Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(48)

She shows me her lopsided smile in return for the tease, but I know she’s as thrown as I am by the intensity of that kiss. So when she steps back, I turn away to pick up the palm pad and switch it off before the music starts again—I need to give us both a little time to recover. “Time for a rest?” she suggests.

“It’s getting late,” I agree, setting down the pad after I nearly drop it, and sinking down to sit in our nest of blankets, my back against the wall. She walks over to ease down beside me, and picks up the burner pad she’s been using today, checking for any updates from her contacts. Making herself busy.

I’m hyperaware of her presence, her knee just a hair’s breadth from mine. I could reach across and touch her with the smallest movement, and I can practically feel the static jumping back and forth between us, but I hold back. Reach for safer ground—because if I don’t put some distance between us, I’m never going to think straight. “You know what? Stay here just two minutes. I’m going to go get you something that’ll put your fancy upper-city food to shame.”

I can’t afford to move around much out here, with cameras on every corner, but I know the mouth of the alleyway is a blind spot—it’s one of the reasons I chose it. So I keep my head down as I step out into the street, and the bright red banner I want is only two stalls up. Its takeout storefront is nothing more than a tent, really, a canvas roof strung between the two neighboring buildings, the kitchen tucked away in the back of the building behind it.

Mrs. Phan’s has the sector’s best Pan-Asian grub, light-years ahead of the pretentious crap they serve in the four-star, hundred-galactics-a-sitting places in the upper city. Sofia deserves a break from my protein bars and gel packs. What are you trying to do, man? Bring her a courting gift?

I shove the voice in my head aside and nod to Mrs. Phan, who’s manning the counter herself. They have a menu here, but the locals just ask for whatever’s cooking; it’s always good. I hold up two fingers to indicate my order, and she bustles away to call unintelligible instructions to the kitchen staff. There are a couple of guys sitting together in a corner, gazing deep into each other’s eyes, and a woman by the other wall working a logic puzzle on her palm pad, and none of them casts a second glance at me.

Mrs. Phan dumps two containers of steaming noodles on the counter, along with two bottles of her husband’s home brew and two pairs of disposable chopsticks. She takes my money and I’m out in under two minutes. Success.

Sofia’s eyes light up when I let myself back in, and she practically tosses her palm pad aside, hands extended for the noodles. “That smells incredible,” she whispers, almost reverent, but she’s smiling, and I’m smiling right back. We’re both silent as we pull the lids off our containers and the caps off our beers, sending up clouds of steam as we dig into the noodles with our chopsticks. I shovel up my first mouthful, the spicy sauce burning my tongue. It’s perfect. Beside me Sofia tries her own mouthful, eyes widening, those perfect manners vaporizing as she speaks with her mouth full. “Oh my God.”

“I know, right?” We’re on safer ground with the food, and for a couple of minutes we’re both quiet—no calculation, no consideration, just enjoying the meal. Still riding out the ripples from that kiss. Me trying not to watch, sidelong, as she licks the sauce off the ends of her chopsticks.

“Nobody saw you?” she asks eventually.

“I’m sure,” I reply around a mouthful. “This place is secure. Nobody’s getting in without an invitation.”

“My place was secure too,” Sofia points out drily. “So was yours.”

So was Mae’s.

I’ve had days now to think on what she did. I haven’t dared make contact—if she did what I told her and sold out the Knave to get her kids back, then they’ll have a watch program on everything she touches, and they won’t be letting her out of their sight. There’s no safe way to reach out to her—not for either of us. She knows it too—that’s why she posted the picture of her, Liv, and Mattie on her public profile, I’m sure of it. What I wasn’t expecting was that I really miss talking to Mae. It’s been years since I went even a day without checking in, and there’s an ache that’s part loneliness, part pain that she’d give me up. But really, I can’t blame her. I don’t.

I blame the ones who used her kids to threaten her.

This is my vindication, though I don’t know who it is I’m making my case to, when I lie awake at night, debating some imaginary opponent. Silently pointing out that this—the threat to innocent kids—is just the latest in a long line of reasons that my cause is just, and I’m only doing what’s required to take LaRoux Industries down. I’ve reached inside myself more than once, searching for any sympathy for the woman I’m sending running all over the galaxy, or even just trying to dampen my satisfaction when she’s forced to ditch another disguise and go scrambling all over again. But the truth is, her fear feeds me. I can imagine, just a little, that it’s LaRoux’s fear. That it’s him I’m hounding. And after all, the great Commander Towers opened herself to this when she chose to look the other way for him.

“I guess I hope this place is safer than either of our homes were,” I say eventually, recalling myself to the conversation at hand. “And I’ve got your back, Sofia, I promise.”