Synnr's Hope - Kate Rudolph Page 0,18
bunch of people.” Or not. Just Solan. From the second they’d hit the dance floor he’d dominated her attention until the rest of the place melted away. And he’d almost kissed her. She was sure of it.
She would have kissed him back.
“You’re allowed to like the guy,” Emily said.
“It’s not that.” Lena had been holding this in since she received the results, and if she didn’t talk she was going to go crazy. “Remember how they had my DNA for the Matching test? Well, the Bureau got in touch.”
“Bureau?” Emily waved a hand in front of the papers. “There are like sixteen bureaus that I’m dealing with for our immigration cases, so I’m going to need a little more info. And I thought they loved bureaucracy back home.”
Lena didn’t know how Emily did it. The red tape had almost driven her mad. And the paperwork. But Emily had studied to become a lawyer and she was determined to do the same now that she was settled in Osais.
“The Matching Bureau,” Lena clarified. She shifted in her seat, already starting to wish she’d kept quiet. But there was no point. If Solan agreed to the bond, everyone would know soon enough.
Emily’s head snapped up, eyes wide. “You have a Match?”
Lena nodded and waited to see if she figured it out.
She was a bright kid. “Solan?”
Lena nodded again. “I got the notification last week. We’re...” What were they? Nothing, at the moment. They hadn’t even confirmed if the Bureau was right. “It’s complicated.”
“Do you want him?” Emily asked. Her tone was neutral, but Lena could sense the lawyer shark within and knew her friend was ready to pounce at the first hint of blood. She could appreciate the trait in prosecutors, but she didn’t like being on the other end of it.
“It’s not like that.” Lena cursed herself as she shifted in her seat. Moving was a sign of weakness in a witness. She wasn’t a witness. This was a friendly conversation. Yeah, right. “Solan isn’t looking for a girlfriend, and I’m not looking for a boyfriend. But you got a position in the military because of your connection to Oz. I was thinking the same might be true for me.”
“I was conscripted,” Emily scowled.
“And I want to enlist. But they won’t take me if I’m just a human. Solan’s my ticket in. And I can’t let emotions get in the way of this shot. We’re stuck here, and we’ve got to make the best of it.” Lena was about to burst out of her skin and she wanted to jump up and start pacing, but she didn’t.
Emily took a deep breath, but let it out without saying anything. She picked up some of the papers and organized them into a pile before speaking. “You’re both adults. If that’s what you want, I’m sure you can work something out.”
Those were fighting words. Lena opened her mouth to say something, but stopped at the last second. Emily clearly didn’t agree with her approach to the whole Matching thing, but she didn’t understand Lena’s position. She couldn’t. And Lena didn’t want to argue with her closest friend about this.
She’d made the decision to see if the Match could go anywhere. She wasn’t turning back.
“I need to head into the city. Solan and I are supposed to do some training, something about testing our compatibility.” She stood and headed for the door. “Will you be around tonight?”
Emily didn’t look up from the papers. “Oz is picking me up for lunch and we’re taking a long weekend. We’ll be back on Space Monday.”
Lena laughed. The Synnrs used Kilrym to determine their weeks and years rather than the rotation of Aorsa. Their years were four hundred days long, which made for convenient ten day weeks separated into ten forty-day months. The humans had taken to referring to the days as Space Monday, Space Tuesday, and so on with two Space Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Any Synnr who heard them talking thought it was weird, but Lena got a kick out of it.
“Have fun,” she said. “Remember to hydrate.” And she ducked out of the office before Emily could throw something at her in response.
THE GYM SMELLED LIKE every gym she’d ever walked into, and it was so unexpectedly comforting Lena could cry. But she wasn’t going to let herself tear up over body odor.
She found the Synnr equivalent of a locker room and was happy to find a locker she could disengage with her handprint. It took