wasn’t okay to put their sticky fingers on the walls after dipping them into the honey pots.
For our own sakes as well as to preserve Starway 8, to preserve all of that, we would leave the second we could.
I waved my companions off. “Be ready to go. Set coordinates for the last known location of you-know-where.” I had a lab chock-full of serum to get off my hands once and for all. The problem was, I still didn’t know what to do with it. “I’ll just get fixed up, and then I’ll be right down.”
Jax looked twitchy about leaving me, especially after what we’d just been through, but he also recognized that I knew this place like the back of my hand and had nothing but allies here.
Of course, that was assuming I’d taken all the hunters’ bugs off. And that Shade was still in a stupor. And that Bridgebane hadn’t orchestrated this whole epidemic just to get me to Starway 8.
Yeah, it was entirely possible we were fucked.
I gave Jax a reassuring smile. He glowered back, probably knowing exactly what I was thinking.
That was as much of a goodbye as we got. Surral, who’d personally doctored my every scrape since I was eight years old, dragged me over to a private cubicle. She swept the curtain closed behind us, cutting us off as Jax and Fiona left for the ship in the company of Mareeka, and the nursing team started administering shots.
Her profile to me, Surral snapped on a pair of gloves. The sound was oddly comforting when it was her tugging them on, even though I’d heard the same tight, elastic noises repeatedly under traumatic circumstances before she’d come into my life.
She turned to me, all medical efficiency to try to mask the worry I saw sinking delicate lines into her face. “I can’t say I wish you hadn’t risked yourself for all of us, but that’s only because you’re here with me and clearly not dead.”
“I’d die for this place.” And for the people in it.
“Please don’t,” she said stiffly.
“Surral…”
“Mareeka and I try not to have favorites,” she cut in. She breathed deeply, fighting the emotion I saw abruptly glaring out of her like a too-bright light that suddenly hit me square in the eyes.
Tears burned behind my lids again, and I blinked. She blinked, too.
“I’ve never spanked a child, but sometimes I want to spank you.”
I laughed in surprise, the movement tugging on my injury. “Really?”
Surral smiled as well, a wobbly little thing that made my chest ache. “Oddly enough, the itch grows, the older you get.”
“I’m not sure you could catch me or hold me down. I’m bigger than you are.”
She gave me a look that quelled both our tears and made me feel as though I was about to get sentenced to cleaning the air ducts again. Besides, I probably only had two inches on her, and one on Mareeka, and I hadn’t gotten that tall until I was sixteen and went through a painfully fast, late growth spurt. Part of their easy command of this place was almost always being able to see over everyone else’s head.
Back to business, Surral said, “I’m not asking you what’s in those injections or how you got them.”
Gingerly, I got myself up onto the examination table. “Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.” She trusted me and knew I had Starway 8’s best interests at heart.
Her sour look was somehow filled with love. She was good at that. My sour look was just sour.
“If I had more time, I’d check it out first. But this has gone on too long, and there are too many children hovering between life and death.”
And none of us wanted more kids to go the wrong way.
“I think it’ll work. But if it doesn’t…” That lump rose up in my throat again, and Coltin’s sweet face flashed before my eyes. “It won’t hurt, anyway.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Surral asked, spearing me with eyes that were such a deep brown they were almost black, like the hair she always kept pulled back. That neat twist was a part of her. I’d never seen her hair loose in my life.
“Have you ever heard of the Mornavail?” I asked in lieu of answering—and trying to distract.
She nodded. “Can’t ever get sick. Not subject to the illness or disease that would normally corrupt the body.”
A new framework of thought clicked into place. The Incorruptible Mornavail.
Shit. I had to reread that book.
Realizing I hadn’t changed