RUWEN NANARAN MADE landfall on Polai in the bright sunlight of morning. It was nice, as far as inhabited planets went, but he wasn’t there to sightsee. His small cruiser sat hidden under cover of dense foliage, fuel cells recharging and cloaking system resetting itself. He’d be grounded here for a week.

More than enough time to get the job done.

He was a Detyen mercenary, contracted out to an anonymous client in need of a piece of information that only the Polans had access to. Getting onto the planet hadn’t been difficult. His ship had one of the most advanced cloaking systems available and Polai had a lax incoming defense system.

He expected that getting out would be another story entirely. Polans let people in, but all ships and transport off the planet were heavily monitored. Anyone caught fleeing without authorization was summarily executed by targeted rocket.

That fact had greatly limited the number of mercs willing to take this job, and had greatly shot up the price. At first, Ru hadn’t planned to take it when it came up on the private merc forum where he found his jobs.

54% chance of failure. 41% change of death or permanent injury. 100,000 credits if completed before the end of the month.

Only a Detyen—a twenty-nine year old Detyen—could like those odds. He’d be dead in a few months anyway, so what was the harm in taking the risk? If he cut his time short in the universe, at least he’d go down in a blaze of glory.

And if he survived, 100k would go a long way on Hedonia, the planet dedicated to pleasure in all its forms. There, he’d go out with a bang.

Some called it the Detyen Curse. Others said it was the denya price. For the longest time, Ru thought it was the biggest bunch of bullshit in the galaxy. How could a species survive if anyone who didn’t find their mate—their denya—by thirty perished?

A hundred years ago, that would have been a silly question. The planet Detya flourished, the crown of its solar system and a principal planet in the Regek Quadrant. There’d been systems in place to match potential denyai to one another. Less than four percent of Detyens had succumbed to the curse back then.

Now Detya was an uninhabitable husk, its oceans poisoned and all life extinguished. The only survivors had been the small percentage who lived off planet or had been traveling at the time of the attack. There had been no declaration of war, no warning of violence. One day Detya had been a happy place. The next it was dead.

Now the survivors had scattered throughout the galaxy, most living in refugee cities on welcoming planets. And the curse took its toll, picking off Detyens one by one as they reached thirty. Only those lucky enough to find their mates survived.

And women were a scarce resource.

As a boy and young man, Ru hadn’t liked to dwell. But the numbers didn’t lie. There were at least three Detyen men to each Detyen woman. Sure, some found themselves matched to multiple denyai, but it was so astronomically rare that he’d be luckier trying to garden on a star.

With less than three months until his last birthday, Ru refused to contemplate the unfairness of his lot for long. There would be dozens of beautiful aliens on Hedonia to ease any suffering he might feel in his final days.

But he needed to earn the coin to take his place there first. There were no poor men on the pleasure planet.

He’d been given a map to the Polan outpost and a rough schematic of the building’s layout. It was late summer now, and the building was only used in the winter. It relied on an outdated security monitoring system and physical locks to keep out intruders. For most people, there was nothing to find. The Polans stored no weapons here and few supplies.

The computers, however, remained in this location even when those manning them left for their summer rotations. This was a government outpost and that gave him access to government servers. The tech-stick he’d been given would do most of the work. All Ru needed to do was plug it in.

He’d been able to pick the lock on a door on the south side of the building. It was too dark to get a good look around outside, but he hadn’t heard any guards or animals. His own bio-scanner didn’t pick up any Polans, though he did scan other alien life in the area.

It was too big to be an escaped pet, and he’d heard of the large felines that stalked the Polan highlands. It was possible one had come down from the mountains looking for food. His blaster would be defense enough against any wild animal, and as long as the Polans didn’t catch him, he’d be fine.

The station had been powered down before it was sealed up for the summer. That meant no light, no temperature adjustment system, and no electronic security. He wore night-vision goggles to see down the dim hallways, everything cast in an eerie orange glow.

The halls were narrow and the ceilings low to accommodate the short, lithe Polans. Detyens all stood tall and broad, which meant that Ru needed to stoop so that his head didn’t brush against the roof.

According to his map, the control room was located in the center of the building. He’d need to follow the central hall until it intersected with the cafeteria. From there, he could cut through a series of small offices and meeting rooms to reach his destination.

But his first order of business was to find the control room power breaker. He didn’t need to power up the entire facility, but he needed those computers turned on and connected. He headed to the central power station located near the cafeteria.

The power breakers had all been shut off and secured, but he was able to use a circumvention method that he’d picked up on another job. He bypassed the passive security measures and the independent alarm that was supposed to trigger when he switched on the power.

When he heard an engine spin up, he knew that he’d been successful.

But he froze when he heard a clatter from within the kitchens. It sounded like a person or possibly an animal had stolen away inside. Ru bit back a curse. He should have checked more thoroughly before switching the power on. It shouldn’t have affected the cafeteria, but if someone was in there and wandered any further into the facility, they’d see the lights and know he was there.

He needed to handle the situation.

Ru slid his blaster out of its holster and backed away from the breaker box. He slipped out of the small utility closet and took two steps down the narrow hallway to the cafeteria. He tried to get a good look at the room through the window in the door, but all he could see were a dozen long tables bolted to the ground and stacks of chairs piled up against the walls. Beyond those tables he spied an empty food dispensary, but there was no one in the room.

He pushed the door open and entered, moving with caution through the empty room. He made his way to the storage room behind the food dispensary. That was where he found her.

Ru froze where he stood. Something within him cracked. The room suddenly brightened, white light nearly flooding his eyes. It had nothing to do with his goggles. He forgot that those existed.

Everything was secondary to the woman crouching in front of the storage closet in front of him. She wasn’t Detyen and she certainly wasn’t Polan. He could tell from her hair and the beige skin peeking out from the tattered edges of her dark jacket. Human, he thought, based on the ones that he’d met in his travels. A hardy species, similar to his own in so many ways.

She turned toward him and Ru was conquered. Suffering and desperation were painted across her beautiful face, her skin nearly gold and eyes wide and dark. Brown hair tumbled down over her shoulders, some matted and tangled from time lost in the wild. Shock suffused her face, her mouth falling open and eyes getting impossibly wider.

This was not possible. His fate had been sealed a century ago, long before he was even born. But the planet shifted beneath him, the stars realigning, until the only thing that mattered was the woman before him.

“Denya.”