Page 19 of Ensnared By the Rabbit Genius
I chuckled with him, glad something had worked. “Very cool.”
“So it turns out that he’s not able to come down himself as he’s tied up repairing something.” He lowered his voice tosay, “I have no idea what he was talking about, but it sounded important.”
“I’m sure it is.” And yay for not being the only one who didn’t understand what Seiwa was talking about.
“But he is going to send a shuttle to pick you up, which tells me you’re one important dude.” He winked at me.
I laughed a little because it did feel like I was kind of important. “Thanks of your help, Andi.”
“Oh, totally! If you go outside, I’m sure you’ll see them land. Maybe down on River Road?”
I thanked him again and headed outside, figuring I couldn’t miss one of their shuttles landing nearby. The fact that I’d be traveling alone this time had me feeling twitchy, but I needed to do this for both our sakes.
CHAPTER 9
Okay, so now I knew just how much Seiwa was able to distract me while on those fucking shuttles. Three minutes is a long damn time, thank you very much! My nerves and guts felt every single second of that weightlessness before we finally touched down in the landing bay. It took me an embarrassingly long time to steady myself and walk off the shuttle. I was kind of glad that I didn’t recognize a single Norlon in the bay and that my Yook escort didn’t say a word about how sweaty I was.
If getting the information about my new assignment to Seiwa wasn’t so important, I might’ve just expired in the landing bay instead.
But I soldiered on, following my escort down corridors that became more industrial as we went. It felt like we kept going deeper into the ship, though I really had no idea if we were going up, down, or sideways. Eventually, we came to a door like the submarine hatch kind at the testing facility.
“I’m not authorized to go any further,” my escort said, “so we’ll have to wait here a moment.”
“What is this place?” I asked with a heaping dose of trepidation because if this fucking door opened into space, I was not going.
“It’s very near the engines.” She gave me an embarrassed smile and shrugged one shoulder. “I think they might do manual work on the engines themselves from in here.”
Okay, so, keeping that sort of thing locked behind a big vault door made sense. Now I was curious to find out what Seiwa was doing in there that he couldn’t stop doing to come talk to me. Like not even for a phone call? That sounded critical, like there might be wailing sirens and flashing red lights behind this door, people scrambling to save the ship.
“Um, everything’s fine on the ship, right? We’re not crashing or anything like that?”
The Yook’s yellow eyes widened. “No. Why?”
“Oh, no reason.”
The handle on the door spun before it started opening toward us, forcing us to back up. A white-furred Yook with smudges of black that might’ve been grease glared at us with squinted blue eyes. He snapped something in Norlish, so I looked to my escort.
They spoke briefly, and I thought the most telling part of their conversation was when the white Yook rolled his eyes before pushing the door open further. I suddenly had a feeling that Seiwa wasn’t as busy as all this made it seem.
“Thanks for your help,” I said to my escort.
“You’re welcome. If you need another escort to get back to the landing bay, just have someone reach out to guest services again.”
I wasn’t sure what would happen next, but it was cool to know they had guest services on the ship.
“Commander,” the other Yook called, “your guest is here!”
“Aye fuh-tier-uh!” Seiwa hollered from somewhere ahead of us as I stepped into the dimly lit room.
I’d heard him say that before but hadn’t remembered to ask what it meant. The words had to mean something significant, because they wiped all the humor from the Yook’s face and had him taking a step back from me. Was Seiwa telling people I was with the FBI? Armed and dangerous? I really wasn’t, and if he was going to joke with people, he should let me in on it.
The Yook smiled at me—which seemed weird now since he’d been so grouchy before—and gestured for me to go ahead of him while he resealed the door. Or actually, he was gesturing to where Seiwa was because that was his bunny butt wiggling around as he backed himself out from underneath a large control panel sort of thing that was the height and width of a kitchen counter. I could see that the flat top of it was covered with all kinds of buttons or apps or something like that, and all of them were pulsing at distracting intervals that made me think there was definitely something wrong with the whole panel.
When Seiwa was standing in front of me, I couldn’t help smiling because he had a little smudge of black beside his nose and his ears looked dusty. As impressive as he always was, seeing him looking like he’d been working was strangely cute. I wanted to clean him up and get him dirty at the same time.
He smirked at me. “Why don’t you all go take a break?” he said rather loudly.
I glared at him since that wasn’t the reason for my visit and his team didn’t need to think that it was. “We need to talk privately for a few minutes,” I added just as loudly and with a big smile.
