Page 105 of Legacy of Chaos

“Seriously?”

“Yep.” Her door whooshed open. “I told you we went to college together,” she said, and he nodded. “Well, one night we were working late on some research, and Jamie went home before I did. I only lived a few blocks away, so I always walked, and I was almost there when I heard someone sobbing behind an old house. I found her in a shed.” She ushered him through the doorway. “She was naked and bloody and scared to death, and the guy who assaulted her had a hatchet buried in his rib cage and was taking his last breath.”

“I’m glad he’s dead,” he growled as the door clicked shut.

Instantly, the scent of winter holiday spices dulled his anger and filled him with comforting warmth, one of the few scents that didn’t annoy him and he associated with pleasant childhood memories. His family, closeandextended, loved the holidays, and they went big. Lots of gatherings at the Four Horsemen’s places, and lots of festivities and feasts at his parents’ house. Unlike his brothers, Stryke had never cared much about the food, music, or games, but he’d enjoyed the feeling of family. The closeness. The laughter.

He…missed that. For the first time in over a decade, he actually missed it.

“I don’t know if you heard,” she said as she dropped her purse onto the entryway bench, “but I told Jamie that NASA should be consulting with StryTech a lot more than they are.”

“Once they hear about my newest project, they will be.” Hell, NASA and every other space agency, private or government funded, would soon be clamoring to be involved.

“And what’s that?” she asked as she started toward the kitchen.

“I’m funding an operation to colonize the moon.”

She stopped dead in her tracks and swung around. “Are you serious?”

“You know Armageddon is coming, right? It’s not a vague concept anymore. There’s an actual timeline.”

“A timeline that’s kept from the public.”

“For good reason. People would panic if they knew there’s only nine centuries left.”

“Actually,” she said as she resumed her mission to the kitchen, “I would argue that after an initial panic, things would die down. Humans don’t seem to care about generations to come. They’ll just put off the problem until it has to be dealt with. And by then, it’ll be too late. Don’t need a crystal ball to see that one.”

“Hmm.” He hadn’t considered that. Humans baffled him sometimes. “You might be right.”

“So,” she said, “you mentioned Armageddon. Are you saying you want to put a population in space in case it doesn’t break our way, and the planet is taken over by evil?”

“Yep.”

“That’s pretty cool. Why not Mars?”

He looked around her apartment as he spoke, committing everything to memory and taking note of anything that might help him understand her more. And to his dismay, he understood that she liked bright colors and fluffy pillows.

“Mars is far less inhabitable than Earth’s moon,” he said, wondering what all the boxes were about. Was she moving in or out? “And the distance and logistics involved make it unfeasible, given the short amount of time we have to get it done.”

“Got a timeline?” She pulled a couple of Belgian beers from the fridge. “Like, during my lifespan?”

“Your lifespan is similar to mine, right? Five hundred years or so?”

She fetched an opener from the drawer. “Give or take. Can you reserve me a spot on the first rocket off this shithole?”

He laughed. “I think that can be arranged. We can make the trip together.” He kind of stumbled over that, seeing how he’d just implied that they were a couple. A thing. And that they would still be in the estimated two hundred years he needed to establish a colony.

Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she ignored it, sparing them both an uncomfortable moment.

“Thank you for bringing me home,” she said as she popped the tops off the bottles. “You didn’t have to do that. I’m only a block from the Harrowgate.”

He took one of the offered drinks. “I wanted to see your place.”

She gave him a you’re-full-of-shit look. “You wanted to see how I live.”

There was no point in denying it. “You can tell a lot about someone by what they keep in their personal space and how they treat it.”

“And what does my personal space say about me?”

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