She stopped at the same entry that had stopped me. The custody scan. The amber eyes.
“She flew the decoy so the rest of us could run dark,” Kira said. Her thumb dented the housing of the terminal. “She’s been alone on a Consortium station for a month, thinking she missed the rendezvous, and they’ve already flagged her. We are not letting their retrieval male reach her first.”
“Her charts know the route,” I said. “Sector Twelve was hers.”
Kira looked at me. Through the bond, I felt the question before she asked it.
“We’re going after them?”
The same tone she had used when she told me she was choosing the bond, not following it. The voice of a woman who made her own decisions, even when those decisions meant flying toward danger in a stolen ship with a cracked fuel coupling.
“We are going after them,” I confirmed. “All of them. Every name on that list.”
She turned back to the screen. Tessara’s custody scan glowed in the terminal light. Not a stranger on a floating station. Our pilot was waiting for no one, because she did not know anyone was coming.
Kira pressed her hand against the screen. A gesture that was not technical. That served no operational function. That was, I understood, the gesture of a woman laying her hand on a promise.
“Then we start with her,” she said.
I covered her hand with mine. The size difference was a contrast I would never tire of, her human fingers disappearing beneath the span of my palm. The bond hummed between us, warm and golden and permanent.
Outside the viewport, the stars burned. Tessara’s stolen charts were loaded in the nav core. Nia was asleep in the medical bay, which she had claimed as her own. The Star-Seeker was fueled and ready, and the galaxy spread before us like a system waiting to be repaired.
We had a ship. We had a list. We had a crewmate to bring home. And we had each other.
The mission had begun.
Preview: Fugitive and Claimed on Aethel-Sky
Bonded By The Star-Gene (Book 2)
Chapter 1: The Soot Docks
Tess
The fence was cheating me, and we both knew it.
His name was Darro, or at least the name stitched into the collar of his grease-stained coveralls said, Darro. He was Felarii, like me, which meant he had the same amber eyes, the same retractable claws, the same instinct to rob anyone who stood still long enough. Unlike me, he'd made that instinct into a career.
His shop was a narrow slot carved into the belly of Aethel-Sky's Soot Docks, wedged between a coolant recycler and a dead-drop freight locker, and every surface was coated in the kind of black grime that never came off. Not off your hands. Not off your conscience.
"A pulse-capacitor rated for a Class-4 shuttle engine," I said. "That's what I need. And that star-chart is worth three of them."
Darro turned the data chip between his claws. Held it up to the sickly yellow light strip bolted above his workbench. His ears rotated forward, then back, a Felarii tell forI'm calculating how hard I can screw you.
"This chart covers one restricted corridor. One." He set the chip down on the bench like it smelled wrong. "Consortium patrols that corridor every nine hours. Anyone running these routes is either desperate or dead."
"Or both." I kept my voice flat. Bored, even. Desperation was a scent a Felarii nose could pick up from across a room, and Darro's nostrils were already flaring.
"The chart's accurate. I ran that corridor four times before the Consortium seized my ship. You'll sell it to the next smuggler who walks in here for ten times what I'm asking."
"If I can find a smuggler stupid enough to fly it."
"On this station? You'll trip over three before lunch."
His tail flicked against the leg of his stool. Annoyance. A Felarii's tail never lied, even when the mouth did.
I kept my own tail coiled tight beneath my flight suit, pressed flat against the small of my back where the fabric hid it. On Aethel-Sky, showing a Felarii tail in the open was an invitation. The dock workers grabbed them. The Consortium flagged them. Better to keep it hidden, even though the compression ached after twelve hours.
