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WES
Icouldn’t help but feel bad for Jax when the surface of the planet proved to be almost entirely barren. It was positively Antarctic in climate—though I supposed if the temperatures were actually Antarctic, I’d have been dead, so maybe more like... like Greenland, or something. Was that better?
I had no idea. What I knew was that we were surrounded by ice on all sides, for miles and miles.
Soon, Jax was convinced he’d seen signs of some kind of rodents, but it had just looked like some random lines in the ice to me, and we hadn’t seen the animals themselves. In the end, it didn’t much matter if therewererodents. If we couldn’t figure out where they were, we weren’t catching any.
And of course, maybe it was my Earth sentiments getting to me, but I’d never imagined eating any of the rodents I knew from home. Rats? No freaking thanks. I could skip ice rats in favor of tasteless ration bars forever. Or even worse, ice capybaras. Who would want to eat something that cute?
“So we have enough food for months,” I said to Jax as he knelt to inspect some more marks on the ice.
He looked up at me, one brow up. “If you want to quit...”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t put words in my mouth.” His brows drew together in confusion at that, but I surged forward instead of stopping to explain the idiom. “I’m asking if you think there’s a danger we’re going to be here for months. You said the distress beacon is working passively. How long could it be before your people see it?”
His mouth flattened into a firm line, head dropping forward for a moment before he turned back to look at me. The blue undertone of his skin was even more prominent than usual, and it made me want to reach out and touch it, to see if he was getting cold.
Finally, he let out a deep breath, his chest making a weird quivering noise somewhere between a purr and a growl. “I do not know. I have no idea the precise number of satellites, or how often this moon’s planet circles our stars. I...I do not know.”
His voice was angry and clipped, as though he would rather be doing literally anything other than talking to me, and for a second, my brain went defensive. Wasn’t I allowed to ask questions? I wasn’t demanding he learn things he couldn’t, just—
But then it pieced itself together in my head.
Darker blue didn’t mean colder for Jax. I reached out and cupped his cheek with a hand, and it was even warmer than the rest of him. Like a human, his skin flushed when he was embarrassed.
Jax was ashamed that he didn’t know the answer.
I knelt down next to him in the ice, grabbing the other side of his face and meeting his gaze steadily. “Are there rodents?”
For a second, he looked confused, glancing around, back at the lines, then to my face. “I believe so. Possibly.”
“Do we need them?”
His lips twisted in a frown that looked almost pouty. “We might.”
And he sounded like a five-year-old saying that the dogcouldhave been the one to climb up on the counter and open the cookie jar.
“Jax?”
This time he didn’t even meet my eye. “Hm?”
“Are we hunting because you feel as though you’re not doing enough?”
He huffed, and the growl-purr sound came again, louder. “I am useless,” he burst out, louder than I’d ever heard his voice, even when we’d been trying not to die on the bridge. “I cannot repair the ship without the parts. I cannot contact my people. I cannot feed you properly. What good is a warrior who cannot even feed his charge?”
I leaned in even closer and pressed my forehead against his. “Youarefeeding me. Maybe the bars aren’t the tastiest thing I’ve ever had, but they’re food. And you repaired the heater, which is going to keep us from dying.”
“So we can spend weeks waiting for help that may not come,” he shot back, clearly blaming himself for that as well.
But I wasn’t going to let that be the last word. So I continued to meet his eye. “Will the food last us a month?”
His brows drew together in a very human expression of suspicion. “Yes.”
“And the trip to earth and back will take how long?”
The line between his brows deepened, clearly not catching the connection just yet. “Less than that.”
I pushed myself against him until he sat back on his haunches, letting me practically sit in his lap, and damn was that nice. He was so warm. “And when Prince Kaelum gets home and finds us still missing, what will he do?”
