CHAPTER 2 LEE #3
He wasn’t ready yet to visit the greenhouses, the blue-green lights a much too vibrant reminder of Segura.
Instead, he had stolen away again to one of the smaller matted weight rooms on the lower training levels for a couple of hours after the debriefing as he let some of the shock thaw.
It had been nice to relinquish his mind’s freedom to something physical for a while.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Lee said, conscious of the space between them as he leaned into the railing of the Hideaway, watching what was left of the lunch hour on the level below.
The watering pond; the cadets carnivorous for both food and gossip.
They would have a field day when word spread of the General’s involvement with their raid, and of Levy’s leaving the program, if they hadn’t already.
Thus far, it had been eerily calm on that front, like the breath before a storm. Maybe they could keep it that way.
“Feel better?” Kat asked as she stared out over the dwindling, dawdling Canteen crowd. She had a fresh green juice in her hand, but she wasn’t sipping it.
“Nope.”
“Me neither.”
No, they wouldn’t, would they? Not for a while, he suspected.
No amount of workouts or raids would change the conversation happening at this moment behind closed doors. It wouldn’t change the evidence presented against Segura, or the hope of ever seeing something like it brought to life again.
He couldn’t shake the memory of the conviction he’d carried while standing onboard that ship.
They’d been close that day to finding a solution for their galaxy, or at least come closer than anyone else.
Fool’s dream or not, those gut feelings had been real.
The dream he’d shared with Gaia and with Segura that night—the hope for their galaxy—and that final look before she’d rushed off from that ship’s control room to direct her people to safety.
They’d been allies. Idealists of the same goal.
And maybe it had all been misplaced allegiance. They were all misfits in an eroding galaxy. But he’d believed them.
Like he believed in him and Kat.
She again stared out over the Canteen, likely as lost and absorbed in her own thoughts as him; taking her own spirals as they may. But she was out here. She’d left her room to face the Academy’s white walls. She was trying.
“Do you think they made it?” Kat asked quietly, her voice barely discernible over those roaring up around them in a hive of sound from below.
“I think they had enough of a head start to be lightyears away by now,” he said.
Wherever they were headed, base or no base.
He didn’t have enough energy in him to speculate over where that would put the people formerly of Segura.
And it was only when he could feel Kat’s eyes on him that he braved a glance over, allowing her a glimpse into the confusion and the betrayal and the truth in his eyes.
“I think they had a lot more figured out than they ever alluded to us,” he said.
“You believe, then, what General Narron said about their mainframe, about the signature? That it was no different from the disaster before?”
“Do you?” he asked. There was urgency behind her pale grey eyes, and an insistence that he could only assume matched his.
He didn’t know why it mattered—why any of it mattered anymore. It was out of their hands. But standing here, facing the one person who’d been through it by his side, the one person who truly understood him… Perhaps it was the only thing that mattered.
“I don’t know what to think,” she said at last. And when she looked away again, he followed suit.
They watched the final leg of the lunch scene play out below them.
He’d thought a few times over the last couple of days about just breaking into the kitchens and stealing a couple things to get them off the vending machine crap.
But that, of course, required more effort and planning than he cared to expend.
“We could just go down there, you know. Food tastes a whole lot better when you’re actually eating it,” he said.
She dragged her head around to face him, and as her vanilla-blonde ponytail skated behind her, he caught the wild scents of azara and orange blossom.
“After you,” she dared, cocking her hip as she shifted her body towards him. Her forearm grazed his arm, and his gaze dipped to meet her static. It was the same as this morning. With every touch or brush, the air around them fizzled and stirred. Something had been awakened between them.
He considered what had changed since the last time they’d been back here in the Hideaway and onboard the Academy…
Everything, really.
“No need to rush it.” He stretched his fingers out, adjusting to the new crackling sensation between him and Kat with amazement, before wrapping them tightly around the railing once more.
They could face the restless cadets of the Canteen at a later date. The threat of the dark radiation wasn’t going away anywhere any time soon. But this new friction between them—this new dose of chemistry—they’d be addressing that soon. They were sparkflames and hotwires.
Lee traced the trepidation in the line of her brows, shoulders relaxing a bit as he grounded his boots into the floor. Just as soon as she was ready.
“Those flier things—the ones you guys got to ride onboard their ship,” Kat said brightly, and Lee couldn’t help but feel the wind chase his neck, the excitement taking root in his blood as her eyes lit up a little. Spark meet wire. “Were they actually as cool as they sounded?”
A smile slipped from his lips. He couldn’t help himself. Those eyes. That face. And the fortuity to be standing here with her again, despite it all.
As he stared out over the railing, he sat above the stacks of Segura once more, with the vents whirring off in the distance, the painted starlight glittering overhead, and the freedom and recklessness at his fingertips. An entire city at his disposal. A galaxy—more than that.
What he wouldn’t give to have that back, right about now.
“Yeah. Yeah, they were better.”