Page 14 of The Naga Inventor's Clever Mate

“Where is Reid?” I asked when I realized the human male wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Of everyone here, Reid and I had grown closest over the past few months. I deeply respected the human and his ability to keep up with the Naga warriors despite his smaller size and lack of a tail. Reid had a dry wit and a keen eye, and unlike my brethren, he understood when I talked about the relics of our ancestors.

“Over here,” Iave said gruffly, his deep voice taking on a worried note that only someone who knew him well would notice. I shot my friend a look and frowned when I realized he had lowered his brow in a deep furrow. He gestured with a hand at a pile of furs and blankets against the far wall, close to where the metal gate had lowered that prevented the water from escaping.

“I’ll have warriors secure the door and the tunnel beyond. We’ll be ready to move as soon as he’s done,” Krashe said, easily slipping into the leadership role he was so accustomed to. The red Naga slithered away, and I followed my friend to the furs. I noticed Reid’s pale face first, sticking out from beneath a lavender fur and covered with a fine sheen of sweat.

“What happened to him?” I asked. They had access to water, and I’d already been assured that they weren’t out of food yet, so it couldn’t be anything like starvation or dehydration. He looked sick. I slipped out my handheld healing device and crouched next to him to appraise the situation. He was out cold, his eyes moving rapidly behind his eyelids, his breathing a bit too rapid to be normal.

“On the third day we were trapped, a gas was blown into the cave,” Iave explained. “Kalani feared it was some kind of poison, but only Reid got sick. Nobody else did. We’ve all been in exceptional health, aside from being trapped.” I cast a worried glance around the hydro plant, which was dormant on account of the water not moving inside the channel. Min-Ji was mingling with everyone. What if she got sick too? I had to find out what this was as soon as possible.

Chapter 11

Min-Ji

“Are you okay?” I demanded to know. Kalani was the picture of health, but I had to ask because she had been trapped for close to a week, with nearly twenty testosterone-fueled guys for company. I could only imagine how many fights she had to break up and how badly she craved a nice hot shower and some privacy with her mate. I could handle a lot, but I was pretty sure that I’d go crazy if I had to spend that much time with the aspirants, the hunters, or any of the single warriors.

“Min-Ji! I am so happy to see you!” The beautiful woman threw her arms around my neck and hugged me tight, a grin splitting her face, eyes twinkling. “I tried blowing open the door, but I think that caused the rock to collapse.” She pointed at the tunnel and then tapped the strange rifle she had slung over a shoulder. She had found that weapon in another underground cave system, and it was a powerful laser weapon. However, like my pistol, the charge was running low.

“Those super creepy spider robots welded the door shut. It wouldn’t budge without a bit more power.” I glanced at Corin, who was always easy to spot because his scales were such a pale blue compared to his brethren. Luckily, my mate had a whole lot of firepower at his disposal. Who knew that his favorite hobby, blowing things up, could come in so handy? Then my thoughts turned gloomy when I realized I couldn’t think of him as my mate. He’d made it clear unless something major changed, we couldn’t be together.

“Hey, hey! Are you okay? Where’d you go, honey?” Ah, I’d missed the way Kalani always took care of everyone and how observant she was. She was a lot like Corin in that way, but more like the stern, motherly type. Vera’s second in command when it came to running the human side of things at Haven. I had missed her. I threw my arm around her neck and hugged her again with a sigh.

“Nothing we need to worry about right now,” I said. “Come on, let’s get everyone sorted so we can get out of here. We need to get back home. Everyone’s been so worried! And Farah and Zeidon are fine. They managed to find their own way out of this place. Safely.” Well, it had been an adventure fraught with peril, but they’d made it, and that was all that mattered.

The only shadow to the festive mood that filled the ranks was the sight of Reid being carried out on a stretcher improvised from spears and furs. Kalani explained to me in a low voice about the gas that had been pumped into the room at one point. He was the only one who had gotten sick, and she wasn’t quite sure how that could be. Like Kalani and me, Reid had all the same inoculations and immune system boosters. He’d served in the UAR just like we had, though both he and Kalani had been court-martialed and fake-executed like the rest of the humans here.

Krashe and the anxious Water Weaver male were in the lead, holding Corin’s lavender map between them. It appeared they were going to try to locate the strange lab with the doorway into Haven, the one that Farah and Zeidon had been held. It was the fastest way back home, and they’d need to unseal the door from this side if we wanted to have full control of everything down here. I shivered, thinking about the creepy, crawling bots and the Revenant beasts that prowled the tunnels. I hoped they’d clear them all out, or that Corin could somehow get them under his control.

“Ekkire is the best pathfinder we’ve got with us,” Kalani said with certainty as she pointed at the green scales of the Water Weaver male. I vaguely recalled that those green males liked to roam far and wide and that they had an uncanny sense of direction. “But it will still be a while. Plenty of time for you to tell me everything.”

I opened my mouth to tell her that she’d have to wait until we were alone, but I was interrupted when Corin sidled up to us. He’d been with Reid and the stretcher as we traveled, but I’d watched him approach each male over the past few minutes and wave his hand device around. “Quick health check, Kalani,” he said, pretending that I wasn’t there.

Triff beeped from inside my arms, and I ducked to put him down, annoyed when the bot followed Corin to the next person ahead of us after a quick "you’re fine." “So, whatever that gas was, it didn’t even linger in your system. Do you know why Reid got sick?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at the stretcher and the man’s pale, sweaty face. He looked like he was in pain, a grimace contorting his features.

“Have you heard of the Shadow Unit?” Kalani asked. I rolled a shoulder to invite her to keep talking. I’d heard the name. It was something whispered about in the ranks, but not really something confirmed to truly exist. “Gene experimentation, nanobots, cybernetic enhancements… I think Reid must have been part of that unit. You’ve noticed that he’s just as strong as a Naga, right? It’s the only explanation for how he can keep up with them.”

I tilted my head and looked again, but he didn’t seem as impressive as the mysterious, fabled Shadow Unit soldiers. He looked pale and sick; he was in pain, and honestly, he looked like he was dying. It wasn’t good. Then I recalled watching Reid and Corin spar, one of my favorite things to do, and realized that Kalani was right. Reid had uncanny reflexes, and he shouldn’t be strong enough to be a match for any of the Naga. They were just too big for that to make sense.

“Now, enough distractions. Tell me, Min-Ji. I know something’s up with you because you’re normally far more cheerful than this.” Kalani’s stare was piercing, and I squirmed as I walked. I wasn’t getting out of this conversation, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to tell her about Corin and his obsession with staying away to keep me safe. I was tempted to think of that safety in quotation marks. Was I really safe, or was that just an illusion in his head? Maybe he worried for no good reason.

I found myself spilling another big worry instead, the words rushing out easily once I’d opened that particular floodgate. “You know I was the pilot that flew the shuttle here, don’t you? I was the one that got us crashed.” And no matter how you looked at it, not all of us had survived. Farah had nearly died at the bottom of a lake. Other pods had fallen out of the breaking ship and been lost. It was a miracle that Charlie had survived that kind of landing. We knew at least one human had died because Naomi had reported seeing a human head-on carried by a Bitter Storm Naga.

Kalani flapped a hand at me. “Pfff, that old news? I know how the UAR works, Min-Ji. I was part of it.” That was… anticlimactic, to say the least. I stared at her face to see if she was saying something other than what she was thinking, but her long-lashed brown eyes were dead serious. Then she smiled, and that tilt to her mouth made my stomach swoop with the first hints of relief. She meant it.

“I didn’t know,” I said fervently. “I swear to you, Kalani. I didn’t know what the Praetor was transporting until I was ordered to fly that shuttle. Our sensor readings went haywire near Serant, and then…” I flashed back to the shuttle and those moments when I made the choice to shoot my superior officer. Jackson had deserved everything he got, but I had still played a part in killing him. I was no killer. I was just a transport pilot.

“Min-Ji,” Kalani said, and she picked up my hand to squeeze it tightly. It made me jerk my eyes back to her face. I hadn’t even been aware that I’d looked down at my feet. “The UAR compartmentalizes everything; it’s how they stay in power. I understand. You got some hostility when we first got here, but that wasn’t fair to you. We were all just reacting to an awful situation. Some of us”—she glared at poor, unconscious Reid—“needed someone to blame for a bit.”

Reid had definitely been the most vocal about distrusting me, but he’d been friendly and welcoming after we’d settled into Haven. He’d never brought up my role as the pilot to Zathar and Vera, and they had never accused me of anything. Still, I felt like at any moment someone could remember and decide to banish me.

“I shot him, you know,” I rushed to say, though my attempt to stop Jackson didn’t really feel like enough. I’d known for a while, before the crash, what we were transporting, and I had still kept on flying. I hadn’t known what to do to fix it. “I shot my navigator because he was going to steal one of the pods to better his odds of surviving the crash.” I still remembered what it had smelled like after I shot him, the taste of it on my tongue, and it made nausea rise in my stomach.

Kalani smirked. “Good. See, you have nothing to worry about. You’re a good person. You tried to get Cosima out of her shell, you’re always there for me, and I know you’re always willing to be Naomi’s test person for new foods. You’re one of us.”

It had been a thought when I’d joined Corin on this rescue mission that freeing Kalani and the others would help me fit in. But I hadn’t been necessary; I could see that now. Kalani never held my role in the crash against me, and those words were a balm to my soul. It didn’t soothe the ache that Corin had caused, but it eased the other jagged pieces inside me.

When I looked away, my eyes collided with a pair of mercury ones. My belly clenched with a surge of something else, something closer to desire. Yearning, maybe. That look told me he’d heard everything, that he’d paid attention to every word I’d said. The small nod he gave me felt as rewarding as Kalani’s “You’re one of us.”

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