Page 71 of Taken By the Alien Killer
Star starts laughing. It comes sudden, wild, like someone opened a box of trapped birds. She covers her mouth, fails to be polite, leans forward against the harness, lets it break out of her in pulses that sound like crying if you’ve never heard joy rescued at the last possible second.
“Sorry,” she says, gasping, which is the least sorry I’ve ever heard anyone be. “I—oh—my mother is going to—” Another laugh, shoulders shaking. “And Sneed—he’s going to write a monograph titledOn the Practicalities of Chaos.And Kaspian’s face when—did you see—” She snorts and hiccups and the sound resets my bones.
I try not to smile. I fail. It’s small, a scar learning to be a mouth. “I saw.”
“We did it,” she says, softer all of a sudden, the laugh collapsing into breath that sounds like gratitude practiced out loud. “We really did it.”
“For once,” I answer, and let my head tip back against the seat as the rings brighten our canopy with a faint, icy glow.
For the first time since I stepped onto this planet years ago to guard a girl who asked too many questions with her eyes, there are no chains. No orders. No titles. Just two people, and the stars. It is an indecent luxury. It feels like a fair wage.
“Where do you want to go?” I ask, because if there is a question worth asking under a sky that finally remembered it doesn’t own us, that is the one.
“Anywhere you are,” she says without looking away from the rings. Then she turns, and the way her mouth softens changes the temperature in the cabin by measurable degrees. “That answer still counts as a destination.”
“Works for me,” I say, the words rough as gravel, soft as a promise.
She flicks a switch and kills the grav plates. The cabin uncouples from weight with a hiccup; our harnesses take the joke for exactly long enough to keep us from looking foolish, then release. We drift up, the satin blanket from the emergency berth a silver river that decides to become a galaxy. Her hair lifts and drifts, red turned copper by instruments, copper turned fire by the ringlight. A pearl of laughter catches at her lip; she reaches out with two fingers; I catch her hand and the world gets very small and very large in the same breath.
“Come here,” she says, and in vacuum’s language that meansbe everything you meant every time you couldn’t.
We collide with the slowness of saints. We turn together without trying. Her body finds mine like we were manufactured to match spec. I kiss her like I’ve been issued one breath for the rest of my life and intend to spend it wisely. She answers like she plans to steal oxygen from the gods and bring it back as evidence. Limbs drift and wrap; the satin finds us and becomes an ocean we learn to swim without training. My hands are careful because they remember what they’ve done, what they’ve held, what they’ve had to let go; she laughs into my mouth and drags me closer with the hungry kind of tenderness that makes reverence a louder language than restraint. The cabin is a chorus—soft hisses, instrument ticks, the small sound she makes when something is exactly right and the smaller one when she decides right can be righter.
“Slow,” I murmur against her cheek.
“Still greedy,” she whispers back, pulling at me until the wordslowlearns to meansavor.“Don’t be gentle because you think I’ll break. Be gentle because you want to.”
I do. I am. I let the weightless make us both believers in new physics. We move through each other’s air like people who learned patience at the end of a sword and finally found a reason to spend it. Warmth spreads where hands live longer than logic. I don’t say I love you because the sentence is everywhere, so thick you could scoop it up with your palm and smear it on your throat to breathe easier. She doesn’t apologize for wanting, and I do not play at being noble enough to say no.
The stars look in. They keep their opinions. The rings draw paler arcs over the canopy; the faint static crackle of the shield remembers its job and does not make us think about it. Time forgets itself. We take our time. We make a mess of the blanket and of the stupid line in my head that says joy must be rationed. When the apex comes—a word I have never used with such accuracy—it is not quiet and it is not loud; it is a tide reaching a shore it knows, and the shore deciding to stay.
We tumble back to the berth on a sigh the ship pretends it didn’t hear. Star wrestles gravity back into the room and it obeys, sulking. The satin lands over us like a conspirator. She tucks herself into the curve of my body with the ease of a person who has been doing it for years in her mind; her cheek finds the spot under my collarbone the medic taught me to count with; my hand discovers it knows how to cover a ribcage as if it invented shelter. The cabin smells like skin and clean metal and the faint ghost of jasmine that followed us, which I refuse to hate tonight. Our breathing finds a shared tempo without being asked. For the first time since I learned the mathematics of vigilance, I fall asleep with nothing held back.
I wake when the ship decides to adjust its pitch by a degree and the change brushes the edge of a sense I never learnedhow to turn off. The ringlight has gone thin, a pale seam at the world’s hem; the planet is a dark shoulder wearing dawn. Star is warm across me, hair fanned like flame drawn thin. One of her hands is open against my stomach, lazy, protective; the other has claimed a fistful of blanket and refuses to negotiate. Her mouth is soft. Every nerve in me that used to set up camp in corners is lying down and pretending to be furniture.
I ease out from under her with the delicacy of a thief and the reverence of a man leaving a sanctuary. The console greets me with a sleepy glow; the pilot’s chair sighs when I sit. For a long minute I just watch the starfield and memorize the error of strands I can finally let go of. Then I call up the nav log.
The cursor blinks with the moral superiority of law. The old habits cough up coordinates unasked: bolt-holes, bad ports, friendly shadows. I ignore most of them because I am done mistaking survival for living. We need a place that won’t ask for papers before it offers water. We need quiet that isn’t empty. We need a roof we can build with our hands and a horizon that doesn’t police us.
There’s a relay shell I remember from a patrol none of us enjoyed: retired, forgotten, parked in the ice fields that hang above the rings like thoughts too cold to say out loud. It has bones. It has bulkheads that can be convinced to stop moaning. It has a view you can name your days after. If we don’t want orbit, there’s a cliff over the northern sea where the wind eats words before they can gather; the rock there is stubborn enough to trust. The first is safer. The second is beautiful. The first is ours if we want it. I choose both in a sequence that says we’re allowed to have more than one good thing.
I type. Numbers find the log. The ship stamps them into memory and doesn’t judge. Under the entry I add exactly two words: Us, first.
“Are you writing poetry?” Star says, voice sleep-scratchy, amused. She is a warm constellation in the doorway, blanket around her shoulders like a ridiculous cape, hair a map of last night’s gravity experiment. She pads to me on bare feet and climbs into my lap without permission because permission is the air we’re breathing now and it always says yes. She reads the nav log over my shoulder and the smile that arrives is slow, private, the kind that claims territory without a fight. “Coordinates,” she murmurs. “A derelict relay in the ice. A cliff that steals words. And a note that says ‘Us, first.’ Commander, are you proposing?”
“Semantically risky terrain,” I say, and let a smirk try on my mouth. I am bad at smirking. She rewards the effort with a kiss that tastes like morning and audacity. I look back at the numbers. I look at her. The look in my eyes says everything I have killed to keep quiet. “Yes,” it says without making me say it out loud. “Yes, and yes again.”
“What does it look like,” she asks softly, cheek against mine, lazy fingers playing with the edge of the console. “The place where we build something real.”
“Loud at the edges,” I answer, honest. “Quiet in the middle. A door that sticks and a kettle that lies about when it will boil. The smell of oil when we want it and of nothing when we don’t. A board that waits for a game that isn’t war. Your mother coming to boss the furniture and pretending she didn’t cry on the way in. CynJyn on the roof swearing at the aurora because she can’t choreograph it. Kaspian at a safe distance sending us a bottle and an apology we don’t need. Sneed delivering a lecture on insulation while he checks the perimeter and pretends he’s not staying for supper.”
She laughs against my skin, the laugh she keeps for the parts of me she curated from wreckage. “Windows?” she asks.
“Facing the rings,” I say. “And one facing the cliff, so we don’t forget both answers.”
She is quiet, not the kind that hurts, the kind that acts like a hand on your neck when you need to be toldstay.“I like your proposal,” she says finally. “It’s terribly unromantic.”
“It has a kettle,” I say. “It’s practically pornographic.”
