“ How do you turn the water on?”
Rias’s voice startled Tikaya so much she dropped the sphere. It slipped from her fingers and clunked on the high table where she sat. She caught it before it rolled off the edge, though she almost dropped it again when she spotted Rias.
He stood by the tub, his weapons, boots, and shirt already on the floor next to his rucksack, and a towel and bar of soap on the ledge. She stared at his muscled chest. If he had been on the gaunt side when she first met him, that was not the case now. Hard to imagine someone filling out on that abysmal military food, but perhaps it suited him. Scar tissue scored his torso and arms: several old gashes and two dense knots where he must have been shot. Some of those wounds had been life-threatening and represented a lot of pain. As with Krychek, he never spoke of it, never complained.
“ Should I be feeling self-conscious under this scrutiny?” Rias asked. “Or are you only looking this way while thinking about translating runes?”
Heat flushed her face. She decided his first question was safest to answer. “Push on that symbol and slide it up, then rotate it for hot or cold.”
“ Hot? Excellent.” He turned on the water and hopped up to sit on the edge facing her. “You’re engrossed there. You must have found something good.”
She brightened, taking this for an invitation to share her findings. “Yes! It’s a journal someone kept. You must be wondering about this place, these people. It’s all explained in here, though if I wasn’t sitting here I’d think it the stuff of a storyteller’s imagination. These people-they called themselves the Orenki-they came from another planet. A group was persecuted for their scientific research methods and driven out of their homeland. They came here and experimented-this is chilling by the way-experimented on primitive humans because we were biologically similar to their people. They wanted to come up with devastating weapons so they could return to their home world, use them on their own kind, and take over.”
Rias opened his mouth to speak, but she barely noticed. She still had to tell him the best part.
“ You’re going to love these instructional, uhm, illusions-sorry, no better word for it in my language or yours. The first one I found shows how to repair and maintain this pumping facility. It looks like there are thousands of sets of instructions on all sorts of mechanical things, though I haven’t quite figured out how to search through them. They’re organized by codes. But I will figure it out. It’s just a matter of…”
Rias turned off the water, and Tikaya realized she had been talking for a long time. And that she had cut him off. She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, did you want to speak?”
Rias chuckled. “From another planet, you say?”
Tikaya, deciding she should let him talk for a while, offered an encouraging, “Mmhmm.”
“ I’m too ignorant of astronomy to even ask how that’d be possible, but given what I’ve seen here, I can’t claim to be utterly surprised. I’m hoping they weren’t ultimately successful, because I’d not be comfortable knowing beings capable of making such weapons were still out there.”
Yes, that was an unsettling idea, but Tikaya was more concerned about human beings learning how to use those weapons. She could not allow the Turgonian emperor to have this technology. Or a disaffected marine colonel. Or anyone.
“ Rias?”
“ Yes?”
Tikaya wanted to tell him, ask him for his help going forward. But when she gazed at him, at the scar on his eyebrow and the war wounds on his torso, she stopped herself. He might share her passion for academics, but she could not forget he was a soldier. He had been loyal to a totalitarian government his entire life, and his one disloyal act had cost him more suffering than anyone should have to endure. Would he truly choose such a road again? “You should bathe before the water gets cold.”
He watched her with sad eyes, and she wondered how much of her thoughts he read.
“ After all,” she said, “you’ve seen me naked. It’s only fair I get to see just how much of a Turgonian legend you are.”
That drew a self-deprecating chuckle, but not the repartee she expected. He slid his trousers off and climbed into the tub. Despite her words, she dropped her gaze to the sphere to give him privacy. She glanced up a few times, but Rias seemed lost in thought. He was considering Sicarius’s offer, she knew it. Probably trying to figure out if he could work her into his life once he had everything back together. She supposed, in some less than ideal scenario, she could see living in Turgonia with him, but slaving for the emperor, creating ciphers her own people would never crack if there was another war? That was not going to happen. And even the rest made her grimace. He would be off at sea most of the year, and she would be alone amongst strangers, thousands of miles from her friends and family.
“ That bad of a show, huh?” Rias leaned against the tub wall, arms folded on the ledge, chin resting on them.
She tried to disguise her blank stare but doubted she succeeded.
“ The show-me,” he clarified. “Nude. Never mind. I can see you’re busy with the sphere. I understand the appeal of a puzzle, though I fear your enthusiasm means I’ll be ogling only myself tonight.” His smile was wistful but accepting.
“ Oh.” She shoved the sphere into a pocket and ran a hand through her hair, which still hung loose. “That wasn’t the puzzle I was pondering.”
Rias cocked an eyebrow. “No?”
Better to bring it up for discussion than guessing at-and maybe misinterpreting-his thoughts. For all she knew, he was musing over ways to remove a wart from his toe. “I heard Sicarius talking to you.”
“ Ah.” He nodded with understanding, but did not say anything. No words to assure her she had nothing to worry about.
“ I couldn’t fault you for being tempted, but…” She searched his face, but his eyes were cast down, thoughts apparently turned inward. “Rias, I love you, you know that already. But I’m not going to do anything to hurt my people, and I’m definitely not going to work for your emperor.”
“ I thought not,” he murmured.
“ And…” She drew a deep breath, “I’m not going to let Bocrest, that assassin, or anyone else walk out of here with weapons that could destroy millions. I don’t know how I’m going to stop them yet, but you’ll have to kill me to keep me from trying.” She lifted her chin. There, she had said it. Maybe it would have been smarter to lead him to believe otherwise, but she did not want to lie to him, even a lie of omission. Maybe that made her naive, but, so be it.
“ Good.”
“ Good?” She rapped a knuckle on the table. “Would it be possible to get more than one-line responses? Do I need to posit my statements as math problems?”
Rias chuckled. “Oh, you’re hard on me, Tikaya.” He dunked his head under the water, ruffled his hair dry, hopped out of the tub, and grabbed the towel. “I was proud of myself for baring my feelings to you last night. I’d been pacing through the hills rehearsing that while the camp was conspiring to leave me.”
Even frustrated with him, she had a hard time ignoring the ‘show.’ He wrapped the towel around his waist and padded over, rivulets of water snaking down the gullies between his muscles. He sat on the edge of her table, and she reminded herself to look at his face.
“ I’m not used to confiding in people,” he said. “Being a captain or an admiral, it’s a solitary vocation. You’re expected to be infallible, even omnipotent. Sharing your thoughts, showing any kind of fear or hesitancy, might crumble that facade, and that’s something men need to believe in when chaos is erupting around them and odds seem impossible.”