14

2.5 hours on the Aurora, 69 hours until commweb range

“Hey, who took the last fish-and-chips packet?” Voller demands from behind me, rummaging through the crates of supplies from the LINA, near the entrance to the bridge.

I swivel to face him in the captain’s ultra-comfortable chair. It’s a lushly padded and gorgeously appointed leather creation, one I’m still uneasy about claiming, especially given the proximity of Captain Gerard’s remains. “Can we focus, please?”

“But I’m hungry,” he says.

I roll my eyes and face forward again.

After all the work and stress of getting over here and getting underway, the actual start of the journey on the Aurora has been smooth. Effortless. Mind-numbingly uninteresting.

So effortless, in fact, that I catch Lourdes yawning in her seat on the bridge, her chin propped in her hand on the as-yet-useless communications board.

Kane is occupying himself by going over the Aurora’s specs and systems, with some input from Nysus. Who is busy watching the finished but unaired episodes of Doing It Dunleavy Style that he managed to recover from one of the newly charged-up tablets, giggling to himself in delight.

Space travel is boring. As a commweb maintenance team, we’re used to it. A boring day is a good day. Boring is what we strive for. When things are exciting, someone is usually about to die in some new and horrible way.

But there’s such a thing as being a little too relaxed. I think, particularly in this circumstance, there’s value in being just that extra bit cautious. A little more vigilant.

“Look, TL, if we didn’t blow up in the first hour, statistically speaking, we’re probably not going to,” Voller says, coming back around to his seat, packet in hand. He drops into his chair and tears into the packet with his teeth.

“That cannot possibly be true,” I say, thinking of all the twenty-year-old systems being worked to their maximum after a deep freeze of decades.

“Back me up, chief,” Voller says, turning toward Kane.

Kane looks up from the panel where he’s working. “It is less likely,” he allows reluctantly.

“See? Hard part’s over,” Voller says through a mouthful. “It’s time to celebrate.”

I wince inwardly. I’m not a particularly superstitious team leader, not like some who refuse to fly without their various good luck charms—my first TL actually rattled with all the various tokens he wore on a chain around his neck—but still.

Kane’s gaze meets mine for a brief second in what, under other circumstances, might have been a moment of mutual exasperation with Voller, but then he drops his eyes back to his work, as if I’m not there.

In spite of our earlier moment, where it seemed like everything had returned to normal, he’s back to that cool, slightly-more-than-professional distance. And I hate it.

I can’t blame him, but this time, blame it on restlessness or not-quite-spent adrenaline, I can’t ignore it any longer. I have to try to fix this. “Kane, may I speak to you for a moment? Alone?”

Voller groans.

I’m aware of Lourdes watching with interest, as Kane pushes to his feet.

“Sure,” he says evenly.

Folding my arms across my chest, I turn and hurry off the bridge, down the starboard corridor. He follows at a slightly slower pace.

When I reach a distance at which it seems reasonable that everyone on the bridge can’t hear us, I stop and face him.

He watches me warily as he approaches, and the heated, cringey feeling in my chest makes me want to avoid his gaze. But I make myself keep my head up.

“I’m sorry, I fucked up,” I say, my hands clenching into fists. “I shouldn’t have … kissed you. That was wrong, especially as your TL.” Just the reminder of that—in my mind, we’re equals, but in all other ways, including legally and officially, I’m his boss—makes me long to find the nearest dark hole and reside there. I thought I was a better person than this. Apparently not.

He’s watching me, his head cocked to the side. “Claire,” he begins. “What are you—”

“You should file a complaint as soon as we’re done here.” Once, you know, we’re done essentially blackmailing our employer. Good, Claire. Fantastic. “And I know it’s wrong to ask this of you, but right now, I can’t have you taking double shifts to avoid me. I need you to be on my side.” My voice is trembling, and I despise myself all over again. For the sign of weakness, for what I’m asking of him after what I did.

He has every right to walk away without another word, or shout at me.

Kane huffs out an exasperated breath, shaking his head. “You know, I tried to get you to talk to me,” he points out.

My face flushes. I don’t know what to do with that response.

“If you’d have let me explain,” he says, moving closer, “I would have told you that you just surprised me.”

That’s not exactly a good thing, is it?

“And I’m not avoiding you. I was trying to give you the space you seemed to want,” he says. He gives me a knowing look. “You’re not exactly easy to figure out sometimes, Claire Kovalik.”

No surprise there, though Kane always seems to have a better feel for what I’m thinking than anyone else, including me at times.

I shift uneasily. I’m still not sure where this is headed. “I don’t want you to pity me, either.”

He tugs gently at a strand of hair that’s come free from my scraped-together ponytail, tucking it behind my ear. “If you think this is pity, then we probably do need to have a larger conversation right now.” His mouth quirks upward as he leans closer.

My heart is beating way too fast. Is this happening?

His mouth hovers above mine, those bright blue eyes tired but filled with warmth. His nose nudges my cheek, and I tilt my chin instinctively. My hands fly up to clutch at his shoulders as if for balance, the softness of his T-shirt molding around my grasping fingers.

But before his lips can touch mine, a sharp intake of breath sounds behind us. “Oh, sorry!” Lourdes’s voice comes out loud, too loud.

Flinching, I step back from Kane immediately as Lourdes backpedals, turning away from us. He’s slower to let me go, his hands lingering in midair, as if I might return to him, before falling to his sides.

I clear my throat. “What’s up, Lourdes?”

She turns around cautiously, her gaze bouncing between Kane and me. I can feel her wanting to talk about it, sense the anxious fluttering cartoon hearts hovering over her head like a speech bubble.

I beam as much don’t even think about it as I can in my return look.

“Um, Nysus found something he wants you to see,” she says, grinning at us. It’s taking everything she has not to say something.

“All right. We’ll be right there,” I say.

She nods and turns to head back.

But it’s clear there’s absolutely no chance of me and Kane continuing our conversation—or anything else—by the way she keeps looking over her shoulder at us on her slow-walk to the bridge.

I sigh.

“Maybe there’s a secret third Dunleavy sister,” Kane murmurs as we start to follow, in a warm, amused voice that makes me want to wrap my fist in his shirt and haul him into one of the cabins with me.

“Shocking season finale twist,” I add, trying to keep my voice steady. Like this is all normal, so normal. And not everything I’ve ever wanted but barely let myself consider.

Kane wanted to kiss me. He would have kissed me. Adrenaline rockets through my bloodstream.

As soon as I see Ny’s face, though, lined with tension and pale, my giddiness dissipates like air from a popped balloon. Whatever he’s found, it’s nothing simple. Or pleasant.

He motions Kane and me over, watching to make sure Lourdes returns to her station. That is … not good.

“It looks like the cameras were set to automatically upload any new footage,” Nysus says in a quiet voice. “When I got to the end of the finished episodes, there were these other random files and the last couple…” He hesitates. “Here. You should just watch.” He pushes the tablet into my hands, along with the headphones he’s been using.

Dread building in my gut, I press one side of the headphones to my ear and start the footage. Kane watches over my shoulder.

It’s hard to tell what I’m seeing at first. The camera is jostling around so much, revealing bright flashes of color and brief glimpses of carpeting and polished wood-panel walls.

Someone is running down the hall on the Platinum Level.

“Are you recording?” a breathless male voice asks, close by but not on camera.

“That’s the producer, I think,” Nysus says. “Ty Rubin.”

“Of course I’m fucking recording. I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job,” another male voice responds sharply. He sounds slightly closer. The camera operator, probably.

“Shhh,” the other man says, the noise more like a hiss. “Just shut up. We need to get this.”

Whoa. Just a little tension there.

The camera steadies as they slow down, coming up on a slightly open door to one of the suites. Female voices are raised in argument, one plaintive and loud, the other attempting placation through what sounds like clenched teeth.

“You ruin everything!” the first one shouts.

“Opal, honey, you’re not listening,” the trying-to-soothe woman says.

The camera nudges through the open door, revealing Opal Dunleavy, her arms folded across her chest, glaring at an older woman with an obvious familial resemblance, minus the purple hair.

I look to Nysus.

“Vi Dunleavy,” he says. “Dunleavy matriarch.”

Is that what they called her on the show? I want to roll my eyes, but the sight of Opal standing there, furious in her pristine white bathrobe, the same white bathrobe she’s still wearing now, only sans knife, makes my skin crawl. This must be close to the end, close to … whatever happened.

Opal looks exhausted, brittle, with purplish circles under her eyes that aren’t quite concealed with makeup, and absolutely rigid with anger. Her mother, too, looks as though she’s not quite well. Her hair is ruffled into short spikes, and her eye makeup is smeared in streaks on the side closest to the camera, as if she was woken from a nap and didn’t have time to repair it. It makes her look off-balance, both physically and mentally.

Neither woman seems to notice the camera, but perhaps that’s deliberate, for the show.

“If you break a restraining order, darling, then you’ll lose any sympathy from your audience,” her mother continues.

“You don’t know anything,” Opal sneers. “This is on brand for me. And I am the brand.”

Vi Dunleavy smiles tightly, wrinkles appearing for the first time on either side of her mouth. “Sweetheart, I think you’re underestimating the appeal of the whole family. Your sister and I—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Opal lifts her hands to press them against her ears. “You just keep talking, so much noise, buzzing in my head!” She sways slightly, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth still open from shouting.

The other woman moves so fast I barely catch the movement before her hand is cracking across Opal’s face. “Listen to me, you little whore,” she snarls, spittle flying from her perfectly lined lips. “You are not going to ruin everything I’ve worked so hard for.”

Opal steps back, panting with shock, one hand pressed against her cheek where her mother struck her.

“I take it this is not normal for them,” I say to Nysus. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but not especially alarming.

Nysus jerks his chin toward the images playing out. “No. Not at all. But it gets…” He swallows. “It gets worse.”

The camera guy seems to realize that this fight is not staged for the audience’s titillation and starts to pull back into the hall.

“No, no,” the producer urges in a gleeful whisper. “Keep rolling.”

An antiquated phrase, but the meaning is still clear.

And the camera operator does, just long enough for him—and for us—to watch Opal straighten her shoulders and then slide her hand in the deep pocket of her bathrobe. She pulls out a large knife, blade gleaming, and holds it up, like a magician’s finishing flourish.

Vi Dunleavy gasps, a sharp, choked sound.

My stomach lurches in anticipation of what we’ll see next, but the screen goes dark.

“Did we find the mother during our search?” Kane asks me in an undertone.

I shake my head. “No.” Which means she’s somewhere else on the ship. Or maybe she was one of the “lucky” ones to reach the temporary safety of an escape pod.

The tablet flashes to life again, the next file starting up.

More jostling, more running, heavy breathing. Only this time, I can’t tell where we are in the ship. The screaming, though, that is unmistakable. Multiple voices raised in outrage, pain, and fear.

The running stops abruptly, and the camera focuses on the floor first. A familiar pale marble. The atrium.

Then the camera sweeps up and it’s too much to take in at once. It’s the atrium in mass chaos. A woman in a midnight blue gown sits on the floor, huddled in a ball, surrounded by her full skirt, rocking back and forth and sobbing. Two men in crew uniforms are splayed out on the ground nearby, bloodied. Dead. Stabbed, if the handle of the golf club sticking out of one’s chest is any indicator.

Across from them, in the distance, a pile of people—I don’t have another word to describe this undulating mob of humanity—scramble on top of one another, throwing elbows and crashing fists into faces to get at something or someone I can’t see.

The camera jerks up, and there, at the railing by the staircase to the Platinum Level, a man in what looks like chef’s whites calmly wraps a cord around his neck and then steps over the edge. The cord snaps with his weight, though, and he plunges to the ground below.

I squeeze my eyes shut to avoid seeing him land.

When I open them again, passengers are fleeing from something, running in front of the camera, in singles or small groups.

“Don’t you see it? I saw … I thought I saw…”

“Come back here! I know it was you!”

“Allara, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” That last is from a woman wearing a shimmery bikini beneath a translucent sea-foam green cover-up and dragging her obviously broken left ankle as she limps on.

“What the fuck?” Kane breathes.

I shake my head—I have no words.

The camera shifts abruptly, zeroing in on a section of the atrium, in front of one of the planters. “Leslie?” the cameraman asks, sounding dazed. “What are you doing here?”

The camera operator sets the camera on the ground and walks in front of it, the worn heels of his shoes appearing before us as he moves away. “Leslie. You’re supposed to be at home. I don’t—”

The rest of his words are lost as the camera bobbles and shakes, someone grabbing it up from the floor.

“Mine, mine, mine.” The lens is tipped upward toward the person clutching it to their … his chest. Anthony Lightfoot.

He rushes through the atrium, his rough movement jostling the camera into providing glimpses of his surroundings. The chef sprawled on the ground with his neck at an awkward angle in a growing pool of blood. A man in a pale lavender tuxedo, streaked with dirt and gore, has his hands wrapped tightly around the slender neck of a woman in a matching dress.

Shit. My hand tenses on the tablet, as if I could reach back in time and stop him.

Anthony makes his way up to the top of the spiral staircase, the motion dizzying to watch. He’s heading for his suite. Probably.

And he almost makes it.

“Hey! Hey, are you spying on me?” I recognize the gruff voice even with the edge of antagonism. Jasen Wyman.

I can’t see him, but I can hear him quite clearly, and so, evidently, can Anthony.

He spins swiftly in a motion that blurs the Platinum Level hallway into a swirl of polished wood.

“I see that camera, you can’t hide from me!” Wyman shouts, approaching Anthony. He’s in pajamas, his suite door standing open behind him. His silvery hair is rumpled and his craggy face appears further wrinkled by sleep lines, but his eyes are narrowed and bright with hate.

“Mine,” Anthony says, holding the camera up, over his head. “Fuck off, old man.”

The view is now mostly of the hall, but a tiny corner of that elegant silvering hair is visible in the lower corner.

The hair vanishes abruptly, and Anthony gives a grunt and the camera tumbles to the floor.

If I’m not mistaken, a septuagenarian just rushed a professional athlete for … spying on him?

Wyman grabs for the camera, providing a close-up, his last close-up, of one of those famous blue eyes, and then he lifts the camera up.

Quickly I reach out and turn off the playback. I don’t need to see this. We know how it ends—in Anthony’s suite, with the two of them beaten to a pulp.

I shove the tablet back toward Nysus. The footage hasn’t revealed anything we hadn’t already guessed at from the evidence, the bodies, we found. Murder, suicide, confusion, and chaos without an explanation or any reason.

Seeing it, though … I shudder.

“What is this?” I ask Nysus.

He lifts his shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know.”

“It’s not mutiny,” Kane says. “Not like that.”

“Hey,” Voller calls. “What’s all the whispering about?”

“What did you find?” Lourdes asks.

I take a deep breath. People are relying on me to know what to do. Because I brought them here.

Everyone you care about dies. Because of you.

The thought sets off a white-hot spurt of shame as I face them. Lourdes is leaning forward in her chair, and Voller is watching us through narrowed eyes, slouching in his seat, his body angled away from his console and toward us.

“Nothing more than what we thought,” Kane says, turning toward them. “But watching it happen…” He shakes his head grimly.

Why does it feel like he’s lying? He’s not.

“Did you see anything about why it happened?” Lourdes asks, her fingers wrapped tight around the scroll on her necklace.

“No,” Nysus says, sounding haunted.

I clear my throat. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re fine, and we’re going to stay that way. Only our food and drink, no more celebratory anything, even if it’s sealed.”

I half expect Voller to protest, but he jerks his shoulders in a shrug. “Tasted like shit anyway.”

“And we’ve all been awake for too long. We can’t afford to be distracted,” I add. Sleep deprivation is not something I want to add into this mix. “Two teams. Shifts of six hours on, six off. Starting now. Voller and I will take the first.”

“TL,” Voller protests.

“Claire,” Kane says at the same time.

“It’s fine,” I say to Kane quietly. “I won’t be able to sleep. Not now.” Plus, there’s a part of me that’s convinced that I need to be awake to keep … whatever from happening.

I could sleep now,” Voller mutters loudly.

“I’ll take the first shift,” Lourdes says. “Keep TL company.”

“Sold,” Voller says, pushing up from his chair.

I could argue, put my foot down, but I’d rather save the fight for a moment when it really counts.

“And no one goes anywhere alone,” I say, stopping Voller in his tracks.

“What?” he asks.

“I mean it,” I say. “I don’t care how the three of you work it out. All crash in the same suite or in the crew quarters, whatever. But no one is alone. Period.”

“Gonna hold my hand when I take a piss, too?” Voller asks.

Kane draws a breath to respond, but I’m ready. “If that’s what it takes for you to be a big boy, absolutely,” I say.

Lourdes hiccups a laugh before clamping a hand over her mouth.

Voller shoots me the finger but waits at the door.

“You sure?” Kane asks me, his voice softer than usual. His gaze moves over my face and for a second, it feels like we’re alone in the corridor again and he might lean in closer.

I nod. “Yeah.” My voice is breathier than it should be, and I hate it.

“Okay,” he says.

I love that he trusts me. More than I trust myself.

No, not love. I flinch inwardly. No love-related thoughts. Not now. Not ever. Get it together, Kovalik.

“Come on, Ny,” Kane says, over his shoulder. “Leave all that here.”

I glance back to find Nysus gathering up every bit of equipment we found for him.

“But—” Nysus starts.

“Sleep, Nysus. You need to rest. It’ll all be here when you get back,” I say.

He opens his mouth to argue, but the grayish pallor to his skin makes me hold firm. There might be more information on those recordings, something we missed, but I’m not willing to risk his health for whatever small clue he might turn up.

“Do you need me to make it an order?” I ask.

His shoulders slump. “No…”

“We need you in top shape,” I say. “See you in six.”

Nysus gives one last longing glance toward the video equipment, then heads toward the bridge doorway to join Voller.

Kane looks at me and tips his head toward the corridor.

I walk with him, assuming that there’s something he wants to discuss further. “We can change up the shifts,” I say. “It doesn’t have to stay this way the whole time.”

But Voller and Nysus, seeing Kane coming, start down the hall, and as soon as we’ve stepped just out of sight of Lourdes, Kane tugs me around the corner, across from the crew bunk room.

“Wha—” I begin.

His mouth closes over mine, warm and soft. His hands slide around my waist, pulling me tighter against him.

The heat of him surprises me, freezes me in place with my hands in the air for a second. Just a second. Then it’s like being lit on fire from within. The whoosh of thrusters catching more fuel.

I grab at the back of his soft T-shirt, trying to lever myself closer to him. If that were even possible. My actions ruck his shirt up, and the smoothness of his skin beneath my grasping hands nearly undoes me. I want to breathe him in, climb him, pull him inside of me.

That’s when he steps back, his breathing ragged, his blue eyes bright with affection and something darker. “Didn’t want to wait six more hours to do that,” he says, tracing a gentle exploratory fingertip across my cheekbone.

I stand there, head swirling and buzzy with too many thoughts and not a single coherent one among them, except: This is a bad idea.

His mouth—so recently on mine—quirks in a smile, as he seems to read my mind. He leans forward to press a kiss on my forehead before walking away.

“It’s going to be fine,” he says to me over his shoulder. “We’re all going to be fine.”

Even as dazed as I am, I’m still with it enough to wince. I wish he hadn’t said that quite so loudly or confidently. It feels too much like tempting fate.