Page 38 of Full Speed to a Crash Landing

I meet his eyes, and for once, I don’t think about the tiny gears working behind them. I let myself drown in their clear, bright hazel.

“What are you thinking about?” Rian asks, his brow furrowing, disrupting my view.

“Just wondering how secure the freezer unit is, and if I can break into it with the tools I have, and if—no,when, I do, whether or not Magnusson will evac me through the hatch after I eat all the portions of ice cream.”

“Very secure, probably you can, and absolutely he will,” Rian says smoothly, standing. “Come with me.”

“No.” I settle my butt in the hard seat. “You promised me more food.”

“Come with me,” he repeats, a smile cracking his impatient look. “I have something better than what’s in the dispenser.”

I stand, and Rian leads me toward the corridor with the bunks. “Please don’t take this as an insult,” I say, “but if you intend to show me your bedroom and expect me to want...” I gesture at his body. “. . . more than ice cream, you are mistaken.”

“You said I was sexy,” Rian states flatly.

“Ice cream is sexier.”

Rian presses a button, and a door zips open, revealing a standard-issue bunk room similar to the one I was given. Larger, though. Two windows.

I step inside, Rian following. “I don’t have ice cream.”

I turn on my heel, heading out the door. Rian grabs my arm and tugs me back inside, laughing. “But I have something better.”

“Statistically impossible,” I say, pulling my elbow free and crossing my arms over my chest. “But I’m willing to test your theory.”

Rian goes over to a storage drawer. I look around his room. The bed’s unmade. I don’t know why I find that charming, but I do. Rian’s so orderly, every thought lined up inside his head like one of those old-style libraries, neat little categorized volumes of knowledge in a row. But his cover’s tossed to one side, a thin blanket twisted up, his pillow dented from where his head lay.

“Here.” Rian puts something soft and round and fuzzy in my hand.

I can smell it faintly. There’s an earthy scent to it as well as a sweetness. I turn it over in my palm. It’s not uniformly round; there’s a thin line from where a stem had been all the way to the barest hint of a point at the bottom.

“It’s a peach,” he says.

“No, it’s not. Peaches are slick.” I rub my fingers over the light grayish fuzz of this fruit. I think if I pressed hard, I’d break the skin. Part of me wants to.

“And orange in color?” Rian asks.

I nod.

“That’s a canned peach,” he says. “This is a fresh one.”

The tip of my pinky touches the hard spot at the indented top. I’ve seen pictures of fruit growing on trees; I know this is where the stem connected it to the branch, and the branch connected to a tree, and the tree grew roots into the soil. I’ve seen hardwoods and pines and spruces when I lived in America; I’ve seen citrus and olive and cypress in Malta.

I’ve never seen a peach tree. I’ve never seen a peach.

Not like this. Fresh.

Real.

“Do I just...” I lift the fruit to my mouth.

“Let me peel it first.” Rian plucks it from my fingers and turns to the little table between his two windows.

I was absolutely going to quip something smartass at him, but then I see the flash of a silver blade in his hand. With skill born from practice, Rian glides the knife between the fuzzy skin and the smooth, pinkish-red flesh of the peach, the bright inside a startling contrast against the dull outer layer.

“Peaches are orange,” I insist despite the evidence to the contrary, but I’m more than half-distracted by the way the fruit juices slick his fingers.

He cuts a slice and passes it to me. The shape is now familiar to me, but there are hard filaments on the inner edge where the stone had been. And the color...I twist the slice around, inspecting it.

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