Page 52 of Star Bright
Darcy couldn’t stand another moment. “Together,” she said fiercely. “All of us.” She reached out and took Vash’s hand. It was colder than it should be, as if he had already given up. “I’m going to pull. Atsu, you have to be ready to run, all right? Yadira—”
The girl was already stripping off her outer layers, piling everything on top of her brother until he was as round as Santa Claus. When she stood only in her nightshirt, with her thin arms wrapped around her, her green eyes snapped with latent fire. She crawled in next to her father, placing her narrow back on the girder that pinned him. If there was worse farther back in the shadows, Darcy couldn’t see and didn’t want to know. This was their chance.
Vash’s gaze locked on her with despair. “Darcy…”
She squeezed his hand hard then slipped her fingers up his forearm, their wrists pressed together. “Ready?”
“Until this very moment, no.” His lips quirked just the slightest. Oh wonderful, now he learned how to pull off a convincing Earther smirk.
The stink of fireworks and something sharper—blood—pinched her sinuses as Darcy settled her weight and engaged her core. She’d have to move fast and steady, and hopefully not do more damage. “Yadira, you need to shift back to your smaller shape and throw yourself this way immediately once the girders move.” As if the girl’s difficulties with changing would be improved by this stress.
“I will.”
To Darcy’s eyes, the girl’s shift was nothing like Vash’s, seeming both lightning fast and painfully slow. Much like puberty, she thought wryly. The delicacy of the wings that sprouted and unfurled from her shoulders was matched by ablatant strength: a girl who had been bound in her shell too long and was finally breaking free.
The instant the girder cleared Vash’s shoulders, Darcy was pulling. He managed to uncover his other arm, revealing a wound in his forearm that gushed blood. His hand was limp, so he could only wedge his elbow along. He only progressed a few inches toward her when he grimaced. “My leg,” he gasped.
Before Darcy could reset her grip, Yadira had wedged herself farther into the wreckage. “No,” Vash whispered. But it was too late.
The drakling shoved again at the twisted metal, and with a horrendous squeal, the tangle started to stretch apart.
Cursing and pulling with everything she had, Darcy inched him away from the mortal danger—away from his daughter. No,allof them would emerge from the wreckage this time. That was the only possibility.
“Yadira,” she called. “Out of there. Now.”
For half an instant, she thought the girl would sacrifice herself for what she’d lost before, but then with a sharp cry from the small drakling’s throat, Yadira was shrinking, the girders coming down around her again—
Vash lashed out with his wounded arm—that was suddenly a drakling wing. The heavy vane tangled around the girl, hauling her out of the collapsing tomb.
Darcy wrenched backward, hearing her own shoulders pop with the strain, but she didn’t feel anything except a wild and fierce determination that they would live. Her senses narrowed to the power she needed to move Vash with Yadira in his winged embrace toward Atsu yelling, “Go, go, go!”
Probably it was the go-go-go that did it. They tumbled out, sprawling in the snow as the girders groaned behind them, the uncured bulkheads collapsing.
“We did it!” Atsu crowed. The ship exploded behind them in a riot of roman candles. “Happy New Year!”
Chapter 18
The journey back to the outpost was agonizingly slow in the overloaded hover cart. It would’ve been horrendously cold even with the layers shared between them if not for Vash’s one shredded wing wrapped around them all, the torn edges flapping in the breeze. They were only halfway back when a ring of lights appeared in the sky above them.
“I wouldn’t mind being abducted right now,” Darcy muttered.
“That is not how the Intergalactic Dating Agency works,” Vash replied wearily. “But if it’s something you’d like to explore…”
“No, I think I’m right where I want to be.”
He gazed at her, a question in his gray eyes, but then the transport was landing in the snow ahead of them.
“Darcy!” Brin raced toward them, tripping in the snow. “I’m so sorry. I will get you authorized for hazard pay when you were only supposed to be petsitting the universe’s ugliest dog.”
Ug descended from the transport behind Brin, grumbling. Two more vaguely humanoid beings were behind Ug with a stretcher big enough to hold Vash in his beast shape, and they were all hustled aboard.
Ug let out a short, disapproving howl at the sight of them. “So about those ship repairs,” Darcy told him. He growled again.
By the time they arrived at the outpost landing area—much more official than the lawn crashing from before—Atsu was asleep in Darcy’s arms, and her shoulder was screaming. Vash and Yadira were talking quietly, their voices rising and falling in a solemn melody of grief and gratitude, apology and approval, with the constant undertone of love, steady as an unfaltering wingbeat.
Brin just watched them all with wide eyes and a secret smile.
As everyone was ushered to the med bay, Brin whispered to Darcy, “The Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency scores again.”
