Kayleb’s skin should have been warmer, even if his top leached out some of the heat. He felt soft under Max’s hands, fragile. Max had been made to destroy, but right now, Inrit needed his strength to save a life. Options for how to cut the metal flashed through his mind. It was a strong polymer designed for the heavy duty battering that happened on a ship. A normal person would need a powerful saw or laser to cut through it.
Either of those things would do further damage to Kayleb. But Max wasn’t normal.
“I need the sturdiest bolt cutter that you have,” he said. “I think I can cut it.”
Inrit told Symes where to find them and the crewman ran for the engineering room. “Can you do it in one move?” she asked, voice pitched low enough so that Krayter wouldn’t hear them, even though he was crouched so close.
From the looks of the thing, the metal was thin enough for Max to wrap his hand around it. If he had the proper leverage, he could do it. “We need to get him off the ground. I can’t wedge the cutter under him.”
It was careful work and adrenaline hit Max just as hard as it would in the midst of a battle. With every instruction or suggestion Inrit gave, she showed her confidence and her training. This was a woman born to lead. And though most of his mind was occupied with tending to Kayleb, a small part started to wonder why she’d hidden herself away as an engineer on a small mercenary ship.
Symes ran back up with the bolt cutters and handed them over to Max. She then took up a place beside Inrit, ready to do anything else they needed.
“Stop! All of you freeze right there!” a harsh, feminine voice called from down the hall. Footsteps pounded as three people, two humans and the Tronx Max had met on Nina Station, ran towards them. “Are you trying to kill the poor man?”
This wasn’t the doctor, but Max thought she might be his main apprentice. Not technically part of the crew, her training would be done at the doctor’s side as she learned the ad hoc medicine that got practiced on ships like this. Ship doctors were fonts of knowledge when it came to cross-species medical care. Most planet based doctors specialized, but it was impossible to even attempt to do so on a ship.
Inrit didn’t move, but she looked over at the apprentice. “I’m trying to save him. It’s your boss who decided it was better to let him die.”
“Not my call. Now back up and let me see to him.” The two women faced off. The apprentice’s red hair was cut short and she would barely stand as tall as Max’s chest when he stood. But power and authority thrummed within her. On the other side of Kayleb, Inrit was a coiled spring. Tension vibrated and he was worried that she would snap.
And between one second and the next, it disappeared. She lifted her hands off of the patient and stood. “I stopped some of the bleeding with the regen gel, and the bar’s clear through. The scan came back clean.”
“What are you doing, Inrit? Why are you getting up?” Krayter asked, his voice cracking.
“It’s alright. Tessa can handle this.” She backed up all the way and Max mirrored her actions, settling Kayleb back into a neutral position. Symes moved with them, but Krayter stayed rooted in place, hands still pressed tight against his brother’s wound.
The apprentice, Tessa, and her crew flowed in smoothly to fill the gaps that he, Inrit, and Symes had made. Tessa doled out commands with the authority of a general and her assistants were quick to respond. “I need this hall clear. If you’re not helping, get out. Engineer, cordon off the area and reroute any personnel or passengers down other pathways.”
“It will be done,” Inrit replied with all the passion of a limp piece of bread. Symes disappeared down a hallway and Inrit walked back towards the control room. With no other idea of what to do, Max followed. They weren’t far. He’d only come across the violence because he’d been on his way to see her. Breakfast and her playful invite seemed so long ago, though it had only been a matter of a few hours.
Inrit remained silent as they moved, opening the door to the control room and gesturing for him to enter before she keyed it closed. She kept quiet as she punched in commands on one of the half-dozen screens at her command center. Only when he focused in closely did he notice that her hands shook. The dark red blood of the Detyen man coated her fingers and smudged across the brightly lit boards. She was making a mess, but she didn’t seem to care.
Max picked up the med kit from where she’d dropped it on the floor and extracted some gauze and fresh water. He pulled up a chair next to Inrit and moistened the gauze until it would work as a makeshift towel. When he placed his hand on her wrist, she startled, gaze flying to him, eyes wide, and her other hand half-reaching into her pocket. And then she came back to herself and realized just who was sitting next to her.
“Did you follow me?” she asked. She sounded confused, like Max did when coming out of a bad glitch. The dark ruby of Kayleb’s blood had soaked into her clothes and her skin, but where it marked her flesh, it blended in almost seamlessly with her raised, dark clan markings. She showed no discomfort at being covered in blood, and he wondered if that was shock or experience showing.
“You let me in the room,” he said. He tugged on her hand and she let him have it. In silence, he ran the gauze over her hand, sopping up the blood until it was clean. But then he took a dry piece and slowly dragged it over and around each of her fingers and down, drying her off until she was as good as new. Without him asking, she offered her other hand. He could feel her eyes boring into his head as he gave his focus over to cleaning her, but her hand had his whole attention. She’d tried to use these fingers to heal. It was the least he could do to see to her comfort.
“Where did you receive medical training?” he asked. She’d known her way around the med kit very well. It shouldn’t shock him that he knew next to nothing about her. Not her history, her family name, her clan, or even her favorite color. But the thought of her already lived so deep inside him that he almost couldn’t fathom the unknown.
Inrit laced her fingers through his and traced her thumb in circles across his calloused skin. It was a simple, idle act of affection, and yet it sent a shiver up his arm that traveled straight to his cock.
The yearning for her hadn’t abated in the midst of the crisis, but he’d been able to shift his focus. Now that they were alone, now that there was nothing else they could do for Kayleb, it roared back to life. He raised their interlinked palms and kissed the back of her hand, rolling his eyes up to look at her while he did it.
The memory of blood in her skin should have been a warning or a turn-off, but it only reminded him more of her bravery, her determination to save a life.
Inrit’s tongue darted out and licked her lips and Max caught the most tantalizing glimpse of strange ridges around the outside. They’d barely kissed before and now he longed to know the feel of her in his mouth. And around his cock.
“I was apprenticed as an engineer when I was thirteen,” she said. It took Max a moment to remember what they were talking about, and this time it had nothing to do with malfunctioning systems. “I showed an affinity for medicine once we were space bound. The doctor on board insisted that I be cross trained. Then when I was…” she trailed off for a moment before resuming. “When I was on another ship, the crew got into a lot of scuffles. I gained a lot of experience tending to their wounds. It kept me… It served me well, in the end.”
And there were more of those tantalizing bits he didn’t know. Max almost asked more, but something held him back, an inborn caution that had served him well time and again in his life.
Instead, he shared. “My brother was a doctor, and so was my mother.”
“You have a brother?” She sounded shocked, as if the mere idea of siblings was ludicrous. From someone else, he’d think it was another dig at his cyborg state, but Inrit had never shrunk back from him because of his machinery.
“I had a brother,” he corrected, the old pain a hollow ache somewhere low in his stomach. “He was fifteen years older than me and my hero when I was little. He was killed when I was still a child.”
“And that’s why you became a cyborg?” she guessed, skepticism clear.
Max laughed and hoped he didn’t sound too much like he was feeding her a sob story in order to get her naked. He was feeding her a sob story and he wanted to get her naked. The two items weren’t related. He shook his head. “That came later. I’m not sure what Ren would have thought about it. He wasn’t one for violence.”
“And you’re made for violence?” she asked. “Or is it just part of the job?” There was a strange hitch in her voice that Max wasn’t sure he could decipher.
He tilted her chin up with his free hand and really looked at her. The red of her eyes was too bright, and the sharp lines of her cheeks seemed even sharper than normal. Was this still the effect of Kayleb’s injury tugging at her? Or was it something else?
Was it him? He hoped not, because there was no way he was leaving her.
“I’m a cyborg,” he said. “Violence is our solution.” It wasn’t the first time he’d voiced that sentiment, but there was something hollow to it when he sat before her, touching her gently and so full of longing he might burst from it. Before she could counter him and throw him into more confusion, Max shifted the questions. “What about you? Do you have siblings? Parents?”
“I was an orphan, raised in the Temple of the Dead on Beothea.” For some, that might have come out sorrowful, but Inrit smiled fondly, eyes crinkling. “That sounds so dreadful, doesn’t it? Like it was all corpses all the time.” She shook her head absently. “But I was raised by Detyens and there was a boy in the temple who was my own age. He just found his denya.”
Max shifted in his seat and could hear the squishing sound of the blood that had soaked into his clothes. He grimaced. His nose had already adjusted to the smell, so if he stayed still enough, it was possible to forget.
Inrit’s nose crinkled. “We’re both filthy, and this isn’t sanitary.”
Max agreed. Protocol dictated that they should have disposed of these clothes already to reduce the risk of exposure to pathogens. “I suppose I should head back to the shower, then. Do you want me to bring you a change of clothes?” He didn’t want to leave her, but he was almost certain he was about to be dismissed. There was no romance in blood spatter.
Inrit’s fingers tightened over his. “Tessa had me block off the main hallway, remember? You’d need to walk through most of the ship to get to our quarters.”
It wouldn’t be the most pleasant walk of Max’s life, but hardly the worst either.
“Or,” said Inrit, “there’s a shower in that chamber.” She nodded towards an almost hidden door in the corner of the room. “And there’s room enough for two.”