Chapter 2 #2
Wrong about what? She’d said she needed his help, but how did she even know who he was? He was at the opposite end of the ship from passenger relations.
He grabbed her wrist—with meticulous placement, so as not to snag his quill-scales in the loosely woven construction of her multi-hued pullover tunic—and started hauling her deeper into the engine room.
“What are you…?” She tried to set her feet against the deck, but the soles of her soft socks wouldn’t hold, and for all the heft of her sine wave curves, she couldn’t break free from his greater strength.
“You may have been pierced.”
“But I didn’t even touch your pet.”
“Not by Lub. I am Szauralithyn. And you touched me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if that mattered. “I didn’t mean… I don’t remember seeing Szauralithyn in the handbooks.” The exotic word rolled off her tongue perfectly.
He would not be impressed. “Because my people would never sign up with an alien dating agency.”
“So you drag women off to your cave instead?”
Despite the urgency, he halted, sputtering. “I am not…”
But he rather was.
With the same care he’d maneuver an unstable core reactor cube—not to say gentle but with calculated restraint—he pivoted her clenched hand upright. When he nudged aside the wide cuff of her sleeve, the little decorative knots around the rim bounced across his fingertips.
“Show me.”
“It’s not bad,” she protested even as her fingers uncurled.
“How do you know?”
They both stared down at her open palm.
A tiny row of puncture wounds marked the middle. When he squeezed her delicate bones together, a single clear bead welled up, followed by a swirl of scarlet.
“It tingles,” she whispered. “Why?”
With a grunt, he circled his thumb, wiping away the mingled fluids. “You are reacting to my quill-scales.”
Her skin was too soft; only a few areas of thicker calluses on her fingers, randomly situated, had partly protected her.
But not enough.
Abruptly, he remembered she had made the colorful veils in the Starlit Salon.
He had seen her working alone there after Felicity had invited everyone to the recital.
The shrouds had not seemed to serve any particular purpose—anyway, not before becoming the refuge of the resonark in its plasmic form—and they were not even fabricated but woven by hand.
These hands, insufficiently hardened, mostly too soft. And yet one had reached out to steady him when he stumbled.
A waste of material, effort, and flesh.
“You won’t die,” he said gruffly. “At least not from this minimal exposure.”
To his shock, she let out another laugh. “Is that supposed to be comforting?”
He stared at her. “Would my comforting matter?”
When she tilted her head, the end of one braid slipped down over her shoulder. The brushy end tangled in the smaller quill-scales around his knuckles.
With a slightly frustrated breath, she tilted her head the other way, freeing the braid. “Sorry, sorry. Is contact alone a problem?”
“No. Only penetration.”
Her breath this time was deeper for some reason, the rise of her breasts hitching. “That’s…good, I guess.”
“If you won’t come, then stay here,” he growled before stalking off.
But his sensitive hearing caught her mutter: “Oh, I wish I could come…”
Why did she say that when she’d been resisting him?
It didn’t matter, he told himself. He needed to dilute his venom in her body, then he could get back on track. Just him, Lub, and the engines.
The med kits had been calibrated for the species aboard, so of course the one in this module had an antidote for Szauralithyn toxin. He’d never had to use it.
No one had ever touched him.
She was waiting right where he’d left her, surrounded by shadows and looking a little lost with her shoulders hunched, cradling her hand.
When he took her wrist again, she flinched. Her gasp didn’t move much air, and yet he felt it like a punch.
Disgruntled and a bit dismayed, he said, “Just me.”
“I didn’t see you.” Her voice shook.
There’d been no need to squander lumes on himself and Lub, but the engine module must seem so dark to Earther eyes. He tapped at the doubled datpad affixed to his uniform sleeve, and the ambient lighting increased, bright enough to make him squint.
The obsidian centers of her eyes also constricted, but from the steadying of her breath, he assumed he had offered her comfort with the change.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
He gave no acknowledgment; he hadn’t intended her to notice his concession. “Keep your hand here.” He pressed her knuckles to the empty work counter and flattened her fingers to expose the tiny purple perforations. “This might sting.”
“What is—” She gasped again, an insubstantial vacuum pop in his ear, when he broke the gel ampule of antivenin across her palm. “Suvan!”
Though her sharp inhalation seemed to steal some of his air, it was his name in that trembling tone that inexplicably ratcheted his pulse. She’d said his full title when she greeted him, but her timbre now was different, lower and more urgent.
“This will neutralize the pain,” he told her as he worked the transdermal salve into her skin with firm, smooth strokes.
If only the numbing compound in the antivenin would work on his strange awareness of her, this prickle across his skin beneath his quill-scales, sinking like an ache into his bones.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she whispered. “The tingles feel…” Another hissed breath seemed to contradict her stoic claim, and a shiver racked her, but she didn’t pull away from him.
He kept her hand pinned until the last hint of violet faded from the wounds and a tiny wisp of vapor curled up from her palm.
Her slow exhalation seemed proof the intervention had prevented any lasting harm from him. He used a steriwipe to remove the sticky ampule gel before spraying a sealant over the cleaned punctures. Then he let her go.
With the lights bright enough for her to see, he expected her to immediately make her escape.
Instead, she curled her hand between her breasts, her wide brown gaze fixed on him. “What…was that?”
The question hung in the air. Belatedly, he realized that in addition to the module being too dark for her, it was likely also too cold. It was cold for him too, but better for the engines.
He noticed because the protective contraction of her flesh had caused the fine hairs on her exposed forearm, crossed in front of her, to prickle like his own spines.
And on either side of her fist, her tightened nipples cast dim shadows that maybe only his sensitized eyes would perceive against the complicated, colorful weave of her sweater.
He refused to be ashamed. She had grabbed him, after all. “Szauralithyn venom. It’s a highly volatile mélange of neuroactive nucleotides. Some vasodilation cascading and somatosensory hyperesthesia. But any bioelechemical effects are almost always transitory.”
She didn’t blink. “What…was that?”
He grunted. “I poisoned you. Only a little.”
To avoid her unwavering—condemning?—stare, he turned away to repack the med kit.
He’d told her the venom caused body-wide overexcitation and sensitivity, but that wasn’t supposed to be something that he would experience himself, only his accidental victim.
Yet despite her silence, he felt the moment she spun on her stockinged heel and fled.