Page 23 of Alien Devil’s Crown

Every thought I had stopped at that grip.

“My turn,” she said.

I had one hand at her waistband and the other reaching for the fastening at mine when the comm on my discarded jacket came alive.

“Rylos.” Varrick, oblivious, eternal. “Credential build’s hit a compatibility problem on the deep-floor set. I need a risk call before I bake it in. War room.”

The ship came back. The clock, the job, the ten of us going into the Spire and the two holding the sky returned to the front of my mind all at once.

Lika’s hand remained around me. Her expression suggested she was willing to test whether command could be exercised from the mat.

“On my way,” I told the comm. Then, to her, because leaving without terms would have been cowardice: “I owe you the rest.”

“No,” she said, giving me one slow stroke through the fabric before she released me. “Your delivery is badly behind schedule.”

I got off her. It was much harder than it should have been. Four meters of mat between us and I could still smell both of us on the air. I picked up my jacket and discovered no arrangement of it concealed the state she’d left me in.

“Match to me,” I said, because some reflexes die slowly. “Four-two.”

She sat up, hair loose, mouth soft, entirely pleased with herself. “You lost control of the field, Architect. Review the footage.”

Varrick was elbow-deep in the credential build when I reached the war room. He looked at my face, looked once at the jacket held too low across my front, and developed an intense professional interest in his console.

I made the risk call, but my attention kept returning to the training bay for the rest of the watch: Lika under me, wet on my hand, and unfinished.

LIKA

The last supper started as a briefing and lost its discipline inside ten minutes. Nobody tried to restore it. I was the last to put my notes away.

I’d dressed for it wrong, which is to say I’d dressed for it, shipboard grays squared away like a briefing. The first thing I saw through the hatch was the giant in an apron. A smiling vegetable was printed across it.

Nobody had warned me and nobody ever would, because to this crew there was nothing to warn about. I couldn’t stop looking at the apron.

The mess hall table was built for fourteen. Eleven of us occupied it, and the boar was on the bench, forelegs up, an arrangement everyone but me treated as furniture. Anhara had cooked root vegetables from a crate she’d carried aboard. I followed the smell into the compartment before I remembered to greet anyone.

The pairs arrived together and the noise rose. I sat where I’d been put, mid-table, trying not to study everyone like a briefing. Six years of Conclave dinners had trained me to read seating charts, alliances, who spoke first and who watched. I knew those dinners. I had never in my life been at one of these.

“He won’t eat the green ones,” Bronwen was telling Anhara, feeding Turnip off her own plate with a fork, which surely defeated some purpose. “He has standards. He ate a man’s boot once, but the green ones are beneath him.”

“He ate half a Conclave trooper,” Zarek said, to the table, informationally.

“He was helping.”

Across from me, the lynx flowed down from a storage shelf like poured mercury, took a cut of vat-meat from Varrick’s plate, and was back on the shelf before the plate stopped rocking. Varrick didn’t look up from his slate. “I saw that.”

“You never see it,” Carys said.

“It’s my dinner he’s eating.”

Brevan stood at one point with his cup. “A toast. Six years at war, less than half a year collecting keys, and tomorrow...”

“Tomorrow, we rob the worst people alive,” Bronwen finished for him, raising her fork with the green vegetable still on it. “To the worst people alive. May they scream...”

“Beautifully,” half the table chorused. Brevan sat back down, toast hijacked, dignity intact only because he let it go with the grace of a man who has learned when a room cannot be worked.

The talk ran six directions at once. Tamsin and Talon argued drift currents with the ease of people who had done this together a hundred times.

She called his extraction corridor conservative. He called her alternative a stunt with a flight plan. They settled it the way they always did, flying both versions with their hands over the table until Tamsin’s hand won.