Page 84 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid
She nodded, and Rentir seemed whipped by the mere thought of her with someone else. His head sagged, but his gaze remained on her.
“He was my copilot,” she said, trying to still her jiggling leg. “He was a caricature of a good guy, honestly. People just aren’t like that in real life. He would have given anyone the shirt off his back. He got it into his head that he liked me as more than a friend, and then… all that kindness was focused on me. It was like being blinded by a Care Bear stare.”
“What is this…kairberrstare?” His gaze turned thorny. “Did it cause you harm?”
She laughed again, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms. “Sorry, no. It’s nothing. I just mean he was relentless. He wormed his way into my life bit by bit, and then one day I woke up and he had become this pillar of my happiness, something I couldn’t imagine living without. And I was scared shitless by that.”
“I think I understand.”
She studied the glowing planes of his face. His expression was somber.
“His loss had the power to hurt you,” Rentir mused. “I have suffered a similar fear with Haerune. We took great care never to let the overseers know how close we truly were. Wherever they found affection, they sought to break it.”
“That’s awful,” she whispered.
He shrugged, his eyes skating away from her, suddenly unable to meet her gaze. “Please, continue.” His tail slid along the bench, the tip flicking only a few inches from her thigh, painting her with purple light.
She cleared her throat before obliging. “There was a lot to lose on Earth. If I’d been caught sleeping with him, it would haveimpacted my reputation. Could have cost me my position. I’d worked too fucking hard to lose it over something like that.” She sighed, rubbing her sweaty palms against the rough fabric of her pants. “I was so hung up on that bullshit I didn’t see what was happening right in front of me.
“There was a constant battle for resources at that point. Every ideology had made the push to extremism as a matter of necessity. There was no more room to agree to disagree, not with everyone believing their side had the answer to the threat of annihilation looming over humanity.”
She stood up and began to pace. Sweat dampened her neck as she approached the worst of her memories, her stomach clenching with anger and regret.
“Laura Price, our CSO, she’d made some weird comments over the year we trained together. I should have fucking listened, but I…” She kicked a hefty rock into the bushes, satisfied by the answering throb of pain in her toes. “Iagreedwith some of it. She thought it was a betrayal of humanity to focus efforts on getting offworld. We were pulling so much more funding for colony missions than the Restoration Coalition was getting for ecological clean-up attempts. And it wasn’t a lottery; only the rich were getting their golden tickets to the promised land. I still believed that colonies offworld were the future of humanity, but I didn’t think it should come at the expense of damning everyone who couldn’t afford the flight.”
She sat down heavily on the bench, bracing her arms against her thighs and peeking at Rentir through the curtain of her hair.
“I didn’t know how deep she was until she blew the computers on ascent. Some kind of EMP charge, just enough to fry the essential systems. She just kept ranting, reading her manifesto, even as the fucking ship burned. I got the crew to their pods, managed to drop our cargo. It should have been enough, but she…”
She scrubbed her face hard, shoving her hair back behind her shoulders with agitated movements. “She fucked the emergency response systems. Those pods should have been able to guide themselves down safely, but the propulsion and nav systems never even kicked on. Fell like a bunch of fucking rocks. Every one of them died.”
Rentir sucked in a startled breath.
“Four hundred souls,” she said somberly. “Plus all five of my crew.”
“I’m sorry.” His tail slid over to curl around the back of her knee. It squeezed, grounding her.
“It was my fault.” She was mortified by how thick her voice was, by the tears blurring her vision. “And Felix…” She shuddered, biting back a sob. How could that wound still feel so fresh? “He wouldn’t get into his damn pod, not until I was safe. We fought for a minute, but I caved. I should have gone down with my ship, but I let him chase me into that pod. Theonepod that deployed as it should have. It guided me down like a feather on the wind, and it should have beenhim.
“His own pod never launched. The fire had spread by the time he wrestled me to safety, and it couldn’t even detach from the ship at that point. He died on that burning fireball for someone else’s agenda, because I fucking failed him. I failed them all.”
“The blame should be on the one who betrayed you,” Rentir said tightly. His tail unfurled, sliding away from her, and she nearly reached out to grab it, desperate to cling to that scant comfort. “Not on you, Cordelia. You did the best you could in an impossible situation.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she muttered, digging her toe into the gravel beneath them.
“Then you should heed it.”
She made a strangled sound of frustration, looking up and blinking fast to keep her tears at bay. “If it were that easy, maybe I would,” she muttered. “Do you know what his last words were?”
Rentir looked askance at her.
“He talked to me until the mic cut out, while I was floating down to Earth. He told me he was sorry. That he’d worked so hard to convince me to lean on him, and now he wasn’t going to be able to live up to what he’d offered. That he didn’t regret one second of trying to wear me down, but he was so damn sorry he couldn’t show me that he was right about us. And the last thing he said before the line went dead was ‘live a little for me.’” Her tears finally got the better of her, spilling down her cheeks in wet tracks. She wiped them away gruffly, sniffling. “And I didn’t. For the longest time, I didn’t. I’m still afraid to.”
She took a wavering breath.
“They raked me over the coals after what happened. Picked apart my life for the media cycle. Found out I’d piloted a mission early in my military career where the whole crew was a loss. It was a negotiation for resources that went sideways. Only reason I lived was because they didn’t need their pilot at the table. I thought”—she laughed bitterly, shaking her head hard—“I thought I wasluckythen. I felt guilty, sure, but so fucking lucky that I hadn’t died in the same hail of bullets. Now…”
She looked at him with swollen eyes, digging her fingers into her thighs. “Do you know what they said about me on Earth? That I’m cursed. That anything I touch goes up in flames. And I think they’re right.” A sob tore out of her chest. “I don’t want to watch you burn.” She clutched at her shirt just over her heart, wishing she could strangle that organ instead. “Please, Rentir, I?—”
