Page 23 of Fated to the Dragon Alien
“Well, the others do,” Jorr said. “There have been whispers.”
Cerani stopped scraping. “What whispers?”
He scratched his neck through the suit, below the helmet. “That the controller listens to you.”
Her chest constricted.
“And that maybe,” Jorr added, “there’s more going on between you two than old suits and crystal output.”
“No.” The word snapped out sharper than she meant. “There is nothing between the controller and me.”
“Didn’t say there was.” His tone stayed calm, but he didn’t look away. “I’m just saying, people notice things. How he watches you when he walks by. How his eyes follow you like he’s burned you into his frostbitten soul.”
Cerani’s hands curled around her scraper. “Whatever he feels—or doesn’t—isn’t my problem.”
Jorr raised an eyebrow but didn’t push. “Pretty clear you’ve got the cleaner end of this shaft today. Let me know if the vein splits.”
She gritted her teeth as he turned back to his spot.
Cerani returned to her work, even though her tool sat wrong in her hand now. Everything sat wrong. Her breath felt thick in her chest, heavier than the filtered air should allow. When she forced another crystal from the rock, her fingers shook—just barely—but enough.
She missed the way Stavian listened when she challenged him. The way he trusted her instincts over system reports. The way…she used to feel when he was near. Seen. Not watched. Not flagged. Seen.
And yet, every time she heard footsteps, her stomach turned in knots and her chest ached. Her thoughts became torn between the need to look and what it meant that she always did look.
She didn’t want to want him, but she did. And she wasn’t altogether happy about that.
Cerani pressed the scraper into the wall with more force than necessary. The crystal cracked too far down the seam. A clean break would’ve meant better clarity, but now? It’d downgrade to medium purity. “Fek,” she muttered.
“Burning through quota already?” Jorr asked from his perch.
“Just eager to finish and get out of thisfekkingshaft.”
“Then I’ll try not to slow you down.”
She rolled her shoulders but didn’t answer. Not because of Jorr exactly. He was one of the miners she genuinely liked being around. But even his friendly tone felt heavier than it used to.
That was the thing about hope. It twisted your focus. Made you soft. Made the shifts feel longer and the silences shorter. Ever since she told Stavian they couldn’t meet again, things inside her had stayed too loud. Too tangled.
Three cycles.
Three sleep cycles of lying flat on the barracks slab with nothing but the walls and the recycled air and the shape of his voice haunting the edge of her dreams.
Cerani wedged the scraper into a new section of the crystal seam and focused on the old rhythm—stroke, chip, collect. Her chest burned anyway. She wasn’t mad at Jorr for mentioning what everyone else was talking about. She was mad that he wasn’t wrong. Not totally.
She’d seen Stavian looking. More than once.
Once so long that Sema whispered, “Are you sure he’s not about to arrest you or something?” Like the words were a joke. Cerani had forced a laugh. Then spent the rest of the shift trying not to remember the way his eyes had zeroed in on her like she was gravity itself and he was just waiting to fall.
Her head turned, like it always did when she heard someone coming down the shaft.
She hated that her body reacted before her brain did.
Not him. Another mech. Another guard. Another reminder she was just a designation stamped on a backlit panel. Cerani blinked sweat from her eyes under the helmet and went back to it.
This vein was shallow, and she was almost done. If her hands didn’t betray her, she could be out of here in ten, maybe fifteen peks. Back in the barracks. Back behind a door, where no one looked at her like she was something rare. Something dangerous. Something precious.
Cerani pried a final shard from the wall and set it gently in the collection box. Her breathing eased as she sat back on her heels, fingers cramping from the grip she held on the tool.
