This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(57)

But my finger hesitates over the ENTER button. The distraction of setting up a secure line can only last so long. What if he has changed, and he’s not the same man I served with? What if someone’s monitoring my computer activity, despite my best efforts to cover my tracks? What if…

I close my eyes. I could list a thousand reasons not to call. And only one reason I should: I trust him. My finger stabs downward, and I lean back, closing my eyes, waiting for the call to route through the retransmission satellite above me and connect through the hyperspace network.

After an interminable silence, the speakers give a tiny crackle, and light blossoms against my closed lids.

“What?” The voice is surly, annoyed, sleepy.

I open my eyes, and there he is. It’s dark on his end, like it is in my room now, but I can see him lit by the glow of his computer screen. The gloom makes him seem pale, ghostly.

Despite the low light, he looks good. Better than I remember. He’s not wearing a shirt, and his dog tags are gone. He’s let his hair grow out, and there’s an ease about the set of his mouth I don’t remember being there before. Like he’s found whatever he was looking for—whatever any of us is looking for, in the trenches and the bunkers and the swamps.

“Sir,” I manage, my throat suddenly going dry.

His eyes open a little more, blinking in the light. “Lee?” He sits up a little straighter.

A muffled, sleepy voice comes over my speakers—not his voice. “Tarver,” it says, petulant. “Come back to bed.” Someone else is in the room with him. Someone female.

Merendsen glances over his shoulder, but his camera shows me only darkness beyond him. “Go back to sleep, Lilac.” Despite the brusque words, there’s a tenderness in his voice that, strangely, makes my heart constrict. I feel my face warming—I never would’ve expected to hear that tone from him. Suddenly, I wonder what I’m interrupting. He could be naked on the other side of the computer for all I know; the camera only shows him from the chest up.

Then he turns back to me, frowning, and the tenderness is gone in favor of sleepy exasperation. “Lee, do you have any goddamn clue what time it is here?”

I hadn’t thought to check the time differences. I hadn’t thought at all, beyond the desperate need to see a face I knew I could trust. “Sorry, sir.” He’s not military anymore, but I could never call him anything else.

Now that he’s more awake, I can see confusion starting to blossom across his features. I can’t blame him. We haven’t served together in a year, haven’t spoken to each other in nine months.

“What’s going on, Lee?”

I hesitate, listening for sounds of life in the room behind him. I can hear none, but I’m all too aware of Roderick LaRoux’s daughter lying in Merendsen’s bed, hearing every word I say. “Is there another room you can pick up in?”

Merendsen pauses. “She’s asleep. It’s okay.”

I shake my head, swallowing, not daring to speak.

Merendsen’s eyes are slightly downcast, staring at my face in his screen and not at his camera. I lift my own gaze to the pinhole above my screen so he can see my eyes.

He doesn’t speak, but pushes away from the desk and gets to his feet. It turns out he is dressed, wearing drawstring pants that hang low on his hips, but I can tell I hauled him up out of bed. He leaves the immediate circle of the monitor light, and as the camera auto-adjusts, all I can see is a shadowy form crossing to the bed and leaning over it. I hear Lilac LaRoux make a whiny sound of protest, see a pair of arms reach up in an attempt to pull him down with her.

Quiet conversation. Merendsen’s soft chuckle. A sigh of capitulation. Silence. Then the soft, unmistakable sound of their lips parting.

He returns to the computer. “One sec.” There’s a jumble of noise and light, and I realize his computer’s a mobile unit, that he doesn’t have more than one, that he’s not somewhere with screens in every room.

The jumble calms after a minute, and I see his face again. His camera blurs and refocuses, adjusting for a different level of light, and it turns out he’s outside. It’s night, the landscape beyond him silver and blue with moonlight. All I can see is a field of flowers.

“Okay, Lee.” Merendsen takes one of those deep breaths I know is a bid for calm. “Tell me what’s going on.”

My throat’s closed so tightly I can’t speak. He’s all at once so different and exactly the same that I feel an odd shyness creep over me that hasn’t touched me since before I left Verona.

He leans forward. “Did you really call me in the middle of the night to stare at my bedhead?”

That particular streak of humor is so familiar that my heart hurts. I shake my head again. “Sir—can I still trust you? What you told me when you were reassigned, does that still hold true?”

Merendsen sobers. “Always, Lee.” His voice is firm, the voice I remember. The voice of a real leader. “Always, you hear me?”

My vision swims as though I’m drowning, struggling to get enough air. “Your fiancée. How much do you know about her?”

“I know more about her than anyone else does, Jubilee,” he responds, though his tone is cautious. His use of my full name is deliberate. He knows only my family called me that, knows the pain it causes—he’s testing me. Testing my resolve, testing how badly I need his help. “Why are you asking me about Lilac?”