Page 7 of Fated to the Dragon Alien

Stavian didn’t like not knowing. His job was to control variables, monitor risk, anticipate failure. He leaned back in his chair, positioning his wings to minimize them scraping on the floor. Cerani hadn’t cracked under the pressure, and she hadn’t complained once during any of her extended shifts. She hadn’t even logged an exhaustion flag. Most miners begged for stim breaks after cycle seven. She was on cycle thirty-three and still pulled over quota. Maybe she knew that her extra shifts helped them make quota, and therefore allowed her fellow, sick prisoners the rest they needed.

He thought of her steady gaze when he spoken with her in the tunnel. Her quiet defiance. She did notknow her place,and if she did, she didn’t give afek.

He should report her. Push the anomaly to Central, let them sort it out. That was the right move. The safe one.

But if they pulled her, he’d never see her again. That just wasn’t acceptable to him.

“Controller?” A voice crackled over the comm line. “Suit sweep complete. Rotations authorized to resume. Shall we reengage mining teams?”

He looked at the status lights blinking bright green across tunnel rows A through E.

“Yes,” he said with a sick gut. He didn’t want anyone in those mines with that equipment, but it was always a careful dance with Central, who saw any compassion toward there prisoners as traitorous. “And download a copy of the sweep report before it gets purged. Send it to my terminal.”

“Understood.” The line cut.

Stavian drummed his fingers once against the console. The data wasn’t helping anymore. Numbers didn’t explain her. Records could be forged, sensors could glitch. Charts lied all the time. If he wanted answers, data wouldn’t be enough. He’d already pulled what he could—med logs, vitals, imaging feeds. None of it gave him what he needed. But whatdidhe need from her? He was afraid to answer that question.

But she’d looked right at him—unflinching, grounded, sharp as a blade. She wasn’t waiting for someone to save her. Cerani knew who she was. If he wanted the truth, he was going to have to ask her himself.

Stavian shut down the terminal, stood, and keyed into the security paging system. “Inmate hold on 630-I. Escort her to Central Intake,” he said. “Bring her to me.”

THREE

Cerani

Cerani kept her hands locked behind her back as the mech guided her down the lower corridor. It moved fast for a clunky thing, metal legs clicking against the grated floor while she hustled to keep up. She kept her questions to herself. She’d learned by now that answers came on the administrator’s time, not the miners’.

The mech had pulled her from lineup after second check-in, just before food allocation. One second, she’d been with the others going toward the rations. The next, a mech had scanned her wrist and ordered her to follow it.

A few fellow miners looked at her with worried eyes as she left. They were likely wondering if she’d be coming back.

The tunnel narrowed the farther they went. The noisy overhead lights sputtered and popped. Passageways snaked off into even deeper parts of the structure. Miners never came down this far. This area was for processing and shipping, which were all automated. It would be a good place to take someone if youwanted to make them disappear. Cerani swallowed and kept walking.

They turned twice, passed a stairwell that smelled like fuel, then stopped in front of a thick steel door. A scan clicked, the door hissed open, and the mech waved her inside without a word.

The circular room beyond was colder than the tunnels. She felt it even through the suit. The lights were dim, and the air stirred with the hum of powered stations. Three wall-mounted consoles blinked soft green from open system screens. One terminal sat in the far center, lit with a pulsing blue glow.

He sat behind it.

Stavian looked different behind a screen in a room barely larger than the lift she’d just ridden on. No guards. No mechs.

Cerani took one step inside and stopped. “Didn’t think your office would be this small,” she said, then instantly regretted it. She couldn’t have blurted out a worse way to greet the controller of the mine.

Stavian didn’t smile, but his expression shifted like he wanted to. “This is the smallest of my five administrative spaces.”

“Ah. Five. Well, that’s nice for you.” She hovered at the threshold before reluctantly stepping inside the room fully. Her lungs felt tight, but not because of the air. “Why am I here?”

“Because I sent for you.”

“Okay.” She bit her tongue and sighed. Cerani was tired and hungry, and both of those things made her prone to spouting her mouth off. She wasn’t like her friend Lilas, who said what she thought no matter what and actually enjoyed getting under others’ skin. Cerani was older than her friends, except for Nena. She had learned restraint and knew that this was an unwise place to be lacking in it. “Why did you send for me?”

The controller stood. There was almost no sound to his movements, which somehow made it worse. She watched him cross the room and enter something into the panel nearest the door. He was awfully close. If not for the helmet, she’d be able to smell him. Her gaze moved over the fine scales of his jaw. The dark arch of his brow. The door hissed shut behind her.

Stavian returned to his console and Cerani moved her gaze to his. She wouldn’t show fear. She hadn’t shown fear when she’d been given as a bondmate to a cruel Terian male back at the settlement, and she wouldn’t show it now, even though she felt it.

Cerani pressed her fingers into her palms. Her nails dug into the inside of her gloves. “Would you please explain why I’m here? I don’t know what rule I broke that requires a personal conversation.”

“You didn’t break any rules.”

---