Page 91 of Her Lawless Prince

They automatically looked down at the monitors on their arms.

“Good,” Payton said as the other two nodded at her. They couldn’t linger too long, but they were fine for the moment.

“Where did they keep the virus formula?” Rick asked.

“I’m checking the system now. Give me a minute. It’s been a while since I used this kind of interface.” Nyle pulled a chair to the table and leaned over next to the arm to read the screen on the top. Soft musical tones sounded as he typed.

“It’s just like flying a ship,” Rick said. “It’ll come back to you.”

Payton walked around the lab for clues, not that she would understand much of the Cysgodian scientific writing. She touched the strange symbols and then the small containment canister at her waist. “Should we maybe copy some of the literary works and send them back to Qurilixen? It might be nice for the elders to teach the children. Maybe picture archives?”

They’d been so focused on the virus that no one had stopped to consider what else they should take.

“Priority has to be the virus,” Rick said. “We’ll see what air we have left after that, but I’m not staying on-world to browse a library.”

“I was right. They deleted any information about the virus out of the system,” Nyle said, standing. “They tried to hide the fact they were responsible.”

They.

He saidtheywere responsible, notwe.

Payton took a deep breath at the tiny admission. Maybe Nyle could someday forgive himself.

He searched the lab before putting a recording disk that looked like a larger version the one Yevgen had left behind on top of the table. Lights began flashing.

“What are you doing?” Rick asked.

Nyle watched the lights. “Copying the system. The only thing people know about my homeworld is the Cysgodian virus, but there is so much more. This database contains everything my people worked on. Grafting advancements for cyborgtronic limbs. Medicines. Technology. You talk about a library; this is my people’s library. This is what we strived for, what we wrote about.”

“We need to hurry this along,” Rick insisted. “We’ll circle back for it if there’s time.”

The lights stopped. Nyle took the recording disk and turned toward Payton. “I know no one more honorable than my wife to entrust this to for safekeeping.”

He put the disk into her containment canister. Payton wrapped her hand protectively around it. “We’ll need a way to access the data.”

“Virus,” Rick prompted.

“Storage facility,” Nyle answered.

Payton glanced down at her air gauge to check it. “Wait, play Yevgen’s disk.”

Nyle started to reach for it.

“Virus,” Rick stated louder. “Priorities.”

“Storage is this way,” Nyle said. To Payton, he added, “We’ll try to find a handheld player to take with us.”

31

Nyle hopedthe others didn’t see his hands shake as he moved around his old workplace. He had thought himself prepared for the rush of emotions he felt being on-world again, but it was more than he could have imagined. Everywhere he looked he saw something from his past.

Outside, it had been childhood walks with his mother down the busy streets or educational trips to the various buildings. He remembered waiting in line for a lecture and giving up because it was too cold.

Inside the facility, it was Valn reciting inappropriate jokes but never getting into trouble because she had a charming smile. Or the time Ward and Darryn had a cart race through the halls and crashed into a week’s worth of food crates. Or when a small lab accident killed a scientist in Sector B that he’d never met.

Nyle had prepared himself for the big memory but not these small ones. This wasn’t his assigned laboratory, but it looked close to the same. Touching the tabletop console, hearing the soft musical notes of his fingers on the keys, it brought him back to those workdays that ran together in an endless stream. So many tiny things he’d forgotten to remember—the sound of muffled voices moving along the hallway past his lab, the clomp of feet as cyborg frames learned to walk.

“Storage?”

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