Page 14 of Phoenix's Last Heist
“If you’re done ogling me,” he quips sharply. “I can show you what I’ve been doing in here.”
“I’m not ogling.” I am, though.“I’m assessing.”
“Assessing,” he repeats, arching a brow. “Assessing me for, what, weaknesses? Are you still planning to—how did you put it—kick my ass?”
“Yeah,” I say, my mouth dry. The purplish freckles on his skin darken with his exasperation and I’m momentarilytransfixed. The longer I stare, the darker they get. He clears his throat and I pull my gaze back to his face with great effort. The look he wears is verydisapproving professorand right now, I want nothing more than to be his naughty student.
“Well?” he prompts.
I look around the room and nod with approval.
“You cleaned,” I say simply.
He rolls his eyes. “Yes, I know that’s a foreign concept to you, but I wasn’t referring to the cleanliness.”
“What’d you do with all my stuff?” I ask, refusing to clarify that it’s actuallymy dad’sstuff. The accompanying grief is a sucker punch straight to the chest and almost renders me breathless. “I had some important things in there, you know. And maybe there were some private things in there that you shouldn’t have been digging through.”
“They’re in the storage lockers off the main hallway,” he replies.
I gape. “I have storage lockers?”
The corners of his lips quirk at that, but he swallows the smile before it can take its full, blinding shape.Stars-damn those dimples.
“I just asked you in here so I could show you the biosphere,” he says. “Do you know how it works? It looks like it hasn’t been used in a few years.”
“I know how it works,” I cut in, glaring at him, already pushing back against the unwanted memories of afternoons spent in here with my father. “I just didn’t have time to get it set up in between runs.”
His brow furrows at that. “Thefts, you mean.”
I shrug.
He sighs. “Well, you actually had most of what you needed to get a healthy garden going. Everything was in cold storage—the seeds, soil amendments, and fertilizer. I planted a varietyof fruits and vegetables from a couple different planets, at least the ones that I’m familiar with, and programmed their care into the system. Ada helped. In a few weeks, we’ll be able to eat something other than that dehydrated, processed garbage you seem to love.”
I want to rail at him—to yell at him for coming into my ship and messing up my stuff. I hate that I haven’t had a fresh fruit or vegetable from the lab since my dad died and that it’sOrionbringing them back. I hate how the sight of the lab pokes at the ulcers of my grief, and that it’s made worse because it’s stupidOrionwho keeps sneaking through my carefully crafted emotional defenses. Not that he knows, of course. I’d rather swallow a Uranian slug than open up to him. But…he worked hard, and beneath the grief—loath as I am to admit it—is a kind of hopeful nostalgia at seeing the small plants erupting from the little pods of soil.
“It’s…” I struggle to wrangle my emotions and find an appropriate response. “You did good.”
He lifts a shoulder in forced nonchalance, but there’s a flash of pride on his face that lights up his eyes and makes his freckles flicker.
“Thanks. It was nice to have something to do,” he says. “I think I’m a bit stir-crazy being cooped up in a metal box without any nature nearby.”
“I take it all Xylothians have a green thumb,” I hedge.
“Green thumb?”
“Another Earth phrase. It means you’re good with plants.”
“Oh. Well, yes. But anything can grow, if you give it what it needs,” he says.
We stand for a beat, the awkward silence thickening between us.
I turn to leave and catch sight of the Solar Mother idol locked in one of the stasis cabinets. Even through the thickcrystalline compartment, I can still sense it vibrating with the same energetic intensity as it did in the temple. I’m dying to get my hands on it again and see if I can translate the markings—see if they’ll lead me to the next clue in my doomed treasure hunt. It’s right there—the last piece between me and the only kind of freedom I’ll ever get. Everything I’ve done, every sin I’ve stacked, has been for this. And yet, every time I reach for it, it feels like the universe moves it an inch farther away. Orion sees where my attention landed and sighs.
“What do you actually know about it?” he asks, crossing to the cabinet and unlocking the door.
“Not much,” I answer, fighting through my distraction in order to lie properly. “It’s a relic—a figure of the Solar Mother entity that the Xylothian Protectorate worshipped thousands of years ago, and it’s made of pure enaurium. It might be the largest sample of the metal in existence for all anyone knows. Other than that, it’s worth about two million credits to my buyer on Epsilon-6. Or I can hand it over to Brill, which will buy my freedom from him, though I can’t say I expect him to honor that bargain once he has the idol in his greedy, nubby little hands.”
I don’t add that according to my father’s journals, it’s also the key to unlocking the location of the Dark Star—the only thing in this universe that has power over life and death. That part’s mine, and some things you don’t say out loud in case the universe decides to listen.
