“What?” she said.
“Because of how I feel when I’m not holding it. It’s the same as how I feel now.” He touched her chin. “I feel like I should trust you, Grace Gushiken.”
“You should?” she said, the feeling of his fingers without the curse of another person’s emotions a wonder, a revelation.
“Yeah.” His face was open, and she suspected without the sword, his heart would be too. You are on the edge of something marvelous. A rare, curious thing: this man wants to trust you. Really wants to, so you need to make it right. You need to be worthy of it. “Yeah, I think so.”
She folded his hand in hers, then pulled him down beside her on the edge of the bed. Not some wanton display, but carefully, like his hand was made of snowflakes and all around was fire. “I guess I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I want you to. I guess I don’t know why. I guess … I guess I don’t deserve it.”
He sighed. “None of us deserve it. We’ve all done,” and here, his eyes flicked towards the chest at the end of his bed, “terrible things. The trick, as near as I can work out, is to stop doing terrible things when you realize.”
She frowned, looking down at his hand, in hers. It was the metal one, and she hadn’t considered that when she’d taken it. Just grabbed on to him, wanting to make it all real. Grace realized she didn’t care he had a metal hand, despite what her father would have said. He would have called Nate half a man and dismissed him, like he’d always dismissed her. Her father had always thought of her as a mongrel/failure. She looked at the sword he held, then the sword she held, and laughed.
“What?” said Nate. “I’ve got to admit, this is weird. We’re sitting in a bed holding hands, but … well, it’s weird.” But he didn’t pull away from her.
It wasn’t everyday a man followed her into a den of horrible monsters, even when he knew she might be the worst monster of them all. That showed dedication. “Not knowing. It’s … different. I can’t tell what you were feeling.” She smiled through the cascade of her hair. “The gentle quiet. It feels … like a miracle.”
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here. Uncharted waters, Grace.” His voice was low and quiet. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t know … I don’t know what I want.”
“You want me to stop lying,” said Grace. “To you.”
“Hell,” said Nate. “That'd be nice, but whatever. What I want is for you to decide.”
“Okay,” said Grace. Still sitting there in the quiet of his cabin, a human next to her without their emotions boiling up to consume her. She laughed, and didn’t know why. “Okay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
When the klaxon went off, Nate was still feeling stupid.
He’d sat with Grace in his cabin for what seemed an hour, talking of little things. She still holding his damn metal hand, and laughing when he said things. He’d asked her why she laughed and she’d said because I didn’t see what you said coming … for the first time, I’m surprised.
Their conversation had wound down like an old clock, the distances between the ticks and tocks getting longer. She’d leaned forward, whispered thank you, Nathan Chevell into his ear. He’d felt the brush of her lips on his cheek, and then she was gone, feet clanking with purpose down the metal halls of the Tyche.
Nate wanted more than that brushed kiss after an hour of talking with her. He should have been sleeping. Nate should have been patching things up with Kohl and El. He should have been seeing how Hope was getting on. But he couldn’t pull himself away, like he was supposed to talk to her. And that left him slow-headed, dumb with some fool emotion or other, and that was no way for the captain to be. The captain had to be above all that. The captain had to be…
Human. Nate, you’re only human.
He pushed that thought down. The captain had to be better than human. Because there were a bunch of other people who depended on him to be so much more.
The lips against his cheek had still left him feeling stupid, despite what his rational mind had said. And then the klaxon had sounded. He jumped to the console, almost tripping over the sword he still held — you came in handy, after all — and pushed the comm. “What the hell,” he said, “is that fucking noise?”
“That fucking noise is a collision alarm with rocks raining from the sky,” said El. “You had enough sleep?”
“No,” said Nate. “Why are their rocks? Aren’t the Ezeroc on the other side of the planet?”
“No,” said El. “You’d better get up here.”
Fucking fuck. Those damn bugs just didn’t quit. One thing was for sure though. They wanted to infect his crew. They wanted to take humans, and — a strange thought nudged him — maybe Grace more than anyone else. Like she had a connection with them. Like they wanted to eat up espers. Good luck to them. They could have all the rest of the espers in the universe except this one.
This one was … his.
• • •
He hit the flight deck at a run, siding into his acceleration couch. El was working on her console, the holo stage alight with telemetry. Lots of incoming rocks.
She tossed him a look. “What’s with the sword?”
“Uh,” he said.
“Never mind. What’s with the open shirt?”
“I—”
“Cap, you need to get your shit together,” said El. “We are under attack.”
He zipped up his flight suit. “It’s been a long morning. Or evening. What time is it?”
“Technically, it’s morning. Dawn’s coming.” El looked over at him. “It’s me who should be sorry. I was … out of line, before.”
“Save it,” said Nate. “Tell me the important stuff. We can get all mushy later.”
“You’re the boss,” she said, her finger stabbing at points of light in the holo. “Here, we have our basic asteroids becoming meteors. There’s no aiming on those, just a bunch of what we would call carpet-bombing. At least I’m guessing there’s no aiming because they’re not coming at us.”
“Why didn’t we—”
“See them coming? Yeah.” El tapped on the console, the holo pulling out. “Here, we’ve got the planet. A while ago we lost the link to the orbital satellites around Absalom Delta. Offline or some shit, Hope could tell you more.”
“I didn’t know this why?” said Nate.
“You were doing white-knighting,” said El. “In the woods, and then you got your fool self hurt, and since then you’ve been,” and here she made air quotes, “’sleeping.’”
“I was—”
“It doesn’t matter,” said El. “What does matter, since you want just the important stuff, is that it looks like at least one of them will impact,” and here, El made the holo draw a line between one rock and the crumbling tower Nate and Grace had been in, “with that science facility you were at.”
“Not a science facility,” said Nate.
“I reckon not,” agreed El. “I also reckon that the bugs want it gone. Which is an odd thing to be saying, like they have a will and a purpose, and two days ago we thought we were all alone in the big bad universe, but there you have it. What was it, anyway?”