Page 6 of Until the Stars Fall

He stood to his full height and turned around to face me, arms back and palms behind him in an attitude of protection over the candles. “Please don’t touch them.”

He sighed and dropped his lighter back into his pocket. The ship lurched. I yelped and tumbled into him, my hands against his chest. He grabbed my elbows and kept us both from falling into the sea of candles behind him. The motion stopped abruptly, and he let me go as I took a step back, my face stinging with a blush.

I stood to my full height, hands on my hips. He towered over me. Sizing me up? I was certainly sizing him up. He smelled like clean laundry and smoke, which I knew because I was still standing far too close to him in the cramped space.

“Beck?” Summer’s voice crackled over the intercom. “What in the actual fuck was that?”

He cleared his throat and reached sideways to press a button on the nearby steel column. “We’re good now,” he rumbled in his deep voice. “Just an accident.” He let go of the button with a purposeful flourish, a bracelet on a black cord glinting in the candle and halo lights.

Summer came right back. “Don’t let it happen again! Loki was on my lap, and he scratched the shit out of me.”

“Is there a cat on the bridge?” I balked. Images of my childhood cat, Bella, ran through my mind, sprawling across my tablets and making things happen with her pink toe beans.

He closed his eyes and rolled his neck in a resigned fashion, leaned back, and pressed the button again with a sigh. “Aye-aye, captain.”

He smoothed his face to a neutral expression and walked away, motioning with his head for me to follow. “You’re exactly what I expected,” he said, lobbing it over his shoulder like an insult.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I followed him, walking on the toes of my shoes across the grated floor and down a set of steps.

“Hannah warned us about your attitude toward magic.”

I turned the corner in time to see him grab a caulk gun of adhesive. He applied it in a thick, uneven circle to the bottom of a fat cluster of amethyst, which he placed within a plotted collection of crystals and candles on the spoke of a six-pointed star painted on an empty expanse of concrete floor, where the shield generator should be.

The hair on the back of my neck prickled up. “Where’s the shield generator?”

“This,” he said, grabbing a hunk of turquoise out of a box and slathering adhesive on it, “is the shield generator.” He plunked it beside another hunk of turquoise and smooshed it against the floor. Adhesive oozed out from the sides.

I had never, to my knowledge, ever fainted, not even when Noah and the officer came to the door to tell us about our parents’ hover crash. But a wave of weakness roiled through me now. I sat on the steel steps, still gripping the railing, and pressed one hand to my stomach.

“How?” I didn’t even know what to ask.

“It’s a beautiful marriage of science and magic,” he said, patting the nearest metal casing, “keeping a shield around this hunk of junk so we don’t break apart in space. It kept us safe in that room upstairs when the window blew out.”

I stared at him, taking deep breaths to try and dispel the tightness in my chest. The shield generator. This disparate collection of candles, crystals, and arcane markings.

He picked up a water bottle from the worktable behind him. “Here, this might make you feel better.” He tossed me a bottle of water.

I caught it and opened the cap, hesitated. Did he drink out of it already? Whatever. I had worse problems. I took a big swig. “I thought you were an anthropology grad student.”

He didn’t look up from his work. “I am.”

“But you’re also a— What’s a male witch? A wizard?”

He huffed what might have been a laugh, except he didn’t smile, and pulled out a little pot of blue paint and a brush. “Witches don’t have gendered terms. That’s a flawed mythology based on a late twentieth-century children’s author. I’m an eclectic witch, and I dabble in artificery.” He settled cross-legged on the floor and thickened the lines of the pentagram with the paint.

“Which of those things makes you the right person to arts and crafts a shield out of paint and crystals?”

“I’m the only one here with an advanced degree in astro-engineering, so the job became mine by default.”

“How many degrees do you have? You can’t be much older than me?” I asked breathlessly, eyeing his handiwork on the floor.

“I’m twenty-eight,” he said, his attention focused on his painting.

I looked around the engine room from my step, playing a frightening game of “what’s wrong with this picture?” Strings of lights crisscrossed above the life support system, and someone hung a crocheted, rainbow-yarn spider web around the upper half of the recycling apparatus. Round paper lanterns painted with symbols hung all around the wastewater system.

Too much. I forced my eyes back to him.

He pointed his paintbrush at me. “You look exceptionally nervous. But look, we ain’t breaking apart in space, so I must be doin’ somethin’ right.”

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