Page 27 of Crash Landed with My Weredragon

Marina didn't trust her voice. The cavern was quiet. The lake reflected their shapes in the dark water. They were two silhouettes, close but not touching.

"I haven't been enough for anyone in a long time," she said finally. "I've been useful, competent and necessary. Those aren't the same thing."

"No. They're not."

"You see the difference."

"I see you, Marina. The whole thing. Not the scientist, not the diplomat, not the woman who organizes rescue operations while covered in dust. You. The person who can't sleep because she cares too much, who steals mineral samples without realizing it, who argues with alien researchers at three in the morning because the data matters. I see all of it, and it's enough. It was always going to be enough."

She wanted to kiss him. She could feel the wanting like a physical weight, pressing against the careful professional distance she'd maintained since the day they met. But the distance was there for a reason, and the reason was forty-seven people on a broken ship who needed her to be thinking clearly.

She did, however, lean into him. just slightly. Just enough that her shoulder pressed against his arm, and his scales were warm through her jacket, and the contact said everything a kiss would have said without crossing the line she wasn't ready to cross.

Toren didn't move away. He pressed back, just as slightly. Just as carefully.

They sat like that for a long time, in the dark, by the underground lake, not kissing, not talking, just being close to someone in a universe that seemed determined to keep everyone apart.

It was enough. For now, it was enough.

CHAPTER 10

*** TOREN ***

The earthquake hit on day nineteen of the assessment.

Toren was in the research caverns with Marina and Melessra when the first tremor came. A low, grinding vibration that rattled the volcanic glass instruments and sent hairline cracks racing across the cavern ceiling. Minor tremors were normal in the Colony. The geothermal systems produced seismic activity the way a heartbeat produced vibration. Background noise. Nothing to worry about.

This one didn't stop.

The second tremor hit eight seconds later, harder, and the bioluminescent organisms on the walls flickered like candles in a storm. Data tablets slid off workstations. A rack of crystallographic instruments toppled with a crash that made Melessra curse in Dobromian with a word Toren had never heard from her before and that suggested considerable stress.

"That's not a standard tremor," Melessra said, already running toward her monitoring station. Her green scales had gone pale at the edges which was the stress response that Toren recognized from a lifetime of crises. "The epicenter is shallow, directly beneath the Colony's eastern quadrant."

"What's in the eastern quadrant?" Marina asked, steadying herself against a workstation as the floor shuddered beneath them.

"Storage levels, secondary water systems, and; Melessra's voice tightened, "the guest wing."

The third tremor knocked Marina off her feet.

Toren caught her. His arms went around her waist before his brain registered the decision, pulling her against his chest as the floor lurched. Chunks of ceiling stone crashed onto the workstation she'd been sitting at three seconds earlier. Dust billowed through the cavern in choking clouds. The bioluminescent light stuttered, went dark, came back at half intensity.

Marina gripped his shoulders, her face inches from his, dust in her red hair and her green eyes sharp with fear she was already converting into action. "I'm fine," she said. "Put me down. We need to move."

"Agreed."

They ran. The corridor between the research caverns and the main Colony was two hundred yards of carved stone that shook and groaned around them like a living thing in pain. Bioluminescent panels went dark in sections, leaving stretches of blackness they sprinted through by memory. Behind them, something massive crashed. An entire section of ceiling coming down in the cavern they'd just left. If they'd been thirty seconds slower, they'd have been under it.

Melessra ran beside them, her data tablet clutched to her chest, her green scales flashing in the intermittent light. She was reading seismic data while running, which was either extraordinary multitasking or terrible self-preservation instincts. Toren suspected both.

They reached the main junction and found chaos. Weredragons crowding the corridors, shouting instructions, carrying children. Warriors in partial shift directing traffic with wings spread as barriers. The emergency lighting cast everything in a dim amber glow that made the dust clouds look like fog. A mother was pressed against the wall, clutching two dragonlings who were crying making high, sharp sounds that cut through the rumble of aftershocks. An elderly Weredragon with faded scales sat on the floor, looking dazed, blood on his forehead from a falling stone.

"Where's Athena?" Marina pulled out her communication device. Static. She tried again. More static. "The comm system is down."

"The relay nodes are in the ceiling infrastructure," Toren explained. "If corridors collapsed, the nodes went with them."

"Then we go in person." Marina was already moving toward the guest wing corridor. "My people are in there, Toren."

Melessra grabbed her arm. "The seismic data; the fault line runs directly beneath the guest wing. The structural integrity of that section is compromised. Going in there right now is …"