Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Mara
The morning begins the way all my mornings begin nowadays, with me on my knees, violently vomiting into the toilet.
I finish the morning ritual, then brush my teeth twice.
And now, my mind fills with thoughts of last night.
How I had dinner with Cayzor of Eighteen, here in my quarters.
He opened up to me, telling me the origin story of that scar on his face and the tragedy of what happened to his parents and brothers.
Some evil House on Chronos is trying to somehow rework the way Illibrium chooses its miners?
Terrible. Unacceptable. They must be stopped.
And I can’t get over how sexy Cayzor looked, sitting on that chair across from me, eating lasagna.
This has got to be hormones, right?
Because there is no other reasonable explanation for the fact that I, a serious professional, spent an entire evening across a table from a coworker, talking about difficult subjects, and all I could think about was how much I wanted his lips on mine.
And meanwhile, I’m pregnant with some other guy’s baby.
I’ve read about this, how pregnancy hormones can wreak havoc on a woman’s libido.
Thank the gods for the gloves, honestly. There are about nine rules against so much as brushing one of these males bare-handed, and I am beginning to understand, deep in my hormonally compromised bones, exactly what those rules are for.
He told me last night that the Fever Brothers have the rare ability to scent their bride prior to the mating clasp. And then he told me that yes, he’d accidentally inhaled my scent while we were standing close in the kitchen and… we’re not compatible.
Fine. Okay.
I’m a grown woman, I can take a no, I’ve taken worse nos from lesser males.
Beings say no. Except I know not to trust a clean reading off a sensor that’s operating in conditions it was never built for.
You flag it and you retest under normal conditions, because a sensor in an abnormal environment will give you a confident, wrong answer every single time and never once tell you it’s struggling.
And I am, currently, operating under some extremely abnormal conditions. And if some small, stupid, hormone-drunk part of me is a little bit relieved to have found a reason not to entirely believe him…
I pause as I get dressed, checking myself in the full-length mirror. My stomach is still reasonably flat with that normal bit of roundness that I can never seem to lose. But it does feel firmer and less soft.
My body is a chemical circus right now. I cannot have an affair with Cayzor of Eighteen, and then leave when this job is over.
It’s physically impossible, plus morally wrong.
We’re coworkers working on a tough case.
I just need to focus on the job and not on the male I’m secretly wishing was my new boyfriend.
Good thing he doesn’t know I’m also pregnant. We need to focus on this job and this case, not on what’s happening with my body right now.
I’ve traveled across the four sectors to audit Timbur Minecorp’s power grid and I’ve learned that the mystery of who killed his parents and who sabotaged the grid is the same story.
Wow. And he warned me of the danger involved with tracking both at the same time.
Cayzor offered me a way out and I insisted on staying involved.
I put on my gloves and boots because I have a grid to crack and work to complete.
Time to get going.
Andrew steps out of his apartment door the same moment I step out of mine, which happens most mornings. He falls into step beside me down the hall, coffee in hand, already bright. “Morning. You look tired.”
“Yeah, thanks. I did wake up a little too early. I was having trouble sleeping and I can’t even explain why.”
“Who are you and what have you done with my sister? Usually you sleep like a rock.” He knocks his shoulder into mine, gentle, and I knock back, and it’s the easiest thing in the world, the two of us, it always has been.
We reach the elevator and step inside. When the doors start to slide closed, our neighbors race down the hallway.
“Wait, hold that door,” a voice booms.
One of the Fever Brothers, Hook, fills most of the elevator, enormous and cheerful, a head and a half taller than Andrew, which is saying something.
My new friend Leah tucks in beside him, and she’s rounder than the last time I saw her up close, hand resting on the curve of her belly, second baby well on its way.
She’s only got one more month of work before she takes off for her maternity leave.
Clamped to her leg, peering up at us with enormous eyes, is a small child with darling ridges on his forehead who must be Argyl.
“Room for three more,” Hook rumbles.
“No problem,” I smile at them, truly pleased to see my neighbors.
They all squeeze inside. The doors close and we start moving down to the first floor.
“Morning, you two.” Leah’s delighted, as she is by everything.
“Argyl, say hi.” The small child declines to say hi and instead hides his face in her leg.
“He’s decided he’s shy this week. It’ll pass.
Last week he told a Lurk guard his entire life story unprompted. ”
“Maybe tomorrow we’ll get to hear his life story too,” Andrew says, grinning down at the kid.
Argyl peeks out at him, considering.
The elevator continues down.
And Hook, in the tone of a male remarking on the weather, says, “Scar was up on your floor last night.”
Oh heck. My cheeks instantly heat up.
“Late, too,” he adds, conversational. “Didn’t leave till…what was it?” He glances at Leah.
“Twenty-two hundred,” she supplies, radiant. “Give or take.”
Jeez. They were watching us?
Andrew’s head turns. “Scar was at your place last night?”
“We had a work meeting.” My voice comes out admirably level. “About the grid. He’s got the old records I needed. He stayed for dinner too because it ran long.”
“Dinner,” Leah repeats, with enormous satisfaction.
I give her a sharp glance. “Something to add, Leah?”
“Nope.” She beams at the elevator doors. “Nothing at all. Argyl, sweetheart, don’t pick that up off the floor.”
Andrew’s still looking at me, his brow furrowed.
Finally, the elevator stops and the doors open.
“Goodbye, hope you have a great day. I’m off to drop Argyl at daycare.” Leah gives her husband a kiss then waves goodbye to me as she heads for public transport with her son on her hip.
Hook lifts one enormous hand in farewell and heads around the long way toward the mine’s main entrance.
Andrew and I go our usual way, toward the side doors.
And that’s when I decide I’m not going to tell my brother what I learned last night, which is unusual considering Andrew and I don’t have secrets.
Except that most of what happened last night involved stories that aren’t mine to tell.
The records, sure, that’s the job. But the rest of it was personal.
Something I know Cayzor doesn’t tell everyone.
I suspect I’m one of the few beings he’s fully opened up to about this and I need to take that trust seriously.
“So.” Andrew bumps my shoulder again, grinning, back to himself entirely. “Since when are you and the scary miner having cozy dinners?”
“Since he brought me the grid records he keeps on his personal system. He’s helping with the audit. That’s it.”
“Uh-huh.” He’s still grinning. “Be careful with those Fever Brothers, Mar. Seriously. I’ve heard bad things about them. They were banished and demoted to the worst housing on Timbur for a reason.”
“Thanks for the warning but I feel I’ve gotten to know Cayzor pretty well and I trust him. He’s someone I can work with.”
“Cayzor?”
“Oh, that’s his birth name.”
He looks at me, puzzled. “You’ve only had one dinner with him and you call him by his given name and you’re defending his family. What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing. I just feel friendly towards him.
We’re coworkers who get along well. And I got the schematics,” I say.
“The whole pre-upgrade archive. Load histories, failure logs, everything, going back forty years. It was all sitting on Cayzor’s system, nobody ever thought to keep it after the upgrade except him. ”
Andrew’s whole face lights up, the way it does when a job cracks open. “The full archive? Mar, that’s the thing we’ve been missing.” He’s already thinking, already moving. “That changes everything. We can actually work the old grid now and get this job finished faster than we thought.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Good.” He holds the side door for me. “Great. Let’s dig into it today.”
And we head into the mine, the two of us, a real lead in hand at last.