Was she just talking to the air? She’d done that a lot as an anxious kid; at the time, it had seemed like progress to stuff it all deeper, to keep it to herself.
The button stayed stubbornly blank.
“Felicity?” Ellix’s voice rumbled through her comm.
Oh, that rumble kept rolling through the tiny bones of her ears, filtering along each vertebrae, all the way down… “Coming.”
Her original tour of the ship hadn’t included the engine cellar. Mr. Evens had said only that the space belonged to the chief engineer. She hadn’t realized the Ravkajo would guard it like a dragon. And from her research, his species somewhat resembled lizards.
Although there were IDA match preferences for scales and fang, no check box existed for rude and remote.
The portal beeped permission to enter and opened to a square of unrelieved darkness. The discordant drone of the engines was like creepy theremin music played backward for max creeptastic effect. Resisting the urge to tiptoe—which was hard in the heavy magnetized crampons anyway—she walked far enough into the cave-like engine module that the door closed behind her.
In the sudden black, a dizzying claustrophobia snatched at her breath. She was trapped…
The white-hot glare of an arc welder ripped sparks through the darkness, briefly illuminating Ellix and the other crew members, and she hurried toward them.
Promptly tripping over something in the shadows.
A big, familiar paw grasped her elbow, keeping her upright. “You’re here.”
The hint of gladness in his deep voice made her heartbeat skip almost as quickly as he’d come to her side. But for some reason, the resonance with what she’d asked in the Starlit Salon—Are you here?—tightened her throat. “I’m here.”
“How are the passengers?”
“Worried, but not too unruly. Should we discuss releasing the lifepod?”
“Not at this speed. I’ve checked and rechecked the calculations. With how the ship keeps accelerating, the pod would be ripped apart on separation.”
She grimaced. “Then we really are in this together.”
“Suvan says the containment unit will be done sooner than he anticipated. It’s wired directly into the engines, so we’ll have to spark the distortion here.”
She wanted to beg for reassurance, as Mariah had done. But she wasn’t just a Love Boat I guest; she was crew. “I’m ready whenever you are.”
He hadn’t let go of her arm, and now he steered her away from the others, into an even darker corner. “Once the unit is complete, I’ll send the rest of the crew away, and we’ll be alone here. I would not ask you to take this risk either, but every time the distortion appears, you’ve been there.”
She blinked. “I… I guess that’s right.” Abruptly, she reared back against his hold. “You don’t think that it’s me doing this.”
“Nay!” He didn’t let her go. “If I did, I’d let you do this alone.”
Peering up at him, she caught the gleam in his golden eye. “I would say you’re getting better at teasing, but…”
“But it was a terrible joke. Because I would never let you take this chance alone.”
She’d been alone—clutching Mr. Evens’ job offer, head still aching from the translator implanting—while she’d watched Earth shrink to the proverbial blue marble behind the ship taking her to the stars. The sight had left her breathless. And the only thing more terrifying had been the thought of staying stuck, not so much on the closed world but in her going-nowhere life.
Now she was going somewhere, very fast, although where that was exactly…
But one thing she knew was close enough. Disregarding the lingering sting of the “passing weakness” comment, she reached out to center her palm on the thick mane arrowing down hischest where the dark gold fur turned silkier and as pale as her own hair.
She took another breath and would’ve sworn she caught a hint of the flowers in the atmo-hall. “Would’ve been odd kissing all by myself.”
His cats-eye pupil slitted as he pinned his paw over her hand. “Not without me,” he growled.
“Captain,” Griiek called. “The containment unit is…ready?”
Felicity lifted one eyebrow at Ellix. “That sounds about as confident as I do.”
