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“Harder. Come on, I know you’ve got some fight left.”
Kaia hissed through gritted teeth, the taste of impending victory taking hold as his hold budged.
She didn’t need the next instruction. She intuited how to use the leverage to widen the gap between them and twist from underneath his arm. Kaia stumbled forward, wheezing out an elated laugh as she spun to face him. She did it. She fucking broke free.
“Good job, princess.” Orion shifted his weight and adopted a neutral expression, limbs going loose and still. But beneath that forced placidity, cold eyes tracked her every move in a way that seemed almost robotic.
“What’s next?” She shoved her hair back from her face.
“Nothing. That’s enough for today.”
“Oh. Well, good,” she said, hurrying off the sparring mat. “I’ve got my fuel tank repair class in ten anyway. Who knows? Maybe they’ll finally let us see an actual ship this time.”
She bent, forcing her full attention to pulling on her shoes instead of the weight of his stare at her back.
* * *
She skipped the tank repair class, slinking straight to her cabin from the gym.
Orion’s bitter mint scent still lingered on her skin hours later, mixed with the salty tinge of their sweat. She should have showered as soon as she got back to her cabin. Instead, she sat in bed, back against the wall, as if stubbornly stewing in the aura of him clinging to her would somehow help desensitize her. But her flesh was still prickling from his touch, and her gut was still in knots. Kaia wanted to just get this over with and get far, far away from Orion.
She jumped halfway off the bed at the chime under her mattress. She knew exactly what it was—the only thing itcouldbe. And at such an opportune time.
RECIPIENT ID: CCLSL-25109
FROM ID: A35R109-09
DATA: DEAREST KAIA, WE’VE ALL BEEN WORRIED ABOUT YOU. EVERYONE MISSES YOUR SCAV RUNS. HOPE COLONY LIFE IS TREATING YOU WELL. I DO WISH WE’D HAVE GOTTEN A PROPER GOODBYE. CAN YOU ATTACH THOSE REPAIR NOTES YOU HAD FOR AHTON’S TAKE? WE NEED TO REUSE THE SHIP NOW YOU’RE GONE. LOVE, LORAN AND EVERYONE ON RIKER 109.
It took her another two startled readthroughs to figure out what this was. Repair notes? ReusingAhton’s Take?
But of course, she’d already known comms were likely to be monitored by ship administrators. Loran would no doubt have made the same deduction. It wasn’t common for colonists to communicate with external parties—colonies were cultish that way—but as a rare new arrival, she may be forgiven for still having contacts outside.
And asking for innocuous “repair notes” from her old life was a perfect excuse.
Kaia flopped to her stomach and shoved her arm under the mattress once more, extracting her S54 card. Then she disconnected the reader’s wireless signal fromColossal’snetwork, taking the tablet offline while she inserted the card and transferred over a first, innocuous data dump—some of her notes about the colony.
She synced a copy of her academy schedule from the card to the tablet—the data had to be temporarily decrypted for transfer, but the tablet being offline should prevent any in-flight snooping of her data packets. After adding some fake data aboutAhton’s Takethruster and claw repairs for cover, Kaia re-encrypted the payload and attached the resulting file to her new outgoing transmission.
Finally, she tapped out a hasty reply, buzzing with excitement. At least the plan hadn’t changed. They weredoingsomething.
RECIPIENT ID: A35R109-09
FROM ID: CCLSL-25109
DATA: LORAN, COLOSSAL IS GOOD. ADJUSTMENT IS HARD, BUT SOON ORION AND I WILL MARRY AND I APPRECIATE HIS EFFORTS. I MISS YOU ALL. THE TAKE REPAIR NOTES ATTACHED.
Attachment: AT_Repair.pgp
She re-read the note a few times, scrutinizing each sentence to make sure nothing stood out as suspicious. The encrypted attachment held data for Loran, and the plain-text message held data for whoever might be watching. AssumingColossaldidn’t have ways to break her and Loran’s encryption protocol was a risk, but she hoped even if they did, this first set of data she sent would be innocuous enough.
She stashed the tablet away and got up to scrub the coffee-mint sweat smell of her fiancé off her skin with her shower ration.
CHAPTER27
ORION
It had taken every shred of self-restraint not to slam her onto that mat and rip her apart earlier that day. Orion swirled the shot glass of kerogin between his thumb and index finger in the pilot’s bar, replaying the incident. For a few excruciating moments, he thought he may have to stop her incessant writhing because clearly she didn’t know when to quit. She fought for much longer than he had expected, each jerk and twist of her body pulling at his tattered strings until she was nothing but prey, meat thrashing in his arms that needed to be either killed or fucked. Maybe both.
