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Akoni drew back slowly. This close, his eyes were smoldering amber and churning ocean, a blue-green shade different from Keon’s, the light and shade trading in different illuminations of green. He hesitated a second, then glanced at Keon once more to acknowledge him, and headed for the door.
Keon didn’t relax and seemed a little unsettled.
I ignored it, although that required some effort. According to Auryn, he and Keon had shared partners several times, and he also knew that Keon had shared (and been shared) plenty of times besides that. So Keon wasn’t exactly opposed to a partner (even one, perhaps, he somewhat fancied) getting kissed, fondled, stroked, licked, or fucked stupid while he watched or assisted.
Maybe he was unsettled that he’d liked it.
I didn’t ask. I had things to do. Like master breathing.
The crater looked worse than I remembered. A pair of dragons with a pony hitched to a cart finished loading up large chunks of debris—the broken fan blades and their mechanisms—just as we arrived. The chunks of boulder I’d blasted out of the ceiling were still where they’d fallen. A dragon with jade green scales stood staring up at the damaged ceiling, tablet resting across one arm while he tapped on it with his other hand.
Crap. I’d thought this was a closed training session.
Mahon moved in front of Keon and headed down the path between fields toanotherfallow field a good distance away from the first.
“Tell me about the meeting yesterday.” I prodded Keon as we walked. No point in hurrying. A nice, slow, romantic amble would do.
“Divvying up the work.” He stared down the length of fields.
“How difficult is it going to be?” I wasn’t about to sayhopeless, because I wasn’t going to let it be hopeless.
“I’m not supposed to tell you any of this, Helena.”
“Oh, come on, you can tell me howdifficultit will be. Dekka won’t brain you for that.”
He relented. “Difficult. Hekon was able to extract the data trees so we know,probably, what each chunk is. They’ve been divided up into civic records, encyclopedic, and gossip. For lack of a better term. News articles, network logs—that sort of thing. I took a chunk of the encyclopedic.”
Mahon had taken out his tablet and was chilling on the edge of the road while we waited for the dragons by the crater to finish up what they were doing. I stepped in front of Keon. “Tell me some good news. Can you read any of it? Make sense of any of it?”
“I’m still going through it all. The data structures are unfamiliar. It’s being cross-checked against what we pulled off the ship. Based on Hekon and I’s initial analysis, it looks like a stock type of encyclopedia. Do you remember physical encyclopedias?”
The rows and rows of dusty old tomes sitting on the lowest shelf of my grandparents’ library? “Sort of?”
He cracked a wry smile. “I guess you wouldn’t, since they fell out of common use years before you were born. Well, the way it used to work was you’d buy a set of encyclopedias, which, as you can imagine, were quickly outdated. You’d buy supplement books with updates each year to stay current, since you didn’t want to have to re-buy the whole set every year. You could also sometimes buy special expanded editions for subjects that especially interested you.”
Sounded almost as wretched as a card catalog. My elementary school had still had one and made all of us learn to use it. They’d also made us learn how to read a paper map, which I hadn’t objected to because my family had often gone hiking and camping out in the backwoods. Dad had let my sisters and I play “Human GPS,” where one of us had been responsible for navigating us to our destination using just a paper map.
Needless to say, we’d occasionally ended up where we shouldn’t have. And I might have once navigated us the wrong way, andwhoops, we just happened to end up by a BBQ joint with a rib eating challenge I’d read about online. What a shocking coincidence. Totally unintentional.
Back to the subject at hand. “So there was a stock encyclopedia that was loaded up by whoever wanted it, then updates came from Homeworld on the regular?”
“Exactly. Although the one from Atlantis is more expansive than the one on the ship.”
“Makes sense.” The ships hadn’t been ark vessels, they’d been interstellar busses. “Can you read it, though?”
He scuffed the heel of one big foot in the sand. “I can make general sense of it. The data’s somewhat damaged, fragmented, and the search indexes didn’t survive. The pull of the ship, as you can imagine, was also not complete.”
“I’m amazed we got anything at all,” I said softly.
“Same. I’ve found what appears to be numerous abstracts on various subjects as well as a trove of primary sources of varying ages.”
“Look for titles likeThe Gate Maker’s ManualandAn Illustrated Guide to Chaos Dragons.”
Another panty-dropping smile. “I don’t want to give you false hope. And that’s all I’m saying on that for now.”
My heart fell further.
He moved closer. “I’m sorry.”
