Page 48 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Ooh. Paperwork. The true deterrent.”
“Exactly.”
She leans back, puts her feet up on a console that doesn’t deserve them, and watches me watch the map. “You know,” she says, “when we’re old and you’ve lost every hair and I’m a saint in a scandal, I’m going to tell the children about how you crawled into a murder ship and pulled us out with your teeth.”
“Don’t,” I say.
“I absolutely will,” she says. “Right after I tell them about how you look when she falls asleep on your chest.”
“CynJyn.”
“You were purring,” she says, delighted. “Like a very large, very murderous cat.”
“I do not purr.”
“You rumble,” she concedes. “It’s hot.”
“Plot the intercept,” I say, and she laughs and plots the intercept.
We work in the comfortable silence of people who have bled together and know when to use words like tools and when to file them away. She feeds the engines the right kind of flattery; I teach the nav how to lie with its mouth closed. Once, a ghost ping brushes the edge of our sensor lid and both our spines lift; then it slides away—a drunk courier cutting through a lane he didn’t pay for. I let my shoulders settle only when the scope says its polite goodbyes.
“Question,” CynJyn says, softer now. “Are you going to tell her about the reassignment?”
“Yes,” I say. “It belongs to her to know.”
“She’s going to be mad.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to kiss you anyway.”
I breathe, measure, and let the admission come out like it’s part of the ship’s hum. “I hope so.”
She grins into her mug. “Good answer.”
I stand, stretch until my ribs complain, and glance back down the short corridor toward the sleeping cabin. The door is closed. The light under it is a thin seam. I can hear nothing and I can hear her anyway because something in me turned itself to her frequency the first time she put a Bishop in my hand and said check in a voice that could have meant anything.
“I’ll watch,” CynJyn says, reading me the way all good thieves read a room. “Go breathe like a person for five minutes. I can handle space not flirting with me.”
“You will call me if anything even thinks about being interesting,” I say.
“I’ll scream poetry,” she promises.
I step back into the dim. The corridor smells like burned insulation and the nicer version of air this ship insists on wasting on nobility. My palm finds the cabin panel and I stand there for a heartbeat because sometimes a door deserves respect. Then I let it open and slip inside.
She hasn’t moved much. One arm is flung across the pillow in a declaration of territory; the other is tucked under her cheek like a truce. I sit on the edge of the mattress and watch her. The bruise at her jaw has gone from angry purple to something sullen; it will fade. The cut at her mouth is swollen but clean. I touch the corner of the sheet and pull it up another inch because the air feels colder in here than it is and my body believes in overkill when it comes to warmth.
“Hey,” she murmurs without opening her eyes. “Don’t leave.”
“I’m not,” I say. “I’m looking.”
“Creep,” she says, smiling very slightly.
“Yes.”
Her lashes flutter and then she’s looking up at me, still half asleep, still more dangerous than anything with a blade. “How bad?”
“Manageable,” I say. “CynJyn bribed the engines with a song. We’re threading the Sparrow. We will aim for a patrol’s blind shoulder and make friends.”
