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“It’s a massive industry within the Azza Empire, and it bleeds into other galaxies. But you knew this of the universe before you left Earth, didn’t you?”
“I did, but my understanding of your world was next to nothing. Now that we’ve helped Rossa once, couldn’t we do it again?”
He chuckles. “Perhaps, if she needs us. We can tell her we’re at her service. How about that? She might need more form-filing if she can’t convince the agencies to give her back her privateering licenses. Thrilling stuff.”
“And in the meantime? Where will we go?”
“Anywhere,” he says, stopping our momentum to steal a kiss from me against the wall of a shuttered shop. “Anywhere you’d like to go.”
“We could stay on EC-12 temporarily. My farm’s probably in shambles. I might have to sell it or lease it . . . get things in order before we make any other decisions.”
“Then we’ll do that.”
Niko makes everything sound so simple, so easy.
“Are you sure you won’t go home once we’ve wrapped this up?” I ask him, chewing on my lip.
He shakes his head. “I don’t like saying I’ll never go home, but there’s nothing there for me. Especially now that I’ve found you,ti kaia. The only thing that tempted me to return was the prospect of the mating call. Perhaps the Kali’Ka meant to send me a message when it revealed you as my mate.”
Frowning, I wonder if I should push him on the unanswered questions he’s left hanging about his home and his people.
“You mean I’m a message that says you don’t need to go home? Ever again?”
“No,” he sighs, quickly grabbing my hand. “You are not a message. You are my life, my partner . . . I shouldn’t have said it that way. I just mean to say that there’s nothing left for me to go home for.”
“If there was nothing left, you wouldn’t call it home,” I say. “Your Lalo won’t live forever. Your friends will be there—your people!”
“You don’t understand—”
“Help me to,” I demand, not wanting to let it slide this time. We’re about to start a life together.
“We’re dying out,” he snaps, his voice tight with more frustration than he usually shows. “My culture is almost dead. In another generation, we’ll hardly exist at all.”
“You don’t mean literally, right?” I ask.
“Yes and no. The population is waning. We are healthy, and there are new children born almost every passing. But the attack that killed my parents was something of a final blow, not only to the strength of our numbers but also to our pride. There are fewer matings, partly because many of us are blood-related already. The spirit stays silent for so many. Even the leader of our kind has no mate and no heir as he reaches thirty and three passings old.”
“That’s young!” I protest, as a fellow thirty-something.
“For the mating call it’s getting late,” he says. “Most bonds occur between twenty and thirty. . .”
His sentence trails off unnaturally as if he meant to say more, but lost his train of thought.
My hackles rise at the sound of rustling fabric behind us. It’s strange because no one has been walking near us. In fact, the streets have been barren. Niko told me that it wasn’t a picturesque, walkable district, but I didn’t care. Most people in this neighborhood use small speeders to get around. They zoom by in the airspace above our heads. The sounds of whistling traffic overhead are all that can be heard as Niko and I both fall silent.
“Let’s go this way,” Niko says as he steers me to the right, down an alleyway filled with trash. He must also have suspicions that we’re being followed. I didn’t imagine it.
“Get behind me,” he hisses. Before I can protest, his arm presses me backward. I’m squished between his back and a slimy, moss-covered wall. He reaches for his stinger, but something strikes before I catch a glimpse of our attacker. Niko is caught off guard too, cursing as the stinger clatters across the street tiles.
He keeps a second one strapped along his thigh, so I reach down for it just as our stalker launches into the air. The dark figure is covered from head to toe in matte black armor. In one hand, he holds a rod and in the other, a blade. I slip my hand inside Niko’s holster.
“They have an airwhip,” Niko whispers to me. “If you get caught by it, interrupt the force with your hand. It can’t hold you for very long.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I say.
“Took the words out of my mouth,ti kaia.Take my stinger, and run, Raina. I’ll find you.”
The stalker jerks the rod, and Niko flies away from me in the blink of an eye. He grips his own wrist, and the pulling force suddenly stops. I switch his stinger to the deadly setting. The attacker approaches with slow, calculated steps.
