it.” He stretched his fingers out, adjusting to the new crackling sensation between him and Kat with amazement, before wrapping them tightly around the railing once more.
They could face the restless cadets of the Canteen at a later date. The threat of the dark radiation wasn’t going away anywhere any time soon. But this new friction between them—this new dose of chemistry—they’d be addressing that soon. They were sparkflames and hotwires.
Lee traced the trepidation in the line of her brows, shoulders relaxing a bit as he grounded his boots into the floor. Just as soon as she was ready.
“Those flier things—the ones you guys got to ride onboard their ship,” Kat said brightly, and Lee couldn’t help but feel the wind chase his neck, the excitement taking root in his blood as her eyes lit up a little. Spark meet wire. “Were they actually as cool as they sounded?”
A smile slipped from his lips. He couldn’t help himself. Those eyes. That face. And the fortuity to be standing here with her again, despite it all.
As he stared out over the railing, he sat above the stacks of Segura once more, with the vents whirring off in the distance, the painted starlight glittering overhead, and the freedom and recklessness at his fingertips. An entire city at his disposal. A galaxy—more than that.
What he wouldn’t give to have that back, right about now.
“Yeah. Yeah, they were better.”
CHAPTER 3: KAT
PROBATION. THEY had been put on probation.
Kat squeezed her eyelids shut, tipping her head back to lean against the warm wall of one of the airshafts. The metal walls hummed with the generators around her.
Okay, it wasn’t technically probation. It was a temporary thing, much like theinternal reviewnonsense of past weeks. Only this time, the four of them weren’t being asked to conduct a review or run secret tests behind doors. Bylaw stipulation simply required they be kept at the Academy and off-raidtemporarily, or until all business with the General and Commanding Council surrounding their raid was sorted out. At least, that’s what she’d come to understand from the Commander’s cheerful message that Nolan had sent them the night before.
She replayed the Commander’s message once more in her mind, like an anamorphic billboard on a loop.
With this stipulation, I would like to reiterate that I, as your Commander, and a representative for the Council, do not hold you personally accountable for the events that occurred on Mission AX27-AR. We are merely taking precautions…blah blah blah.
Of course, their additional raider clearances had also been revoked in this same stroke. Although she was pretty sure thatone was permanent. The Commander had struck two birds with this stone.
It was all being written off as technicalities. Although, that’s not what it would look like on their transcripts. Or in the hallways…
She glanced down at her hyperband, the latest string in the riveting conversation between her and Lee:
Kat: Please tell me this isn’t happening.
Lee: …
She didn’t know how early she’d awoken or how long she’d been down here, letting the warm metal mold and solder the edges of her mind, until the thoughts firing torpedoes against her organs had become more of a dull ache in her gut.
A day later, and she still felt like she had as little grip on the present as before she’d gone into that debriefing.
Yes, she trusted their Commander to protect them, even if a part of her still feared they could get kicked out. She believed they’d made the right decision in submitting the truth behind Segura’s operations. If there was anyone who could stand up to the General, it would be her. Commander Blanche would do what was best. She would fight for the future of a better galaxy, and as Lee had said, she knew where to find them if they were needed. They wouldn’t exactly be going very far anytime soon.
But that didn’t stop a part of her from wondering, again, where Gaia’s crew had ended up. Or if they’d ever get a chance to finish the work they’d started with the dark rays.
And it didn’t change the fact that the General had been a real tool in there. Even if they were, as he’d said, just raider cadets.
She let her body slump back further into the metal as she stared into the polished expanse of the box around her.
