Page 53 of Collision!
Maybe those spines were a bit more menacing than his squint.
And yet her fingers tingled with the memory of touching him.She longed to soothe the prickling thorns, to reach past the threat to feel the tiny scales like satin.
He stalked toward them, boots ringing on the deck.Or just in her ears.
He paused at the end of the bar, next to the monitor he’d installed there the night he’d found her knitting alone.
“I dreamed of you,” he said in his low rasp.
Then he looked up at the resonark, and she wasn’t sure who he was talking to—her or the anomaly.
She desperately wanted to believe it was her, but…
Sometimes dreams didn’t come true.
He had a compact datpad in his hand that he connected to the resonark monitor.“Captain,” he said as a small hologram of the Kufzasin blinked on above the device.“The interface I told you about is in place.Powering connection now.”
So Suvan hadn’t come looking for her.
Instead, he glanced over at Felicity.“May I borrow your button?”He tapped a port on the side of the datpad.“Right here, please.”
Remy slid down the bar toward them, Ikaryo right behind her.“Help us out here, Chief, and pretend we aren’t all rocket scientists.What’s this machine?”
Suvan’s gaze flicked to Mariah before returning to the resonark.“A way to finally observe the anomaly’s quantum bond.”
“Huh.”Remy leaned forward to peer at the port where Felicity plugged the feelings button.“I thought you weren’t able to get good readings on it.”
Mariah winced internally, knowing Suvan’s deep aversion to fallibility would pain him more than half-healed bones.
“Now I can,” he said.“The method came to me…last night.”
Again his eyes shifted her way.Last night, meaning when he’d dreamed?Had everyone experienced some sort of vision?
Except her.
The little button had gone dark when Felicity took it off, and Mariah felt the collective holding of breath as Suvan adjusted something on the monitor box.
Nothing happened.
A faint sigh of disappointment drifted around the salon like a poison fog.
But Suvan seemed undeterred.He poked at both machines a few more times.
“Ms.McCoy,” he said.“If you’d please.”He gestured from his mouth outward with a flick of his fingers, and Mariah remembered that long tongue… “A few notes should be enough.”
Remy’s eyebrows shot up.“You want me to sing, Chief?”
“Anything to spark the resonant harmonics,” he said.“Although since we’ve established repeatedly that the anomaly reacts most strongly to emotional energy, you should…go big.”
Or go home.Mariah wondered if he knew the Earther saying.They’d all chosen to not go home.
With a glance at Ikaryo, who inclined his head in answer, Remy took a belly breath.She held it a moment, reaching out to her lover.Silver-blue glitter raced upward along the augments of his arm, sparkling all the way to his jaw.
“Done with silence, I’m singing of
my heart entwined with yours, my love.
When the stars come out to shine
