“Smug? Smirky?” She tossed out adjectives to fill his pause. “Sinister?”
“Unsettling. You know she hasn’t said one word about this detour to Vegas? Nil. All that fuss to get on our TM and Eliot doesn’t even care where we take her, which raises the question, what does she care about?”
“You.” The word felt thorny, the way it sprouted. Green, too. Wraparound tendrils climbed all the way up Priya’s throat. “Or was that not obvious after two intersecting missions? Her eyes are on you, Far.”
“She does stare an awful lot, doesn’t she?”
“You stare back.”
Far chewed his lip. His cheeks were flushed from their walk, but Priya suspected some of the color had stayed for emotion’s sake. She felt hot, too: near a sweat, a shout, a kiss. It was as if someone had come along and twisted off every safety mechanism to her emotions. Someone had, she reminded herself. Eliot. Unsettling everything.
“P…”
“I know it’s not romantic. But—it’s almost as if she’s draining you, as if you’re letting her. I don’t want to be dating a shadow-person.”
“This is new ground for us,” he said softly. “Like you said, Eliot’s running a long game, and I’m still figuring out how to play. Staring, swearing, wig-snatching… The only thing it takes from me is pride, which, according to Imogen, I can spare.”
Far stepped closer so the warmth of his sunbaked skin rolled onto hers, fingertips to arms, nose to cheek. Such a different static from before; instead of finding cracks, it filled them, until Priya felt that her skin was no longer an apt container for everything inside. She was breathless and breathed: a song before the first note, after the last.
“Have no doubt, P,” he whispered. “I’m yours, at the end of everything.”
Their kiss was all tension at first—tight lips, teeth on edge—but it didn’t take long to soften. It never did. Far was this at his core: feathery breath, heat of a wandering heart. Priya roamed with him, letting their kiss fall deeper out of their now. Out of time and space, out of the Invictus’s common area and the Nevada desert, into a perfect suspension of them. Just them, just them, floating and falling all at once, hands in hair tumbling toward the couch, just them—
And Saffron. The red panda’s YOU’RE IN MY SPACE!!! squawk yanked their surroundings into focus, and Priya realized she was in danger of crushing her purse, along with its cargo. “Wait, wait! The spoon! I need to take a sample before something ruins it.”
Far fell gently to the side, curls amok. “Work first, play later, huh?”
“Isn’t that always the case?” Her insides blazed still, would for a while. But, “The answers in this DNA are our next move. The sooner we have them, the better. It’ll just take a few minutes to run the test. Why don’t you search the ship? There are only so many places Eliot could’ve stashed the Rubaiyat.”
“Good thinking!” Far slid from the couch. Destination? The honeycomb bunks.
Priya risked no contamination, donning latex gloves before retrieving the spoon from her purse, unwrapping the napkin with an archaeologist’s care. She cupped it in both hands— artifact and offering—all the way into the infirmary. It would only take one swab to get what she needed, but Priya did two for good measure, pausing to fold her hands and whisper a prayer to Ganesh—remover of obstacles, miniature statue at her workstation. The god’s elephant head watched, serene, as she placed the sample in the reader. It was an older diagnostics machine, nothing like the fancy scanners in some of the newer CTMs. This had never posed a problem before, but the crew’s injuries were often minor: scrapes and burns, food poisoning, a common cold every once in a while. Running DNA aboard the Invictus was a first.
When Priya inserted the sample, the diagnostics machine wheezed so loud that Saffron perked his tented ears and trundled into the infirmary. He sat on the floor, eyes latched to the screen, entranced by the hourglass cursor that never seemed to run out of sand.
“Keep an eye on that for me,” she instructed the red panda and went to check Eliot’s bunk. The place was wrecked: sheets everywhere, the mattress upended. Far was on his hands and knees, prying up floor panels that had no business being bothered, elbow deep in wires he knew nothing about. Priya, who did know about the wires and how they connected to the ship’s power grid, was quick to warn him. “Careful. One wrong move and we’ll have a fritzed Invictus with fried Far on the side.”
“The Rubaiyat isn’t here! Nothing’s here!” Far scowled. “Eliot was wearing a yellow dress when she showed up, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then where is it?”
“Not in the floor.” It wasn’t in the hanging wardrobe, either, though Priya spent several seconds scanning for the frill. “That’s odd.”
Unsettling, actually.
Far dropped the floor panel back into place, frowning. “She must have a hidey-hole somewhere. Will you help me check the console room?”
She did, if only to keep him from tugging at even bigger, badder wires. Both of them made a thorough search of it. More floor panels were lifted, drawers were opened, overhead pipes were checked. They even tipped Bartleby over to see if something had been hidden in his hollow torso.
Nothing, except for several tumbleweeds of Saffron’s fur.
There was a chime from the infirmary just as Priya set the mannequin back on its stand. Answers. Finally! She made her way to the workstation. Gone was the hourglass, a full DNA profile in its place. The report was a mess of Gs and Ts and As and Cs, mapped with graph lines. Data too raw for Priya to read—geneticist she was not. The machine had managed the hardest part, turning markers into more familiar language: female, age range fifteen to twenty, Alopecia universalis.
Two eyes and a Medic degree had already told her as much. There had to be more juicy secrets hiding in this saliva…. She scrolled down the sequence. Reports automatically cited census data—linking chromosomes to ID numbers. Every single person in Central time was stored in the system. Even Far, whose genetic profile was as censored as an ancient war letter, was matched with one of his old Academy pictures: skull-cropped hair, grin thrice as cocky.
Priya kept scrolling.
No picture. No name. No ID number.
NO MATCH FOUND.