“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 onle 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.
