Page 17 of Fated to the Dragon Alien
“I’m not,” he cut in. “Meet me in the south maintenance duct before third shift break.”
She gave a small nod. “I’ll be there.” Cerani looked at him for a long moment. Her pulse thudded at her throat—faster than it needed to be. He didn’t move. Neither did she. “Why are you doing this?”
He glanced at the wall, like it would have answers. “Because sometimes,” he said, “feelings get buried so deep, it looks like there’s nothing left. But that doesn’t mean someone feelsnothing. Your overseer—he made a choice to stay silent. Give me a chance to prove I can make a different choice.”
Cerani didn’t answer. She just turned back to the wall and rested her tool against it, but she didn’t scrape it. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
And even though she didn’t speak, she let herself hope—for the first time in too long—that maybe he meant every word.
SIX
Stavian
Stavian ducked through the south maintenance access just after the corridor sweep cycled off. The security sensors reset for twentypiks, giving him enough time to reach the alcove behind the duct. Officially, this part of the shaft was down for wiring inspection. In reality, it was where he met with Cerani.
The duct was narrow and stale, thick with the smell of metal and pipe grease. The air was too warm, the kind of heat that clung to skin and stayed too long. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was she was there.
Cerani sat on one of the old supply crates he’d dragged in twelve cycles ago, when they began. Her knees were drawn up, elbows resting on them. The data tablet he’d stashed behind a panel, concealed from the ever-watching scanners, was balanced in her hands. She looked up as he stepped in, her mouth already pulling tight with focus—not a smile, not yet, but close.
“You’re late,” she said. A twinge of anxiety tightened the skin around her eyes.
He checked the overhead light. “Two peks, maybe.”
“That’s still late,” she said. “It’s a good thing I don’t worry about you.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “You’ve picked up sarcasm as fast as grammar.”
She held up the tablet and tapped the screen. “That’s because sarcasm is my friend Lilas’ native language. I miss her biting commentary.” She cocked her head. “I guess you can’t see where my friends ended up, can you? If my records are locked, theirs probably are, too.”
He crossed the space and sat on the crate across from her. “I tried to learn anything I could about the Terian people, and you’re right. There was nothing about your friends in the files I have access to.” The distant echo of machines deep in the tunnel system was barely audible. He’d be able to hear if someone approached where they were.
Cerani handed him the tablet. “Look. I got pretty far. I worked on them during my first break.”
He’d set up the tablet with practice lessons, in case she felt like using it, and had been amazed at how hungry she was to learn. It was like Cerani was a dry cloth, soaking up every bit of knowledge she could. “You finished all of these?” he asked as he looked over the completed lessons.
“I did them twice. The first time to learn, the second time to see if the scoring algorithm repeated answers.”
He looked up. “You tried to outmaneuver the system?”
“I wanted to see if I could. Turns out, it reroutes the questions every third input.”
“You figured that out?” he asked, surprised.
Her face stayed even. “That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, right? Tracking patterns.”
She made something behind his ribs shift, every time. She didn’t act like anyone else and never tried to impress him, but she did.
“Impressive. This is advanced syntax,” he said. “I hadn’t planned to show it to you until several cycles from now.”
Her brow furrowed. “Am I picking this up faster than you expected?”
“Much faster.”
“Well, I started working through the safety manuals in the barracks,” she said. “No one looks at them, but since I know what each symbol means, now, I practice reading by putting the words together. It’s what I do until lights out. It’s the extra studying that’s helping me learn faster.”
He passed the tablet back. Her fingers brushed his. Comfortable and steady. Too steady. She didn’t flinch anymore when they touched. He wondered what it would feel like to touch her without gloves. Skin-to-skin. The thought made his cock twitch. He shifted on the crate and cleared his throat.
“You never fail to surprise me,” he murmured, then took back the tablet and pulled up something else. “Let’s try something different.”
