Chapter 2

Consciousness returned to Amy in reverse of the way it had left her: the darkness numbing her was shot through with silver stars, then a column of blinding gold light surrounded her, then her whole body tingled, and with a gasp, she woke.

She gasped again and choked at an unfamiliar scent, like burning cedar and incense. Oh no, had one of Sunset Falls wandering hippies dosed her with more illicit fun than her body could handle?

She groaned and rolled to her side, one hand over her eyes, the other braced beside her. The smooth coolness of the floor under her palm calmed her little. If she had to puke from the spins, at least she was in the bathroom.

“Relax,” came a rumbling voice. “The trans-dimensional transference plays havoc with most biological systems. You’ll right yourself in a moment.”

Ugh. She’d forgotten why she stayed away from hippie types. Trans-dimensional transference? Right. She didn’t need any out-of-body experiences, not when she had to work so hard to keep body and soul together in the first place. She opened her eyes and peered between the gap in her spread fingers.

She wasn’t in the bathroom of her rented apartment. She wasn’t in any bathroom.

Her gaze wandered over the strange, sleek lines of the place she found herself. Blinking lights shined across a dashboard, and out the front window there appeared to be more of the glittering stars that seemed to be still swirling around her head.

She must’ve been given some really good shit. Because if anybody had asked her, she would’ve sworn she was on a spaceship…

Her drifting gaze locked on the guy who had spoken.

Aaaaand the guy was an alien.

She gargled out a laugh and tried to slam her fingers closed over the wacky view. She’d known Sunset Falls was odd. Well, great, now she finally fit in somewhere. Because she thought she was on a spaceship. With an alien.

Unfortunately, due to her missing finger, the gap didn’t entirely close so she was left staring at the guy.

The man was even more odd than anything she’d seen in Sunset Falls. He was tall, topping her by at least a foot, if she’d been standing. And his strange clothes reminded her a bit of the beautiful woman in the thrift shop: satiny textured like good leather, fitted to his leanly muscled shape. And those muscles were on blatant display in the close cut of the vest that left his arms bare. His dark skin was more unusual in Sunset Falls then her mono-lidded eyes, even without the purple overtones.

The deep, rich purple lightened to amethyst in a scalloped pattern that mostly resembled…scales. Fish scales, snake scales. Dragon scales, actually, like the ones on the homemade fireworks charms her ye-ye used to send her—against all US Postal Service rules—from China.

How had she ended up in some weird cosplay or theatrical production? She raked her fingers up into her hair—at least the short strands weren’t prickling with static electricity anymore—before grinding both palms over her closed eyes. The scars on her left hand abrading her eyelid were more effective than any “pinch me” plea.

She cracked open her left eye and peered through the gap of her missing ring finger.

Dragon-boy was still there.

She slapped her hands down on the floor and looked at the guy again. “Is this some sort of joke?”

He frowned at her. Against the rich hue of his skin, his eyes were a startling jade green. And the pupils at their center were cat’s-eye slits, not round. Those were very convincing colored contacts, even more convincing than the spaceship setting. This would be a great joke. On someone else.

“Have you not gone through a trans-dimensional transference before?” He tilted his head. His black hair was longer than hers but coarser and twisted tight, so the coils bristled with his movement, like there was infinite energy stored in the wound strands. “I thought you were a famous interstellar explorer.”

She frowned back at him. “I smoked pot one time,” she said defensively, holding up her forefinger. “I hardly think that qualifies me as an interstellar explorer.” Only when his frown deepened did she notice she’d gestured with her maimed left hand. Flushing, she tucked it down into her lap. She hated when people stared at the hole where her ring finger had been.

And then she noticed something else.

She was naked.

With a wheeze, she jackknifed upright, pulling her knees close and wrapping her arms around herself. If her arms had been long enough, she’d have wrapped them three or four times around. “Where are my clothes?” she demanded. “You creep! What did you do?!”

He squinted, his eyes almost closed, although she couldn’t tell if he was trying to give her some privacy or if he was just confused. “Nothing else comes through the trans-dimensional transference, other than you,” he said, as if that was obvious. “I have your assigned gear here on the ship. Let me go get—”

“Ship?” she echoed. A chill swept over her skin. Not just from being naked on the cold metal floor. “What ship?”

He took a step back, as if he too was just coming to the realization that something was off. “The Blissed. The ship we were assigned by the Octiron Corp for the Great Space Race,” he said in a tight tone. “You’re my teammate. Team Prism. We even have a logo. On your clothes. Which I should go get now.” Through his narrowed stare, he skimmed her nudity.

Teammates? She shrank back until her spine pressed against the bulkhead behind her. Oh no, the only thing she’d been worse at in school than science, math, and music was sports. And…guys. A low, subliminal hum rippled through her bones as she cringed into the wall. This ship, whatever it was, was moving. She’d heard of being shanghaied—she was Chinese, after all—but that didn’t happen anymore, did it?

“I’m not supposed to be here.” An edge of panic sharpened her words. “I don’t know how I got here but—”

“The trans-dimensional transference—”

“Stop saying that!” She didn’t even try to moderate the shrill edge to her tone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, you…you…” What character was he supposed to be?

He sagged against the wall opposite her. Somehow, despite his strangely scaled skin and even stranger eyes, the look of shock and dawning awareness on his angular face reassured her more than anything he might say.

“There was a black box,” he said slowly. “At least there was when they transported me.”

She stiffened, her protective arms sagging a little. “Yeah, a light came out of the box. Then there were stars. So many stars…”

He nodded. “That’s how Octiron brought us to the Paragon Galaxy. But the crossing can be rough. It feels like a dream.” His jaw shifted to one side, as if he was biting off his own fantasies. “Maybe you just forgot…”

This was not any dream she’d ever had. “I really don’t think I’d forget that I was a—what did you call me?—a famous interstellar explorer.” Her head was swimming not just with stars but with all the unfamiliar words. Octiron? Paragon? Just when she thought she’d mastered the English language… “There’s been a mistake. Obviously.” Ugh, considering she was nekkid, everything was obvious right now. She squeezed her bare thighs together and pressed her breasts into her uplifted knees, trying to dig her feet into her butt to keep anything from showing. “I’m not into this whole space-stripper thing.”

“It’s too late for this to be a mistake,” he said. “The race has already begun, and we’re behind because you’re late.” He stared her down. “Why are you late?”

She glared back at him. “I can’t be late when I never agreed to be here at all.”

He sagged even further down the wall, as if she had cut his knees out from underneath him. He closed those jade green eyes, his face going still and stark. “Are you saying I have to do this on my own?” His voice faded at the end.

She cringed, knowing she was letting this guy down. As if she hadn’t disappointed enough people in her life.

“I didn’t ask for this.” She softened her voice to ensure he understood and gave a brisk nod that felt a lot stronger and more decisive than she was inside. “Okay then. I’ll just…” She glanced around. “My clothes?”

He pushed away from the wall, his gaze averted from her. Which she appreciated. He didn’t even take a little peek. She knew because she watched him, watched him very, very closely because it wasn’t every day that she was asked to be teammates with a tall, muscly, sexy dude. The woman in leather would totally take this guy on.

But that wasn’t her.

He edged past her—the odd trousers clinging to his ass, which she knew because she was watching him very, very closely to make sure he didn’t peek—and disappeared down the short corridor.

With him gone, she glanced around, looking for the way out. Though he seemed nice enough, even if he was purple, she wasn’t taking any chances.

But as she looked for the exit sign, she got distracted by the “ship”. In high school, she’d worried that her accent was too thick to audition for school plays, so she worked on the set crew instead, and she knew enough to be impressed with the stagecraft of this cosplay. On the forward screen of the cockpit, an elaborate starfield swirled like something from a sci-fi movie. Personally, she preferred movies with fewer explosions, but to each his or her own. She supposed it wasn’t much of a role-playing adventure if there wasn’t some pretend danger.

Maybe it would’ve been fun to play along with this guy… Too bad she had to get back to the shop and return the box to Mr. Evens so he didn’t fire her.

The other half of would’ve-been Team Prism returned with an armful of fabric which he thrust at her wordlessly, his gaze fixed studiously somewhere over his left shoulder. He was being very polite, not like a regular guy at all. Maybe her scars made him not want to look. She didn’t blame him.

Her chest ached, not where the ugly scars were, but deeper, and she let her hair swing forward in a black curtain.

She plucked the fabric from his hands with a tart, “Thank you.” One touch—while she kept her gaze fixed on his face to watch for any peeking—told her these clothes weren’t like anything she’d ever dreamed of. They were more like his or the woman’s back at the shop, even more lavish than leather. Definitely not like her own secondhand clothes. And he thought these were right for her?

“Where are my things?” She clutched the layers to her chest, tucking her maimed hand in the folds.

He hazarded a glance at her, then away again. “I told you, you left everything behind during the—”

“Trans-dimensional transference, right,” she finished. “Okay, fine. These are…really nice.” She’d consider it payment for this awkward, unauthorized attempt to include her in this wacky game.

And maybe tomorrow, when she folded them away in the pressboard dresser in her rented apartment room, she’d touch the strange material and imagine what might have been.

She glanced toward him and swallowed. With all the guys she’d been with—fewer of them than she had fingers on her one hand—she’d always found an excuse to keep her shirt on and the lights off. He was the first guy to see her nude—assuming he could actually see through those wacky colored contacts. At the vulnerability, her skin prickled worse than when she’d grabbed that weird box.

“I’m getting dressed now,” she announced, so he knew not to look.

He inclined his head but kept his gaze pinned to a numeric pad on a nearby wall.

So gentlemanly. Still, she didn’t linger as she layered on the clothes. The pants fit her snugly but had plenty of give, and the pale gray tank top provided all the support her B-cup breasts required. She shrugged into the long-sleeve jacket—the sleeves more than a little too long—and fumbled a moment with the front closure. Not velcro, not a zipper. But at her touch, the edges sealed together, and the chill that had seeped through her from the metal floor finally faded.

Maybe she looked just the tiniest bit like the gorgeous, mysterious woman at the curio shop? For some reason, she felt like a new woman.

It felt…

Pretty awesome.

She stood and thrust her feet into the boots that had been at the bottom of the pile. They were off by at least a size too big, which seemed appropriate enough. If these clothes had been meant for the tall woman at the shop, there was no way she herself was big enough to fill such shoes.

Amy cleared her throat, and the guy turned around, his jade gaze sweeping her once from boots on up. A quiver of heat went through her, half interest, half embarrassment. He’d been expecting a tall, bold, interstellar explorer, and instead he got a short, scarred, B- student who’d squandered her venerable ancestors’ struggles while hoping for something better. Even if she didn’t know exactly what better might be.

Well, she wasn’t going to find it playing with this purple guy.

She put her right hand on her hip, the sleekness of her own stolen curves under her palm giving her some false confidence. “Okay, where’s the door?”

He blinked at her. “Door?”

She hitched her hand a little higher on her hip, as if that would make her taller. “The door. To leave.”

“Leave the ship?” He squinted. “You want me to space you?”

She sure felt spaced out. “Is that what you call it when someone doesn’t want to be here anymore?”

“Yes.” He drew out the word with reluctance.

She nodded decisively. “Space me.”

***

Luc was fairly certain his unwilling teammate had no idea what she was asking.

“To be clear,” he said slowly, “if I put you out the airlock, you will be ejected into the vacuum of space, where you will suffocate in an uncomfortable amount of time. Unless you can hold your breath more efficiently than seems likely for your physiology, in which case your warm-blooded, carbon-based life will be snuffed out by the unrelenting cold of outer space. And you would choose that over being my teammate in the Great Space Race.”

She eyed him, and though he was not familiar with her species, the consternation in the round, deep darkness of her gaze felt familiar enough. He saw it sometimes in himself when he confirmed in a reflective surface that his appearance was professionally acceptable in his place of employment. It was the look of someone who existed always on the lonely fringes of the galaxy, never at the center, so every whirl felt more precarious.

Her wide, black gaze fixed on the forward screen of the cockpit with its bright starfield before shooting back to him. “Look, I can see that you’re really dedicated to this game or race or whatever it is, but it’s…not my thing. I just…I’m not interested in pretending like this.” She bit her lower lip, her gaze wavering away from him again. “But I think I know what happened. I picked up the black box from the person who was meant to be your partner.”

By the Shining Lady of Perpetual Fire… “You stole it?” He glared at her. “I was promised an explorer, not a thief.” Although he supposed the difference between an explorer and the thief depended on whether one took what one found and whether anyone else objected.

She glared back. “I didn’t steal it,” she protested. “I took it accidentally. I just picked it up… And then I was here. Naked. With you looming. Not exactly something I signed up for.”

Keeping one eye on her, he queried the ship’s data core. “So you are not…” He read from the screen, “From planet Earth in the Milky Way Galaxy?”

She blinked. “Of course I’m from Earth. Everybody is.”

He skimmed through the highlighted warnings. And cursed under his breath. “Your natal spacetime is a closed world,” he said, trying to keep the accusation out of his voice. She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t even know about him at all or any other realities that were beyond the grasp of a closed-world dweller.

“This is so larfed,” he muttered. He spun to face her. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I told you that.” She waved one hand in a big circle, encompassing the ship, the starfield, her clothes, and him. “Do I look like I belong here?”

Since she asked…

Dressed in ship’s fatigues that were too large for her on most axis, she looked like a youngling playing at adventure. But if he saw past the too-long sleeves, the too-big boots, the too-wide dark eyes, he was suddenly aware of her delicately curvilinear beauty. Her smooth skin was lightly tinted with a dusky hue, like the first rays of rising sun though the blowing golden sands of the drakling homeworld, which only highlighted the hectic flush of outrage on her round cheeks. The silky strands of her black hair fell straight as the shadows between beams of starlight. Although the ships fatigues disguised the shape of her body now, he’d caught a glimpse before she covered up. Knowing he’d never win a drakling female as his brothers had, he’d learned to make do with every flavor and genus of enthusiastically consensual interstellar porn, but he’d never seen such harmonious proportions. They weren’t technically mathematically perfect—his precise mind had run the numbers when he’d forced himself to look away—but somehow the curves and angles and more of that satiny amber skin roused a hunger in him that he thought marked only his more feral brethren.

He cleared his throat. “You may not belong here, but trust me when I tell you that you would fare even more poorly out there in the vastness of space.”

“You can’t me keep here,” she said, a rising shrill in her voice.

“I can’t get rid of you either,” he said with a touch of equal desperation. “The trans-dimensional transference—the black box—won’t work again until it’s time to send us home. If you hadn’t stolen it—”

“Accidentally,” she reminded him pertly.

He lifted one shoulder. “I need…” He swallowed hard, unable to believe what he was about to propose. It broke all galactic codes on closed worlds, not to mention it was wrong, but she wasn’t on a closed world anymore, was she? He had to win this prize. And that wasn’t going to happen if he got kicked out of the race before he even started. Crushing his hesitation with a ruthlessness than he knew would’ve surprised his brothers, he started again. “I need a teammate to stay in the race. If you stay, the black box will take you home at the end. And if we win…”

He let his voice trail off enticingly. He’d never tried to be enticing before.

She gave him a wary look, clearly not impressed by his attempt at enticing.

“If we win,” he continued with dogged determination, the same tone he used to explain intersystem tax codes at continuing education seminars. Except this time he was talking about treasure. Although his reluctant teammate had the same glazed expression his students usually bore. “If we win,” he said one more time, “the prize will be immeasurable riches.”

He hated to say immeasurable since his job was about measuring finances, but for her sake, he couldn’t very well explain the galactic credit system. But if the explorer she’d accidentally replaced was from this same planet of Earth, then there must’ve been some way to convert galactic credits to Earth currency. His gut tightened with hopeless desperation. He’d never intended to attempt this adventure on his own; he was supposed to be teamed with someone who knew how to…adventure. He stood straighter. He would do what he had to. “Riches such as you could never imagine,” he offered in a lower voice, “multiplied by a number you’d never dare dream.”

“I’m not interested in dreams.” She nibbled at her lip, which brought a sunset-bright flush to the soft swell. “But…what kind of riches?” She narrowed her eyes, the stubby little spikes of her black eyelashes pointing at him accusingly.

He took a breath. He needed to convince her, but he didn’t want to lie to her. He wasn’t like his brothers with their boasting and bluster. Still, the less he revealed to her, the lighter sentencing would be if he was ever convicted of interfering with off-world development. “The Great Space Race producers have set us three tasks,” he explained. “For each task we successfully complete, we will receive points and prizes. If we complete all three tasks, we win the grand prize. And you’ll be financially set for the rest of your life.” He paused dramatically, then added, “The only catch is, parts of the race will be broadcast for viewing by”—larf it, he’d almost said the galaxy; it was going to be difficult to remember to keep her in the dark—“by fans of the race.”

To his surprise, she nodded slowly. “So it’s a reality television show.”

He blinked as his universal translator took a long moment to translate her words and access the concept. He returned her slow nod, although he wasn’t sure how “reality” translated to “entirely made up” in her Earther language, but he supposed that was exactly what the Great Space Race was. Not that it mattered as long as the fortune and the fame were real enough to blow away his brothers once and for all.

“One other thing,” he said. “You’re going to have to pretend to be the explorer you replaced. Our producer might end our race if he finds out we aren’t a real team.”

She looked down at herself, her hands dropping to her waist beneath the ships fatigues, her odd number of fingers uncountable under the too-long sleeves. Her lips twisted wryly. “You don’t think it’s obvious I’m not her?” She raised her dark gaze to his and scrunched her shoulders together a little. “Not exactly space race teammate material, right? I’m not big enough or cool enough.”

He tilted his head, his universal translator whirling in confusion again. “Your body size and temperature are perfectly acceptable for this task.”

He wasn’t quite sure why his own internal heat ticked upward as her hands moved down over the swell of her hips.

After a long, breathless moment, she rolled her shoulders back and straightened. “You know what? What the hell. I’ll do it.” But even as she agreed, she was nibbling at that lip again. “I mean, Mr. Evens can’t be too mad, considering it was his little black box that got me here, right?”

“I don’t know this Mr. Evens,” Luc said, considering he didn’t know any Earthers except her. “But that would seem unfair to me.”

She flashed him a little smile. “Do I have to wear makeup like yours? I can spend an hour in front of the mirror and still not get my eyeliner straight on both sides.”

That surprised a short laugh out of him. “No…costume like mine.” He gave her a slow once-over, really looking at her for the first time since she’d appeared. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

She lifted her chin, making herself just a little taller. “Don’t. You don’t have to blow smoke up my ass. I know I’m not perfect, wouldn’t even dream of thinking it, but apparently I’m all you got, so there you go.”

He froze. Smoke? Had she somehow guessed what he was? But how could a closed-worlder know about draklings? “I can’t blow smoke up your…anywhere,” he said with a hint of a stammer. “I’m not—”

She waved one hand, her round cheeks darkening again with a flush. “I didn’t mean… Never mind. If you play for the other team, that’s cool with me.”

He frowned. “You are the only one on my team. It’s just you and me. And all the galaxies of viewers.” He grimaced. Larf it. He’d told himself not to make that mistake.

But she didn’t seem suspicious of his slip. “Okay then. We’re a team. Onward to riches.” She held her hand out, her fingers curled into a fist. He eyed the gesture and hesitantly echoed it.

She closed the distance between them with a gentle bump of their hands. “So, what’s next?”