by Elsa Jade
To her surprise, when she ran her hand down the yurk’s neck, observing the feather-like structures along the crest, the creature arched into the stroke with a little purr.
Mach made a similar sound of delight. “I didn’t know she liked that.” He traced his hand over the same path as hers, eliciting the same purr. Then his caress slowed, and she let go of the rib bone to headbutt his elbow. “I’m her Alpha. Shouldn’t my programming tell me she likes to be petted?”
Lun-mei pursed her lips. “If you—and she—were built for war, maybe they didn’t think you needed to know about petting.”
He bowed his head. When he looked up at her, his eyes glinted silver. “Thank you, Doctor Chien. I can’t tell you…” He closed his jaw hard.
“You’re welcome, Mach,” she said softly. “What’s her name?”
He touched the yurk again. “We didn’t have names either.”
She scowled, angry on his behalf. “You’re Mach.”
“I was Alpha of our unit. If they needed to identify me, they called me Machine One.”
“Mach,” she said again, her heart aching for him. She forced herself to dredge up a smile. “This is your chance to give her a good name. Not Machine or Chip or Pickle. How about something…noble?”
“I’ll think about it.” He gave the yurk the last rib—an entire rack, gone—and the beast took a short hop back into the tub to curl up with the bone, gnawing with every indication of happiness.
Mach walked to the sink to wash his hands. “I was also thinking…”
Lun-mei was watching the yurk, amazed—an actual alien dragon—so she was slow to respond. “Yes?” She turned to meet his gaze.
“You know you can never tell anyone about this, not about the yurk, or me.”
She frowned. “Of course…not. I’d sound crazy.” But even as she said it, she wondered when she’d slip. And what the world would think.
Mach watched her, eyes half shuttered, hiding the silver. “I’ll make it go away.”
She shook her head. “The yurk? You can’t let her go, not when she was just hatched.”
“The memories,” he said. “I know Earther doctors use drugs in surgery that erase recent memory. Among the few recovered materials from the ship, I have a better version. We’ve used it before when our secrets were accidentally discovered.”
Her heart skittered again. “I can keep my mouth shut.”
“This way, you won’t have to.”
When he turned from the sink, her gaze dropped to the canister in his hand. It was smaller than the pepper spray she’d had in her pocket when she’d first stepped out of her truck a million years ago. “Mach,” she said warningly.
“I know you told me not to tell you what not to do,” he said. “But you won’t even remember this.”
She spun toward the door, but he was on her before she took a single step. He didn’t even touch her. There was just a fleeting coolness against her neck, and the yurk crunching on the bone was the last thing she heard.
Chapter 7
Delta stared down at the Earther female blanketed on the couch for a long minute before he slanted a disbelieving glance at Mach. “You kidnapped and drugged a woman.”
“I didn—” Mach started but finished miserably, “—id. I did.”
Delta swiveled his head toward the bathroom. “But you didn’t deactivate the yurk.”
“I didn’t.”
Lips pursed, Delta drawled, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“I…don’t.”
“Okay then. I’ll leave you to it, Alpha.” Delta sauntered toward the kitchen.
Mach scowled at the sarcastic title. “Wait. I need you to keep an eye on the yurk. She’s sleeping off a rack of ribs, but she’ll wake hungry again. I have a sack of bird seed to tide her over, and then her nanites will need a round of carbon.”
Delta paused in the doorway. “We have a few buckets of anthracite for our nanites. I can go without.”
“I want to start her off with a couple of diamonds. The carbon is higher purity.”
Delta lifted one eyebrow. “Diamonds. Really?”
Mach stared back at him. “You were the one who didn’t want me to kill her.”
Dropping his gaze, Delta clamped his tensed hands around his belt buckle. Mach had seen other Earther males do the same many times, although he’d never mimicked the gesture himself. Delta had always been more clever about matching himself to their accidental world.
Although Mach sometimes suspected the last of his matrix was hiding something from himself too. But that was what a shroud would do.
“Maybe you were right,” Delta said softly.
“About the diamond?”
“About deactivating her. And me.”
Mach jolted toward him and clamped one hand on the other male’s shoulder. Delta jerked his head up in surprise, silver flaring in his eyes as his nanites roused to what seemed like an attack.
Gentling his grasp, as he’d seen Lun-mei do with the yurk, Mach moved his hand up to Delta’s neck and thought he could almost feel the same fear and confusion in his matrix-brother as he had in the yurk. “I’m not deactivating anyone,” he said, his tone harsh in contrast to his hold. He gave the other male a light shake. “Crashing here wasn’t our choice. Being what we are…wasn’t our choice. We’ve found a new life—a real life—here, and we can be free.”
Delta stood stiffly under his hand. “Tell that to her.” He rolled his eyes, but since he was stuck in Mach’s grasp, it wasn’t clear whether his cynical response was aimed at Lun-mei or the yurk farther away.
Mach released him with a grimace. “I’m not ending the veterinarian either. I’ll take her back to town in her truck, let her sleep off the memory wipe, and buy some diamonds while I’m there. You make sure the yurk gets the seed when she wakes, and when the nanites send her into rest mode again, come get me.”
Delta took a step back. “As you command, Alpha.”
Raking his hand through his hair—that gesture had seemed to come to him easily from the very start—Mach stared at the other male. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded. “It’s been a hundred and fifty years and you’re going to glitch on me now?”
“It’s been a hundred and fifty years,” Delta repeated.
Mach huffed out a breath. Definitely a glitch. But when Delta didn’t continue, Mach realized that was all he meant. It had been too long. Where the yurk had survived her long imprisonment, Delta was failing.
Frustration soured with something more dismal. The strength of their matrix had been decimated in the crash, before they’d ever had a chance to activate, but he’d done everything in his power to keep the survivors alive. If Delta failed, that meant his Alpha had failed. And that wasn’t part of his baseline programming. “What kind of donuts do you want?”
To his chagrin, the other male didn’t perk up. “Day-old whatever is fine. Save your money for the diamonds.” He disappeared down the hall, not looking back.
Letting out a sharp breath, Mach turned back to the unconscious veterinarian. Lun-mei would’ve known what to say to the troubled male. If she hadn’t been kidnapped and drugged to unconsciousness.
His only consolation was that she wouldn’t remember how badly he’d treated her.
Of course, he’d been programmed by the worst.
Kneeling beside the couch, he bowed his head as he plunged his hands into his hair again. It was soothing, he realized, to pretend that someone else was petting him, the way he petted the dogs, the way Lun-mei had touched the yurk—gentle, curious, and awestruck all at the same time.
Looking up at her, he found himself bemused by the looping parabolas of her features: the full, outbound curve of her wide cheek, the short upward arc of her nose, the sweep of her lashes. How he longed for her to open her dark eyes. She’d be furious—rightly—to find him creeping close and staring, so he averted his gaze. She wouldn’t remember him, but he’d hate himself on her behalf.
Ca
refully, he gathered her up in his arms, blanket and all. She weighed barely more than the sack of bird seed he’d put aside for the yurk. For once, he was glad of the false trappings of Earther humanity that they’d adopted, since it let him care for her this little bit.
Since he’d already gone through her personal effects—oh yes, she’d be so very rightly furious with him—he had her key, her address, and her love for chewy candies in flavors called lychee, mango, and pineapple. That had been the flowery, sweet scent he’d noticed earlier that he’d assumed was her perfume.
He’d taken one of the candies. It was wrong, but he’d done so much wrong already. Passionfruit, the label said. He didn’t know what that was—Carbon County didn’t have a lot of tropical fruit—but he unwrapped the little foil square.
It was still melting on his tongue, sweet and tart, as he settled her in the passenger seat of her truck. Belting her in, he had to tighten the strap more and more since she was so small. Her head lolled until he reclined the seat enough. A faint line appeared between the dark wisps of her eyebrows as the midday sunlight bounced off the hood of the truck onto her face. A pair of sunglasses was propped on the dashboard; he balanced those on her nose, and her frown smoothed away.
As he wheeled her truck through the yard, Delta was retrieving the sack of feed from the back of their pickup. He lifted one hand in acknowledgment, and Mach nodded at him.
They’d been programmed and trained to do what they were told to do. In the absence of a direct, activated order, Mach could only continue as he’d started: in a freefall toward an uncertain future.
***
He’d worried that her home would be an apartment in Diamond Valley, someplace bustling where he’d have to deal with suspicious eyes on his very suspicious activities. But the address on her driver license took him around the back of a nice house on a quiet, tree-lined street to a converted garage. An arbor stood between the house and garage, and though the vines had lost most of their leaves in preparation for winter, their tangle was a suitable visual barrier, along with a large cedar tree arching over the shallowly peaked roof.
Mach parked the truck in the obvious gravel slot and went around to the passenger door. Lun-mei hadn’t moved, and in a moment of consternation, careless of being seen, he paused, watching for the rise and fall of her breath.
His nanites, which had started to ramp up, quieted again when he confirmed the slight motion of the blanket around her. Still, he pressed two fingers to the side of her neck. Warm, soft, smooth.
And very much alive. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and bent to gather her up again. Warm, soft, kind of pokey with her elbows and knees, but he cuddled her against his chest as he climbed the outer stairs toward the second-floor door where a pot of red flowers bloomed bravely against the chill. Their straw-like petals brushing against his shins, he balanced Lun-mei easily in one arm while he unlocked the door and nudged it open.
From inside, an orange cat made a break for the sudden opening. It took one look at him, hissed, spun on the fulcrum of its tail, and shot back the way it had come.
His nanites were so incensed, he thought his hair might be standing on end. Much like the cat’s.
He hadn’t even considered she might have a roommate. What kind of Alpha shroud was he?
More cautiously—as much for the cat as for any other sort of roommate—he peered through the door. All was quiet. The entire efficient space was visible, except for one open doorway that he supposed was the bathroom and one corner blocked by a decorative three-tier standing screen stenciled with purple mountains, and there were no other occupants. Of the three stools next to the kitchen counter, only one was askew with a surprisingly small coffee maker and a single coffee mug in front of it.
The tension in his spine eased, along with his nanites. She lived alone. Except for the cat, although judging from the speed of its attempted escape and the volume of its displeased hissing, she might as well live alone.
He’d already told her why dogs were better. Maybe he’d have to explain again…
Except by the time she awoke, he’d be as long gone as her unfaithful cat.
Striding to the bed shielded by the screen, he laid her down on the neatly made-up coverlet. He unwrapped her from his blanket and straightened her on the bed with as little touching as he could manage. He would not compound his transgressions by handling her like she was one of his matrix-kin with her systems in recovery mode.
He went back downstairs to retrieve her bag from the truck. When they’d reached the edge of Diamond Valley, the bag had started to beep, and back in her apartment, he went through it to find her phone. There was no security code—he’d have to explain that to her too—and so he read the message from her boss asking her to check in.
Mach glanced at her. She’d be out for hours yet. Quickly he texted back a note that her night calls had gone late and she needed sleep and then coffee. There, that sounded exactly like her.
He found he was smiling to himself—pointlessly, because there was no one around whom he needed to convince of his humanity. Plus, she would be furious with him again for kidnapping, drugging, memory-wiping, impersonating, and making her look weak to her boss.
That wiped his smile away completely.
He deleted the received and sent message, hoping her boss would see the reasonableness of the reply and just leave her alone.
Then it was time to go.
He looked at the key in his hand then at Lun-mei lying defenseless on the flowered coverlet. He couldn’t lock up from the outside because then she’d have incontrovertible evidence that she hadn’t driven herself home in an exhausted state, wearily texted her boss, and fallen into bed fully clothed.
Sucking in a shaky breath, he smelled-tasted the sweetness of her fruit candies. There was a dish of them on a small table beside the door. He put the key there and strode toward the window that overlooked the house’s backyard. If he jumped down from there, he’d have to leave the window slightly open, but she’d be safe enough in town.
He had the curtains parted and the sash up but he hadn’t stuck his leg over the sill when a groan brought him whirling around.
His nanites didn’t react because somehow he’d known this would happen.
Lun-mei was sitting up, rubbing her temples. She’d have a headache from the memory wipe, he knew. She didn’t like being told what to do, so of course her brain had resisted being told to forget.
Before he could throw himself out the window, she looked up, her dark, foggy stare locking on him. “Mr. Halley?”
She remembered him, at least a little bit. That shouldn’t incite a ping of gratification. The memory wipe was most complete for short term, no more than a few hours. She would’ve gotten the message from her office to respond to his call after midnight, almost twelve hours ago. But the only part he really needed her to forget was the hatching.
He forced himself to nod at her. “You’re awake. Good.” Terrible.
She glanced around, frowning fuzzily. Maybe there was still a chance…
Her gaze arrowed back to him. “What are you doing here?”
Yeah, no chance. “You came out to the ranch to…look at my dog. You slipped…in the bathroom and hit your head. Do you remember?”
Filling in the holes left by the memory wipe with enough plausible details would complete the process. He waited, letting her make the likely—if utterly wrong—connections.
After a moment, she gave a tentative nod. “The water in the tub spilled—”
“My dog was having pups,” he said hurriedly, not wanting any stray scraps of memory to coalesce back into reality. Not any reality she would understand. “I had her in the bathroom to keep her warm and safe.”
Lun-mei was nodding again, though her eyes were narrowed, as her confused brain inserted his words into the gaps. Dog, alien dragon, what was the difference, really? “I must’ve bumped my head really hard.” Her massaging fingers slipped from her temple around t
oward the back of her skull.
Where she wouldn’t find any bump. Mach hastily interrupted her self-exam. “I said I’d take you to the hospital, if you want.”
She dropped her hand abruptly. “No. That’s really not necessary.”
“You fell asleep on the drive back here,” he said, still mixing fact and fiction. “You told me you had a really long night, and I guess my coffee wasn’t strong enough.”
“Oh, it was good coffee,” she murmured, her confused scowl easing.
Yes, he was giving her enough truth to gloss over the holes. Surreptitiously, he closed the window. “Well then, if you’re feeling okay…”
“The pups are okay.” Her voice hovered halfway between a statement and a question, her frown returning. Of course she’d latch onto that point.
“Doing great,” he said with strained cheer. “You did great. Everything’s great.”
She tilted her head, as if it were suddenly too heavy to hold upright. “I can’t remember—”
“Just the one, big, black pup,” he said, trying not to sound desperate as he gave her the details she was pursuing like Chip and Pickle going after crows. “Got a little stuck, but you popped her right out, gave her some ointment.”
“Right…”
“You sure you don’t want to see a doctor?”
“I am a doctor.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed and pushed to her feet.
He was at her side instantly so he caught her before her knees buckled. “Whoa.”
She looked up at him, the unnatural haze over her dark eyes rapidly clearing. Instead, a flush tinted her golden-brown skin. “Mr. Halley, you can go now.”
If he’d been activated, he would’ve had to obey her. “All right,” he said amiably, letting his grip trail down her arm to shake her hand instead, which allowed him to hold onto her another moment while she regained her balance. “Thanks again for saving the pup.”
She was looking at their linked hands. “I… Yes, of course. That’s what I do.”
Maybe they all had their own self-imposed programming.