Page 25 of Claim
Yeah, no.Which was why Mag found her huddled in an out-of-the-way spot while everyone else was donning their costumes.
When he hunched down in front of her, his big body filled her universe, which wasn’t much considering she’d put herself in the corner.
“Breathe,” he said softly.“June, you must breathe.”
“I am,” she gasped.“No oxygen.”
“Teq sampled the air, remember?You think he would risk his wife-mate?”
Considering they were all stuck here together, she wasn’t sure that was quite the reassurance he seemed to think it was.He gazed at her, his big black eyes unblinking.“I should send you back to theDeepWander.”
She stiffened.“No.”
Even as she said it, her teeth chattered.
Slowly he opened his arms, and she fell forward gratefully into the enveloping protection.“I’m being a whiny wimp,” she confessed into his shoulder.
“You should hear what’s echoing deep in my own head where surveillance can’t catch it.”He held her another moment, then angled back to his heels, putting a little distance between them.“This is no reflection upon you,” he said solemnly.“For your good, I will send you back.”
And maybe she was being even more hypersensitive than the Luster surveillance or Teq’s scanners, but somehow she knew he meant more than sending her back to theDeepWander.He meant all the way back to Earth.
Slowly, she pushed to her feet and stared down at him.If she locked her knees, she could keep them from knocking together.“I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” she said.“Any worlds.”
She thrust one hand at him.After a heartbeat, he slid his palm over hers, his longer fingers wrapping all the way to her wrist, and if he mostly stood by his own strength, she could at least pretend she let him borrow some of hers.
Even if her knees were still sort of shaking.
When he towered over her, she couldn’t really remember why she’d ever been wary of him.Now, even though he wasn’t touching her, even though nothing could be forever between them, his presence felt like a promise, that they might finally wrest a future for themselves, if not from a cosmic fortune then from their shared resolve to keep moving forward, helping each other along the way.
She smiled up at him, making sure the tremor in her knees didn’t sneak past her heart.“You ready to dance?”
“I have been listening to some Earther musical selections,” he said.“As suggested by Oliver.”
She bit her lip to hold back a horrified laugh.“That was probably…interesting.”
“The darkest monsters from the deepest caverns would flee from such noise,” he said with great seriousness.“But even though I tried to let it go, as the song suggested, it had no particular effect upon my dancing.You can judge for yourself.”
As he stepped away from her, it took everything she had not to tag along.But she had to finish unpacking the makeup cases, and he had to…well, he was apex.
When he joined the other orcs, though, he looked back at her.Even across the strange, empty room she felt the power in his black eyes.
Whatever the distance, they could hold each other up.
Chapter 8
Alone, Mag studied himself in the holographic image beaming from his datpad.He zoomed in, making himself larger than life.When he looked up, his reflection looked down.It—he—towered above him, looking distant and disapproving.
Was this how his orcs felt when he stood at the command dais?Was this how June felt?
June…
Turning slowly from side to side, he studied the cloak and the boots and the gleam of his brother’s sung stone upon his chest.She had done very well.
If only he could take this apparition with him when he confronted the captain of thePratorim, the council of the Luster, and Illgattoa.
In the depths of the previous rest cycle, he’d gone down to the brig.The confines were a new addition to theDeepWander.In all the lightyears of salvage and mining, the crew had only ever needed a locked room for those occasions when Amma’s yezo was stronger than their constitutions.No one had ever sought to steal from their own ship before.
Mag stood in the gloom, looking through the thick plasteel bars.
