though there was a strange hollowness in her stomach. She wasn’t some bug under a microscope for him to study. She was a flesh-and-blood human being with hopes and dreams and emotions. Maybe those emotions made her heart heavy with sorrow and her soul hurt, but she would never choose to erase them in the way of Stefan’s people.
What use was it to have such power if you saw no beauty in a child’s smile or in the sea’s turbulent moods? If you didn’t understand friendship or laughter? No, she’d rather feel, even if it hurt so much she could hardly breathe through it at times.
Chapter 2
Tazia was on her way back to her room three days later, her shift complete, when she decided to take a different corridor. Andres’s room was that way and he’d told her to go in and grab a reader on which he’d loaded the latest chapter in a continuing thriller from a shared favorite author. Having finished it already, he wanted her to read it so they could dissect the mystery from start to finish.
He was convinced he’d figured out the murderer.
Using his code to get in, she found the reader where he’d said it would be and shook her head at the state of his room. Clothes thrown on the bed and the floor, a T-shirt hanging off a wall lamp, a single shoe lying in solitary splendor on a bunched-up rug, while a used plate and cup sat precariously balanced on a nightstand crammed with candy, cookies, and a mess of data cubes.
It was a good thing this wasn’t a military station or he’d be in constant trouble, she thought with a smile as she stepped back out into the corridor and shut the door behind herself. The funny thing was, Andres was an excellent and organized oceanographer, not a paper clip out of place in his office.
The dissonance between Andres’s public and private selves made her wonder what Stefan’s living space was like. She tried to imagine him in a room full of chaotic debris: clothes strewn about, tangled here and there, hard copies of station reports piled up on random flat surfaces, and ran up against a mental roadblock. Stefan’s room, her brain informed her, would be as neat and as tidy and as flawless as Stefan—so perfect it had no personality.
Still angry at him, though she knew he hadn’t meant to hurt her, she had to bite back a gasp when she suddenly found herself looking at the object of her thoughts. He was in his quarters, but the door was open and it gave her an uninterrupted view of a shirtless Stefan doing chin-ups using a bar that had been bolted in at one end of his room; his muscles bunched and flexed in a smooth, effortless rhythm that was a silent statement of his strength.
Skin heating, she knew she should look away, but the temptation was too great. Men had always been something of an exotic animal to her—she’d never been the girl who knew how to flirt, or who had a secret boyfriend in the village. That hadn’t changed after she left her homeland. Always more comfortable with tools and machines, she’d never learned the “feminine arts,” as Teta Aya used to describe them.
Neither had she been “awakened.” Another one of her grandmother’s scandalous euphemisms, the elderly woman having outlived three husbands, and who knew how many lovers. Tazia had begun to think she simply didn’t have that gene, the one that made the other girls sparkle with anticipation at the sight of a boy. All Tazia had wanted to do was learn, build, explore—and none of the boys in the village had ever found that the least bit interesting.
Now, as she watched Stefan’s body move, her stomach fluttered, her blood grew thick and languid under her skin, and her breath turned jagged. He was beautiful. Never had she thought that about a man, but no other word did him justice. His shoulders were broad, his hips slim, the muscle on him sleek and fluid. Those muscles moved like liquid silk under the pale gold of his skin, the color having held even after months under the sea, which told her it was genetic, his ancestry not as obvious as it might appear.
A single bead of sweat trickled down his spine as she watched. Her throat went dry. At that instant, she wanted nothing more than to run her fingertip along the path taken by that