CHAPTER 25 KAT
FRIDAY NIGHT, to shake things up, she and Lee met Whistler down on one of the lower training levels.
They’d intended to go for a climb at the Wall with the twins, but it seemed everyone had thought of that same idea tonight.
Her ears still thrummed from the splat of noise and chaos that had met them upon opening those doors.
So instead they ended up across the hall, where Kiara and Kamata engaged Demi in an open pull-up contest from the doorframe.
“Blue or Green?” she asked Lee, dumping the last of her vending machine vita-snacks into her palm and crinkling up the bag.
“I’m good thanks,” Lee said. Shrugging, Kat popped them both into her mouth.
“Another week down,” Whistler said, fist-bumping them with his free hand, while he adjusted his airy up-do with the other. “It feels like this term has been flying by.”
“Too fast,” Lee said. And Kat would have to agree. She could barely keep the ground under her with everything hitting them all at once.
“Sorry we had to steal you away from Demi the other night,” she said.
“It’s all chill, he was cool with it. I told him I had somewhere to be.” Whistler shot her his crooked grin. The casualness always threw her. “Any new leads on le General?” Whistler asked, lowering his voice despite the rolling accent.
“Besides the fact that the guy’s kind of a megalomaniac?” Lee sighed as he leaned his head back against the wall. “Nothing new.”
“I wonder what Commander Blanche has on him. She’s always worn a special tension where the General was concerned,” Kat mused. “You know she was a raider before she became Commander?”
“She was pretty young too when she took over the Academy,” Whistler mused. “I think I read once it was in like ‘09 or ‘10 maybe?”
Kat’s eyes narrowed as she made the quick calculation. “She was only thirty-two,” she breathed. Thirty-two and already beginning on her legacy. What would it be like to come back here, older, wiser? Having explored their galaxy, with a handsome freckled-raider on her sleeve…
She let her musings carry her as they watched Demi dominate by at least a dozen pull-ups. His golden earrings glinted under the overheads as he swung himself down beside them.
“So what are we doing tonight?” Kamata asked, also sashaying up alongside them.
“Anti-grav chamber?” Demi suggested.
“I believe those are still under review…” Kiara winked.
“Know anything about that, Hanneman?” Kamata teased, coming around their other side.
Kat didn’t let her expression give away anything, despite the silent laughter coming from either side of her.
“What if we do the RIMs?” Lee asked.
“I’m definitely not feeling racing the mod-vehicles through crowds tonight,” she supplied, gazing sideways over at that perfect, boyish face of his.
His freckles were like a constellation, directing all stellar traffic to his remarkable green eyes.
But where she normally glimpsed that clarity, she caught a myriad of other emotions and none she could discern.
“We don’t have to race them. What if we take them somewhere a little more discreet this time?”
Kat couldn’t help the little squeal that escaped as the five of them slipped around by the secondary storage bay under the stairs. They really hadn’t done this in ages.
“How did you know where they store them?” Demi asked as Lee scanned his hyperband.
“It’s a Gamma thing,” Kat told him over her shoulder, then corrected herself—“or an ‘us’ thing.”
But her eagerness turned to disapproval as they flicked on the light. “No no no,” Kat moaned.
Lee clapped his hand to her shoulder as they peered over at the wreckage. The mod-vehicles were all there as expected, only they’d been dumped haphazardly in a pile on the lower shelf, with at least two sets of controls missing entirely.
“It’s fine, we’ll be fine,” Kat insisted. Stepping forward, she picked up one of the RIMs lying with one of its fins bent on its side, caressing it as she adjusted its mini thruster pack.
“I believe I heard Sean took them out this last week,” Whistler mentioned, hazel eyes skating pointedly over hers as he secured a couple of the mod-vehicles for himself and Demi.
“Where is the respect?” Kat tutted, as she and Lee closed out the storage bay. But a tiny smile crept over her face once more when they found themselves standing outside the starboard doors of the Spectrum.
She ought to be more on edge about breaking rules so soon after the consequences of last term, after how unstable she very clearly felt at the moment. But these were her people—this was her crew. And quite frankly, she’d never needed to care about something less.
“You’ll do us the honors?” she asked Lee, batting her lashes up at him.
“Always.” Lee huffed a laugh, quickly adjusting the alignment of the wires, until the doors sprang open. “After you.”
Kiara and Kamata disappeared after the rest of them went into the Spectrum, returning with neon-charged light strips for the modular vehicles.
“For dramatic effects,” Kiara explained. Although where they’d located the strips, Kat didn’t ask.
“Is this what you had in mind when you suggested the RIMs?” Kat asked as she and Lee scouted around the perimeter of the arena.
“More or less,” Lee shrugged. And when he flicked his eyes back to her, there was just a hint of a smile tugging on his lips in that sea of torrents.
“Look at you, my little rulebreaker.”
“There’s nothing little here,” Lee reminded her, leaving Kat grinning wildly at his back until they stopped at a secluded spot a decent-way up the risers.
Most of the arena was bathed in darkness. But a few sides over, they could see the bright neon yellow and magenta of a couple of RIMs just beginning to hover into action with Demi’s excited hollering.
“Do you think it’s his first rendezvous with the Spectrum after hours?” Kat asked.
“Sounds like it,” Lee chuckled beside her as he attached one of the light strips to his RIM, then extended a hand out for hers.
She savored the darkness with its soft edges, curling around them as she sank down onto the bench behind her, hovering like the RIMs, just at the edge of the fray. The unusual serenity of the Spectrum broken by their newest camaraderie and the undertones of a good time.
This she could get behind.
Lee joined her, setting both mod-vehicles down behind them. He shifted his weight as he leaned back into his hands, content to watch the others zoom around. A show of lights, with only hums of sound bites hailing them.
She’d never really been the watching type. Never cared to.
But if she had, would she have seen him earlier?
She traced his silhouette in the starlight.
The shape of a boy who would put everyone before himself—who would put her before himself, if it meant making her happy.
Even now, that worry and fear and who knew what else, burrowed beneath the hard lines, nearly detectable and carefully concealed.
And yet, despite having barely tilted her head, not even disturbing the air particles moving around them, he was aware of her.
He knew she was watching. And he saw her.
“Lee,” she said quietly. He acknowledged her immediately, his chin flicking towards her.
“When was it for you?” She swallowed, having great difficulty putting her thoughts into words. “When did you decide that you wanted to be with me?”
And while her heartbeat relayed what the rest of what her words could not, he took his time, dragging his teeth over his lip with that same sexy confidence, the same assurance as he made every decision in his life.
“It was always you,” Lee said, finally. He didn’t waver, his echo but a variant of the same sentiment he had used that day on the ship. “From that first day we shared a sandwich before boarding the transports. And the first day you beat me at the Laser Rounds… and every day afterwards.”
His words carried her breath to higher intervals, with no sign of letting up. “Always?” she whispered, barely a kiss on her lips.
He reached over, sending those air particles scattering as he tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear, letting them settle against the back of her eardrum. “Always.”
The earnestness behind their whispers crashed into her in a mélange of shock and surprise, with a force that had the hairs on her arms standing up. But oddly, they didn’t scare her now.
No. Now they enraptured her, they empowered her. Wrapping her up in a security blanket that sent a fresh tidal wave of pebbles up her arms and into her heart.
It was always you.
It will always be you.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to see you.”
Her heartbeat, like the kiss that he pressed to her lips, was featherlight.
His fingertips like snowflakes where they grazed her jaw and neck.
But the hunger behind the premonition—there was nothing light about that.
It was in the cadence of their breaths, and the hesitation behind his touch, like phantom traces in the gaps.
She was going to eat him alive.
“Oy, you two. Get out here!”
Or she would have.
Lee grinned, his teeth flashing brilliant white in the shadows, and Kat so badly wished they’d been close enough for Kamata to see the gesture Lee directed her way.
But she was sitting up again when she heard the reverberating taunt. “Girl sure likes to talk…” It was about time she showed them exactly who Kat Hanneman was.
Maybe it wasn’t about getting her feet under her, but learning to fly at a new pace.
They had time to lay out all the heavy stuff and build her legacy.
But tonight? Tonight was for the RIMs. Tonight was for living.
And so she swiveled around to face the two mod-vehicles sitting on the ground behind them.
“Blue or Green?”