Chapter 11
It wasn’t a dream this time. It was more.
Mariah felt the distance all around her, empty as the end of an echo, vast to the point of infinite.
But not impossible to cross. If she just…
She was reaching when the ping from her datpad woke her, and her hand fell to the device.
A message from Suvan.
The memories of last night’s pleasures swept through her, erasing any other thought. Followed quickly by frantic possibilities of what the message might be: a short-sweet good morning, an apology and rejection, a NSFW hologram of parts of him she hadn’t yet seen…
She should probably open it and find out.
‘The Juraszczyk ghostform will be arrayed at the start of third-shift.’
That was it.
Well, she hadn’t ever deluded herself that Suvan was a romantic under his thorns. And that was fine, because she had that covered.
Not covered at the moment, of course, since she was still naked.
Dreamily, she trailed tingling fingers down her body, seeking the places deliciously abraded from the points of his quill-scales that hadn’t ever pierced her. But ooh, so close.
He had teased her, his fingers inside her, sweet venom poised at her clit…
Before the memory—or her touch—got too hot and heavy, she pushed back the covers. Maybe she should send him a NSFW hologram.
Would his quartz-bright eyes light up?
Anyway, it was romantic that he’d given her named credit for the ship’s vaguely monstrous mask. So she messaged back ‘good morning’ and went to shower.
As she was braiding her hair—musing on how easily it had come undone in his hand—her datpad pinged again.
Lub’s lure and one bulbous eyeball bobbed on the screen.
With a smile, Mariah accepted the incoming comm. “Good morning to you too, Lub.”
“I forgot to tell you to come to the supply bay,” Suvan said, squashing his pet’s head out of the way. “That’s where we’ve staged the ghostform.” Then he paused. “You will be there, yes?”
Biting the inside of her cheek to stop her smile from widening at the note of diffidence in his voice, she nodded. “I’m excited to see it—and you.” Without waiting for an answer, she chirped, “Gotta go get breakfast before they’re out of coffee,” and disconnected.
She blew out a hard breath.
Was she coming on too strong for her reserved engineer? Maybe. But if he needed data to make his decisions, she couldn’t be coy.
Even if revealing her heart felt a little like offering a soap bubble to a porcupine with knitting needles.
+ + +
There was still plenty of coffee left when she wandered into the salon.
“It’s really not that bad,” she told Remy, who was again behind the bar thinning the black sludge.
Remy snorted. “I am in awe at how you see the bright side of everything.”
Feeling a little stung—and not in a good way, although she wasn’t sure why, since she’d heard it more than once and often in a more snappy or sneering tone—Mariah shrugged. “If not the bright side, what? Staying in the dark?”
“Hey, sorry.” With an apologetic grimace, Remy nudged a brimming mug across the bar. “I wasn’t taking a crack at you. I’m genuinely jealous.”
Considering the statuesque redhead had sung an elemental entity into being, that was flattering. Mariah let out a little sigh. “Sorry back at you. Mostly I love my rose-colored glasses. I guess I’m a little sensitive this morning.”
Leaning both elbows on the bar, Remy canted forward with a smirk. “Really? I would’ve never guessed Chief would leave his engines. So I say again: Totally in awe.”
Maybe that teasing should’ve bothered Mariah too but… It was true. Also, she knew she was blushing hard enough that she couldn’t hide anything. “I’m meeting him later when they install the ship’s disguise.”
“Which Ikaryo tells me is amazing. He’s been working around the clock so we can get out of this asteroid junkyard.” She levered herself upright again. “Also why I’m jealous: You got to spend the night with your sexy alien lover.”
“Sexy alien lovers?” Felicity threw herself onto the barstool next to Mariah. “Who was it?”
“Our sneaky chief engineer,” Remy supplied helpfully while Mariah sputtered.
“Oh yes. I guessed that one already.” Felicity waved away the coffee Remy tipped toward her and smoothed her blond updo.
Mariah frowned at the chic cruise director. “You’re keeping track of…” She couldn’t quite force it out.
“The dates and mates,” Remy said.
Felicity laughed. “Um, no. Matchmaking is one thing, but I’m not meddling and definitely not monitoring.
Not officially anyway.” She patted her omnipresent datpad as she slid a glance toward Mariah.
“But if I make a few notes about whoever might want to leave a good review for the cruise when we get back…”
Remy rolled her eyes. “Ma’am, if you’re still hoping for five stars, you must also be drinking Miss Sunshine’s brand of rainbow-up-the-butt juice.”
Felicity looked confused. “Is that…better than the coffee, hopefully?”
Mariah groaned. “Stop. Whatever happens next on this cruise, I think we need to be ready for the possibility that this is all a…a crisis connection.”
“Nope.” Remy straightened. “Mine’s one hundred and eleven percent the real deal.”
When even the professionally cheerful Cosmic Connections Cruise director looked unconvinced, she held out both hands.
A little tattoo that Mariah hadn’t noticed before glinted with starlit silver-blue on the inside of her wrist. “Okay, maybe I’m fooling myself again, like I did with my music back on Earth.
And I still can’t find my feelings button, so I can’t prove anything.
But Ikaryo and I aren’t just shooting for the stars; we’re aiming at forever. ”
The declaration wasn’t loud, but the conviction in Remy’s voice rang clear.
As Felicity echoed Remy’s sureness with her own fervent, feelings-button-bright confession of love for their captain, lights blinked on the sensor Suvan had installed at the end of the bar. Mariah didn’t interrupt the other women to point it out, but her throat tightened.
If the resonark believed…
In her head, a cynical voice suggested that evidence of an electrical reaction was not a verification of love everlasting. The resonark was not a crystal ball revealing their romantic futures.
Why did it sound like Suvan’s voice?
She ignored it. “Are you both going to the supply bay later?” When they confirmed, she slid off the stool. “Then I’ll see you there.”
Felicity grabbed her hand. “Are we being too much? I know it’s silly when we’re on a collision course with the unknown. But—”
Before she could finish, Mariah hugged her, aghast that her qualms might erode her friends’ happiness. “You do not have to justify your joy,” she said. “And we’re all out here chasing that promise, right?”
But as she sat alone in her cabin later, knitting out her nervousness beneath the viewport, all her feelings roiled around in slow-motion chaos like the asteroid debris outside.
She’d boosted the whimsical color effect on the screen to amuse herself while she worked, but somehow the prismatic streaks and sparkles looked…
Fake.
Technically, the elaborate arcs only enhanced the existing trajectory tracking. Not a lie; an embellishment to the view.
Almost reluctantly, she turned off the effect.
Now only distant starlight illuminated the leftover mining rubble, limning the icy edges in faintest silver. But mostly the rocks were black against the darker space—anonymous and indistinguishable in the emptiness.
Was she fooling herself about what she felt for Suvan? Or what he might feel for her? Adding rainbows that didn’t exist?
She looked down at the lumi-lace in her lap. Suvan had said the filament wasn’t the same tech as the feelings buttons, but as the yarn pulled up from the center of the ball, the strands’ pretty shimmers alternated with shadowed streaks—too much like her own misgivings.
Suddenly, the soothing metronome tick of her needles sounded like a tsk-tsk of judgment. The rhythm faltered, and she realized she’d dropped several stitches and the tension was uneven from the very start.
How was she supposed to knit a pattern when the colors kept changing? What if it clashed and looked ugly?
Why would she believe an austere, pragmatic engineer—prickly in both metaphoric and literal ways—would even want a sparkle sweater?
She let the rows unravel in her hands all the way to the first slipknot.
She’d always discounted the myth of the sweater curse. According to the sweater curse, gifting a complex piece to a lover would bring about the relationship’s demise. Which seemed so…heartbreaking.
Of course infatuation might lead to hasty, poorly fit patterning and construction.
And the lag time between a starry-eyed first stitch and the sleep-deprived, night-before-an-arbitrary-milestone final bind-off sometimes allowed for the painful recognition of mismatches in aspiration, application, and accomplishment.
But it wasn’t a curse.
The tangling strands of lumi-lace pulsed with light and shadow. If there was such a thing as black magic, this might be it.
Annoyed by her own frayed doom-knitting, she shoved everything to the side of the couch with a dramatic F bomb. But no one was around to appreciate or soothe her angst. If Lub were here, she’d probably get pit bull/anglerfish cuddles—slightly unnerving but still sweet.
Somewhere under the jumbled mess, her datpad pinged. So she had to dig through everything, making a worse snarl, to find the device. A recorded message from Captain Ellix Nehivar waited.
“Attention all souls on the Love Boat I…”
Mariah smiled, imagining Felicity sitting next to the captain as he dictated, reminding him they’d all chosen to be his crew now.
But the rest of the message sobered her. The captain explained how they would feint at their pursuers with her fabricated disguise and then make their escape to continue along the resonark’s enduring trajectory to the null cloud.
“Chief Engineer Suvan Adrakh is upgrading our engines to max power. Some amenities may be limited during the transition.” There was a pause in the message, and Mariah found herself holding her breath for whatever he was about to say.
“Following the resonark’s path wasn’t in the IDA itinerary I was given, but holding my old course was taking me in circles.
I am…” His pause this time sounded almost shy.
“I am happy to be on this voyage with you all.”
Mariah looked at lumi-lace she’d tossed aside in frustration. Out of contact with her body and movement, the yarn had gone completely dark.
With a sigh, she picked up the tangled mess. The knots and dangling loops shimmered as she straightened the disarray, winding the ball back into shape.
The familiar motions should’ve been calming, but her brain kept spinning long after the yarn was contained again.
She wanted the resonark to be what Evens swore it was: a manifestation of an elemental connecting force. But if it wasn’t…
Did that really change anything?
Just as the captain had given them the chance—and the duty—to vote for their voyage, with every moment they needed to decide anew: to turn back, to continue, to choose to seek love without proof or even a promise that anyone awaited that contact.
She picked up her needles and cast on.