Page 44 of Cloverleaf Station

“High,” Kieron said, his breath coming quicker despite how hard he was trying to stay calm. “I can’t think of any reason for it to be there otherwise.”

“He wouldn’t have gotten space sick and done something rash, or maybe indulged in a kill-pill if he knew he was going to die anyway—”

“He was orthodox Traktan,” Kieron snapped. “That means no suicide, no intoxicants—he didn’t even use Regen unless it was a life-or-death emergency, because they take such a strong stance on purity of original form. He wouldn’t have put a dart through the hull and compromised its integrity without having a very good reason for doing it.”

“No one knows how they’re going to react to death until they’re faced with it,” Elenus said, more gently than Kieron was expecting from him. “I’m not blaming your friend for anything, I’m just … trying to understand.”

Kieron shut his eyes for a second. “So am I,” he confessed. It was easier to be honest with Elenus when he wasn’t looking at him.

“Keeeeron.” Catalina’s voice was soft, like she felt unsure about interrupting their conversation—or unsure about what she was going to say next. “I can seeeee iiit.”

Stay calm. “Put it up on the viewscreen, please.”

Their view of the space in front of them vanished, replaced by a magnified view of the chunk of his old ship. A small section was highlighted in … pink. Of course, in pink. Catalina couldn’t get enough of it.

“Enlarge, please.” It got bigger, the picture slightly clearer. Even Catalina didn’t have perfect performance in this much radiation, but Kieron thought he had an idea of what the organic matter was now. His mouth went dry.

“A little bigger,” he whispered. The image became a little bigger, and he saw … he saw …

“Is that an arm?” Elenus exclaimed. “How the fuck did he attach one of his own arms to the back of the ship? How did he—”

“The bit.” As soon as he realized what he was looking at, Kieron knew what had happened. “The expandable bit. Zakari must have known what was going on, he knew he was going to die out here. The odds of the ship staying in one piece were small, but if he could break the ship apart himself and make sure each part carried a piece of him with it … then the chances of recovering some of him to put back into his family crypt increased significantly.”

“Oh.” Elenus fell silent, a rare enough occurrence that Kieron felt like rewarding him with some more knowledge.

“His whole body would be best, of course,” he said roughly. “But having at least a part of it to bury legitimizes the eternal nature of his soul, in the eyes of his culture. Hundreds of years ago, Traktans used to cut off a finger or an ear before going to war and leave it at home, in case the rest of them was lost to battle. Most modern Traktans have given that up, but …” But the lesson had stuck.

“So, wait. He literally tore himself and your ship apart, into quarters, before he died, so that you’d be able to find a piece of him to send home?”

“Yeah.”

“Holy shit.” There was both horror and deep respect in Elenus’s voice. “That’s got to be the most badass thing I’ve ever heard.”

Kieron had to agree.

Chapter nineteen

It took a combination of probes, guidelines, and tricky maneuvering on Catalina’s part to get the piece of Zak’s ship close enough for Catalina to latch onto.

Towing it out of there wasn’t an option—the chances of it getting taken out by an asteroid were too high, and Kieron hadn’t come this far just to trip at the very end of the race. Five hours of painstaking patience resulted in the safe attachment of the ship fragment to their roof, and then Catalina spent another three hours getting them back to the station as safely as she could.

Kieron spent most of that time in silence. His mind was both racing and not, a hundred different thoughts flooding through it every minute, but none of them sticking for long. All of the implications of this find, everything he’d be able to say to Xilinn and Pol and Szusza, what it would mean for them to have him back home, what it would mean for Kieron for Zak to be home again …

That last part was the stickiest thought, the one that lingered longest. Kieron had dreamed over and over about what it would be like to recover Zak’s body, to be able to give him back to his family. He had never thought about what he himself would do next. Why would he? What future was out there for someone like him? He’d brought misery to Zakari’s family—not that Xilinn had ever blamed him. She wouldn’t, she wasn’t that kind of person. But he was to blame. He’d encouraged Zakari to pursue goals that weren’t in line with Traktan tradition, he’d enabled him to leave the planet and take up a very dangerous profession, and he hadn’t been with him the day it all fell apart.

If he had been, could he have helped? Would he have made it worse? Would they simply have died together, the way a part of Kieron had maybe always hoped they would? Not that he’d wanted Zakari to die—he’d just wanted to know there was something for himself beyond solitude at the end.

Selfish. So selfish. Thoughts like that had made contemplating the future nearly impossible, because what could it possibly hold for a man like him? Emptiness, loneliness, those were what he deserved. What he was destined for. All he should ever want or expect, and now …

Now he wanted more. Kieron wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but sitting here surrounded by Catalina, enveloped in her warmth and color and care, with Elenus absently reaching out to touch him every now and then as his hands flew across the control panels—not that his guidance was necessary for Catie, but it gave him something to do—made him want more. With them. Which didn’t seem … impossible.

But it’s not a good idea. At least, it wasn’t right then. Not while he still had to figure out how to get Zakari’s body back home, not while he was still working at the station, definitely not while he was Elenus’s employee. It was bad enough they were sleeping together. And there was still the issue of Deysan Moritz to cover, which …

It wasn’t like Kieron didn’t know where Elenus had shoved him or the tech he’d shoved in there with him. It was more that he had given himself permission to forget as long as he was still on the hunt for Zak; permission not to fuck with a good thing while it was still beneficial to both himself and Elenus. But now that he had Zak back … and now that Elenus and Catalina were both safe … soon, he was going to have to confront Elenus over what he was doing to his former business partner.

Not yet.

Not yet, no. Kieron didn’t like the fucker, after all—he’d tried to kill him, and he’d kidnapped and tortured Catalina, which made him fucking scum as far as Kieron was concerned. But legally, there was more to it than that.