Page 6 of Risking Her Heart

Angota is already there talking to Captain Nyanna and Shukach. The three of them turn their attention to us as soon as we walk in. Dan says something in the human tongue. He’s animated and angry, throwing his arms around while his face and hairless head are as red as the sand. Angota watches the rant with quiet calmness.

“We have a bigger problem,” Angota says in our tongue, looking right at me.

3

KATARINA

“We are fucked! Fucked I say! I don’t know what we are going to do. What else can go wrong? Ah, for fucks sake!”

I have to cover my mouth to hide my grin as I struggle to suppress a laugh. I know this isn’t funny, not in the slightest, but the way Dan is ranting. Stomping here and there, throwing his arms around, and it just looks ridiculous. I know it’s stress making me react this way, but even so, it has caused me a lot of problems in the past.

After we crashed, I walked out of the wreckage of the ship, sat on the sand, and began laughing. How was it I had survived? We lost a lot of people. Bodies were either lying around the inside of the ship or spread across the sand and yet there I was. Alive.

Me. Pointless, little old me. I didn’t stop laughing and crying until Nyanna came and sat next to me. She didn’t speak, only put her arm over my shoulders and stayed at my side. The two of us looked out over the rolling sands that were going to be our home.

The absurdity of it all seemed too big to comprehend. How did any of us survive? We should all be dead. The generation ship, the thing we never thought about because it was such a constant, was gone. The one unshakeable thing in the universe was ripped away, leaving what? Nothing but wreckage and a handful of survivors.

I’ll never forget the way Nyanna helped me, though. Her silence was what I needed to get past the overwhelm. I like to think maybe she needed it too. I don’t know, we never talked about it. It’s not like we were or are best friends or something. I didn’t know her at all before the crash. And now, she’s Captain Nyanna, much too busy for someone like me.

I’m a worker. That’s all I know how to do. I’m not the smartest, not that I’m dumb or anything, but I’m also not a leader or a thinker. All I ever wanted from my life was to find some semblance of happiness. My job on the ship was caretaker of one of the many parks and gardens. Watering plants, pulling weeds, cleaning up the messes people left behind because apparently putting your litter into a trash can fifteen feet away was too much effort for the general masses.

It was a good job. Simple, but good. I wasn’t going to set the world on fire, and I didn’t want to. There was a guy, of course, because I wanted kids. A family. I mean it was my duty to have two kids, but I didn’t only want them out of any obligation to a future planet I would never walk on. I wanted them because I dreamed of being a mom.

But that guy, Ryan, didn’t make it. Thankfully, I wasn’t the one who found him, someone else did, but I was the one who identified his body and helped to bury him. I thought it was strange then that I wasn’t sadder than I was when I buried him.Not that I wasn’t sad, I was. Just not as sad as I thought I should be or would be.

Standing next to Zas’tu, my Zmaj savior, Ryan seems like a distant memory. One I’m not sure was even real. He is more like something I dreamed of compared to Zas’tu, who is real. Zas’tu is very there in some way that seems like he’s more than real. He is more solid, more here, than even the walls. More than Dan and the others and much, much more than Ryan.

I’m watching Zas’tu out of the corner of my eye when I see him look down. His mouth twists into his crooked smile and he moves his hand, silently offering it to me. I put mine into his and my hand fits. It shouldn’t. He’s so much bigger than me, towering and bulky, and his hands are sized for him. Why would it? But it does. His hands are not abnormally small or something, but when he closes his fingers around my hand it’s perfect.

There are no scales on the palms of his hands but they’re still cool. His long fingers encircle my entire hand easily. The nails of his fingers are more clawlike than nails. Well, human nails. Darker and they look stronger, like they could slash through someone leaving considerable damage in their passing.

At some point, which I totally miss, having been lost in my thoughts, Dan quits ranting. I only realize it when one of the Zmaj speaks. The deeper voice and alien language pull my attention back to the room around us.

“Can we speak Common?” Dan asks. “I am not nearly fluent enough in Zmaj to keep up with this.”

Yeah, Dan. You tell them.

A chuckle slips before I can clamp it down. Zas’tu darts a glance at me and then he has his crooked smile and broken tooth on display, which make my knees weak and my stomach flutter like it's trying to grow wings and take off. I shrug as my cheeks flush from more than embarrassment.

Those eyes. The way he looks at me…

“We have bigger problems,” the Zmaj at the front says which pulls my attention away from Zas’tu.

“Bigger? We don’t have a source of water. Maybe you and yours can be okay with that but we humans won’t last long without it. This is bad.”

“Yes,” the Zmaj says.

“Right, so what are we going to do about it?” Dan asks, pacing back and forth in front of the group of Zmaj.

“Bigger problem,” the Zmaj says. “But will address both. We must move.”

“Move?” Dan exclaims, his voice cracking, jerking to a sudden halt.

I jerk back too, looking at Zas’tu. He’s watching the spectacle up front but must sense or feel my gaze because he turns towards me.

“Move?” I whisper.

His smile flashes as he shrugs, but I can’t tell if he understands me or not. He tightens his grip on my hand in a way that at least feels reassuring but who knows what he’s thinking or intending. I regret even more not learning the Zmaj language. I never saw the point in it but who knew I’d fall for one of them?

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