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“Never.” His tongue grazed my lips and I parted for him, and entire body warming with the long, slow, precise kiss.
Auryn had his chin on his hand and his usual observant cat expression, while Akoni seemed slightly bewildered. Akonialwaysseemed a little bewildered when I kissed or flirted with Keon.
Eh, he’d get used to it.
Keon kissed me gently one last time and walked into the living room proper, his free hand holding mine. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Good,” Akoni said instantly. Auryn nodded.
I would have taken the bad news first to get it out of the way, but I got outvoted. Oh well. Good news it was. I deposited myself between Akoni and Auryn again. Auryn rested one hand on my thigh. Akoni kissed my shoulder and his fingers slid along my other thigh, then stopped.
Keon flicked on our large screen. “Then I have literal news. As in, vintage news broadcasts from Homeworld.”
“FromHomeworld?” I exclaimed. “Like the nightly news fromHomeworld? They had news?”
“Apparently. It’s from the ship’s archives. Right before the ship left orbit, they would download the last news broadcast and messages and such from the planet. No idea why they did it, but they did. If we’ve converted the dates correctly, this is from fifty-five years before the cataclysm here on Earth. The ship apparently was in transit for fifty-two years after some delays, and was a tourist and commercial shipping vessel.”
Akoni crossed one knee over the other. “What large-scale trade was there? What was being shipped?”
Keon shrugged. “We’ve only glanced at the manifests, but they use pictographs we haven’t translated yet. Our first and only guess so far is that Homeworld shipped technology components, while Earth shipped back delicacies and artwork.”
The news broadcast hadn’t been translated and had no captions The Homeworld news anchor dragon spoke to the camera about the news of the day. She did not look like an Earth dragon, with semi-thick scales like rose quartz. She had an accent I’d never heard, and wore shimmering, gauzy veils and bits of glittery metal draped around her horns and had finlet and cheek piercings. Her voice was melodic and soothing, but not sing-songy.
It was impossible to tell what the broadcast had been about. Something political? Something industrial? Something interplanetary? Commemorating a park or new structure? All possibilities. My consorts listened with rapt attention.
“I barely caught any of that.” Auryn admitted when it was over. “Her accent is very thick, and it’s not even the same dialect.”
“Is that the bad news?” I asked.
“We’ve diverged a long way.” Akoni mused.
“Well, five or six thousand years will do that.” Stood to reason that the Lemurian dragons were culturally different from Homeworld at this point. Hell, they had been culturally differentbeforethe cataclysm.
There were also the unknown variables of how much human society had impacted Lemurian culture (which was probably more than the Lemurians would ever admit) and how much the war had changed Homeworld.
“So what’s the bad news?” Akoni asked.
Keon changed the screen to its usual fractal dance and sank down on the coffee table. “There’s no Chaos Affinity technical documentation.”
I couldn’t have heard that properly. “Like… none? Ornone-none?”
“I brought you the only thing we could find that comes close, and it’s the only example. There’s nothing.”
“Maybe it’s under a different name. Label. Pictograph. There are almost a million of the damn things.”
“Love, there’s nothing, because nobody wrote it down. Chaos dragons skipped generations. Sometimes four or five or six at a time. Chaos dragons kept careful documentation of everything for the next generation, but it was all in a special type of file, and it seems to have been created using a technique similar to what the powerful gemstone dragons like Jahlim could do: weave the intended context and meaning of their words into the text. It operates on the principle of quantum entanglement and is similar to our scale encryption. Hekon has translated the special pictograph asgrimoire.”
My sister was the one who lived for things like entanglement. I was more of a dirt-in-the-sandbox type. “Entanglement is the theory that says if a particle ever interacted with another particle, they’re forever linked, right? Like if I zap a particlehere, then in theory—”
“Not really atheory.”
“Hush.In theory, if there was a particle on Homeworld that had ever interacted with it, that particle would feel the zap too?”
“That’s a very,verysimple—”
“Well, what’s got me confused is at this point, how has every particle in existencenotinteracted with every other particle in existence?”
Keon pinched the bridge of his nose. “Focus.”
