Page 37
“Just around. You don’t spend much time with the rest of the crew out of work hours.”
“I have friends. I’m closest to Daisy. I like the others, too. Cleo can be intimidating, but then she is the boss.”
“Georgia scares the pants off me,” Striker said. “One of her cold looks can freeze your heart.”
“Yeah, I’ve never figured her out. I heard something about her being caught by the Siblits and spending time in a prison camp. I asked her about it once and she bit my head off. She told me it was none of my business. I’ve kept out of her way since then.”
“So you spend all your time in the lab with that science nerd, Dallin?”
“He’s not a nerd. He’s brighter than all of us put together. And he runs rings around me when it comes to analysis. It’s like he’s got an encyclopedia of alien animals and their physiology in his head.”
Striker chuckled. “He has. Although all that knowledge doesn’t always come out in the right order. Don’t you know what happened to Dallin?”
“I didn’t know anything had happened to him. I figured he was super smart and not great with other people. He struck me as a super introvert.”
“He’s probably all of those things. We never served together. Dallin was in the Trials. He was one of the first to volunteer when they began doing the implants. He got plugged in and jacked up on all the data he needed to be the top of his game.”
“Oh! He never told me that. But they were banned after a year because of some side effects, weren’t they?”
“Madness. Psychotic tendencies. Increased suicide rates, to name a few.”
“Is that why Dallin doesn’t go on field missions that often? I wondered why he remained on board so much. He’s not dangerous, though.”
“No, I mean, you probably don’t want to get him too angry, but so long as he takes his meds and does all that deep breathing stuff, he’s fine.”
She chewed on her bottom lip. “He can get intense. I once saw him smash his fist through a wall. He thought he was alone when he did that. He apologized about a hundred times when he realized I’d seen him. He said he was having a bad day.”
“Think of him as part cyborg. It’s as if a part of his more alien traits were taken away when the information was shoved in his head. Most of the time, he’s okay. But now and again, he gets this spooky look in his eye.”
Wren shook her head. “I have nothing to worry about. Dallin’s always looking out for me. He must bring me about a dozen mugs of coffee a day. Each time he puts one down, he tells me it’s bad for me then smiles and walks off.”
“I like working with him, but just know there’s a lot more going on beneath that geeky surface than you realize.”
“Thanks for the tip. And I still don’t think he’s a geek. He’s way too buff to get that label.”
“You’ve been checking him out?”
She smiled at the jealousy in Striker’s tone. He always wanted to be the most popular Apexian in the room. “Nope. We’re just friends. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“I imagine you’ve got special friends at every jump zone.”
“That depends what you call a friend.”
She slid him a glance. Their make-out session had been front and center of her thoughts ever since it happened. She shouldn’t dwell on it. She’d been the one to shut things down, but her body betrayed her, and her memory kept flooding with enticing reminders of Striker. Even now, she could feel herself fighting the desire to inch closer to him.
“I meant women. You’re popular on the Apocalypse,” Wren said.
He grinned. “I’m popular everywhere.”
“And you must take advantage of that.”
“Is that a crime?”
She finished her coffee and set her mug down. “No, but don’t you ever want a special someone. Someone to hang out with all the time?”
“And let all the others down? It’s not my style.”
