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“W-what’s it?” she asked.
“You know where the human’s jump point is.”
He noticed she was visibly trembling. A pit of sympathy wedged into his ribs.
“That’s why you were asking about the Crescent Rim,” he elaborated. “That’s why… stars. So much makes sense now. How did it take me this long to see it?”
She said nothing, but he took her silence as confirmation. He turned and swept back into the kitchen.
“Wait! Please—just—”
She hurried after him, tripping over something in her path and grunting as she collapsed. He stared at her as she pushed herself upright, brushing her reddened palms off. Her skin was so thin—literally, thin. It had to be like having silk for an epidermis.
“Motherfucker, I can’t see anything,” she said with an adorable little scowl that made his chest ache. It was impossible to look at her without feeling empathy. The spark locked onto her, sensing her, wanting to make things right.
She followed him into the cockpit. The city sparkled through the glass sphere around them and he caught the way her eyes dragged around the room with a saddened trace of awe. Her mouth popped open silently.
He settled into the main chair as she sank into another, staring morosely at the lifeless terminal. He fiddled with the comm machine and brought up Morwong’s line.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
His ears fastened to the sound of her bare legs squeaking against cushions. He firmly avoided turning in that direction. The sight of her bare skin had done unconscionable damage already. Asking where her clothes had gone would draw attention to her borderline nudity.
Stop, brain. Please just stop for one damn moment.
He cleared his throat. “Everyone’s trying to figure out where humans are getting through.” There, that sounded normal. “We destroyed their jump points last time. They don’t have the science to make their own so they would have had to save a couple or steal them. An entire swarm vanished past the Outskirts and that was when we learned that they must have hidden another gate somewhere… maybe even a series of them.”
“Ah.”
She sounded dismayed. He’d grown so used to her verbal mannerisms that he could tell her face was pinching without looking to confirm it. That irritated him.
How well he could read her.
How much he’d missed despite it.
No. Not missed.Ignored.
There was a reason he’d never been able to picture Lucca as a Ternetzi woman. Caligher knew what humans sounded like. And he’d ignored it. Every sign was there, right in his face, and he’d ignored them all.
“A swarm went missing?” she asked in puzzlement.
Hundreds of ships had disappeared. Someone bounced in a message from the Outskirts letting everyone know about the numerous ships that never returned. Not long after, a human ship was spotted in their central territory… right around the same time Caligher met Lucca.
Of course it wasn’t a coincidence. She’d been in the middle of it the entire time, and Caligher had flown next to her, bemoaning the existence of humans, blissfully unaware the entire fucking time.
And Lucca had been hiding knowledge of an even larger warship on the horizon.
“You didn’t know about the missing ships?” Caligher asked her.
Something new crossed her face. Something she tried to mask when she realized he was looking, but her nostrils flared. She tried not to swallow.Tried. But that delicate column of her throat slowly bobbed, the lump moving down as her skin flushed pink.
His brows lifted as he watched her struggle with her facial ticks.
It wasguilt.
“What do you know?” he asked gently, somewhat tauntingly.
So many times she’d flat-out refused to answer his questions, and he’d granted her space to get away with it. An unfriendly smile crossed his face. This time he put some menace behind the word, wielding her name like a command.
