Chapter 12

After they showered again and rebandaged their various wounds, Amy fell into an exhausted slumber. Luc didn’t blame her. It had been a demanding day, replete with terrors and wonders. As he rose carefully from the bed so as not to disturb her, he smoothed one hand over the long black strands of her hair spread across the pillow. The texture was so silky he barely felt it, and yet it pleased him nonetheless.

She was the most wondrous.

“Anabolic state optimal for rest,” the ship’s comm whispered. “Shhh.”

Luc forced himself out of the room before he forced himself on her again, and the pyramid light overhead dimmed to shadows as he took his roiling energy away from her. As much as she had seemed to enjoy his touch, she needed sleep more. At least for now. Even as his accountant half fretted at the calculation of the likelihood of them encountering trouble, his drakling soul adored her boldness, not just in bed but her refusal to back down from the challenges ahead. She was small but mighty, innocent but magnificent.

He wanted to go back into the bedroom and claim her as his mate.

Chaining the ardent need smoldering inside him, he silently closed the bedroom door and headed up to the cockpit, as far away as he could get on the small Blissed. The ship was designed for intimacy, and every place she wasn’t felt empty to him. But he needed some time to think without the distraction of her, without the pain in his wounds egging the violent side of himself to take command. He fingered the numbing adhesive bandages spread across his shoulders and back, some in places he wouldn’t have been able to reach on his own without her. His teammate.

He slapped his open palm against the armrests of the chair as he settled himself with a curse. Team Prism had been behind from the start, and this unplanned diversion into a world of pleasure he hadn’t expected had only eaten up more of their time.

The beast within him coiled restlessly; speaking of eating, it would like to nibble on her more. There were secret places of his infamous interstellar explorer that he hadn’t yet explored…

With a growl of annoyance at his erotically wandering thoughts, he swiveled to focus on his research screen. He’d uploaded all of his idle calculations based on the cadences of the Firestone Queen’s poem, but he wasn’t quite sure where that led them next. He studied the equations, keeping in mind that for all their passion for poems and instinctive mastery of stormwind trajectories, draklings were most known for their affinity for treasure. Where was the second gem hidden in this vast galaxy?

He lost himself in the purely intellectual exercise for awhile, relieved at the diversion. The numbers twisted and teased, just outside an easy solution, but they were still less confusing than the feelings of the creature awakening in his soul.

When the comm pinged with an incoming query, he growled in annoyance. The contact was coded for security so he couldn’t tell who was calling, but his concentration was already broken so he smacked the acceptance. “Identify.”

“Luc baby, it’s me.” Rickster’s writhing tentacles filled the screen for a moment before he stepped back. “How’s it floating?”

Luc swallowed a grumble. Barely. “We’re still alive,” he said, unable to completely contain the edge to his voice.

“Right on. You found the first gem.” Tentacles wound around each other delightedly, working up a thin froth. “Do you have an estimate of its worth yet?”

Since the Ajellomene assistant producer must already know the value of the fake Heart’s Flame considering Octiron had planted the gem, Luc frowned in confusion. But wait, maybe this was for the audience. He managed a tight smile. “It’s stunning. Dare I say priceless?”

Of course there was a price: the payment he’d receive if Team Prism won the race. And the reward would be the look of astonishment—maybe even gleeful pride—on his brothers’ faces when they saw the whole extravaganza.

“Can I…see it?” Rickster dripped a little froth on the screen as his tentacles seemed to reach forward longingly.

Luc managed not to recoil at the gloop. “I think it’ll be more impressive when all three gems are together, don’t you?” The tantalizing delay would increase interest, he hoped. Addendums in the Octiron contract had specified bonus credits if certain viewer thresholds were crossed.

“We’re not recording right now. Show me.” Rickster snapped his tentacles outward, as if in irritation, although Luc couldn’t figure out why. The assistant producer had to have been part of the setup for Team Prism, so he must’ve seen all the gems already. Just like he must’ve known the mine on Am-Syx was practically boobytrapped and the hive-mites were loose.

Anger at Octiron’s callous disregard for safety overwhelmed Luc’s interest in playing the part of the complacent, befuddled accountant. “No,” he said in a low voice. He leaned forward to stare hard into the screen. “Won’t be anything to see next time either if we die in the attempt. You didn’t even have a rescue crew on hand if we’d gotten into trouble.” More trouble, he thought grimly. “Does the Galactic Employment Standards Commission know about these hazardous working conditions?”

Rickster made a burbling noise—an Ajellomene laugh, Luc realized. “Standards? Who cares about standards? Not Octiron Corp. It’s about ratings, baby. And your only value is last episode’s viewership and sponsor credits.” The tentacles shrank in a way that looked deflated. “And if a team’s whole season goes bad? Forget about it.”

“No ratings, viewers, or credits if we’re crushed under a rock fall or dissolved by mite acid,” Luc snapped back.

“Well, actually…” The Ajellomene rubbed his tentacles over his upper end, smoothing back the smaller tendrils. “But you’re right. We need you alive to retrieve the other gems or it’s all over.”

Surprised that the producer was willing to concede, Luc pressed his advantage. “Tell me about the next challenge.”

“I…don’t know.”

He wanted to reach through the comm to throttle the prevaricating producer, even if it meant getting tentacle froth on his hands. “We’ll make it look good,” he said with more confidence than he really felt. But with Amy’s help, he knew they could make it work. “You’ll get your ratings while we get the second gem.”

“You’re the one with the computations,” Rickster said, his bubbly voice rising toward a whine. “I’m just behind the scenes.”

“Then tell me what’s back there,” Luc urged.

“I really don’t know,” Rickster said. “My last team…they, uh, didn’t do so hot.”

Clenching his jaw to stop himself from asking what had happened to that hapless team, Luc said through gritted teeth, “We’ll get the gems. You’ll get your footage. I’ll contact you later.”

“Luc baby—”

He disconnected, livid, and slammed himself back in his seat.

“Did that seem…weird to you?” Amy stroked her hand along his shoulder as she slipped into the copilot seat beside his station.

If it had been anyone else, he might’ve flinched in surprise when he’d been so focused on his calculations or the cagey Ajellomene, but he’d caught her fresh scent when she’d lingered in the doorway, watching his exchange. He’d always know where she was, her unique fragrance forever imprinted on his senses.

He swiveled to face her, his knees bumping hers gently. Ignoring her question, he studied her, admiring the vertical lift of her rumpled hair. The accountant in him itched to smooth it down tidily, but the drakling in him liked its waywardness. “Did you sleep well?”

She inclined her head, her dark eyes half lidded. “Apparently you didn’t.”

“Too much stimulation.” He smirked at her.

“Hmm.” She sipped at the goblet she’d carried with her, then held it out to him. When he lifted one eyebrow, she said, “Not coffee. Some morning beverage you’d programmed as a favorite.”

“Pixberry tea. Very soothing.”

“You look like you could use some soothing.”

He took a drink of the sweet-tart warmth. “You heard all of that?”

“As I said…weird. And not just because it was a gooey, talking starfish.”

“I have no trouble working with tentacled species—they tend to be as good at counting as I am—but something about Rickster makes me twitchy.” He handed the goblet back to her.

She spun the glass idly between her hands, her gaze unfocused. “He made it sound as if he doesn’t have any influence on the show, and yet he brought you in and me. Well, not me specifically, but an explorer.”

“And he had this ship waiting for me.” Luc frowned. “Although the Blissed is not the same as the other regulation race ships.”

Her lips quirked. “You mean they don’t all have disco pyramids?”

“I’m guessing not.” At the thought of the red sparks on her skin, he needed to touch her, so he spiked his fingers through her wild hair. “And they don’t have you. Unlucky them.”

She leaned her head into his palm. “Sure. Because I’ve been so useful to you.”

When she’d first appeared and he realized she wasn’t what she was supposed to be, he’d thought his chances of winning had been annihilated. He knew better now. “More useful than Rickster,” he pointed out. “Why would he arrange for us to meet Idrin and get the passage token but then not share the next challenge?”

“And he acted as if he’s never seen the gemstones, but I thought an assistant producer would be involved.” She shook her head. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. We know what we have to do.” She drank the last of the tea, and he wondered if she realized as she’d spun the goblet that she’d put her mouth where he’d put his.

“I do know what I have to do,” he murmured. He leaned forward to kiss her, and when she opened her mouth to him, he licked the flavor of pixberry from her lips. Mostly sweet, just enough tart. “Definitely one of my morning favorites.”

When he lifted his head, they were both breathing heavy, and he had to shift sideways in his seat to ease the tightness in his groin.

She gazed up at him, blinking a little dazedly. “I wondered…since you left…”

“Didn’t leave,” he corrected. “I was right here.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Cuz you had to stay. Unless you wanted to get spaced.”

“Teammates.” He lifted his clenched fist.

After a moment, she bumped his knuckles with hers. “Go, Team Prism.”

He couldn’t help but notice she avoided the word mates. Not that it meant the same thing to an Earther as to a drakling. This was why Octiron liked to throw mismatched teams together—to watch the sparks fly.

Except the producers hadn’t counted on how much draklings adored sparks.

Inexorably, he tugged her from her seat into his lap, but when she made a soft noise—protest or pleasure, he wasn’t sure—he spun them to face the screen. “Our next step,” he said, to forestall any possible objections. “I have the cadences and trajectories, but they aren’t aligning the way I thought they should.”

Nestling into his side, she swiped a finger over the interactive screen, scrolling through his numbers. “Bad at math, remember?”

“I thought if I explained it to you, maybe I’d see my error.” Surreptitiously inhaling the scent of her—warm from her sleep and the tea—made him wonder what other errors he’d made, like focusing on his work to the detriment of the kind of happiness his brothers were finding, thinking he’d never have his own chance and resigned to being alone.

“Take me through it then.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “Just don’t expect anything from me.”

He expected nothing. But he wanted… Oh, he wanted everything.

Focusing on the screen, he showed her how he’d translated the beats of the poem to the map of the Paragon Galaxy after he’d realized—with the help of those after-work beverages—that there was a correlation.

She gave a low whistle. “In three dimensions? Impressive. And I see how you diagrammed the stanzas over the starfields. But how did you figure out to start with Paragon? The map you made could’ve been laid over any galaxy, and the universe is endless.” She shook her head, eyes wide with amazement.

He cleared his throat and recited:

“And now the stones slumber, a thousand times a thousand years unseen,

Awaiting the quintessence of two with bold passion between them

Who follow the incarnate love of the blacksmith and the Firestorm Queen.”

He summoned up the poem. “Here is the text, displayed in Old Runic drakling, our language as it was written at the time.” The strokes looked raw and primitive on the modern screen, more carved than written. “See these words? Quintessence. Incarnate.”

“Synonyms for paragon, like this galaxy’s name.” She thumped his knee. “Clever.”

He grinned. “I thought so, at least until I sobered up. But then I realized…” He converted the poem to its numerical values. “It all fit.”

“The accented syllables represent individual stars, and the meter and rhyme pattern gave you distance and speed so you could project into three dimensions to create the map. Okay, that’s not just clever, it’s brilliant.” She kissed his temple.

Her interest and approval touched a part of him that he suddenly realized he never appreciated. While he had the respect of his colleagues and the credits from his employers to prove his value, he’d never given any conscious consideration to his ability. Maybe because the skills had come naturally, or maybe because he’d internalized the message from his own kind that nothing mattered if it didn’t come with flames and roaring.

Well, his mathing was getting him all the action and adventure they could want now, but Amy was also curious about the puzzle, just like he was. She really was the perfect teammate for him.

He cleared his throat, forcing himself to focus on the poem as she was doing. “The problem is, the second stanza isn’t working the same. I’ve reviewed the numbers but it doesn’t fit at all.”

She pinched the screen to convert the map back to the Old Runic. “Read it to me.”

“This is the stanza about the second gem of the diadem,” he said.

“Hidden, the Body’s Hunger, silenced in the forgotten abyss,

For the blacksmith’s touch was all she needed, and his kiss.”

She shivered. “The Heart’s Flame. The Body’s Hunger. When you read it, I can hear how much they loved each other.”

He nodded. “I think one of the reasons draklings adore the poem is that it’s so unlike us. We love our treasure above all else, but she gave it up for him.”

Amy made a thoughtful noise in the back of her throat. “Gave it up? She didn’t need it anymore, because she had her blacksmith.”

He inclined his head. “Maybe, since we recite the poem at our mating ceremonies, it shows we aren’t the greedy, violent beasts the universe thinks we are.” He snorted. “Or at least not just that.”

“I think whatever happens with this race, you’ve proven it,” she said.

He let out a derisive cough. “The universe is still very much about winning.”

“True,” she drawled. “Okay then, with that in mind… Your initial calculations got us this far, so what changed in the next stanza?” She peered at the screen. “The first gem was about the heart. The second one is about the body. What’s different about the gems?”

He frowned thoughtfully. “In older poems, the Heart’s Flame was depicted as a red-orange teardrop, and the Body’s Hunger was described as a trapezoidal-cut yellow-green gem, a reference to the first rush of spring growth in the drakling deserts.”

She toyed with the results on the screen, shrinking, enlarging, rotating. “Yellow-green trapezoid,” she mused. “The body in springtime.” She leaned forward abruptly, almost tipping herself off his lap. Only a quick snaking of his arm around her waist kept her off the floor, but she didn’t seem to notice as she tapped the screen. “The queen’s diadem is a prism, right? I was terrible at science, but prisms refract light so we can see what it’s made of, more or less. Yellow and green are in the center of the rainbow, so can you adjust the map toward the middle of the visible light spectrum?”

He leaned forward with her, catching her excitement as he saw where she was going. “I never thought of that. Draklings tend toward the infrared range.” He color-shifted the screen.

She chuckled. “Draklings and their flames.”

He grinned at her. “We do like it hot. But I see what you mean by the balance of the body.”

As the map recalculated, she twined her fingers through his. “Don’t hate me if this doesn’t work.”

He gave her hand a tug so she tumbled closer to him. “I won’t hate you,” he promised.

Because he rather suspected he was sliding past toward the other end of that particular spectrum…

The map pinged as it finished recalibrating, and they both leaned forward.

“The Jessup Void,” he said slowly. “That doesn’t sound welcoming.”

“Sounds like an abyss.” She pointed out the word in the second stanza. “And the stars aligned.” She smiled at him excitedly.

His stars had aligned. With her. Did he dare press his dubious luck after their last near debacle?

He threaded his fingers through her long hair, delighting in the delicate, silky texture, so different from a drakling’s fire or an accountant’s cold interfaces. “This changes things, Amy,” he said carefully. “The Jessup Void is known throughout the universe for its perils. And now that we know Octiron is willing to sacrifice us for the ratings, I can’t ask you to keep going.”

She raised one eyebrow. “You’re not asking,” she pointed out. “I was abducted by other aliens, not you, and then I chose to keep going. No asking.”

“That was different,” he said. “That was when we still thought it was a game.”

Her dark gaze was steady. “It hasn’t been a game for me for awhile now.”

It hadn’t even been that long. But he understood her point: She’d been taken from her closed world, thrown into this race madness, nearly squashed and dissolved, not to mention fucked an alien—of course it wasn’t mere entertainment to her, no matter what the viewers at home might think.

“It’s not a game to me either.” He slid his hand down to grip the back of her neck. “And the win doesn’t matter to me as much as you do.”

She gazed up at him, her skin luminous as a golden moon in the light of the color-shifted map. “I’ve gotten a lot of participation ribbons in my life. But you already said it: The universe is very much about winning.”

He stiffened, her words sharper than a shard of aquari crystal. “So I’m not worth it even as a consolation prize.”

She lifted her hand to touch his cheek, but he jerked his head back, releasing her, and she lowered it with a hurt look. “You know that’s not what I meant. But I’ve come too far—I went through a trans-dimensional transfer!—to turn around now. I…I can’t even turn around, because I can’t go home until we reach the end.” She fisted her hand in her lap—a fist smaller than it should’ve been with her missing finger. “To you, this is a just bragging rights at a wedding reception. For me, it really might be my last chance to…to finally make something of myself.”

Deliberately, he lifted her from his lap and set her in the copilot seat before turning to face the controls.

“Luc,” she said softly.

“Setting our course for the Jessup Void,” he said curtly. “I need a moment.”

But he wanted more than that.

He wanted forever.

And to win that—win her—it seemed the only way was into the abyss.