Page 38 of The Interstellar Rake's Irresistible Kiss
“It’s a complete sample,” Nor said. “But it’s a hair from Rayna.”
Trixie sighed. “I think she’s the only one of us whoisn’tlost anymore.”
He frowned. Did Trixie really consider herselfstill lost? When he was right here with her?
Disgruntled, he finished the scan and they replaced the filter. While he replaced the brackets holding the panel, she straightened, turning to look around the dome.
“It needs a water slide,” she murmured.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The next filter had nothing as well. But on the last one, the sensor pealed.
Trixie jumped. “Is it…?”
He checked the scan.“Earther DNA. Doesn’t match anything currently on record.” Meaning any of the other women who’d been rescued from the station. “It’ll take a little while to compare against the Intergalactic Dating Agency files that Jinn appropriated.”
She stared down at the filter panel where a small area was illuminated by the pad’s scanner. He carefully excised the section in question and placed it in a specimenbag she held out to him.
“All that’s left is a hair or a bit of skin,” she murmured. “You know, in Sunset Falls, I was a nail artist.”
“You…painted construction fasteners?” He squinted uncertainly.
She waggled her hand at him. “Fingernails. In pretty colors. Hard to believe now.” She rotated her hand back toward herself to stare down at the ragged cuticles. “I’ve bitten them down to nothing.If I had some nail polish, that would help me stop.”
“Maybe we can find you something similar on Azthronos that would work.” He tilted his own hands, intrigued. “What kind of colors?”
She laughed, as if he was teasing her again. “If any guy can make it look good, it would be you.”
He pursed his lips, uncertain why other males wouldn’t look good, although he was glad he would. They sealed upthe collection bag and checked their task list.
“We got everything on the map,” she said. “But it wasn’t very much.”
He nodded. “Hopefully the other teams are finding more.”
“Maybe it’s good that there isn’t evidence of many more victims,” she mused. “I hate the thought of what he did to them.”
As much as he hated the thought of his little Earther torn apart by the power of the singularity.If anything else was torn apart, it would be Blackworm, Nor brooded, by his bare, unvarnished hands.
The dat-pad chirped an incoming message. But when he accepted the call, only hissing static came through. “The radiation must be interfering.” He queried again on a narrower band and received a text-only reply. “Lieutenant Linn, the shuttle pilot, says we’re getting some interference,” he toldTrixie. “The neural gel is processing another batch of potential collection points. We just need to wait until the radiation clears enough to synchronize.” He tapped at the pad. “Sending a message to the other teams to wait for the second round of instructions. Since it shouldn’t be long, there’s no point in going back to Azthronos yet.”
She hunched her shoulders. “So we’re being irradiated rightnow?”
“The station shielding will protect us.”
“But we can’t even get messages to the other teams.”
“It’ll clear up soon,” he said, trying to soothe her obvious unease. “The solar storms never last long.”
Tucking the specimen bags into the satchel he brought along, he took her hand and tugged her over to one of the low steelcrete planters holding the jungle overgrowth. “While we wait, tellme about the nail arts.”
She settled gingerly next to him with a sidelong glance, as if she didn’t trust his interest. “I got the training because I knew I could do it anywhere. And I like the work. It’s soothing and pretty.”
“Just like you,” he murmured. When she wrinkled her nose at him disbelievingly, he shook his head. “Knowing you can do it anywhere was very practical,” he said, then grinned.“But I doubt you thought it would be this far out.”
She huffed out a laugh. “No kidding. But maybe if we end up making this place a resort, it could use a hair and nail salon.” Her green-brown eyes went a little hazy, not with shock this time but with thoughtful dreams of the future. He wished he could see what visions were unspooling in her mind right now.
