Chapter 5
The grim gargoyle engineer had kissed her.
Mariah was prone to believing a lot of fantastical notions and outright improbabilities.
As they hurt no one, why not? Maybe the chunks of quartz she found on the northern California beaches back home had no mystical powers, but they were semi-smooth and sparkly which was delightful enough.
And sure, unicorns might not exist, but it was tricky to prove a negative—and impossible to do so across the infinity of spacetime.
Plus, she wanted to believe in unicorns.
But she couldn’t believe Suvan had kissed her to save her.
Unfortunately, there was no time to consult her tarot to bring order to her thoughts.
Suvan corralled her back to the booth, though she noted he very carefully didn’t touch her again. “Gather your things,” he said, sounding subdued. “Even if the resonark is not a threat, it’s late, and I cannot leave you here alone.”
She wanted to protest that it wasn’t so late, and she wasn’t alone because he was there too. But since he probably had to work, she should give him a break.
Plus he was right that she shouldn’t be alone here. Not because she feared the resonark, but because she’d hoped winning a ticket to this Cosmic Connections Cruise would be the—what had Suvan called it?—the state change she’d been seeking.
“It’ll just take me a second,” she told him.
As she started to sweep her stash into her moon-face tote, Suvan winced. “They will tangle.”
He’d worried about that before, and she’d joked about scissors. She felt bad now, hearing the suppressed note of agitation in his gravelly voice.
“I suppose as chief engineer, you need to be conscientious about maintaining order, to keep the ship running.” She angled her hips into the booth and settled herself for a more organized retrieval.
“Can’t have a ship running amok right into the heart of a null cloud.
Unless there’s an energy ghost haunting it, of course. ”
With an aggrieved glance at the resonark and one slightly more resigned toward her, Suvan settled again opposite her.
He reached for the hanks nearest him, putting them in sequence of color, although not quite as she would’ve expected, choosing by saturation instead of hue.
“And yet I behaved without sense. I am sorry.”
She paused to catch his eye. “Chief, if you think I’m in trouble, please do whatever you think is best to save me. Although yeah, ask first if there’s time. And I’ll do the same for you. Deal?”
For the longest moment, she thought he would scoff at the possibility of her needing to save him. But then he nodded, a slightly jerky imitation of the Earther movement—or maybe he didn’t often agree with others. “Deal.”
He tried to pass her the arranged skeins—but one snagged on his knuckle spines.
She hid a grin at the low, dismayed rumble in his throat. Careful not to touch him, she plucked the threads free and smoothed the yarn into her tote, keeping the colors as he’d arrayed them. “Why did you come here tonight? Did you have a dream too?”
“You mentioned a dream after…” He nudged the knitting needles and scissors closer to her with another suspicious glance at the resonark.
“After you kissed me.” She nodded. “Not that I recognized you in my dream, since I hadn’t met you yet. It was…an impression.” She shrugged, feeling her cheeks heat. “It was only a dream, you know? Or do Szauralithyn not dream?”
“We have an equivalent sleep state with phantasmagorical elements, but I don’t remember mine.” Even though everything was packed, he didn’t stand.
“I’ve gotten good at holding onto them long enough to wake up and write them down.”
His pale eyes were fixed on her face. “Why do you want to remember them?”
Suddenly, his attention across the table, empty except for their bottles, reminded her the Love Boat I had launched as an alien speed-dating cruise.
Previously when she’d attempted dating, questions like these had led to answers that resulted in no future dates.
But what else was she supposed to say? A lie?
“I want to know what I’m thinking about when I’m not awake to judge it.
Even if my brain is just firing off random connections at night, trying to stitch together experiences and feelings and the sensory inputs of the day—even if it’s more a scrap quilt than a coherent pattern—that might still tell me something. ”
“And what did this particular dream tell you?”
Had he finally found enough sense of humor to mock her? She lifted her chin. “It’s why I came to see you earlier in the engine module. Although I didn’t have a chance to ask you about it.”
“Because you ran away.”
Because she’d been overcome by the exquisite effects of his venom.
She wasn’t telling him that. But did he sound a little disgruntled that she’d left?
“You seemed angry at my interruption,” she suggested.
“I was…startled. No one comes to the engines. Even when there are problems, I usually deal with the screams through comms.”
He must’ve correctly interpreted her expression, because he quickly added, “I prefer it that way.”
“Screaming?”
After a moment, he slowly exposed his teeth.
Was that a smile? Um, and were those fangs glinting at either corner?
“If they scream from far away, at least I can mute those frequencies.”
“How very sensible,” she said dryly.
And yet when he’d thought the resonark was attacking her, he’d chosen the most up close and personal—and, frankly, irrational—way to break that dangerous connection.
By making one between him and her instead.
Maybe it did make a kind of sense, the way a nocturnal reflection could signal a truth even if the dream wasn’t factual.
And he was lingering with her now in the very rainbow light he’d tried to nullify.
“In my dream,” she said slowly, “I was surrounded by darkness. I wasn’t afraid, or not exactly, but I was lost. Then I saw a face and…and I think it was yours.”
“But you hadn’t met me yet.”
“I’d never seen you before,” she confirmed. “But when you cued up the presentation on the anomaly, you appeared in the captain’s datpad for just a second. And I knew I had to talk to you.”
“About a dream.”
“About the way my dream felt exactly like the moment when the resonark manifested as Remy and Ikaryo were singing, when it seemed like everything in the universe was connecting.”
She held her breath while she watched him. Because the only thing more revealing than telling someone about a dream? Telling them it was a dream about them.
As the silence lengthened, she desperately wished the bar had something with real bite. She’d enjoyed the synthequeur cocktails—all the fun colors and flavors with none of the alcohol risks—but now she would’ve happily blamed a buzz for her tongue’s babbling.
Or anything else it might do…
She tried to shift it to something that wasn’t a fixation on kissing. “You never told me why you came here tonight.”
His silence lingered for another beat before he said, “As much trouble as it was to get sensor readings on the anomaly, I wanted to see it with my own eyes.” Then, with what seemed like heavy reluctance, he added, “I may have had a dream too.”
About what? Her? Oh, how she longed to ask. But even an entire Coke bottle of pure Everclear would not loosen her tongue enough for that.
“Or maybe it was a subconscious simulation cascade,” he continued evasively. “And since I didn’t come to the recital, I have no comparison to that. But I’ve left a new sensor at the bar to track the shadowlight activity, so we need to go now.”
As he slid out of the booth, he hefted her moon-face tote to his shoulder. She couldn’t even protest because the strap was already anchored over the longer spiny scales there.
Following meekly, she carried their empty bottles to the bus tub at the bar.
Suvan pointed out a shoebox-sized cube. An array of lenses like spider eyes was aimed at the resonark which pulsed with cosmic innocence.
She realized the cube had been under his arm when he’d appeared in the salon, but she’d been too busy looking at him.
“Good night, resonark,” she murmured as they headed for the door. “Sweet dreams, if you have them or remember them.”
Suvan glanced briefly over his shoulder then down at her. “You think the waveform is affected by pleasantries as it is by the harmonic resonance of music?”
She shrugged. “No idea. Maybe I’m reminding myself it’s a good night.”
In the nighttime illumination of the corridor, his pale eyes seemed bigger, and for the first time, she noticed subtle occlusions within, like the shattered refractions of flaws inside a clear quartz.
“Is it?” he asked.
A quiver of…something prickled across her skin. Was he teasing? Flirting? Or being an impassive engineer?
She wasn’t feeling quite bold enough to ask. “I have some ideas for a new pattern. That’s a good enough night for me.”
He paced beside her toward the stateroom hallway. “Was the knot pattern around the anomaly different in some way from what you usually do?”
“Different from what?” She chuckled as she winged out one elbow to point at the myriad stitches in her knitwear.
“Most of my patterns end up not being what I intended. When I found out about the IDA, I admit I was also excited about maybe ending up with someone to wear all the weird-sized sweaters and socks that come out of my needles if I get distracted.”
He was quiet for a few steps, although she was getting used to his measured silences so she waited. “You took the ticket for this cruise because you wanted a date—and a mate. Was there no one on your Earth?”
Again she couldn’t quite decipher his tone: curious or judgmental? “Maybe there was, somewhere. But I felt like…I didn’t belong there.” She forced another laugh. “I guess all along I was knitting my way to somewhere else.”
He rumbled under his breath. “To this ship.”
“I found a business card that was a logo of a crescent moon, a contact number, and the words ‘Love awaits. Cross the cosmos, and find your forever.’ Who could resist? By the time I made it through all the closed-world secrecy around the Big Sky IDA, I was already half in love.”
Abruptly, he stopped. “With whom?”
“The possibilities,” she clarified, as she turned on her heel, having overshot him.
He grunted again before waving her on, as if she’d been the one to stop. “How many possibilities do you need?”
He’d already stomped a few steps ahead of her by the time she pivoted again. “For me,” she murmured, “just the one.”
Maybe he would’ve responded, but the oversized device on his wrist clanged, a harsh sound in the quiet hall.
“Chief.” The captain’s distinctive growly voice was strained. “You aren’t at the engines?”
Suvan stiffened. “On my way.” He was already turning again. “What’s wrong?”
“I need full power plus. We are being chased.”