9. Astrid

9

ASTRID

I couldn't stop looking at Zyrus, and I wanted to blame the dream. That dream haunted me, and like all true hauntings, it had a nasty habit of sneaking up on me and then dissolving into nothing when I tried to examine it too closely.

If Zyrus noticed anything different in the following days, he didn't say a word. He was just there, my silent shadow.

It should have been annoying.

It wasn't.

I wanted to touch him. When he sat on my sofa and merely existed, it took all of my willpower to keep my hands to myself. It was even worse when he stood. It seemed like every day, we'd somehow end up only a foot apart, staring into each other's eyes and waiting for something to happen.

He was looking at me too. Never at the same time. I looked at him, but I could feel his eyes on me as I tried to keep myself busy. That was the other thing. I was starting to go stir crazy. It had been weeks since my injury, and I was plenty healed. I was used to walking the perimeter of the encampment every day on guard duty or just to stretch my legs. There was always something that needed to be done down on Nebula, some fire to put out—figuratively or literally.

I needed a job or something like it, somewhere to keep me occupied so I couldn't worry about what was happening on Nebula or keep obsessing over the blue giant who had taken up residence in my quarters and my mind. But that felt like a big step, like I was admitting I planned to stay on Nebula Outpost for some time.

If there was danger here, I knew I shouldn't stay. But this was where Zyrus was, and something felt undeniably wrong about walking away from him without giving it—whatever it was—a chance.

"Is everything alright?" Zyrus asked. He was sitting on the sofa with a tablet in his hand. The screen was lit with bright colors and cartoons.

"Are you playing a game?" He normally sat quietly or peered at the viewscreen on the wall as if it showed the actual outside instead of a projected image.

"It tests my reflexes. It keeps my mind sharp."

"But is it fun?" It had been years since I had a tablet or comm with enough charge to play one of the ubiquitous games out there, but I'd had favorites for the long days of travel between jobs back in the day.

He turned off the screen and set the tablet down to look at me fully, his brows drawn down a bit as if that question was confusing. "It is intellectual stimulation."

He was nothing like the man I'd met on Honora Station.

The thought walloped me on the side, and I nearly staggered as if it was something physical. Was that dream real? Some sort of mixed up memory? I'd traveled across the galaxy more than once, and every place tended to blend into every other place. Coming off a days-long journey in cheap accommodations and landing at yet another space station wasn't worth remembering.

But Zyrus was. How could I have forgotten?

But it still didn't feel real enough for me to say something. And if we'd met before and Zyrus remembered, surely he would have said something by now. Maybe I'd met someone who looked like him, another Detyen who'd tried to turn my head.

It didn't feel right.

I wished the dream was a bit easier to remember, or that there wasn't a decade of trauma piled on top of it making excavation of the memory nearly impossible.

"Do you ever just do something for fun?" He was so serious all the time. I knew he was there to guard me, but no one was going to break down my door, and if that was something Zyrus was even remotely concerned about, he wouldn't have been playing a game.

"Fun is not … " He trailed off with a shake of his head, as if he didn't know how to finish the sentence.

"You haven't always been this way." I should have made it a question, but it came out as a statement. "How'd you get so serious?"

He was quiet for several moments, and I thought he wouldn't answer. Finally, he did. "It was the only way I could survive."

There was pain in that statement, and I wanted to delve into it, to uncover all of Zyrus's secrets, but I forced myself not to ask. We all had our pain, and it was never any fun when someone went poking around in it.

"I said I'd check in on Alice today. Do you mind if we …?" I nodded towards the door. The room felt heavy with unsaid things, and it was best if we left for a bit. Who knew what I would say if I didn't walk out.

Zyrus stood and left his tablet on the side table. We walked in silence to Alice's room, and I knocked.

"I'll wait over there for you." He pointed towards a bench. "Please don't leave without me."

"Right. Sure." No more solo jaunts. I'd agreed to that.

Zyrus walked towards the bench, and Alice answered the door. She gave a questioning look to his fleeing back but didn't say anything. Her quarters were only a hallway over from mine, but they were about half the size, and she didn't even have a private space for her bedroom. The place was tidy, both because neither Alice nor I had many things to mess a place up and because she'd always been fastidious.

"Any luck?—"

"Have you?—"

We both spoke at the same time, cutting each other off. I shut my mouth and let her speak.

"Have you contacted anyone down on Nebula?" she asked. She took a seat on one of the two chairs in her small dining area, and I took the other one.

"Not yet. Something weird is going on." I told her all I'd learned so far, the alleged quarantine, and what the doctor said. It wasn't much, but what I knew wasn't good either.

"I knew that job was too good to be true." She scowled it out.

That had become something of a mantra down on Nebula. The pay at the Nebula mine had been good, good enough to attract people from across the galaxy into leaving their lives behind for difficult, dangerous work. For a while, some people had even thought the explosion was some sort of inside job to keep from paying us. I could never quite believe that, but with the way things were going now, maybe the conspiracy theorists had a point.

"I'm trying to find out more," I promised. "It's just hard from up here."

"Harder down there."

"Yeah." We had easy access to food and water, to soap and bathtubs and everything I'd wanted for ten years of hard living. Complaining while we were stuck up here was not a good look. "Any luck contacting your family?" Unlike me, Alice had left behind people who cared about her to take a one-year contract at the mine.

"I've found a new address. They moved. It appears my wife remarried."

"Oh, Alice. I'm sorry to hear that." I reached out and covered her hand with mine, offering a squeeze.

Strangely, she smiled. "Namyra was a good friend of ours, a very good friend, if you know what I mean. We'll have to see how things go when I get back, whether there's something to pull out of the ashes."

A wife back home and a lover, from the sounds of it. At least Alice would be taken care of.

"What's going on with you and the big blue guy?" Alice asked. She picked up a piece of paper on her side table and folded it and refolded it until it was limp in her hands.

"You know what's going on, you were there." Alice had come right along when I was injured, not leaving my side until I was rushed into surgery. She'd been one of the first to know that Zyrus agreed to watch me.

"It's been weeks. I understand your concerns, but don't you think we're too, I don't know, insignificant, for someone to hunt down? Once news of Nebula gets out, there will be a few media stories, maybe a few lawsuits, and that's it. It will disappear under a thousand other stories, and no one will remember it by next year. They've probably all forgotten about the disaster."

I wished I had an answer to that. Maybe I was being paranoid, but now that I had memories of Zyrus lurking in the back of my mind, I didn't want to send him away. Not until I figured this out.

I could tell Alice.

It was on the tip of my tongue. Yes, Noelle and Pippa both had Detyen lovers and knew what it was like to be in a relationship, but Alice knew me . We'd spent a decade together eking out survival on a planet completely indifferent to us, and that bound people together in a way beyond friendship. She'd listen to me.

Or she'd just tell me to fuck the man and see how things went. We weren't trapped any more.

"I'm going to keep trying to find a way to get word to the others," I said. I couldn't talk about Zyrus; I didn't know how to put it into words.

But with that done, there was nothing more to say.

Zyrus was waiting for me just as he'd promised and stood from the bench when I slid out of the room. He turned toward my quarters, but I shook my head.

"I need to walk, need to clear my thoughts, just for a bit." I wasn't asking. If he told me no, I might scream.

He nodded and kept pace beside me silently.

I couldn't keep my mouth shut. "If I don't keep pushing station security, no one is getting off of Nebula. It's too easy to forget about them down there. I'm tempted to hijack a ship and go and rescue them myself." I paused and blew out a breath. "But my flying skills aren't exactly great. Can you pilot?"

"Yes." The word was completely neutral, with no hint on whether he wanted to help or stop me.

"What do you think they'd do if I showed up with a hundred refugees and told them to deal with it?" There was an image in my head of blazing blasters and red-faced captains. It would be satisfying until they threw me onto a penal colony and made me disappear forever.

"It's more than a hundred, isn't it?" he reminded me. "With the prisoners who were kept in the mine."

Did it make me a bad person that I forgot about them? I didn't ask the question out loud because I feared I knew the answer. "Right."

But the extra survivors down on the planet just made this whole thing worse. Why weren't they being brought to Nebula Outpost so they could be sent home?

Zyrus placed his hand on my sleeve, and I looked up at him. His face was as serious as always, but looking at him made my breath catch in my throat.

He was gorgeous.

Had I really kissed that mouth all those years ago or was that just the dream?

He nodded towards a door I hadn't noticed and tugged on my sleeve just enough to get me to take a step that way. I felt its absence when his hand dropped away.

I wasn't sure what I was expecting when the door slid open, but it wasn't a comms closet. One whole wall was made up of screens and buttons, but no one was there to stop us from touching anything.

"What is this place?" Nebula Outpost seemed to have been built with hidden away rooms in mind.

"The rooms weren't originally wired for long-distance comms," he explained as he touched the screen to make it light up. "These closets used to be available for rent for people who wanted to call back to planets outside the Nebula system. Most of the closets have been repurposed, but for some reason they've kept a few." He adjusted a dial, and the screen came to life, though it was only showing the logo of the space station.

"Are you … What are you doing?" For some reason, my mind couldn't keep up, and all I could do was watch Zyrus's hands as they worked.

"I'm trying to contact one of the comm stations down on Nebula. Ryklin was able to message from an outpost, and I know those coordinates, but there's no guarantee that the equipment survived the fight or that anyone's manning the station."

"You're getting me in touch with my people?"

"I'm trying."

My eyes widened, and my heart started to pound. There was space for a chair in front of the screen, but if there ever had been one in this closet, it had been moved a long time ago.

At first, I heard static, but after a moment, it resolved into a man's voice. "There are still survivors on Nebula. We have injured. If you can hear this, please respond."

"Davis?"

The message looped, and I realized it was a recording. Hope, if I'd ever managed to feel it, was swept away on a wave of anger, and I wanted to scream. I didn't even know who I was mad at. Commander Henner for cutting me off. The company for not bothering to search for us. Davis for not being right there.

I had to do something about it.

"Astrid?" The word came back tinny and glitchy, but it was repeated quickly.

"Davis!" I leaned forward so fast I nearly toppled over the desk and Zyrus had to put a stabilizing arm around me.

"You're alive? Truly?" Even through the distance, I could hear the relief. "What's going on?"

"I hoped you could tell me something." Of course, they were just as clueless as I was down on Nebula, maybe even more so. "I've been trying to talk to station security, but they told me you were in quarantine."

"That's ridiculous. No one's sick. They've been flying patrols overhead every day, but no one's come down to get us out of here. They definitely know we're here, we've tried to flag them down for days. I've been trying to get someone on comms, but I could swear they're jamming the signal." Frustration laced his every word.

"How is everyone? Prepped for winter? Any updates?" I'd been a leader of these people for the better part of a decade and knew just how harsh the cold months could be. We didn't lose people to the cold every year, but it happened. And with hope of rescue dangling in front of them, preparations had to be more bitter than normal.

"It's not good, Astrid. We have injured from the fight with the smugglers and the medkits we scavenged from the ruins can only do so much. Plus, we have the people who were forced to work that mine, and you know how it rips you up if you don't have safety equipment. If someone doesn't come get us soon, I think people might start taking drastic action."

My stomach curdled at the thought of my people risking themselves like that. "How low are those surveillance ships flying?"

"Low enough. Tell me the truth. Are they just going to let us rot?"

"I won't let them. Give me a little more time. I promise I will get you guys out of there. Maybe it's time this story spread beyond Nebula Outpost."

The line crackled and popped, but Davis was still there. "I'll try and keep the comms open. Keep me updated." He ended the call.

I wanted to try again, to see if I could talk to anyone else down there and get an even bigger picture, but Davis had said more than enough.

Zyrus led me silently back to my room, seeming to understand that I needed time to process everything.

Back in my room, the door slid shut behind me, and I leaned against it, heaving a big sigh. Zyrus turned to face me, his expression so serious it made something in me hurt.

What had happened to that smiling man I'd met all those years ago? Had I just conjured that up?

He stared at me, eyes dark and deep, and I took a slow, measured step towards him.

He didn't back up.

It was only when I was this close to him, in touching distance, that I realized how tall he was. Usually, I hated to be towered over, but something about him made me feel protected.

"Thank you," I said, and it was for far more than the message to Davis.

He nodded once but said nothing.

Slowly, I raised my hand to his cheek and pressed my palm to his skin. His nostrils flared, and his eyes flashed red, but he remained as still as a statue.

I had to rise up to meet him, and then our lips met. It was soft and tentative, like the ghost of a memory. But Zyrus kissed me back, his hand wrapping around the back of my head and his tongue sweeping into my mouth to claim me.

This was real.

My blood roared in my ears as the kiss went on.

And then Zyrus made a noise in the back of his throat and crashed to the ground at my feet.