Author: Rachel Bach

“Don’t,” I said. “I mean, don’t leave on my account. I’m just passing through.”

The movement stilled, and then I heard the couch creak as the cook sat back down. I let out the breath I’d been holding and started for the cargo bay stairs, eager to get out of this awkward situation. But after the first step, my feet stopped.

I couldn’t begin to explain why. The cook was the last man in the universe I wanted to spend time with. Not only was I apparently allergic to his face, my brain had picked him out of everyone to be my dream executioner back in the bunker. That had to mean something, but I just couldn’t make myself leave. The image of the nearly empty whiskey bottle was stuck in my head like a hook, and I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the cook drinking alone was wrong. Very wrong. And I needed to do something about it.

“Need” was too light a word, actually. This was more like a compulsion. Maybe it was just another sign that I was going nuts, but whatever the reason, I was too tired to fight it.

Feeling like a complete moron, I turned and walked into the kitchen to grab a tumbler off the rack. Glass in hand, I crossed the lounge again and sat down on the couch beside the cook. When I was settled, I leaned over and snatched the bottle off the table.

“What are you doing?”

His voice was a whisper, but the words were remarkably crisp for a man who’d consumed most of a fifth of whiskey.

“Taking a shot for you,” I answered, emptying the last of the liquor into my cup. “King’s health.”

I tossed the drink back before he could reply. It was a pretty big slug, even for me. There’d been enough whiskey left in the bottle to fill my glass almost to the brim, and it took me four swallows to get the whole thing down. The whiskey burned my throat as it went, and by the time I’d drunk the glass dry, I could feel the fire all the way to my toes.

I lowered my empty glass with a deep breath, blinking against the sudden spinning feeling that always followed a serious shot. I was still recovering when I heard the cook’s sigh very close, and then his hand reached out to take the empty glass from me. “What was that about?”

The sound of his accented voice speaking softly in the dark sent my whole body rigid. “Solidarity,” I choked out at last. “Now you’re not drinking alone.”

His hand stilled on the rim of the glass. I held my breath, terrified he was about to try and make me explain something I didn’t understand myself. How did you explain to a man whose name you couldn’t even keep in your head that the idea of him drinking alone was so awful you felt morally compelled to butt in? Fortunately, I didn’t have to, because the cook didn’t say anything else. He just sat there with his hand resting on the edge of my empty tumbler. And then, slowly, his fingers slid down the glass to touch mine.

It was such a small thing. His fingertips couldn’t have been brushing more than a square inch of my skin, but we might have been tangled naked considering the effect it had on me. All at once, my heart was pounding, putting my whole body right back on edge, but not for a fight this time. What his touch brought was lust, pure and strong and completely inexplicable. How I could want a man I couldn’t even look at without feeling sick I had no idea, but my body didn’t care about the details. All it cared about was touching more of him.

The full cup of whiskey must have been hitting my brain right then, because I flipped my hand over to grab his without a thought, dropping the glass in the process. He caught it instantly, snatching the glass out of the air with his free hand. It was the most amazing catch I’d ever seen. Any other time I’d have made him do it again. Now, though, I barely noticed. My entire focus was locked on the place where our skin touched.

Maybe it was the drink, but his fingers were noticeably warmer than mine. His whole body was. I could actually feel the heat of him radiating across the few inches that separated us, and I desperately wanted to get closer, to wrap myself around that warmth. But I wasn’t that far gone just yet, so I settled for pulling his hand toward me so I could study his fingers, the only part of his body it seemed I could look at directly without feeling nauseous.

The cook took a sharp breath as I pulled him closer, but he didn’t resist, just let me move him as I liked until his hand was sitting in my lap. It was a pretty tame touch, but by the time I’d gotten him where I wanted him, my own breaths had shrunk to pants. I kept expecting the cook to ask me what I was doing, which would have been a good question, because I didn’t know myself. My body was moving on autopilot, touching his with a familiarity I couldn’t begin to explain. But though I was acting like a total freak show, taking his booze uninvited and grabbing his hand like it was my property, the cook wasn’t trying to escape. He was actually leaning closer, his body inching toward mine until I felt his forehead land on my shoulder.

I went completely still. My nightshirt was thin enough that I could feel the heat of the cook’s skin where he rested against me and the soft pressure of his breath as he inhaled deeply, like he was trying to breathe me in. At the same time, the hand I was holding tightened on mine, his long, elegant fingers closing over my palm and gripping until I could have sworn I felt him begin to shake. Drunks are usually relaxed, but the cook was so close now I could feel the tension in his body, almost like he was straining against something even as he leaned a little farther into me.

By this point, I he was vaguely aware that I should be furious over such a massive invasion of my personal space. But I’d grabbed him first, and anyway, his weight felt good against me. Right, like it should always be there. The strange madness that had made me touch him was only fanned hotter by his nearness, and with his head right next to mine, I couldn’t help thinking how easy it would be to turn and press a kiss against his hair. It would feel lovely, I bet, soft as silk and warm against my lips.

I’d already started to move when I caught myself. I jerked to a stop and closed my eyes with a silent curse. Drunk or no, this was getting out of hand. I needed to leave, now, before I did something really stupid, but the insane part of me wasn’t ready to let go yet.

Since I couldn’t make peace between the half of me that wanted to flee and the half that wanted to climb on top of the cook and put the lounge couch to the test, I settled for touching his hand, running my finger down his palm to the thin black tattoo that peeked out from under the edge of his shirt’s old-fashioned button cuff. That surprised me, actually. The cook didn’t seem like the tattoo type. But when I started nudging his sleeve up to see the black mark in full, a sentence appeared in my mind.

“This life for Tanya,” I read, tilting my head to get a better look at the black markings. They were no language I’d ever seen, but that didn’t seem to matter. I knew what they said. I was trying to figure out how that could be when I realized the cook had gone stone still.

Quick as he’d caught the glass, the cook stood up, pulling away from me so deftly I didn’t even feel him moving until he was gone. I jerked up in surprise to see him stepping over the short coffee table, pulling down his sleeve as he went. The revulsion struck as soon as I looked, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away as he deposited my glass in the kitchen and walked to the hall door. He paused when he reached it, but he didn’t look back. Just lowered his head.

“I am sorry to have bothered you, Miss Morris,” he said, his voice polite and distant. “Have a good evening.”

Before I could answer, he was gone, leaving me alone in the dark. I stared at the closed lounge door for almost a minute before I stood and followed.

It was hard going. The whiskey had me now, and I stumbled into the hall, using the wall to keep me up as I trudged back to my bunk. The glowing bug was right where I’d left it, but I didn’t spare it another glance as I fell face-first into bed.

There were no nightmares this time. No black monster, no deaths. Instead, I dreamed I was lying on a narrow bunk in a small room while the cook made love to me with a thoroughness that took my breath away. And when I woke up flushed and panting to the hyperspace exit alarm, I was hard-pressed to say which dream was worse.

CHAPTER 4

You do not look well,” Rashid said when I walked into the lounge thirty minutes later. “Did you not sleep?”

“I slept great.”

It was embarrassing to lie about something so petty, but I’d spent my whole shower putting what had happened last night out of my head, and I wasn’t about to even brush that topic now. Rashid was still looking at me funny, though, so I hid behind my helmet, sliding it on so quickly the neuronet connectors snagged in my freshly braided hair. “Where are we?”

I’d meant the question for Rashid, but my com was on, and it was Basil who answered. “It’s”—the aeon made a deep whistling sound that vibrated my speakers—“but since your throat can’t handle that, most humans use the rough translation ‘Ample.’”

It was a fitting name. The planet we were orbiting was huge and green, its sprawling landmasses covered in a grid of verdant fields so large their boundaries were visible from space. “Lot of traffic for a farming planet,” I said, eying the dense swarm of ships around us and the even larger clump waiting to use the jump gate floating in orbit around Ample’s moon.

“There’s always traffic in the Sevalis,” Caldswell said, his dry voice buzzing over my com. “This is actually light. You should see the pileups around the Seval itself.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Aren’t we already in the Seval?”

“We’re in the Sevalis,” Basil snapped. “The Seval is the name of the aeon home planet. Honestly, don’t they teach you anything besides how to kill each other in Paradoxian schools?”

I probably had learned about the Seval at some point, but that was a long time ago, and anyway, I wasn’t about to pass up an opening like that. “Oh sure,” I said. “We also studied poultry butchering. I can demonstrate it for you sometime if you like.”

I could almost hear Basil’s feathers poofing up at that, but before the bird could retaliate, Caldswell cut him off. “Prepare for landing. We’re on a schedule, people.”

Despite being a farming planet, Ample had several cities. Huge ones, actually, with blocks of high-rises so big and tall they looked like mountains. Unlike Wuxia, though, or any other heavily populated planet I’d ever seen, including Paradox, there was no urban sprawl. The huge, vertical cities just ended, skyscrapers giving way to lush fields with nothing but a road between them. We landed in an empty field a few miles away from one such transition, but even though we were close enough to walk into town if we wanted, there was nothing around us. Just the dusty landing field sitting like a brown island in a vast green sea of farmland.

After the traffic we’d seen coming in, the emptiness was jarring. I didn’t spot so much as a single aeon out in the fields. In fact, from the line of combine harvesters I could see moving on the horizon, it looked like everything here was automated, which was a letdown. Being so far from the Sevalis, Paradox had almost nothing to do with the aeons. Consequently, I’d never been on an aeon world before. Colonies were all well and good, but this was my first time on an honest to god alien planet. I’d run down to open the cargo door like a kid on King’s Day the moment Basil cut the thrusters, so you can imagine my disappointment when, instead of a mysterious world full of gloriously colored alien birds, I got automated farm equipment and a bunch of plants.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, putting my hands on my hips.

“In the cities,” said a cheerful voice behind me. “Aeons can’t relax unless they’re packed in like fish in a can.”

I glanced at my rear camera to see Mabel coming out of the engine room with her cat in her arms. The captain’s sister-in-law had traded her mechanic’s coveralls for a colorful shirt, shorts, and a huge straw hat. She looked like a tourist, and because I’m the helpful sort, I told her so.