Page 56 of Leviathan

"I'm still worried about Leija," Maria said. "I know you said she is safe, but if he is unconscious because of poison, won't that make it harder on his instincts to tell what is what? He could hurt her by accident."

I pressed a neurofilament against one of Eun's exposed ones, and I got a sudden flash of territorial encroachment. The communication was vague, emotional, and reactive more than fully responsive, as I would expect from a Vaurelcar in his state. Instead of trying to speak with words, I sent an image of his mate smiling as she stood in the center of a room, accompanied by a detailed diagram of a human-appropriate living quarter. Hostility was replaced by curiosity, so I began gathering materials to match the diagram to pass over.

"He's already responding to some of my prompting," I replied. "I believe he will build her living quarters inside so she will be comfortable, but we mustn't do anything to try to get her out until he wakes up. He will fight that, and it will be inconvenient."

"But you can take him, in case she needs us to," Maria said. "Right?"

"Yes, but in this case, fighting is the worst thing I could do right now. If it were just him, I could toss him out, but I can't eject him into space without Leija dying. He's damaged the structural integrity of the ship he took over and won't be able to maintain an environment for her if I pitch him out, nor do I think he would be able to get to a habitable planet in time," I said. "Even if that wasn't the case, I don't want to fight him. Maria, he has been severely abused. Cutting off a Vaurelcar's neurofilaments like that... It's horrific. I want to help him."

"Then we will help him," Maria said. "But I'm not leaving her in there alone. She's already been alone for months. She doesn't even know I'm human."

The tremble in her voice stopped me in my tracks. I had been about to say that she hadn't been alone; she had her mate with her, but the worry cut into Maria's face spoke volumes. I was used to being alone. I choose not to have a crew.

Maria chose none of this.

She decided to open up to me, to mate with me, to care about me, but that didn't mean that she was choosing to be alone. Her species might be one that needed groups or same species companionship to connect to. Suddenly, I became aware of just how fragile our relationship was. I couldn't be her everything if she needed others of her own kind.

If she needed that, I would need to change, to open up further, and let others in.

Or I would have to let her go.

"I can likely get a communication device passed in with the rest of the materials I'm passing in," I said. "So you can contact her directly and make sure she is alright. If she wishes for us to attempt to extract her once she knows what is going on, we will."

Maria's shoulders relaxed, slumping with the weight of the tension that had begun to build up in her body.

"Yes, please," she said, rubbing her arms as she hugged herself. "It would make me feel a lot better about all of this if I could just talk to her."

"Why don't you go rest?" I told her. "I'll let you know once you can contact her."

My own tension didn't abate even when she finally left Eun to his slumber, removed the suit and went deeper inside me. Once she had gone to sleep, I slowly shifted her quarters farther away from the loading bay as well. She could still get there; I didn't block the path, but I needed to make sure I had a warning if she was planning to go within reach of a traumatized, sleeping Vaurelcar.

She rested and we continued to head towards Shek’invitali space, this time with two more passengers in tow.

The only problem was that there was a familiar flicker on my long range scanners.

Someone was stalking after us.

And I didn’t know what he wanted.

TWENTY-TWO

MARIA

I straightened my hair, excitement and nervousness warring in my belly like I was walking down the stairs on the way to meet a prom date. I'd gotten so used to walking around half-naked that figuring out what to wear was an entirely new problem, especially because I didn't have much time to try to figure out how to design something new using the manufacturing bay. I'd settled on getting a large chunk of flowy fabric and trying it around me like a sarong.

"Can I talk to her yet?" I asked, impatient as I gave myself one more look over in the bathroom mirror. I had already invited Lyrien into my rooms to set things up for me, so I knew he could hear me. "Is it ready?"

"He only just accepted the com device," Lyrien replied. "I am uncertain as to how long it will take for him to give her access, and for her to figure out how to activa... oh, there she is."

"Hello?" a soft voice called out from the other room.

I rushed back into my bedroom, crossing over to the new door on the far side that led to a new room Lyrien had shaped out for me. My bare feet stepped from the carpeting in my bedroom to the exposed strands of his neurofilaments. Right now, the room was just his exposed filaments, with a large flatscreen taking up most of one wall. I was already plotting out how I would set it up. I was torn between having a private movie theater or making it more like a sci-fi command center. I would do both, of course, but which to start with was the real question.

Leija's face was there, right in the center of the screen. Behind her were the strands of Eun's neurofilaments, pulled back to create a blank room. She stood in the center of them, her hair ruffled but her posture relaxed.

"Leija!" I called out as I moved in front of the screen. "Are you okay? Lyrien said you would be, but that must have been intense being in the center of all that."

Her eyes snapped wider as I came into view, a sudden rush of liquid shimmering in them.