Page 87 of Command

“We will begin with this,” he said, holding the syringe to the light. The exorin stained the plastic walls of the syringe as he flipped it over. It oozed thickly to comply with gravity.

Kaia gave Orion Halen’s hand a squeeze and nodded. Shestepped forward to accept the syringe, but Orion grabbed her upper arm, making her turn back.

“Kaia, if it doesn’t work…”

“If it doesn’t work, I have my supply,” she said, voice low. “Right?”

Orion Halen’s throat bobbed in a swallow, his grip on her arm loosening.

“Right.”

Threxin had his doubts that Orion’s diluted exorin would satisfy the female if shedidgrow addicted to the real thing, but he wasn’t about to point that out and make things harder for himself. He would rather not have to restrain anyone to get this job done.

Half a milliliter appeared to have no discernible effect on Kaia Halena. They had called in Tetha and the human scientist Kaia and Orion had been working with to draw a blood test for later analysis. They upped the dosage to one, then five, then fifteen milliliters to no effect.

After the fourth draw of blood, Kaia Halena looked exhausted and flinched at the sight of a needle. Orion was demanding they stop for the day, but the female insisted on just getting through this as quickly as possible. Finally Kaia, exasperated and on edge, grabbed both the remaining vials from the counter, pitched them to her mouth, and gulped them down.

Threxin sighed, running a hand through his spikes. “That was not part of the protocol.”

“Fuck the protocol. Either I get addicted to this shit or I don’t,” she snapped, offering her arm to the human engineer for the final draw. “Let’s get this over with.”

Orion drew the final vial of blood and stored it in the secure container. Then, both he and Threxin watched her for many ticks, waiting for something to happen.

“Why are you doing this anyway?” Kaia asked in a bored voice, slumped in the examination chair with one footpropped on the edge. Her red-painted fingers drummed an impatient beat on her knee. “Why do you give a shit, if your big plan is killing half of us and keeping the rest corralled behind a fucking fence?”

Because I want to claim your assistantdid not seem a wise answer.

“Both my kind and yours appear compelled to break reasonable rules,” he said. “If I can remove the dependency dynamic completely, I will eradicate a large part of the problem.”

“And then what?” Kaia narrowed her eyes.

“Then perhaps we have a slightly more than minuscule chance of surviving on the same rock without descending into what your Earth became,” Threxin said evenly. “You were working toward a vaccine too, no? Did you change your mind?”

Kaia scoffed but offered no answer. She clearly did not like the prospect of a closer cohabitation with his kind, but what she liked mattered not at all to Threxin. It was up to him to commandColossaland lead his cohort to a better life. And more and more, logic dictated that perhaps the humans would be an increasingly unavoidable part of that.

Threxin’s innards lurched with a sensation akin to a moment of zero gravity when Alina Argoud chimed him that evening using the device he gave her. The contact pulsed with a unique texture in the patch adhered to his inner wrist—each incoming sender had its own signature.

“Can you come to my cabin?” Her voice came through his bone-conducting earpiece.

Threxin’s lips twitched in a half-smile. She was being uncustomarily direct, and the fact that it was about the topic of seeing him pleased him. He ignored Renza’s curious liftingof the spikes when his brother nodded his smirk and turned around, pulling his black work gloves off his hands. They’d been inspecting one of the uhyre craft with the mechanics, making sure they were kept in flying shape.

“I can,” he said quietly once he was out of earshot. “Tonight. One ship hour.”

“Okay.”

She cut off the connection abruptly, not wasting time on pointless words or goodbyes, and Threxin was liking this little human more and more by the tick.

He arrived in Alina Argoud’s cabin to find her in her plastic spinning chair, back straight and feet planted firmly side by side. Something was wrong—he could not tell what it was exactly, but he could tell it was not good. She had a look in her eye and a tension in her posture that made her usually pliant form look positively adversarial.

“We need to talk,” Alina said, and Threxin’s eyes flicked to the way her fingernails dug into the plastic edges of her seat at its underside.

His apertures narrowed, his spikes lowering.

“Okay.” Threxin peeled off his black gloves slowly and crossed his arms on his chest. “Talk.”

Alina sucked in a sharp breath, her hands tightening on her seat, and threw her bangs out of her eyes. “I need to ask you for something, and I need you to say yes, Threxin.”

Ah.His lip twitched in a small smile. The female was simply nervous about making a request. He doubted there was anything he could not procure for her as long as it was on the ship. Or perhaps she wanted to request some additional leniencies on the ship?

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