Quiggs sucked a ragged breath. “You broke the kiss first.” He offered his widest, brightest, wettest smile at Max’s huff of disbelief.
“I thought you were dead.”
“Doesn’t matter. I win the first round.”
“The battle’s not over.”
Quiggs wiped a sleeve over his mouth. “I don’t hate kissing you. It’s… strange. Can’t understand why you enjoy it.” He traced Max’s ear. A tawny hair curled around his finger. “My turn.”
“You’re not sticking your finger up my ass to test—”
Max roared from the vicious yank. He fell back on the chair and rubbed the spot where Quiggs had snatched the hair from its root. The pain encircled his skull and drilled his teeth.
Quiggs sat upright, holding the limp hair, now fading white. Another was already pushing through the inflamed follicle.
“What the fuck, Quiggs!”
“Look at your hands. No claws displayed. No sensory hairs rallying in defense either. As I suspected, your body loves me no matter what I do, even though your mind thinks penetration is impossible. I win both rounds. You’re mine.”
Max held up his hands and wriggled his fingers. So steady he could thread a needle. Then he realized the risk Quiggs had taken, and a fine tremor seized them. He reached in a drawer for his flask of brandy and downed half the contents. Long swallows stinging his eyes and scorching a path to his stomach. “Never do that again,” he growled between gritted teeth.
“I had no idea it would you hurt so bad.” Quiggs stood, fumbling inside his pocket for a small jar of cream. “Hold still. Works wonders.” He dabbed the injured follicle, and the other sensory hairs flattened out of the way. “Don’t be scared,” he cooed. They patted his fingers tentatively, sending tiny warm currents. “See, Max, the little sweethearts love me.”
Max groaned, slouching back in his chair as the cream numbed the ache. “You had me figured out before you stepped through the door.”
“It depended on if you admitted having feelings for me.” Quiggs swallowed nervously. “You never actually said the words. You just agreed when I asked.”
“I’ve battled a den of ferals for you. Hacked miles of vines for you. Licked every inch of you. Risked a rebellion for you. I’ve shown you how I feel.”
“I’m not embarrassed to say I love you, Max. A few lovely, feely words from you when we recite our wedding vows would be nice.”
Max had prepared a special wedding vow three weeks ago while sitting beside Quiggs’s hospital bed watching him sleep. “Your love is a golden vessel of warm honey, and I’ve a lonely heart wide open to receive it.”
Quiggs whistled. “Oh, fuck. That’s good. I wrote a bad limerick.”
Max slipped on his jacket. “I want Professor Hines for the exam tomorrow. If I’m only doing this once, I want the best expert on assholes.”
“Aw, Max, once? What about special occasions like anniversaries, birthdays? Days when my inventions work?”
“No promises. Still want to wed me?”
Quiggs wrapped his arms around Max’s waist and gazed up at him through his lashes. “I’ll figure something out.”
Epilogue
“Dammit, Quiggs, stop pushing! What the fuck was I thinking to agree to this?”
“Just take a deep breath and do it.” Quiggs rubbed Max’s ass. “C’mon, my husband. We’re on a deadline.”
“I hate this,” Max gritted out.
“Too late for regrets.” Quiggs angled himself and shoved hard.
Max climbed the last step of the ladder and dropped into the wickerwork gondola, tethered to heavy stone blocks twenty feet below. He immediately crawled to a corner and fitted his boots into foot holds spaced around the sides. Solid footholds secured, he stood and grasped the rail, fixing his gaze on his whitened knuckles instead of down at the crowd in the plaza.
Families watched from the balconies, and men lined the city’s balustrade. The ousted Ruling Mothers prayed for disaster, but there wasn’t a chance they could regain control. The Assembly ran smoothly the last three months under the newly elected chairperson—Dean Cagney’s sister, a mother of four young aspiring farmers.
Quiggs climbed aboard and rechecked their supplies. Four days of food and water. Fuel for ten hours. Grid slates for mapping. Plenty of smoke flares for the trackers to locate them after landing. Precious milk-spray canisters. He tested the furnace valve and the vents in the fireproofed panels. The gored panels strained against the tethers with no signs of tearing.
Painted across the panels of the eighty-foot inflated balloon was Beau IV. The first three Beaus had met sad fates. The Beau IV had the kinks ironed out. So far expeditions tracing the irrigation pipelines to the breeding den had failed. From an aerial view, Quiggs hoped to detect differences in shades and patterns where the canopy covered the stone dome of the bunker.
Though there were no reports of feral activity, and the breeding season had ended, Max was as protective as he was possessive, insisting on accompanying him. The greatest danger was the capricious air currents, which could lift the balloon and carry it for miles before Quiggs could deflate and land.
Quiggs snapped goggles around his leather-padded black helmet and slid his hands into a pair of gloves, fireproofed against the heat of the furnace. He and Max wore sturdy boots for a hard landing.
“Ready?” Quiggs grinned at Max.
“No.” Max gripped harder, his eyes squeezed shut.
Quiggs signaled for Witters and Meeks to loosen the tethers. He pitched the first soft fuel cube into the furnace, tossed in lit tender, and closed the slot. Seconds later he heard the puff as the fuel ignited and sent a shooting flame up a pipe into the balloon.
Flushed with excitement, Quiggs fed the furnace another cube, glad his hands were gloved as sparks shot out. When the basket bucked and strained the tethers, his team released the handling ropes. Up, up, up the balloon shot until the eastward breeze off the canal grabbed it.
So far, so good. Except Max looked green.
“You okay?” Quiggs shouted above the rushing wind and the crackling furnace.
“Stop bouncing around!” Max tightened his grip.
Quiggs walked to him and gave a playful stomp, startling a curse from Max as the basket tilted a bit. He slid an arm around Max’s waist.
Last night, in case of a catastrophe, Max had yielded his ass a second time since their wedding four months ago.
Max had chosen to lay on his back stone sober, knees to his chest, explaining he wanted to watch Quiggs’s expression as he sank balls deep. Quiggs had lasted a minute, barely finishing before Max had flipped him on his back and sealed their contract by fucking him with deep, slow strokes as he kissed him. Quiggs had admitted to himself he rather enjoyed the kissing, especially when sprinkled with lovely feely words from his husband.
No one but Quiggs knew his husband had a romantic streak.
“Pay attention!” Max’s yell snapped Quiggs out of his fog.
The balloon soared higher, the air current lulled, and they drifted slowly into the outland, passing over lush farms and orchards before the endless stretch of vines began. The thick canopy was humbling. Months of spraying barely dented the expanse.
They were airborne an hour when Max, with his keener eyesight, noticed the beam first. “Quiggs… see it?”
Quiggs removed his goggles and made out a dark green beam rising from the vines to the sky. The beam was straight-edged, its width fixed instead of diffusing. It contained varied lengths and intervals of flat white circles and dashes, as sharply defined as if written with a marker.
The military and herders used lanterns to send simple signals for danger, all clear, injury, help. But their signals were rough off-on sequences of glaring yellow or soft bluish light. The steady green beam, with its repeated pattern of white circles and dashes, belonged to ancient technology.
“Have you ever heard reports of a strange green beam?” Quiggs asked.
“Never. Odd how
it appeared shortly after we were in the air.”
“I think we’ve triggered an alarm to the watchers.”
Max didn’t snort at the mention of watchers. “Is it a warning or an invitation?”
“I see a simple repeated sequence. But it doesn’t translate into an ancient word.”
Max’s face flattened. “I can’t believe I’m the one saying this—I’ve figured it out.” He stared at Quiggs. “That’s not an ancient word to translate. The message within the green beam is our military’s code for help.”
While Max sent smoke flares for a fully equipped rescue expedition to track them, Quiggs opened the vents. As they descended, drifting closer, the beam disappeared. Quiggs saw a strip of gleaming white stone with an entryway—and a robed figure hopping foot to foot waving up at them.
Beau sent the signal. Beau was alive.
The End
Beau deserves his own book.
INTUITIVE
Ingenious Page 34