Deep Claim

by Elsa Jade

  Honestly, it seemed like a fair trade, didn’t it?

  Turning to her side and scooting back to make room for him on the narrow bunk, she cushioned her cheek on her clasped hands as she watched him settle in. “Do you miss it, ever?”

  He laid back beside her, straightening his long legs beside hers. “Which one? Farming? Fleeing from local law enforcement?” He rolled his head to look at her. With the fading light of his lume stick on the floor behind him, he was little more than a silhouette, but his eyes caught the faint illumination bouncing from the bulkhead of the runabout behind her. “I made my choices. Terrible choices, mostly, but mine, for what it’s worth.”

  “Worth a lot, I’d say. All the Q on Ydro-Down, maybe.”

  In the cozy confines of the bunk, he rolled to face her, one knee coming to rest between her thighs, his hand resting on her hip. “Why am I here?” His voice was husky, ragged.

  She wrinkled her nose in confusion. “Because your boss told you to follow me.”

  “Which is why I should be out there, watching.”

  Ah, he meant here in the bunk, with her. “Because I asked you to be.”

  He reached up to trace along the outer curve of her ear, down her jawline to her chin, up to the pout of her lower lip, as if mapping a target-rich environment before an attack. “Which still shouldn’t stop me from being out there, where I’m supposed to be.”

  “Then maybe because you want to be here.”

  “And that of all reasons is why I should go.” He let out a slow breath. “I’m not supposed to feel such thrills anymore.”

  “You think I’m thrilling?” The brush of his fingertip over her lips definitely gave her a thrill.

  When she darted out her tongue to taste his skin, he let out a low growl. “You know it.”

  “No. I’m a hard worker, trustworthy, strong. Not…thrilling.”

  “You carry det cord in your pocket. You are fearless on the heights and in the depths. Your mouth is softer than bean leaves in the fall at the end of the harvest.”

  “In the fall…” Only haphazardly terraformed, with its artificially imposed orbit, Ydro-Down didn’t have proper seasons, and the reaping of Q never ended. What would it be like to have a quiet time of year set aside for feasting and singing and friends? “Maybe you tried to stop your emotions, but seems to me that’s like halting the spin of the world. How much energy are you wasting to keep it still, especially when the molten core keeps churning?”

  His tarnished eyes glinted. “I’ve been falling because of you, Jashanna. And I don’t think any gravity will stop me.”

  Chapter 10

  He curled his fingers behind her nape, but went no further, half expecting her to remind him that this was not the time or place. They had six half-frozen, semi-corpse hostages as chaperones not to mention airborne enemies that could attack at any moment. The cramped, dusty runabout was as distant from any romantic getaway as anything his childhood yearnings for adventure could’ve conjured. So no, not the time or place, and yet… Maybe they couldn’t count on the time and place ever being really right. Maybe they could only take what they could get and make the most of it.

  And this hardrock miner was definitely the most. Though he meant to give her space to choose, when she licked her lips, her dark gaze slumberous, his grip tightened instinctively on her neck. She made a soft noise, a rumble of hunger and approval that reminded him of the feast day crowds at home, ready to indulge after a harvest season of backbreaking labor.

  She angled her hips forward, wedging his knee higher between her legs. “If you fall, I’ll catch you.” Her voice thrummed with a husky tone, unfamiliar and yet vibrating through him on the frequency that he felt in his bones. “I’m strong enough to hold you.” She flexed her thighs as if to prove it.

  “And how would you catch me?” he whispered back. “Make me believe you could.”

  Her laugh was low, wicked. “First, I’d need to find you. Luckily, your bare butt glows like a full moon in the dark.”

  “So maybe you should strip me naked,” he suggested.

  “I said you learn fast,” she said approvingly as she eased the underlayers off his body, including the snug binding around his chest. “Then I’ll use my hands…”

  She traced every square millimeter of his skin with the same delicacy that she’d fingered the infinitesimal seams in the rock around the locked vault door.

  As if searching for the flaws that would blow him apart.

  And he wouldn’t even mind. “Your hands are big enough to catch a moon, I think.”

  With a smirk that gleamed in the gloom, she clenched his backside, drawing him close. “Yours, at least, little man.” Then her smile faltered. “Or should I say…”

  “Fenn, because that is my name.” He matched her gestures, banishing her clothes and gathering her in. “And little man, I suppose, but only compared to you.”

  She moaned as he cupped her breasts, his fingers teasing the flesh into peaks to rival the Sultanas. Grinding down on his knee, she gasped no words at all.

  In the cocoon of the small bunk, their bodies curved together, hers around his, arcing in a falling orbit toward the core of their shared yearning. As a fighter, what he lacked in size and strength, he’d learned to offset with technique and intensity—the same, he discovered, as a lover.

  “Hands,” he whispered. “What about mouth?”

  “Oh yes,” she groaned. “I have a big mouth too.”

  He laughed, the warm gust of his own breath brushing back to him from her skin, a feedback loop of rising desire. Would that soaring sensation only mean a deeper crash?

  Again, he couldn’t mind.

  Probably because all thoughts scattered, like a laser dissipating through the fog of his lust, as she guided him through the secrets of her arousal—and his own. He’d meant for the procedure to snuff out his emotions, but now every nerve ending flared with feeling, as if she’d ignited det cord along each lightning branched pathway. Under her hands and lips and clever tongue, he shivered with a needy fever that only burned higher when he matched her, touch for touch, kiss for kiss.

  Higher, higher… So high, that when they climaxed—her first, then him, then her again—the fall back to earth seemed to never end. Or maybe the spiral was just so gentle that, for once, the descent didn’t hurt.

  Limbs still entwined, she drew the thin, Q-dusted blanket around them. Too late to blame the hazardous material for his behavior this time since his mind had never felt clearer even though the lume stick had faded to near nothingness. Only the faintest flow of distant stars through the front viewport managed to reach them somehow, and in that faraway shine he threaded one fingertip over the close crop of her hair.

  “The tips shimmer,” he murmured, “like you’ve filled up on starlight.”

  She snuggled closer to him, the heat of her body blocking the chill in the quiet runabout. “Nah, I drink sunshine. But my friend Laly refines a mineral oil from scrap ore that helps with dust burn and makes a lovely hair tonic.”

  “Reminds me of earth after a rain.”

  Peering up at him, she cocked one eyebrow. “Wouldn’t know. Ydro-Down doesn’t have living dirt or liquid water anywhere, except what we make.”

  “It’s…everything good. I dream of it, sometimes, that smell.”

  “I thought you were afraid to dream.”

  “Has being afraid ever stopped something from happening?”

  She made a soft noise, some mix of compassion, wry amusement, and understanding. “And sometimes it’s the dreams themselves that are frightening.” She ran one hand down his flank, a soothing gesture.

  He flinched, partly at her words, partly at the bruises he was only now noticing. “Ouch. True.”

  Instantly, she lifted her hand. “What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?”

  “Not you,” he hastened to assure her, wrapping one arm behind her back when she would’ve scooted away. “Just got a little banged up when we went over the edge.”
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  She grimaced. “That was my fault,” she reminded him.

  “Well, I didn’t really notice it until now.” He smirked at her. “And that is definitely your fault.”

  She chucked him under the chin with a disapproving tsk. “I should’ve checked you over more thoroughly.”

  Grasping her hips, he braced himself against the bulkhead and lifted her bodily over him. “You should probably do that now,” he said solemnly. “Just to make sure.”

  Since the bunk was too tight for her to sit fully upright, she hunched her shoulders against the ceiling, her knees around his thighs as she gazed down at him. The distant starlight highlighted the outer curves of her—her hip, her shoulder, her large nipples—in hues of silver and platinum and diamond. But her eyes stayed dark and deep, as mysterious and irresistible as the singularity at the heart of the Salty Way.

  Her touch skimmed him, an erotic exploration that unveiled as much to him as to her. She kissed her way across his old scars and the even older marks of his familial caste from home and—even older than that—the breasts and vulva that he sometimes considered his oldest scars. He trembled as she charted that aching flesh even more delicately than she’d outlined his bruises. She’d worked her way down his body—the body that sometimes seemed to him more distant and unreachable and perilous than the ruined core of the galaxy.

  At the nadir, from between his knees, she glanced up at him, and for once her usually bold dark stare was uncertain. “May I? Do you want this?”

  When he cupped her head, her short hair prickled against his palm, as if every strand was infusing him with infinitesimal shocks of pure energy. “Yes.” But he heard the tremulous hesitation in his own voice.

  She rested her chin against his knee. “Yes, but?”

  He let out a wavering breath. Of course the one time he wanted her to crash ahead without questions… “Sometimes it’s confusing.”

  “We’ll stop.”

  He shook his head, a restless thrash against the meager cushion of the bunk. “Stopping doesn’t make everything clear.”

  “No, but it can give you a chance to find a path through the fog.” She kissed the inside of his thigh, just the barest brush of her lips, but it sent a quiver along every nerve, flooding his skin with tingling awareness, until he felt like the relay tower, rewired, initialized, ready for her signal. “Ydro-Down doesn’t have fog,” he chided.

  “No, but we have damps—toxic vapors that roll up from the mines. Sometimes, the vapor is laced with Q, brings on the deep-creeps, worse than wormy. Makes everything maze so you can’t tell up from down. Worse, you might want to go down, deeper than you’ve ever been, because somehow you believe that’s where you belong, where the world will finally come clear.”

  He traced his hands out across the breadth of her shoulders. “And does it ever? How deep do you have to go before it all makes sense?”

  She did that one-shoulder shrug, muscle rippling under his palm. “I told you, I’m mostly immune to Q exposure.”

  But he caught the note of hesitation in her voice this time. “Mostly.”

  When she sighed, her breath was a ghostly gust across the slick, swollen flesh between his legs. “I was supposed to break a vein, got cocky with the det cord and dropped a pin line into a pocket of vapor instead. I huffed that Q dust like a wormhole opening up all the way across the cosmos.” She spread one hand in a dramatic reenactment. But her smile was crooked. “Took seven of my friends to bring me up. They thought I’d die. Overseer refused to authorize any treatment since I was so far gone.”

  He laced his fingers through hers, holding tight. “What was it like?”

  “All the demons were down there. Not in the tunnels, I mean, since my friends had brought me out. But in my mind.” She tucked their joined hands under her chin, her gaze focused far away. “But down there I saw…the demons were ones I already knew too well. The deaths of my family and friends. So many losses. Coldness and darkness. Hurt in my bones. Trapped knowing I’d never get out. That was all true, not just a nightmare of the deep-creeps.” She gazed at him. “What could the demons do worse?”

  “You fought off the Q exposure because you were stronger than all the deeps.” Awe rose in him like sunlight. “I wish I had that trick.”

  “Struggle in indentured servitude for all of your life,” she suggested, “and then risk the nothing you have left in a last-ditch rebellion with almost zero hope of victory. That should do it.” Bitterness and teasing twined in her voice like the competing octaves of the old songs she sang.

  He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry. You fought so hard, while I…I just ran away.”

  She closed her eyes a moment. “You had it hard too. Maybe worse in its own way, fighting the people who were supposed to love you most to believe in who you really are.”

  “A mistake,” he whispered.

  “No, you made mistakes,” she corrected. “You aren’t just a walking, talking miscalculation in the flesh.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “It’s always been the flesh that confused me.” Rejecting the urge to curl up, he spread their joined fingers and smoothed their palms up between his legs. “They wanted a daughter to carry the land rights, as is our way. These marks”—he ticked the edge of his thumb over the raised ridges on the smooth skin above the coarse curls—“delineate every hectare I would own, all the dirt and water and nu-soy. But I only wanted…”

  When he didn’t continue, she echoed his stroke, strumming across the ceremonial scarification. “You wanted all the stars of the Rim.”

  “Not all of them,” he objected. “I’m not that greedy. Just a few.” He looked down at their hands over his body. “But I wanted to go out as I am, not as they wanted me to be.”

  She rested her hand over his lower belly, the width of her palm hiding the scars. “You didn’t seek other modifications?”

  “Not enough credits, at first. Then fleeing law enforcement. Then…” He gave her one of her lopsided shrugs. “When I joined Nazra, Boss would’ve paid for any mods I requested, but by the time I might’ve asked, I realized any changes meant more to others than to me.”

  “Good for you,” she said fiercely. “QueCorp imposed mods on some miners, even tried to compel breeding. Only we should decide what happens to our bodies.”

  The night chill suddenly seemed too close. “Jash, you asked what I wanted, and…I want this. I fought for it, maybe the wrong way at first, but by now I’ve won this night at least.” He tightened his knees around her shoulders. “Even if this moon spins too damned fast.”

  Her dark eyes gleamed. “Not all spinning is bad.”

  And she made him believe before the sun came up.

  “We have one shot at this,” he told her as the first rays of light filtered into their canyon. “The drone is designed as small and passive as possible to avoid detection, but there’s nothing out here so if that ship is looking for us—”

  “Which they will be,” she said.

  He nodded. “We need to be already on the move, and we’ll have to abandon the drone. I’ll encrypt the message to base, of course, but codes can be broken.”

  She sucked at her eyetooth thoughtfully. “Tell them to meet us where the deeps meet the sun.”

  He lifted one eyebrow. “And your almighty Grey will know what that means?”

  “Only him.” She cut him a look. “Don’t be jealous.”

  “I’m jealous.” Fenn spread the drone’s flimsy solar membranes to the light. “But does he know you sing under your breath when you orgasm?”

  “He was my first lover. Sometimes he sang along.”

  Grumbling, he jacked a data tab into the tiny port and coded the message she’d suggested. “I could sing, maybe.”

  She patted his shoulder. “If we survive this.”

  Despite the dismal odds, he brightened. Sometimes, if was enough.

  Setting a delay on the drone’s launch, he clambered back into the runabout with her. “Ready.”

&nbs
p; “How far will it have to rise to reach the Nazra?”

  He peered out the viewport at the stark peaks above them. “High.” And then it would be a race whether the attacking ship or Nazra got to them first.

  Jashanna fired up the engine, and they jolted off into the light of a new day.

  However long that lasted.

  The flat berm where they’d parked for the night was part of an uplifted geological shear formation that angled toward the peaks. Convenient for stable travel, not so good since it exposed them to attack from above. He checked his tab. With the natural interference, he wouldn’t see the drone’s launch, but he checked the countdown.

  “Drone’s away,” he announced. “It’ll release the beacon with your message when it gets to altitude.”

  “Now we just need to get to the pickup in one piece.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Are they all right back there?”

  He’d checked the caskets before she’d left the bunk. “No worse than before.” That wasn’t entirely true since the units’ temp batteries already showed depletion. But considering their likely abductors were somewhere above, their fate in general hadn’t changed much.

  She stared out the port. “Should we wake them? Give them a fighting chance, if we…” She swallowed back the rest.

  He’d wondered the same. “They’ll be cryo-sick, weak. We don’t have meds or clothes or even enough water for them.” He shook his head. “I think they stay where they are. The rest is up to us.”

  “Me,” she corrected. “I insisted, so this is on me.”

  With a snort he’d learned from her, he leaned back in his seat. “What, and let you have all the renown and reward?”