BETWEEN THE DAWN AND DAY

Galaxy Girl - Book Two

by Kate Christie

Copyright 2021 by Kate Christie. Second Growth Books,
Seattle, WA.

All rights reserved. This e-book is licensed for your
personal enjoyment only and may not be resold or given away to
other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this
author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
organizations, events, and incidents are either the products of the
author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any
resemblance to actual organizations, persons (living or dead),
events, or incidents is purely coincidental.

Acknowledgments

As always, I offer my sincere gratitude to my
trusty early readers: Kris, Charley, Alix, Cristy, and Marcelle. A
huge thanks also to editor extraordinaire Margaret Burris. Any
errors in the following pages are solely mine.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

About the Author

Patreon Supporters

Chapter One

Ava
Westbrook stared at her phone screen, her finger poised above the
“Recent Calls” tab. Who should she call first, Bea or Kenzie? Then
she rolled her eyes at her own whipped-ness. Kenzie was at work,
and Ava wouldn’t be standing in the living room of her potential
future home if not for Bea’s assistance. She hit the call button
beside her oldest friend’s name and waited.

“Do you absolutely love it?” Bea asked in
lieu of a traditional greeting.

“I do,” Ava said. “It’s just what I was
looking for.”

The condominium she was currently being shown
was located in a building at the north end of First Avenue, and
offered views of Puget Sound, the Olympic Mountains, and—up close
and personal—the Space Needle. The building was twenty years old,
and the penthouse unit boasted ten-foot ceilings, marble floors,
granite slab countertops, and four terraces with expansive views of
the Seattle skyline. Compared to her suite at Hyperion Tower, even
the thirteenth floor felt reasonably close to the ground.

“Your list of required amenities was pretty
thorough,” her best friend said. “Including the whole-unit sound
proofing. But rest assured, no one is going to hear you and Kenzie
getting down to—”

“Bea! You know that’s about security,” Ava
said, her voice a whisper.

“Right. Sure thing.”

“Anyway, thanks for finding it.
Seriously.”

“Of course. You know I love real estate.
Plus, the cloak and dagger bit is always fun. Who does the realtor
think you are again? An attorney?”

“Uh-huh,” Ava said, and glanced over her
shoulder at the realtor in question, who was busy scrolling through
her own phone. Blonde and full-figured, she wore the slightly
startled smile of a suburban mom who had decided to give selling
real estate a try and now couldn’t quite believe she brought in a
cool million a month.

The phone crackled as if Bea had covered the
mic, but then she returned. “James wants to know if I’m the first
person you called.”

“You mean, like, today?”

“You’re hilarious. Come on, out with it. Have
you already called Kenzie to gush about your new place?”

“It’s not my place yet,” Ava said. Probably,
it would be better not to admit that she had seriously debated whom
to call first.

“You totally video chatted her from the
master bedroom, didn’t you?”

Ava shook her head even though Bea couldn’t
see her. “Gotta go,” she said. “Bye!”

“Is everything all right?” the
realtor—Denise, she was pretty sure—asked as she drifted
nearer, offering that same bright, semi-disconcerted smile.

“Everything is wonderful. This would make a
perfect executive apartment for our firm. My employer has
authorized me to make a cash offer at full price.”

Denise blinked. “Oh. That is wonderful
news. Would you like me to get in touch with the seller, and then
we can talk about getting the official offer in writing?”

“Please. And while you’re at it, let them
know that if we can get the deal done in two weeks, there’ll be an
extra twenty-five thousand at closing.”

Denise nodded, phone already at her ear.
“I’ll reach out right now,” she said, the financial wheels in her
head visibly spinning.

The condo was empty, and Ava knew from her
own research that it had been sitting unused for more than a
month—apparently not everyone was in the market for a luxury
penthouse in Belltown. A cash offer over asking should ensure that
Ava could move in sooner rather than later, assuming the inspection
went well. The condo association was well-respected, and the
builder had been in the construction business for more than two
decades. Ava was betting the inspection would go just fine.

She glanced out the living room window toward
Queen Anne Hill. In the distance, she could make out the cell phone
antennas bookending Kenzie’s building, blinking red against the
evening sky. Ava liked the idea of being so close to the hill that
loomed over the north end of downtown. With her augmented vision,
Kenzie would be able to see Ava’s apartment, and in a pinch, Ava
could probably shout for her and actually be heard. Not that she
intended to test that particular emergency alert system anytime
soon. She and Kenzie had only been dating officially for a few
days. Ava probably shouldn’t let on yet that she was that much of a
lesbian.

As she was gazing up at Queen Anne, her phone
vibrated with a new text: “Hi!”

Speak of the devil… Ava stepped outside and
took a picture of the view from the terrace that spanned the width
of the penthouse. “What do you think?” she typed, attaching the
photo.

“OMG,” Kenzie wrote back immediately, “are
you serious?”

“As a heart attack. Do you approve?”

“Um, YES!”

“Good.” Inside, Denise was lowering her phone
and glancing around, so Ava typed, “G2G!” and stepped back into the
condo.

“My client is very interested,” Denise said.
“How soon can we expect to see the offer in writing?”

“Within the hour. I’ll have a representative
from our holding company get in touch directly.”

Denise nodded. “I’ll be waiting.”

Ava didn’t doubt it.

As she took the elevator back to the ground
floor, she asked herself if she could imagine coming home each
night after work to this block, this building, this elevator. And
yes, she decided, she could easily picture living in this sunlit
building near the Olympic Sculpture Park, where she and Kenzie had
had their first date, only a stone’s throw—or flight—from the top
of Queen Anne Hill. Maybe she would even do her part to help the
environment and start walking to work. Couldn’t get much more
Seattle than that.

Outside, Ramón nodded at her as she slipped
into the Tesla’s back seat, and she returned the gesture. While the
car moved quietly down the street, Ava removed her baseball cap and
shook out her ponytail. If this had been New York, she never would
have been able to fly so low under the radar. But here in Seattle,
there was no such thing as paparazzi. Few people outside the tech
world—or tech reporting world—recognized her, especially without
any pesky photographers shouting her name.

Her phone vibrated again, and she pulled it
out, already smiling before she read the message: “So? Are you just
going to leave me hanging?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she texted back,
and pressed the phone icon.

“That place is amazing!” Kenzie said when she
answered.

“I agree. That’s why I’m having my holding
company make an offer tonight.”

“Your holding company?”

Ava frowned a little as a delivery bike
zipped past the Tesla on crowded First Avenue. “That’s off the
record, right?”

“I think we can safely assume everything is
off the record at this point. But if you’re buying an apartment,
does that mean you’re planning to stay in Seattle?”

“Possibly.” Ava made her voice teasing. “I
guess you’ll just have to wait and see.”

“It’s like you think I’m capable of being
patient.”

“One of us should be. What are you up to,
anyway?”

“I just got home and am currently eyeing the
pathetic contents of my refrigerator.”

“Want to go to dinner with me?” Ava asked,
and then held her breath. Being nervous was ridiculous, she knew.
Even if Kenzie rejected her invitation, it didn’t mean they
wouldn’t see each other soon.

“You mean, like on a date?”

“Yes, exactly like a date.”

“I’d love to. Where do you have in mind?”

Ava thought about inviting her to her hotel
suite but immediately dismissed the idea. For all she knew, her
mother—or Chloe?—had installed additional listening devices since
the last security sweep. That was why Ava had decided to fast-track
the purchase of a residence. If she and Kenzie were really going to
date, then they needed a private, secure space to spend time
together. Also, Ava needed to live somewhere that didn’t double as
her office. Her work-life balance had suddenly begun to take on
more importance.

“How about the Pink Door?” she suggested,
naming the Italian restaurant a few blocks from Pike Place Market
that had recently become one of her favorite dining spots.

“I think they’re usually booked up.”

That might be true, but finding restaurant
reservations typically wasn’t an issue if your last name happened
to be Westbrook. Ava’s brother’s arrest on terrorism charges hadn’t
entirely destroyed their family’s clout. One might even argue that
Nick had elevated their brand—in the aftermath of his trial, no one
seemed to want to make an enemy of a Westbrook.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said. “Call
you back?”

“Can’t wait!” Kenzie said, her smile audible
through the phone.

Ava shook her head at Kenzie’s open
affection. What would it be like to walk through the world
practicing such vulnerability? Which was ironic, because as a
Zattalian, Kenzie was one of the least vulnerable beings on the
planet.

As soon as they hung up, Ava opened her
phone’s browser and tracked down the Pink Door’s phone number,
barely able to contain her own sense of anticipation. Usually, the
women she spent time with were more concerned with appearances than
actual enjoyment. Not Kenzie, though. She was kind and caring, and
she seemed interested in the smallest details of the world that had
become her second home. Even Ava struggled to maintain her
customary cynicism in Kenzie’s presence. If she wasn’t careful, she
might find herself falling too far too fast.

She really could be such a lesbian sometimes,
Ava thought as she dialed the restaurant. No doubt Bea would
approve.

#

Half an hour later, Ramón guided the Tesla
into the parking lot behind Kenzie’s building, parking on the brick
path beside the burbling fountain. Seattleites certainly seemed to
like water features in their outdoor spaces. Maybe she would get
one for her new condo—assuming the written offer was accepted. She
should know soon. In the meantime, dinner with Kenzie would more
than distract her, she decided as Kenzie stepped out of the shadows
draped in a cami wrap dress in a shade of gray-blue that Ava was
beginning to suspect was her favorite color, her strong, smooth
shoulders left bare.

An image of Kenzie pressed against the door
of Ava’s suite a few nights earlier flashed into her mind, and she
closed her eyes briefly. Maybe they should get take-out and come
straight back here because, really, how was Ava supposed to keep
her hands off Kenzie in that dress? But then she remembered
Kenzie’s relative newness to the adult dating world and took a
breath, pushing the surge of attraction down to a more manageable
state. She hadn’t had sex in a while, and a few more weeks
or—god help her—months wouldn’t kill her, but pressuring
Kenzie very well might destroy the feelings growing between
them.

Before Ramón even had the car in park, Kenzie
was there opening the door for herself and sliding into the back
seat next to Ava. “Hi,” she said almost reverently, her gaze
sweeping over Ava and lingering on the faint cleavage revealed by
her black midi dress.

“Hi,” Ava said, smiling into Kenzie’s eyes
even as she shifted to put extra space between them. “You look
beautiful.”

“So do you,” Kenzie said, her voice soft.

“All set?” Ramón asked.

Ava nodded and looked out the window as he
guided the car around the fountain and back onto the street. The
fewer lingering gazes the better for her libido.

“Hi, Ramón,” Kenzie said, leaning forward to
chat with him while they drove the short distance to Pike Place
Market. She interrupted herself as the car glided down the steepest
portion of Queen Anne Avenue to tell Ava, “This is one of my
favorite views of the city. Doesn’t the Space Needle look like
something out of the Jetsons?”

And yes, Ava had to admit, the resemblance
was uncanny from this angle.

“You’re not old enough to remember the
Jetsons, are you?” Ramón asked.

“I, um, enjoy stories about space,” Kenzie
said, pushing up her glasses.

At this rate, it was going to take Ramón all
of three seconds to figure out Kenzie was an off-worlder. In
addition to being her primary driver, he was also ex-special
forces. Everyone on her security team was.

“That’s right,” Ava said, “you like Rey from
Star Wars, don’t you?”

Kenzie nodded enthusiastically, and they
spent the rest of the drive ranking Star Wars films. Or Kenzie and
Ramón did, anyway. Ava mostly sat back and wondered how much of her
future would be occupied with preventing Kenzie from inadvertently
outing herself. A lot of it, she hoped, watching Kenzie argue
good-naturedly with Ramón about where The Force Awakens fell
in the rankings.

Ramón let them out at Virginia Street, and
soon they were strolling arm in arm down Post Alley toward the
restaurant. As a longtime New Yorker, Ava wasn’t usually a fan of
narrow alleyways. But with Kenzie—or rather, Galaxy Girl—beside
her, Ava could give her internal alert system a rest. She had never
felt so safe walking around a city at night, not even with a
Hyperion security team shadowing her.

When they walked into the restaurant
together, heads immediately turned. Ava released Kenzie’s arm and
shifted away, careful to maintain a slight distance as the host led
them toward their table in a quiet corner.

Kenzie didn’t say anything until they were
seated and the host had retreated. Then she asked, “Are you
okay?”

Ava kept her eyes on her menu.
“Absolutely.”

She could feel Kenzie’s gaze on her. “Really?
Then why did you pull away back there? And don’t say you didn’t. I
have super senses, remember?”

As if she could forget. “I suppose it
occurred to me that being seen in public together might not be the
best idea.”

Kenzie’s head tilted in the way that always
reminded Ava of a curious puppy. “Because I’m a reporter?”

“That, too. But I’m more concerned that you
would be at risk personally if people found out about our
relationship.” She swallowed, tightening her grip on the laminated
menu. “If my brother’s followers were to come after you…”

“I’m pretty sure Galaxy Girl would save me.”
Kenzie’s voice was almost cocky now, and was that an actual wink?
“Besides, aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? This is
only our first date. Maybe we should wait and see how the evening
pans out.”

“This is not our first date,” Ava said.

“It isn’t?”

“No, the Sculpture Park was.”

Kenzie laughed, and she looked so pretty
under the fairy lights and candlelight chandeliers hanging from the
restaurant’s rustic wood beams that it was all Ava could do not to
lean across the table and kiss her. She restrained herself, though,
inwardly cringing at her own impulses. She was acting like a
teenager, for god’s sake. Again, she had no doubt that Bea would
approve.

Kenzie seemed almost relieved when their
server approached. Or perhaps enthusiastic was the better
term. Ava had already decided on her order, so she sat back and
watched as Kenzie asked detailed questions about different items on
the menu, charming the young server with her sweet smile. By the
time they’d finished ordering enough appetizers and entrées to feed
a small dinner party, they knew their server’s favorite dessert on
the menu, how many siblings he had, and his projected date of
graduation from Seattle Pacific University. Kenzie’s interest in
the storytelling aspects of her job clearly came naturally.

They didn’t have to wait long for their food.
The first round of appetizers arrived quickly, and it was quiet for
a while as Kenzie did her usual impression of, as Ava eventually
told her, a hummingbird.

“A hummingbird?” Kenzie frowned around a bite
of potato gnocci. “But they’re so tiny!”

“Yes, but their metabolism is so high that
they have to eat the equivalent of their body weight in nectar and
insects every day just to stay alive.”

Kenzie swallowed and grinned. “I love that
you know that! Did you know that peregrine falcons can fly two
hundred and forty miles per hour? They’re the fastest living
creature on Earth.”

Ava lowered her voice. “I thought you
were the fastest living being on Earth.”

“Oh.” Kenzie’s ears turned pink. “I meant the
fastest Earth native.”

“Ah.” Ava hid a smile and reached for another
piece of gnocci.

The dishes were still coming when Kenzie’s
head snapped up, and she looked at the nearest wall over the top of
her glasses. After a moment she glanced back, eyes apologetic. “I’m
so sorry, Ava. Really.”

What was she talking about? Before Ava could
ask, she heard it in the distance: multiple sirens from what had to
be an entire fleet of emergency vehicles.

“There’s a gas leak at an apartment complex
on Capitol Hill,” Kenzie explained, head tilted again to one side,
her gaze unfocused. “The fire department needs help
evacuating.”

Ava pictured the adults, children, and pets
who might at that moment be on the verge of a terrible death and
nodded, trying to project support. “Go. We can do this another
time.”

“I really am sorry,” Kenzie said as she rose
and reached for her coat and bag. “I’ll text you later, okay?”

“Please.”

And then Kenzie leaned across the table to
kiss her cheek, the always surprisingly delicate scent of her
perfume lingering even after she was gone.

Their server seemed almost more disappointed
than Ava felt when she called him over to pack up the remainder of
the food, but Ramón only gave her a knowing look when he picked her
up.

“Another ambulance to chase for Miss
Shepherd?” he asked.

Ava settled the embarrassingly large to-go
bag on the seat beside her. “Unfortunately.” And here she’d thought
her own schedule was unreasonable. Between working at ECM and
moonlighting as a superhero, Kenzie’s availability was almost
nonexistent. The anticipation Ava had felt earlier in the evening
had fizzled, leaving her more tired and irritable than she had a
right to be. This was why she hadn’t bothered trying to date much
since Nick’s arrest. It was just too complicated, and her current
lack of emotional resiliency meant she didn’t manage the low points
well. Honestly, maybe she would be better off staying single.

Back at her hotel suite, Ava changed into
leggings and a sweatshirt and carried her laptop to the couch.
There, she kept tabs on the condo offer (it had been accepted) and
answered emails from Hyperion’s Asian subsidiaries while
simultaneously monitoring Twitter for any Galaxy Girl sightings. By
nine thirty, Seattle’s local hero had helped the Seattle Fire
Department evacuate the complex and transport the injured to the
hospital. It was nearly midnight, however, before Kenzie finally
texted that she was home—apparently she’d detoured to foil not one
but two armed robberies along the way. She offered to come over,
but Ava had an early meeting in the morning.

“Raincheck?” she texted as she brushed her
teeth. “Thai food tomorrow night?”

“Yasssss! But takeout this time at my place?”
Kenzie replied.

“It’s a date.”

“Woo hoo!” Kenzie texted back, followed by a
string of emojis that Ava had no idea how to interpret. Where had
she even found an emoji of an alien holding a fishing pole?

She blew Kenzie a kiss via text and signed
off. Their age difference, usually a non-factor, was showing. Seven
years in Internet time was like multiple decades in real life.
Although, come to think of it, Ava didn’t know if Zattalians aged
like humans. Did Kenzie’s former planet have a similar orbit around
its sun? Or did the length of Zattalia’s orbit even matter given
that Kenzie had been born in space? Someday, Ava hoped to have the
answers to these and other questions.

For now, though, she went to bed and scrolled
through her Kindle bookshelf, settling on a fantasy by Mercedes
Lackey that featured a strong woman who made her life by the sword.
Escaping for a few hours into a world without advanced technology
or alien registration policies was exactly what she needed
tonight.

As the book loaded, Ava glanced at the empty
spot beside her on the king-sized bed. She didn’t normally feel
lonely, which might have been because she was good at keeping
herself too busy to notice how much time she spent on her own. But
in the wake of Bea’s visit and Kenzie’s revelation that she had
feelings for Ava, something had shifted. In New York, she would
have made a few calls and had a handful of invitations to spend
time with people she’d known from before her brother’s drift into
insanity. But here in Seattle? Her options were far more
limited.

Her screen flickered and she turned back to
the Kindle, pushing away the longing for a certain someone’s
company. She couldn’t afford to fall headlong into whatever this
was with Kenzie. She needed to stay clear-headed, especially with
so many of her brother’s minions still on the loose and apparently
up to no good. She had set up a news alert to track alien
disappearances across North America and Western Europe, and over
the past couple of weeks, the numbers had been rising slowly but
surely—just as they had the last time Sentinel attacked the
off-world refugee community.

Her contact in Boston had asked to meet in
person somewhere secure, and Ava had suggested they rendezvous in
New York the following weekend, where she was scheduled to wine and
dine one of Hyperion’s largest investment groups. Soon, she hoped,
she would find out more about the mysterious Labyrinth and
determine if her paranoia about Sentinel was justified. Knowing
your enemy was crucial. Because while Kenzie might be superpowered,
she probably wasn’t completely invulnerable. In Ava’s experience,
few people were.

Chapter Two

In her studio at the top of Queen Anne Hill,
Kenzie rushed through the shortest shower in her personal history.
Though that wasn’t saying much. While growing up in space, she’d
learned to conserve limited resources from pretty much the moment
she’d become aware of the inalterable fact that space was always
actively trying to kill anyone foolish enough to attempt to live
outside a planetary atmosphere. Even with their robust genetic
modifications, Zattalians couldn’t survive in a vacuum. Or not for
long, anyway.

The shower was necessary—and necessarily
short—because she had left work early to respond to a request from
Panopticon for assistance with an unruly off-worlder terrorizing
the animals in the African Savanna section of the Seattle Zoo. The
presence of so many families with small children had made the
Seattle Police Department’s usual containment protocols unsuitable,
and the same was true for Panopticon, which Sloane liked to say was
basically the SPD’s Alien Affairs Bureau on steroids. D’aman had
met Kenzie at the exhibit in question, where they had safely
apprehended the off-worlder—a powerful Troolimpigo with little
interest in conversation—with minimal damage to the zoo facilities,
animals, or visitors.

When Kenzie had commented on meeting another
Troolimpigo so soon after their visit to the pop-up alien bar in
Portland, D’aman had shaken their head. “That was one of the
bouncers, Kenzie. I saw in her mind an image of the same bottle of
pills that our Pendran friend took. But I don’t think these are
opiates. From what we’re seeing, I think these pills might
stimulate the nervous system, much like Earth-based
amphetamines.”

Kenzie had paused at the edge of the Savanna
Grassland in the shade of a sycamore tree. “Do you mean like speed
for aliens?”

Her former mentor had nodded.

“But how?”

“Well, where do off-worlders congregate in
large numbers?”

She’d frowned. Off-worlders didn’t
congregate in large numbers because it wasn’t safe. Then it came to
her. “You mean the pop-up bars?”

They’d nodded again. “I will ask around and
let you know what I find.”

If D’aman was right, whoever was behind this
plan had to know that amphetamine-addicted off-worlders would put
both humans and aliens in danger—and in doing so, further discredit
the refugee community. There was one group Kenzie could think of
who would benefit from such a plan: Sentinel. Was this
related to the “increased chatter” Sloane had mentioned Panopticon
was tracking? Was Nick Westbrook directing Sentinel’s shadow
assaults on the alien community from maximum security prison?
Kenzie would definitely need to follow up on all of this with her
sister—assuming Sloane could be convinced to share classified
information. Now that Kenzie and D’aman were partnering with
Panopticon, Sloane would have to be less stingy about
information-sharing, wouldn’t she?

But that was a question for a different time.
Ava was on her way over, and right now, Kenzie needed to get ready
for the date that her team-up with D’aman and Panopticon had almost
made her late for.

Still damp from the shower, she ransacked her
closet for something appropriate to wear. The previous night, she’d
worn her best dress for dinner with Ava at one of Seattle’s nicest
restaurants. But sharing takeout in her tiny apartment was a whole
other box of wax. Ball of wax? Whatever. It should be box,
in her un-Earthling opinion.

Her phone vibrated on the nightstand while
she was speeding through her pants selection, and she grabbed it:
“Thai food ETA in fifteen. See you soon?” Ava had texted. And then
the phone vibrated again as a small red heart popped up.

“Yes please!” Kenzie texted back. She only
hesitated a moment before sending back her own red heart.

She was dating Ava Westbrook. Oh, god.
How was she going to tell her parents? But like the Sentinel drama,
that particular conundrum could wait. Right now, she had to figure
out what the heck to wear.

Superspeed was handy in many situations, this
one included. Kenzie’s hair dried as she blurred around the
apartment getting ready. She eventually settled on capris and a
plain cotton camisole with a collared shirt unbuttoned over it,
hoping the outfit walked the line between sexy and semi-casual.
Instead of a crowded restaurant, she and Ava would be alone in her
apartment tonight, and she couldn’t help wondering what would
happen between them. Would there be more making out? She hoped so.
Kissing Ava Westbrook had become one of her favorite activities.
But at the same time, she knew that Ava probably wanted to do more
than just make out. Kenzie did, too—in theory.

Her phone rang, and she grabbed it eagerly,
happy to be distracted from the voice in the back of her head
whispering that she was too old to be so inexperienced. That voice
was a jerk, and she would rather talk to almost anyone than allow
her insecurities unfettered access to her psyche so close to her
date with Ava. But then she almost dropped the offending device as
she read the name on the screen: Jane.

She chewed her lip, debating whether or not
to answer. The timing might be lousy, but this was the woman who
had given her a home when she had nowhere to go. Besides, Kenzie
had already blown her off multiple times. She couldn’t ignore her
forever.

“Hi, Mom,” she said, clearing her mail from
the kitchen island and stashing it in her junk kitchen drawer.

“Hi, honey. I can’t believe I actually got
you. I’m not interrupting, am I?”

“Nooo, but I am expecting a food
delivery.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” her
famous scientist mother said. “Do you want to call me back in a
little while?”

“Um, actually, a friend is coming over for
dinner, so…”

“Oh, is it Matt? How’s he doing? It’s been so
long since you two have been up for a visit. Your sister, too. Your
father and I were just saying that I-5 seems like a one-way street
these days.”

This was an old family joke, but Kenzie could
admit that it was fairly accurate. Their parents came to Seattle
far more often than Kenzie and Sloane found their way back to
Bellingham. Their hometown was only ninety miles north of the city
near the Canadian border, but Seattle’s traffic could be
ridiculous, and Sloane refused to let Kenzie fly her car over
traffic jams even in the dark.

“I promise we’ll come home soon,” Kenzie
said, ignoring the question about Matt. She was pretty sure it
didn’t count as a lie if she didn’t answer. “But can I call you
this weekend? Would that be okay?”

“I think so. Why don’t you text me and we’ll
set up a time.”

“That sounds kind of specific,” Kenzie said,
only half paying attention as she quickly wiped up the previous
night’s crumbs from the pizza she’d picked up on her way home.
She’d been so hungry after helping the fire department with the gas
emergency that she almost hadn’t noticed the guy smoking in the
shadows on the roof of the building where she’d left her civilian
clothes, and had only barely avoided outing herself as Galaxy
Girl.

It wasn’t the first time Kenzie had thought
Sloane’s protocol needed some tweaking. Too bad she couldn’t just
transform like D’aman. But… what if she could? D’aman had given her
a Taammeni headband to wear the night they’d taken her out in
Portland. What if she could convince them to make the loan
semi-permanent?

Her mother’s voice filtered into her
consciousness, and she returned to the conversation in time to hear
her say, “…you could make the time because we have something we
want to discuss with you.”

Doh. That didn’t sound good. They knew
about Galaxy Girl, didn’t they? And judging from the good doctor’s
formal intonation, they were not very happy about her adventures in
vigilantism.

Kenzie’s phone once again saved the day as a
text alert informed her that Ava was five minutes out. “That sounds
fine,” she said quickly. “I’ll text you, okay? Dinner’s here, gotta
go!”

She ended the call without waiting for her
mother’s reply and stood motionless for a second, pondering the
situation she’d landed herself in. She may have dodged the issue
for now, but the reprieve was only temporary. This weekend, she
would have to tell them about Galaxy Girl—and about Ava.

Maybe. Probably. Although she might
wait and see on that one.

Ava arrived at Kenzie’s loft not long after
the food did. Kenzie heard her footsteps in the hallway and hurried
to her door, pulling it open before Ava could knock.

“Hi,” she said, and then hesitated as Ava
gazed at her with startled eyes. “Sorry, I, um, heard you?”

“That’s fine,” Ava said, appearing to
recover. “And, hello.” She held out a bottle of wine.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Kenzie said,
taking it and giving the label a cursory glance.

“No, really, I did,” Ava said, her lips
quirking. “Not to be a wine snob, but…”

“But you’re totally a wine snob,” Kenzie
said, laughing.

“Totally,” Ava agreed.

She was so pretty in her green collared shirt
and tight-fitting black jeans, her smile soft in the low light from
the hallway. Kenzie gave into the urge to reach out and pull her
into her arms, but slowly to avoid scaring her. “I’m happy you’re
here.”

“So am I.” Ava wound her arms around Kenzie’s
neck.

“Mmm.” Kenzie inhaled the scent of Ava’s
perfume. “You smell good.”

“So do you,” Ava breathed into her ear.

Kenzie shivered at the sensation and almost
dropped the wine bottle. And, right, that wouldn’t do, especially
given it probably cost more than she made in a week. She pulled
back and rested her forehead against Ava’s and said, her voice
almost peevish even to her own ears, “I missed you.”

Ava’s laugh was surprised, but as Kenzie
started to huff and pull away, she added, “I missed you, too.”

They gazed into each other’s eyes for a long
moment, and Kenzie realized that the kissing might start even
sooner than she’d thought. But then the smell of Thai food wafted
down the hallway and caused her stomach to growl embarrassingly
loudly.

Ava blinked up at her. “Are you shaking?”

“Maybe a little. I didn’t have time for my
afternoon snack.”

“I saw you on Twitter. Everything okay?”

“Yep. Totally fine.” Someday she would tell
Ava about the alien speed circulating through the off-world
community, likely care of her brother’s minions. But not
tonight.

“Come on, then. Let’s get some food into that
beautiful body of yours.” Ava kicked off her shoes and tugged
Kenzie down the hall toward the studio’s great room.

She thought about resisting, but she was so
hungry she could barely focus. Kissing Ava—like so many other
things—would have to wait.

The kitchen island was piled with the
multitude of dishes Ava had ordered for dinner, white plastic bags
taking up nearly every inch of the butcher block surface.

“I wasn’t sure what you liked,” Ava said,
sounding a little embarrassed.

“I like most things,” Kenzie assured her, and
began pulling out white cartons and arranging them on the
island.

“Where’s your corkscrew?”

“Next to the fridge, second drawer down.”

As Ava busied herself with opening the wine
and scouting out a pair of matching wine glasses, Kenzie savored
how utterly domestic the whole scene was. They were like Sloane and
Mika, practically—except without the kitchen counter sex. Darn
it. Why had her mind gone there? She popped half a spring roll
into her mouth and chewed it quickly. Clearly, she needed to
fortify herself for the night ahead.

Or maybe not: “By the way,” Ava said as she
poured the wine, “I’m really sorry, but I might have to skip out
early.”

“What?” Kenzie caught herself. “I mean, I
thought that was my line.”

“Turns out it’s mine, too. I’m expecting a
work call any time. Again, I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Kenzie said, trying not to sound
as disappointed as she felt.

She kept quiet as they filled their plates,
trying to readjust her expectations for the evening ahead. At least
Ava hadn’t canceled outright. She was here, and they could still
have a nice dinner. The apartment was clean, and she’d set a vase
with fresh flowers on the dining table runner along with candles of
assorted heights and colors. Not only that, but the plates, cloth
napkins, and silverware all matched. Adulting wasn’t that hard,
really.

“So, what’s going on at Hyperion tonight?”
she finally asked, facing Ava across the table.

“I’m expecting a report from an investigator
I asked to look into a potential case of industrial espionage.”

“Meaning, someone outside Hyperion broke into
the company and stole something?”

Ava nodded, washing down a bite of pad thai
with a swallow of the wine she’d brought. “That, or one of our
employees did the stealing themselves.”

“Do you need any help? I could always ask
Mika to make a call.”

“No!” Ava looked alarmed at the prospect.
“There are viable legal channels we can pursue,” she added, and
went on to explain the matter in the vaguest of terms—a (nameless)
rival firm in Silicon Valley had just released a fuel cell
prototype that was remarkably similar to a Hyperion product in
final testing. The internal review should show where the leak had
occurred, and the appropriate authorities would be notified.

“At least, that’s how we hope the situation
plays out,” she finished. “There’s always the chance that the
bastards simply get away with ripping off our tech. That’s
capitalism for you—still more laissez-faire and Wild West than org
charts and HR benefit booklets would have you believe.”

“I could pitch an investigative piece for the
Tribune,” Kenzie said, still in fix-it mode. “I’m sure Aaron would
green-light it.”

“No,” Ava said again, just as quickly. “This
whole thing is off the record, okay?”

“Of course. I told you, that’s the case
unless you tell me otherwise.” She paused. “Actually, that reminds
me. I don’t think I can, um…”

“Use me as a source anymore?” Ava said,
half-smiling at her across the table.

“Right. And, uh”—she gulped before plowing
ahead—“I’m going to have to tell my boss why, according to the ECM
handbook.”

Ava’s hand stilled, wine glass halfway to her
mouth. “There’s an ECM handbook that deals with this sort of
thing?”

Kenzie nodded. “More of a code, but yeah,
there’s a section that discusses conflicts of interest. We’re
supposed to reveal potentially compromising situations as early as
possible.”

“Huh.” Ava took a long swallow of wine.
“Apparently, journalism is less laissez-faire and Wild West than
the paparazzi’s general conduct would suggest.”

“Apparently so.” Kenzie hesitated, licking
lips that tasted of garlic and ginger. “So, are you okay with me
telling Aaron about us?”

Ava waved a hand. “I’ve been out since high
school, Kenzie. I think the question is whether or not you’re okay
telling him.”

Kenzie nodded, the motion fast enough it
would probably have given a human whiplash. “Absolutely. I mean,
who wouldn’t be proud of dating you?”

Ava’s eyebrow did its sexy tilty thing, and
Kenzie realized belatedly that there were probably quite a few
people who wouldn’t view dating Nick Westbrook’s sister as
something to shout from the rooftops. Sloane, for example, and
their parents.

“If you’re okay with people knowing,” Ava
said, fiddling with her wine glass, “then why the hesitation about
telling your boss?”

Kenzie shrugged. “You mentioned the other
night you were worried about people finding out, so I guess I
wondered…” She took a huge bite of noodles, her eyes on the window
over Ava’s shoulder so she wouldn’t have to maintain eye contact.
Was that a siren? Did someone need her help?

“You wondered?” Ava prodded.

She was going to have to finish this
conversation, wasn’t she? “I wasn’t sure if you were
embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?” Ava frowned. “Why would I be
embarrassed?”

“Because.” Kenzie waved at Ava, hardly
believing she needed to spell out the obvious. “You have multiple
degrees and a handful of patents to your name. Oh, and you’re also
a top executive at one of the largest tech firms in the world.
Meanwhile, I’m a junior reporter who only has a job because I also
happen to be good with a camera. How could you not be
embarrassed?”

“Are you serious?” When Kenzie ducked her
head, Ava reached across the table to take her hand. “Hey, being at
the start of your career is nothing to be ashamed of. Besides,
you’re a wonderful, selfless person who helps perfect strangers—at
considerable risk to yourself, I might add. Admittedly, U-Dub might
not be MIT, but it’s a decent little school in its own right.”

Kenzie stared at her, lips quirking at her
teasing tone. “Have you ever considered you might be biased?”

“About U-Dub? No.”

“Ava!”

“Oh, you mean about you? Absolutely,” she
said.

Then she leaned across the table and, at the
same time, tugged on Kenzie’s hand, urging her forward so they
could meet halfway. Kenzie savored the way Ava kissed her, the
press of her lips both eager and modulated as if she was trying her
best not to overpower her when, really, Kenzie didn’t think she
would mind being overpowered one bit.

And then, just as the kiss began to deepen
into something more fervent than controlled, Ava’s phone rang.

“Fuck.” Kenzie’s eyes shot open as Ava pulled
back to smile bemusedly at her. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Ava said,
reaching for her phone and squinting down at the screen. “It’s not
like I wasn’t thinking it.”

She took the call down the hallway, her voice
hushed. When she came back, her forehead was furrowed, her eyes
apologetic.

“What did they say?” Kenzie asked, although
she was pretty sure she already knew.

“The investigator discovered actionable
evidence.” She reached for her purse. “I’m sorry, Kenzie. I’m going
to have to take that raincheck. I need to meet with my team to
discuss next steps, and since our chief counsel is currently eating
dinner at her desk…”

“No, I totally get it,” Kenzie said, even
though she felt like stomping her foot in a less-than-mature
demonstration of her current mood. Were they seriously never going
to get to finish a meal together and… do whatever it was that adult
women who were dating did after dinner? Of course, she had some
ideas, especially after walking in on her sister and Mika, but
someday, she hoped to experience the real thing.

As Ava’s thumbs danced across her phone
screen, Kenzie tamped down the urge to hurl the blasted device into
planetary orbit. Destroying Ava’s personal property would probably
not earn her a third date. Fourth date? Whatever.

“Can I at least pack you some food to go?”
she asked.

Ava slipped her phone into her purse. “No,
that’s okay. I’m sorry I can’t stay. Maybe one of these times we’ll
actually get to enjoy dessert.”

She probably hadn’t intended anything
lascivious with her remark, but that didn’t stop Kenzie from
zeroing in on her lips. “I hope so,” she said, her voice slightly
deeper. Apparently, she channeled Galaxy Girl when she was thinking
about sexy times.

Ava licked her lips, and Kenzie’s hand shot
up to adjust glasses that weren’t there. Laughing softly, Ava
rounded the table to press a kiss to her temple. Kenzie lifted her
chin in unspoken invitation, and Ava hesitated.

“I’m afraid if we start, we won’t want to
stop,” she said.

“That’s kind of the idea.” Kenzie waggled her
eyebrows semi-wickedly.

“Kenzie Shepherd, who knew you could be
diabolical.”

“I can be diabolical!”

“Sure you can,” Ava said in a patently
disbelieving tone.

“Why does literally no one believe that I can
be evil?”

“Because you can’t.” Ava turned and headed
for the hall. “I would delay this meeting if I could, but they’re
waiting for me.”

“I understand.” Kenzie followed her to the
door. “We’ll try this date thing again, okay?”

“Promise?” Ava asked, her voice wavering
slightly as she stepped into her shoes.

Was she nervous, too? That possibility hadn’t
occurred to Kenzie. “Of course.” She pulled Ava into a warm hug.
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily. Unless, I mean, you want
to.”

“That’s the last thing I want.” Ava’s voice
dropped, and she whispered against Kenzie’s hair, “Kiss me
goodnight?”

In response, Kenzie backed Ava up against the
door, much as Ava had done to her the night they first kissed. This
kiss, too, was deep and passionate, and she hoped Ava could feel
her sincerity. It was ridiculous, really, how attached Kenzie had
become in such a short time to this one person, this amazing woman
whose arms around her were solid and warm and heart-stoppingly
tender.

She pulled away at last and leaned her
forehead against Ava’s. “Text me later?”

“I will.” Ava pressed one last kiss against
the corner of Kenzie’s mouth, and then she was turning and slipping
out of the apartment.

The door closed behind her with a quiet
click, and Kenzie focused her attention, relying on her super
senses to track Ava’s progress. Ava’s steps were smooth and
measured as she walked away down the hall, her heels clicking
against the floor, but at the stairwell, she paused and hesitated
for several seconds, as if she might change her mind. But then her
notifications went off again, and Kenzie heard her sigh, long and
low. A moment later, the stairwell door creaked open, and that was
it—for now, at least. There was always later. After all, Kenzie
only lived a short bus ride—or flight—from Hyperion. How long could
Ava’s meetings really take? Probably, Kenzie should warn her first
before dropping in. No need to get Hyperion security all in a tizzy
again.

She seated herself back at the dining table
and reached for the pad thai carton. Maybe after dinner, she and
Matt could play Minecraft or National Geographic
Challenge from the comfort of their own homes. Matt. Holy crap.
She was going to have to tell him she was dating Ava, wasn’t she?
And Antonio, too. While Matt would probably fangirl over how lucky
she was—she hoped—Antonio seemed likely to take the news less well.
As did her parents.

She groaned slightly and shoved more noodles
into her mouth until she was sure she must look like a chipmunk.
Why did she have to inform the people in her life about the inner
workings of her heart? It wasn’t fair. Straight people didn’t have
to plan out how to tell their friends and family they had met
someone. Although, in this case, the people who loved her would
probably be less shocked by Ava’s gender than her last name. Yay
for progress.

Grabbing the TV remote, Kenzie settled down
on the couch to watch TV until Ava texted her. Hopefully, there
wouldn’t be a city-wide emergency, and Panopticon wouldn’t reach
out to her and D’aman, and Ava would be open to a late-night visit.
An image of Matt popped up in her mind, but she pushed it away as
Netflix loaded. He could wait, and so could her parents. What they
didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

In theory.

Chapter Three

Ava opened her door, smiling as she took in the sight of Kenzie
standing before her, Ben & Jerry’s carton held out in
offering.

“Are you sure it isn’t too late?” Kenzie
asked.

It probably was, but Ava only shook her head
and tugged her late-night visitor inside. Since leaving Kenzie’s
apartment earlier, she’d been thinking almost nonstop about their
kiss. In fact, she might not have been entirely focused on her
meeting, much to her chief counsel’s disapproval.

“Hi,” Kenzie said belatedly, smiling as she
kicked off her shoes and set the ice cream on the nearby counter.
Then she tugged Ava in and kissed her. Apparently, their minds had
been similarly occupied.

Ava pressed herself against Kenzie, who held
her almost reverently, as if she were something precious. Then
again, in the arms of a Zattalian, Ava realized, she probably could
break at any moment. Kenzie’s lips parted hers, and thankfully, Ava
forgot to think about anything other than kissing the woman who had
answered her booty call in record time.

Not that it was a booty call. Ava had just
wanted to see her, that was all. Making out was a bonus.

Alas, it was a short-lived bonus. Soon Kenzie
was pulling away, clearing her throat as she gestured toward the
counter. “We should probably put that in the freezer if we’re not
going to eat it.”

Ava blinked, taking in the flush tingeing
Kenzie’s ears pink and the way she fiddled with her glasses, not
meeting Ava’s gaze. She seemed to need a break. Which was fine.
Totally fine.

Ava stepped away and reached into the
silverware drawer. “No need to let good ice cream go to waste,” she
said, holding up a pair of spoons and willing her libido to chill
the eff out. Literally.

Kenzie reached for one. “I mean, if you feel
that way…”

The ice cream—Half Baked, with chunks of
cookie dough and chocolate brownies—was sweet and cold and
definitely hit the spot after the meeting Ava had just endured. As
she found herself explaining to Kenzie, the only assurance she had
been able to offer her product team had been that she wouldn’t give
up on their hard work without a fight. Realistically, though,
lawsuits could cost more than a development cycle. For most
corporations, it made more financial sense to walk away than to
take a competitor to court, even when there was evidence of
wrongdoing.

“But that’s not fair,” Kenzie said.

Ava resisted the urge to lean in and taste
the ice cream lingering at the corner of her mouth. “Yes, well,
that’s the system. Those with the deepest pockets typically
win.”

“What if I write a story…?”

“No,” Ava said. “My answer hasn’t
changed.”

Kenzie pushed the ice cream container away.
“I hate feeling powerless.”

“I hear you. But it’s just part of doing
business in America.”

“Not just America,” Kenzie said, her face
darkening, “and not just on Earth. You would think that advanced
civilizations would have weeded out things like greed and
selfishness, but that’s not the case. Apparently, self-interest is
quite literally universal.”

Ava wanted to ask her about her space
travels, about the planets and galactic outposts she had visited
prior to moving to Earth, about how she’d lost her birth family and
what it had been like to be taken in by the Henderson-Shepherds.
She wanted to ask how it felt to be a Zattalian in a universe where
her kind were so mistrusted, but she couldn’t be sure her hotel
suite was free of listening devices. She really couldn’t wait to
move.

Giving in to her previous urge, she leaned in
and kissed the ice cream from Kenzie’s lips. “Is it okay if we
don’t talk about work anymore?”

“Of course. What do you want to talk
about?”

“Honestly, I was hoping we wouldn’t need to
talk at all.”

Kenzie’s eyes widened and she gulped audibly.
And, right. So much for the booty call.

Ava slipped from her bar stool and placed the
empty ice cream carton in the trash. “Want to relax on the couch
and find something to watch?”

“Oh. Well, yeah, that would be okay,” Kenzie
said.

Soon they were cuddled on the couch together,
streaming a Netflix sit-com on the wide-screen television mounted
on the wall. It had taken them a while to agree on a show—Kenzie
didn’t do blood and gore and Ava found rom-coms overly
saccharine—but eventually they’d settled on a remake they’d both
heard good things about. Ava was starting to feel more relaxed now,
her thigh pressed against Kenzie’s, their feet sharing a pillow on
the coffee table. She missed her reclining couch from home. Should
she move her furniture out from New York when the condo closed?
Probably it would be easier to buy new furnishings here. After all,
she wasn’t sure how long she would even be in Seattle.

“You okay?” Kenzie asked, her shoulder
pressing into Ava’s.

“Fine. You?”

“I’m good.” Kenzie smiled and slipped her
hand into Ava’s.

At the touch, Ava’s remaining tension slipped
from her body. She really was fine. The hotel suite was the
temperature she liked, the blanket covering their legs a welcome
weight. From a lifetime on the East Coast, she was accustomed to
sweltering temperatures even this early in the summer, but Seattle
had remained pleasant so far. Kenzie was warm and solid beside her,
a tangible reminder that this was actually
happening. They were actually happening.

Wait until her mother found out. Actually,
that would be terrible. None of Ava’s family members could ever
find out that she was dating an alien, let alone a Zattalian.

Later, after they’d binged a couple of
episodes in a row with plenty of PG-rated cuddling interspersed,
Ava stood up and stretched. “I think it’s time for bed.”

“Right.” Kenzie rose beside her. “I should
probably go anyway. Work, and all of that.”

Ava hesitated. “You don’t have to leave if
you don’t want to.”

Kenzie’s brow rose. “I don’t?”

“No. It would actually be really nice if you
stayed.” And not because Ava wanted to jump her bones—she did, of
course, whenever Kenzie was ready for that development—but more
than anything, she didn’t want to walk her to the door and watch
her disappear down the corridor. She wasn’t prepared to say goodbye
just yet. “I even have an extra toothbrush.”

“Oh,” Kenzie said, smiling shyly. “Well, in
that case, I would very much like to stay.”

It obviously wasn’t the first time Ava had
done this part with a potential partner—the little domestic things
like turning out the living room lights, brushing their teeth
together, negotiating what time to set the alarm. But it had been a
while, and Ava couldn’t pretend she wasn’t a little nervous at
having a beautiful superhero from another planet lying in her bed
in a borrowed T-shirt, watching her change with eyes that betrayed
her own nerves and (if Ava wasn’t projecting) excitement.

“Is this side of the bed okay?” Kenzie asked,
smoothing the comforter over her lap. “I mean, I probably should
have asked first, but—”

“It’s fine. I really don’t have a preferred
side.” Ava set her brush on the dresser and walked toward the bed,
her movements slow and deliberate.

Kenzie stared up at her, and Ava smiled at
the sight of Galaxy Girl clad in one of her old college T-shirts,
looking like she might fly out the window at any moment. “You
know,” she said as she slipped between the sheets and switched off
the bedside lamp, “nothing has to happen tonight. I’m fine just
going to sleep.”

“Excuse you,” Kenzie said. “That would be an
egregious waste of what little time we have together.”

And, true. She did have a point.

In the dark, Ava felt Kenzie’s hands reach
for her. She let herself be tugged closer. Kenzie was warm and soft
and smelled of toothpaste and Ava’s skin cleanser. Soon their lips
and skin were sliding together, Ava’s hair falling over them like a
curtain that blocked out the entire rest of the planet. With the
lights off, Kenzie seemed emboldened, more assertive in bed than
Ava would have expected. She appeared to approach sex the same way
she did food—open curiosity when the menu item was new followed by
enthusiasm bordering on obsession when she discovered something she
really liked. And Ava’s body, it seemed, fell firmly in the
category of things Kenzie liked.

“You’re so soft,” Kenzie murmured, cupping
Ava’s breasts and rubbing her cheek against both nipples in a way
that soon had Ava barely able to stop herself from grinding against
Kenzie’s fabulous abs. When she released the moan trying to crawl
out of the back of her throat, Kenzie glanced up at her and asked,
“Do you like that?”

“You could say so.” Ava’s voice was thick as
her hands clenched and unclenched, the feel of a scantily clad
Kenzie—Galaxy Girl—lying on top of her almost too much.

“Good,” Kenzie said, and returned her
attention to the flesh still trapped in her warm hands.

But Ava didn’t want to overwhelm her, so a
few minutes later, as she felt herself teetering at the edge of
losing control, she took a breath and said, “Maybe we should slow
things down.”

Kenzie pulled back, eyes searching in the
light that leaked in from the slowly quieting city. “Are you
okay?”

“Yes, I promise. But I don’t want to rush
anything, and we both have to be up in a few hours.”

Kenzie hesitated before nodding. “You’re
right. It’s just, once I start touching you, I don’t want to
stop.”

“I feel the exact same way,” Ava said as she
slid her sleep shirt down and maneuvered back to her side of the
bed. “But we have time, Kenzie. There’s no rush.”

“Thank you,” Kenzie said, sounding grateful,
and then she yawned.

“You’re welcome.” Ava scooted back some more,
hoping the extra space would help her body resettle. She had been
sexually active for more than a decade, and her body wasn’t
accustomed to foreplay for foreplay’s sake.

Kenzie appeared to fall asleep within
moments, which Ava envied. Still wide awake, she lay on her side
cradling her pillow, eyes on the woman sleeping in her bed. Kenzie
was so lovely, with the half-moon of her eyelids hiding her
startling blue eyes, her creamy skin sun-bronzed in places and
delicately freckled in others. Just like a human’s skin, except
that hers emanated an unusual warmth Ava could feel from here. Just
looking at her, Ava would have no clue that she wasn’t human. Did
humans and Zattalians share DNA? Was that even a possibility?
Perhaps she would have to collect a sample of Kenzie’s—

Blinking rapidly, Ava stopped the thought.
Jesus, she was almost as bad as her brother. You could take a
Westbrook out of the family, but you couldn’t take the bigotry out
of a Westbrook.

Was this all a huge mistake? Kenzie was a
unicorn among sheep, and Ava had no idea how to keep her safe from
Sentinel or other anti-alien groups. Was she putting Kenzie at
incredible risk by dating her, or was Kenzie one of the few people
on the planet qualified to be her girlfriend? Both things could be
true at once, she supposed, and closed her eyes, groaning inwardly.
The Romeo and Juliet thing wasn’t nearly as romantic as
Shakespeare made it seem. This wasn’t a game, not any of it. If
Ava’s brother found out who Kenzie was, what she was, he
would try to have her killed. Full stop.

And Kenzie. Anyone who cared about her had to
realize that being with Ava put her at risk—assuming they were
aware of the relationship. So far, only Sloane and Mika appeared to
know. Kenzie had said Ava was the first woman she’d kissed. Did her
friends and family even know she was interested in women? Matt
would probably be okay with the news, but Antonio… Ava allowed
herself a small, malicious smile. Actually, she kind of wanted to
be present when the jackass sportswriter learned she and Kenzie
were together.

Which would be when, exactly? It might take
Kenzie a little while to come out, and that was totally fine. Ava
hadn’t been out so long that she’d forgotten what it was like. Not
that she had intentionally shared her identity with her family. Her
parents and Nick had found out when her college girlfriend posted a
photo of them kissing on Facebook and accidentally tagged her
public, carefully sanitized profile instead of her private one.
She’d deleted the photo immediately, but even so, she’d been called
home the following weekend to her parents’ townhouse on the Upper
East Side for an emergency family meeting, during which her parents
had taken turns trying to convince her she was heterosexual and
threatening to revoke her tuition if she didn’t “behave.”
Meanwhile, Nick had sat in the background laughing at her
distress.

Good times. Except they hadn’t been, of
course. Her father had never quite gotten over her refusal to toe
the straight and narrow, which was why they’d barely been on
speaking terms when he died. She’d thought she would have more time
to make things right with him; in hindsight, she probably should
have known better. Still, as her therapist back in New York had
pointed out, her father was the one who had refused to accept her
for who she was, not vice versa. It had taken Ava years of
counseling to stop blaming herself for the fracture in their
relationship.

Either way, she couldn’t pressure Kenzie to
tell people before she was comfortable doing so, no more than she
would ever push Kenzie to have sex before she was ready.

She must have dozed because an indeterminate
amount of time later, a sound dragged her back to reality. She
opened her eyes to find Kenzie still on her side but curled in on
herself now, tense and still, and there was the sound again: a
heart-breaking whimper that managed to escape between Kenzie’s
barely parted lips.

Tentatively, Ava leaned in and brushed her
fingers over Kenzie’s hair. “Shh,” she murmured, trying not to
startle her. “You’re okay. It’s just a dream.”

Kenzie blinked awake, her eyes widening
momentarily as she took in her surroundings, and Ava tried not to
flinch back. Then Kenzie focused on her, and the strain in her face
eased. “Ava?”

She slid closer. “I’m here. It was just a
dream.”

“Just a dream,” Kenzie repeated, and her
breathing slowed as her body slowly unclenched.

“You okay? Do you want to talk about it?” Ava
asked.

“No,” Kenzie said, her eyes immediately
shuttering. But she held out a hand to Ava. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Ava said, holding her hand
delicately on the sheets between them.

Within minutes, Kenzie was back asleep, her
limbs relaxed, brow unfurrowed. Ava watched her in the dim light
from the city, trying to imagine what had made her cry out in the
darkness, and her mind began to spiral over the multitude of
possibilities: the still unknown calamity that had killed Kenzie’s
family and brought her to Earth; the years of hiding her identity
while living in the midst of anti-alien humans; the smoke and fire
she’d flown through to save the people—and cat—from the fire the
previous week; the literal blood on her hands from the terrorist
attack against Panopticon.

Sleep’s pull was stronger than Ava’s worry,
though, and eventually she couldn’t resist closing her eyes. When
she opened them again, the alarm was going off and the light inside
the suite was considerably brighter. Kenzie was still here, too,
blinking awake in an adorably groggy way that reminded Ava of a
confused puppy.

“Good morning,” Ava said, stretching just
enough to shut off the alarm. She couldn’t remember the last time
she’d awakened naturally on her own. She needed a vacation, damn
it.

“Morning,” Kenzie said.

“You okay?” Ava asked, suddenly remembering
Kenzie’s night terrors.

“Fine,” she said.

“Come snuggle,” Ava said, her voice its usual
morning rasp.

Kenzie hesitated, but after a moment she
scooted closer.

Ava moved into Kenzie’s space, resting her
chin on her collar bone. “Is this okay? I don’t want your arm to
fall asleep or anything.”

“Galaxy Girl,” Kenzie said cryptically, her
voice low enough to elude any bugs that might have found their way
into the suite.

“Excuse me?”

“Paresthesia is caused by nerve compression,”
Kenzie explained, pausing to yawn adorably. “Your puny human frame
could never compress my nerves.”

“Paresthesia, hmm?” Ava kissed Kenzie’s neck,
sucking lightly on her pulse point. “Have I mentioned I’m a sucker
for nerdy girls?”

Kenzie, she knew, was a sucker for puns,
sexual or not. She shivered a little as Ava kissed and sucked her
way up her neck and across her chin. But just as their lips were
about to meet, she turned her head away.

Ava pulled back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t
mean—”

“No! It’s just, you know, morning
breath?”

“I don’t mind if you don’t.”

“Are you sure?”

Ava had a feeling Kenzie had never kissed
anyone without brushing her teeth first. She tried to keep her face
neutral as she nodded. “I’m sure.”

Kenzie tilted her head. “Okay, but if you
want to stop, tell me, okay?”

“That’s the general rule, isn’t it? If either
of us wants to stop, we say so?”

She nodded, and then added shyly, “But, um,
can we say if we don’t want to stop, too?”

Ava smiled. “Of course. I hope you will.” And
she leaned in, eyes on Kenzie’s lips.

Morning breath must not have been too bad
because Kenzie’s kisses were just as enthusiastic as the night
before. Unfortunately, work was still a thing and the clock was
ticking. Eventually Ava made herself pull away and rise, breathless
and disheveled.

Kenzie lay on the bed looking more than
pleased with herself as she watched Ava shrug into her robe. “Have
breakfast with me?” she asked.

Ava was tempted, but she had three meetings
before noon. Showering was an imperative. “I don’t have time,” she
said regretfully, returning to sit on the edge of the bed. “But
what are you doing tonight?”

“No plans. Why?”

Ava smiled as she took Kenzie’s hand and wove
their fingers together. “We still haven’t managed to complete an
actual date.”

Kenzie stared up at her. “You mean, you want
to go out again tonight?”

Ava’s smile faltered. “Or whenever. Just let
me know what works for you.” She started to release Kenzie’s hand,
but the other woman’s grip only tightened.

“Wait. What’s that look?” Kenzie asked,
waving at Ava’s face.

“I don’t know what you mean.” She felt her
chin lift slightly.

In a flash, Kenzie was on her knees at the
edge of the mattress, running her thumb over the corner of Ava’s
pursed lips. “Yes, you do. Did I do something wrong? Oh my god, was
my breath that bad?”

Ava shook her head. “No, of course not. It’s
just—it’s fine to tell me if you want some space. We’ve spent a
significant amount of time together this week. It makes sense if
you need some time to yourself.”

Kenzie’s brow cleared. “I don’t. I was just
surprised. I thought maybe you would want some space.”

Ava wrapped her arms around Kenzie’s neck.
“Can we start this conversation over?”

Kenzie held her close. “Please.”

“I don’t have any plans tonight and would
love to see you again,” Ava said. “Would you like to have dinner
with me?”

“Yes. But only if we can have dessert this
time.”

“I think that could be arranged,” Ava said,
and leaned in to kiss her, amazed that she got to.

They were still making out when her second
alarm went off a few minutes later, and Kenzie pulled away looking
scandalized.

“You have two alarms? That’s, like,
sacrilegious!”

“Good thing I do,” Ava said, and pulled out
of Kenzie’s grasp. “Now go. You have work, too.”

“You grossly overestimate the amount of time
it takes me to get ready.”

Before Kenzie could call her a “puny human”
at a volume any new bugs might pick up, Ava headed for the
bathroom. “The cafeteria is on the twelfth floor, if you’re hungry.
I’ll text you later about tonight, okay?”

“Are you kicking me out?”

“I mean, you could always join me in the
shower.” Ava waggled her eyebrows suggestively.

“I totally should because you don’t think I
would.”

No, Ava did not think she would. Spoiler
alert: She didn’t. But Ava didn’t mind too much because she knew
she’d be seeing her in a dozen or so hours. She already couldn’t
wait.

Maybe the two of them dating was a
ridiculously bad idea that would only end in disaster, but for now,
Ava was willing to take that chance. At this point, she couldn’t
imagine walking away.

Chapter Four

Coming out was more exhausting than hiding her true identity,
Kenzie decided as she stared at her text messages. She hadn’t even
gotten home from work yet and already D’aman was asking about that
long-awaited coffee, Matt and Antonio had invited her out to the
pub, and her parents wanted to know if she was available to “talk.”
She was pretty sure there would be more yelling than talking once
they found out that (1) she was indeed the off-worlder beneath
Galaxy Girl’s cowl, and (b) she was regularly locking lips with Ava
Westbrook. Not that the Drs. Shepherd & Henderson ever yelled.
They “raised their voices,” which humans apparently found more
civilized than actual yelling.

Personally, Kenzie had yet to identify a
difference.

Happily, her boss hadn’t raised his voice
earlier today when she’d informed him of her relationship with Ava.
Instead, he’d bundled her off to the human resources department to
answer logistical questions and sign assorted documents meant to
preserve Emerald City Media’s—and her own—reputation. Alison in HR
now knew intimate details of her relationship with Ava while her
friends and family didn’t even know that they were dating.
Probably, Kenzie shouldn’t mention that fact to Jane or Benjamin
when they finally found time to chat.

That wouldn’t be happening tonight—Ava was
catching a red-eye to New York just before midnight and would be
gone for two whole days, so the next few hours were about them.
Besides, Kenzie could always make time for her parents while Ava
was away. That didn’t mean she would, but she might.

The bus let her off at the top of Queen Anne
Hill, and she hurried home, texting furiously as she ascended the
Galer Street Stairs and covered the few short blocks to her condo.
She and D’aman set up a time the following morning to meet while
the boys agreed to a raincheck. But Matt wasn’t happy being fobbed
off, judging from his last text: “Why are you avoiding us? Do you
have a secret boyfriend?” A laughing emoji followed, and Kenzie
couldn’t determine from the context clues what exactly Matt was
laughing at—the idea of her having a secret, a boyfriend, or a
secret boyfriend.

She almost whipped off a message correcting
his heterosexist assumptions, but she stilled her speedy thumbs.
That was a conversation to be had in person.

Half a block from her building, there was
only her parents’ text left to deal with. But then her phone pinged
with a note from Ava—“Be there in 15!”—followed by a heart emoji,
and Kenzie decided the good professors could wait a little longer.
She had a date to get ready for.

She and Ava had seen each other every night
this week except one, but Kenzie wasn’t remotely tired of seeing
her. In fact, she was more than a little disappointed that they
wouldn’t be able to spend time together this weekend outside the
constraints of work. It would be nice to wake up to Ava without an
alarm blaring in her ears. Which reminded her—she needed to
persuade Ava to turn down the volume on her clock radio. Of course,
that would involve convincing Ava to trust her, another person, to
wake her up in time for work. Realistically, that might not happen
anytime soon.

Perhaps Kenzie should ask D’aman about a
source for Gamemendon ear plugs. Made from a material sourced from
a planet in the Betelgeuse system, those babies could block sound
like nothing else. The pair D’aman had given her when she first
arrived on Earth had vanished while she was in college, and she
still missed them intensely.

In her apartment, Kenzie whipped through a
quick shower and change of clothes, opting for gray pinstripe
capris paired with a white collared shirt and a heather blue
sweater. Casual but elegant, in her unprofessional opinion. Ava
liked it when she wore blue, and Kenzie was happy to oblige. They
were going for dinner and drinks at a rooftop restaurant that Ava
had raved about. Apparently, she’d been concerned that if they had
dinner at either of their apartments, she might, for some reason,
be tempted to miss her flight.

Kenzie knew exactly what the unspecified
reason would be, too: sex. Not that they’d had it yet, but almost.
At least, she was pretty sure. What counted as sex between two
women, though? Did orgasms make it so, or was there a specific act
that qualified? Would she even know when she lost her virginity? Or
what if she already had and she hadn’t even realized? Kenzie took a
deep breath and held it in for four seconds, picturing the word
“peace” inside her mind, then released her breath and held still
for another four seconds, again thinking, “peace.” Calmer again,
she tossed her phone, wallet, and keys in a bag and headed
outside.

Her fifteen minutes were up, so she wasn’t
surprised to see a black Tesla parked near the fountain in the
parking lot, Ava leaning against the rear door scrolling through
her phone. She was surprised, however, by the sound of a
familiar heartbeat. Make that two familiar heartbeats. There,
beneath a tree at the edge of the guest parking area, was—her
mother? Kenzie stopped in her tracks, watching as her father
emerged from their aging Subaru Legacy. What the hell were they
doing here?

“I still think we should have called ahead,”
Ben was saying, and then he followed Jane’s gaze, fixed squarely on
Kenzie.

Even from a distance she could hear his
whistling wheeze of discomfort. Ben disliked drama and
confrontations in equal measures, so Kenzie could see why he
wouldn’t have been very fond of this plan. But Jane loved combining
unexpected elements to obtain dramatic results in the laboratory.
She was the clear mastermind here.

“Kenzie,” her adopted mother said, her tone
characteristically brisk. “I’m so happy to see you, darling.”

This must be what an ambush felt like. “Mom,”
Kenzie said, her tone cold.

She heard another sharp intake of breath and,
half-turning, caught Ava trying to slip back into the Tesla.
“Wait,” she said, her desperation to see Ava before she left for
New York getting the best of her. In for a penny, in for a
kilogram. Or whatever the saying was.

Ava stopped and folded her hands in front of
her body, while Jane and Benjamin stepped forward, presumably to
get a better look at the woman who had been waiting for their
daughter. Kenzie knew the moment her parents recognized Ava: Their
heart rates increased, their breathing grew shallow, and Kenzie
heard her mother murmur, “Benjamin, get the gun.”

Wait. They owned a gun? How was
Kenzie, the sole Shepherd-Henderson impervious to bullets, also the
only one who appeared to take the dangers of projectile weapons
seriously?

“You’re as bad as Sloane,” she hissed at her
parents, attempting to glare them into submission.

Jane faked a smile—for Ava’s sake, no
doubt—and said through gritted teeth, “Given the circumstance, I’ll
take that as a compliment.”

“Honey,” Ben said, glancing from Kenzie to
Jane, “why don’t we wait a moment before jumping to conclusions?
You know what they say about assumptions: They make an ass out of
you and—”

“I am not an ass,” Jane said, her voice
tight. “I am a mother.”

Kenzie and Ben exchanged a look she was
pretty sure communicated that the two were not mutually
exclusive.

Another voice entered the fray: “Miss
Westbrook,” Ramón said quietly, emerging to stand beside Ava, “is
everything okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice
surprisingly even. “Is it, Kenzie?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said brightly. “Sorry, my
parents apparently decided to drop by. I guess they don’t believe
in calling first,” she added, her gaze hard as she glanced back at
the surprise visitors.

Jane only sniffed. “I believe you’re the one
who doesn’t believe in answering your phone.”

And, okay, that was fair.

Silence settled over the scene, and Kenzie
saw it as if from above: Ava and Ramón watching the
Shepherd-Hendersons warily, Kenzie in the middle, and Jane and
Benjamin regarding Ava and her bodyguard just as mistrustfully. For
a moment, she was tempted to make her view literally from above and
fly away. But not only were there security cameras positioned
around the courtyard, Ramón didn’t know that she was Galaxy
Girl.

At least all the guns within the immediate
vicinity of the courtyard—and there were far too many, in Kenzie’s
opinion—remained concealed. For now.

She took a calming breath and did the only
thing she could think of: “Ava,” she said, holding out a hand, “I’d
like to introduce you to my parents, Jane Henderson and Benjamin
Shepherd.”

Ava eyed her hand, and for a terribly long
moment, Kenzie thought she might be the one to take flight. But
then Ava gave a small sigh and stepped forward to take Kenzie’s
hand, squeezing it hard enough to leave bruises on a normal person.
Fortunately, Kenzie was anything but normal.

“Mom, Dad,” she said, her gaze severe, “this
is Ava Westbrook. My girlfriend.”

Ava gripped her hand even tighter, and Kenzie
squeezed back apologetically. They hadn’t exactly had the
girlfriend talk yet, but she figured telling HR and her parents
that they were together all in the same day gave her some leeway on
that front. Matt would be so pissed if he knew how many people had
found out before he did! Kenzie focused on her mother, whose pale
face was turning redder by the moment. Right. One interpersonal
emergency at a time.

“Your… girlfriend?” her mother
repeated. Some people’s voices got louder and higher pitched when
they were upset, but not Jane Henderson. Her voice simultaneously
deepened and grew quieter, usually forcing the listener to lean
closer. At least, listeners who lacked enhanced hearing
abilities.

“Yes,” Kenzie said, somehow remaining calm.
She suspected Ava’s steady presence beside her had something to do
with it. “I’m bisexual, and Ava and I are dating.”

“You’re…” Jane trailed off, her face pinching
in with what Kenzie recognized as—damn it. Was that
fear?

Ben slipped an arm around Jane’s waist. “It’s
nice to meet you, Ava,” he said, his voice gravelly like when he
drank too much Scotch. He stepped forward, tugging Jane with him,
and held out a hand.

Kenzie flashed him a grateful look. Thank
goodness for Ben’s unflappability. Jane might be brilliant, but she
wasn’t known for being cool or collected.

“Likewise,” Ava said, her voice clipped as
she gave Kenzie’s father’s hand the briefest of shakes. “Kenzie,
could I borrow you for a second?”

“What do you—” Ava’s semi-glare stopped her.
“Of course. You two,” she added, staring hard at her parents again,
“wait here.”

Surprisingly, they did as they were told. Not
without some low-scale griping, but Kenzie tuned that part out, her
attention directed squarely on the woman walking beside her.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I had no idea they
were coming.”

“I get that.” Ava paused beside the Tesla.
“But girlfriend, Kenzie? We haven’t even defined what we are
to each other. If you’re only dating me as some sort of belated
rebellion—”

“Ava!” Kenzie said, and then lowered her
voice. “You know that isn’t true. I would never—”

Ava held up a hand. “I’m sorry. I know you
wouldn’t. This is all just a bit much. I wasn’t expecting to meet
your parents tonight.”

“I wasn’t expecting it, either.” She
hesitated. “Would you want to, though? Be my girlfriend, I
mean?”

Ava rested her chin on her hand. “Are you
sure you want that? Your parents aren’t the only ones who are going
to react badly. Remember Sloane when she thought we were just
friends?”

“I don’t care what other people think,”
Kenzie said. “I can’t really afford to. You know that.” She would
have said more, but Ramón was still lingering nearby, arms folded
across his broad chest as he eyed her parents.

Ava nodded. “All right, then.
Girlfriends?”

“I’m in if you are.” She tried to smile
confidently, but her stomach had dropped so much that for once, she
wasn’t hungry.

“I’m in. Monogamous, though, right?”

Kenzie stared at her. “What?”

“I’m not interested in dating anyone else,”
Ava clarified. “Are you?”

“Of course not! Are you joking? That sounds
like so much work.”

For the first time that evening, Ava smiled
at her. “I completely agree.”

Kenzie smiled back. That was it, right? They
were official? She supposed she might have known better how to
handle all of this if she’d had any experience dating. Unlike Ava,
whose Internet history was littered with photos of her hand-in-hand
and/or drunkenly making out with women who looked like
supermodels.

“Anyway,” Ava added, glancing back to where
Jane and Benjamin were still waiting, “maybe I should just head
back to the office and—”

“No! We’re supposed to go to dinner.”

“I know, but I don’t want to come between you
and your parents.”

“You’re not coming between us,” Kenzie said.
“I’m an adult, and I have my own life. Which, incidentally, I will
share with them when I’m ready, not on their schedule.”

Ava gazed at her, squinting as if she
couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. They can’t just show up and expect
me to drop everything.” She tilted her head and batted her
eyelashes in a way that she had discovered worked on pretty much
anyone who cared even a smidgeon for her. “Please? I really want to
hang out with you before your flight.”

Ava chewed her lip. “Fine,” she said after a
moment, her voice resigned.

“Awesome!” Kenzie started to lean in to give
Ava a kiss, but at the last minute she stopped and offered her a
high five instead.

Ava stared at her hand before muttering
something about the West Coast. Still, she complied, albeit with
the most tepid slap Kenzie had ever received.

In a flash—fast for a human but not inhumanly
fast, she hoped—she was standing before her parents again, hands on
her hips, channeling the energy of her heroic alter ego. “I love
you guys,” she said, “but Ava and I have plans tonight. So, it was
nice to see you, but I have to go.”

Ben nodded even as Jane matched her stance,
power pose to power pose. “Now, wait just a minute, young—”

Kenzie interrupted. “No, Mom, I won’t. Ava
and I have reservations. You can always drop in on Sloane, if
she’ll have you. Just be sure to knock first.”

And with that cryptic comment, she turned
away. Her breath felt odd and her heart was skipping a little, and
she realized as she rejoined Ava that this was the first time she
had ever openly defied her adoptive parents’ wishes. Always before
she had at least pretended to toe the lines they’d drawn, to follow
the rules they’d set, trusting them to mediate her Earth
experience. Was this how human teenagers felt when they went
through the individuation process?

“Shall we?” Ava asked, indicating the open
car door.

Kenzie took a breath, resisting the urge to
glance back at her parents. “Yes,” she said, and slipped inside.
“We shall.”

Ava followed, closing the door with a
resounding thud. Once their seatbelts were fastened, she reached
over and clasped Kenzie’s hand. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Kenzie said. But as Ramón guided the
car out of the parking lot and onto the street behind the condos,
she had to close her eyes and concentrate on the faint purr of the
Tesla’s engine to shut out the sight and sound of her parents
arguing bitterly beside their car.

Would they cut her off financially if she
didn’t follow their rules? Or worse, would they report her to the
Alliance for using her powers, something she absolutely wasn’t
supposed to do? Would the Alliance arrest her and send her off to
one of their infamous intergalactic prisons, filled with smugglers
and extremists, thieves and scammers? Because despite the
romanticism of space piracy that seemed to proliferate in American
movies, stealing in space was just as illegal as it was on Earth.
In fact, the stakes were often higher in space, where thievery
could easily lead to the death of a ship’s passengers and crew.

Beside her, Ava squeezed her hand, more
gently this time. “Hey,” she said, voice soft. “Where did you just
go?”

Kenzie’s eyes popped open and she gazed at
Ava until the memories of dismal prison colonies and exploding
space ships faded. “Nowhere,” she said, lying as if it were second
nature (because it was), and squeezed back carefully. “I’m right
here.”

The restaurant—Café Vittoria—was as amazing
as Ava had promised, with a panoramic view of the city that rivaled
the photos she had shared from her soon-to-be new apartment.
Kenzie, however, was still unsettled from the scene with her
parents. When her text alert went off shortly after they’d been
shown to their table, she jumped slightly and stared at her phone
as if it might start shouting at her.

Ava lowered her menu. “Do you want to
check?”

“I don’t know. What if it’s them?”

“What if it isn’t?”

Sighing, Kenzie turned the phone over and
clicked on the notification. Her sister had sent, “You
okay?” followed by a hug emoji.

“It’s Sloane,” she told Ava. “She’s just
checking in.”

“You should answer her.”

Kenzie nodded. “All good,” she wrote
back. “Thanks.” And she added a heart.

Sloane’s reply came almost instantaneously:
“Want me to kick the parental units back to the Ham?”

Kenzie snorted even as she felt tears
threatening. Her sister was such a confounding blend of compassion
and the profane. She had literally yelled at Kenzie only a few
weeks earlier for being friends with Ava, and now that they were
more than friends, Sloane had apparently decided to support their
relationship. Kenzie could only imagine what Jane—and maybe
Benjamin, though to a lesser degree—had spewed to Sloane after
discovering their younger daughter was dating the sister of the
devil incarnate.

Actually, she’d rather not imagine it.

“I probably wouldn’t stop you,” she
texted. “Gotta go. Server is circling the table.”

“Call me when Ava heads to the
airport?”

She sent a thumbs-up emoji and turned her
phone face down. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine. What did she say?” Ava asked,
forehead furrowed.

“She wanted to make sure we were okay,”
Kenzie said, blinking back the annoying tears.

“And are we?”

“I think so.” Kenzie held out her hand. “Can
we talk about something other than my parents? Tell me about your
trip. Will you have any time to relax in New York? Are you planning
to see any friends?”

Ava looked as if she might challenge the
subject change, but in the end, she merely took Kenzie’s hand and
started telling her about the work weekend awaiting her. Maybe she
understood that Kenzie was teetering on the edge of an emotional
precipice and that if Ava was too kind, she would freefall into the
abyss. Or maybe Ava, too, wanted to talk about less emotionally
charged topics. Seriously, how had things gotten so complicated? A
few months ago, Kenzie had been a low-level content reporter whose
biggest worry had been losing her job in an industry that seemed to
be on its last legs. Now she was a secret superhero in a
star-crossed relationship. Like, what was this life even?

But as Ava answered her questions and made
self-deprecating jokes about her many years on the East Coast,
Kenzie’s emotions began to settle. It had been difficult to hold a
line with her adopted parents, and in the immediate aftermath she
had feared she’d done the wrong thing. But as the server brought
wonderful dish after wonderful dish and Ava continued to hold her
hand and smile into her eyes, Kenzie decided that she had been
right to set a boundary with Jane and Benjamin. She loved and
admired them, but that didn’t mean she had to allow them access
anytime they wanted it. She had long felt as if she owed them her
life, but they had chosen to take her in. They had done so because
they’d wanted to help, and they had helped, to a degree she
could never repay. That didn’t mean she should sacrifice her
happiness or ignore her needs and desires just to make them
happy.

Families were so freaking complicated. She
figured she must have experienced her share of dysfunction with her
birth family, too, but growing up on a ship meant that she was used
to regimentation, rules, regulations. One step out of line on a
spacefaring ship could lead to dramatic consequences. With the
stakes so high, Zattalian children didn’t have the luxury of acting
out. Or maybe previous generations of scientists had simply bred
the urge to dissent out of them? Seemed entirely possible.

Humans, in her experience, didn’t have that
issue. Sloane, for one, had proclaimed herself a rebel long before
Kenzie was on the scene. Ava, too, judging from her stories over
dinner, had done more than her share of rebelling as a minor, from
unapproved piercings and tattoos to “borrowing” assorted family
cars to sneak out at night.

“For a couple of years there, my parents
didn’t know what to do with me,” she admitted, swirling the pinot
noir in her wine glass into a dark red whirlpool.

“You were the motorcycle type, weren’t you?”
Kenzie asked, pretending she hadn’t seen photos online of Ava clad
in black leather sitting astride a “crotch rocket,” as their mother
disdainfully referred to Sloane’s preferred mode of transit.

“Oh my god, don’t remind me,” Ava said,
laughing. “What about you? Have you always been a glasses and
cardigan kind of girl?”

Kenzie nodded. “Yeah. I know, it’s pretty
boring.”

“You, boring? Never.” Ava reached across the
table and took her hand again, rubbing the soft skin of her wrist
with the pad of her thumb. “You’re amazing, Kenzie. Smart and brave
and compassionate. I admire you.”

Kenzie felt a smile blossoming and tried to
squash it. “What? No, you don’t.”

“I do.” Ava’s voice dropped. “I also like
thinking about what you’re hiding under those collared shirts of
yours…”

The touch at Kenzie’s wrist became more of a
stroke, and she swallowed a bite of grilled salmon and mashed
potatoes. She meant to reply in flirty kind, but what came out
instead was more of a whine. “You don’t really have to go to New
York, do you?”

Ava pulled her hand away. “I wish I
didn’t.”

“At least you get to see your college friend,
right? What was her name again?” Kenzie kept her voice casual, as
if she wasn’t going to scour Google for information about the old
“friend” the second Ava’s flight departed. Possibly sooner.

“I don’t think I mentioned it,” Ava said,
lips quirking. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you seem a little
jealous.”

“I’m not jealous! I’m merely envious that she
gets to spend the weekend with you.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I’d rather be
with you.”

It was a consolation, Kenzie decided,
to know that Ava would miss her, too. Anyway, she would only be
gone for a few days. Kenzie was mature-ish. She could find ways to
spend the coming days and evenings that didn’t involve pining over
her absent girlfriend.

GIRLFRIEND. She definitely wouldn’t be
getting used to that anytime soon. Nor, she was pretty sure, would
her parents.

Despite Kenzie’s wishes to the contrary,
dinner eventually came to an end. Ava paid the bill, and then there
was nothing else to do but walk her to the elevator and return to
the ground floor. As the car steadily descended, taking them ever
closer to the moment they would say goodbye, Kenzie tried to think
of something to say. But the knowledge that Ava was leaving on an
airplane—which could be ridiculously glitchy especially compared to
the level of technology Kenzie had been raised with—while she,
Kenzie, was probably going to spend the weekend coming out to
multiple important people about multiple important secret
identities made her brain seize up. All she could do was lean
against the back of the elevator car and watch the lighted numbers
above the doors flashing far too quickly until the brakes brought
the car to a smooth halt.

“Can I drop you somewhere?” Ava asked as they
exited the elevator.

The building’s exterior doors were only a few
feet away, but Kenzie held back, not ready for the date to be over.
“That would be nice. Thanks.”

“Of course.” Ava paused beside her, one hand
on her purse. “Are you going to try to catch up with your parents
tonight?”

Kenzie shrugged. “Maybe. Or I might see if
there are people who actually need my help.”

Ava touched her arm. “They’re only worried
about you because they love you. You know that, right?”

“Of course I know that,” Kenzie said,
frowning slightly. “But loving someone also means respecting their
choices. Jane and Ben raised Sloane and me to always try to do
what’s right. At some point, they have to trust us to decide what
that is for ourselves.”

Ava looked away. “I wouldn’t know about that.
Trust isn’t something my parents put much stock in.”

Kenzie caught her hand and held it. “I’m
sorry. You deserved better.”

“I’m not sure about deserve…”

“I am,” Kenzie said, and leaned in to kiss
the corner of Ava’s mouth like she’d been longing to do all
evening.

Ava turned her head so that their lips
brushed, and Kenzie closed her eyes as their breath mingled, the
scent of cherries and wine passing between them. The kiss was sweet
and, like dinner, far too short. Soon Ava was pulling away and
tugging her toward the glass doors to the busy city street.

“Come on,” she said. “I don’t want to miss my
flight.”

Kenzie didn’t feel the same way, but she let
Ava bundle her into the waiting Tesla, where they held hands and
stole kisses and talked about what they would do when Ava returned
from her trip.

Sloane had confirmed that the
Shepherd-Hendersons were still at her house, so Kenzie asked Ramón
to drop her there. Actually, she asked him to stop a block away so
that Ava wouldn’t have to risk running into the older couple (and
the gun they apparently traveled with) again. Once had been more
than enough.

While the car idled silently at the curb, Ava
insisted on walking Kenzie down the dusk-lit sidewalk that bordered
the neat houses, some the original Northwest Craftsman bungalows,
others built more recently in the newer boxy, minimalist style that
was slowly taking over the city’s residential neighborhoods. When
they got close enough that Kenzie could see shadows moving behind
Sloane’s curtains, she stopped, no longer certain about the current
plan.

“Maybe I’ll just go home after all,” she
said, brushing her toe over a crack in the sidewalk. What was that
superstitious child’s rhyme? Oh, right: Step on a crack, break
your mother’s back. With her strength, stepping on a crack was
the least of her—and her mother’s—worries.

“Do whatever feels good,” Ava said.

“I mean, I know what would feel good,” she
said, and leaned in to kiss Ava.

Ava gasped against her lips and then, with
surprising strength and agility, pressed Kenzie backwards against a
large tree at the edge of the sidewalk, the trunk rough against her
back, boughs laden with early summer growth arching over them.
Kenzie’s arms came around Ava, cradling her close, and time slowed
again as Kenzie deepened the kiss, wishing she could keep Ava with
her. She could, of course. If she wanted Ava to miss her flight,
all she would have to do was—

Kenzie broke the kiss, cheeks warm, breath
unsteady. “You should go,” she made herself say, releasing her grip
on Ava’s waist.

Ava stumbled slightly, looking as dazed as
Kenzie felt. “Right. I should go.” After a moment, she stepped
back. “Thanks for tonight. I’m going to miss you this weekend.”

“I’m going to miss you, too,” Kenzie said,
folding her arms so that she wouldn’t give in to the urge to sweep
Ava back into them.

“All right.”

“Okay.”

Slowly, Ava began to back away. “Good luck
with your family.”

“Thanks. Have a safe flight.”

“Thanks.” She smiled, her eyes soft. “See you
in a few days?”

“I’ll be here,” Kenzie promised.

With what appeared to be an effort, Ava
turned and walked away, waving over her shoulder once as she neared
the Tesla. The last Kenzie saw of her was her pink cheeks and dark
hair vanishing into the car’s interior. She could have used her
augmented vision to watch Ava as Ramón guided the car away, but she
had already overstepped with her powers. Even considering
preventing Ava from leaving was a road Kenzie couldn’t allow
herself to start down. She’d never been tempted to use her strength
to bend someone to her will before, but then again, she’d never
cared about anyone this much, either.

Damn her ancestors. Why hadn’t they
considered the drawbacks to superpowers before mucking about in
their own DNA?

Speaking of ancestors… As Ava’s car turned a
corner and vanished from sight, Kenzie pushed away from the tree
and squared her shoulders. The Shepherd-Hendersons might not share
her supercharged DNA, but they had been her family now for nearly
as long as her biological parents had been. And while she might not
owe them her life, Ava was right: They were worried about her
because they cared. The least she could do was allay some of their
fears about her extracurricular activities. In time, they might
even come to approve of her foray into vigilantism. Well, maybe not
approve. But they might grow to one day accept it.

Putting on a burst of speed, she made her way
to Sloane’s front porch and took a deep breath before knocking
firmly. No time like the present to come out.

Chapter Five

Ava sat in business class on the red-eye to JFK, drinking mediocre
whiskey and watching stars blink into being beyond her window. What
an evening. She still couldn’t believe that Kenzie’s parents had
shown up out of the blue, or that Kenzie had chosen to spend time
with her over them. Boundaries were important, of course, but
holding them firmly in the face of a parent’s opposition was
difficult. Once again, Kenzie had lived up to her superhero alter
ego.

Picturing Kenzie in her skintight hero outfit
sent a thrill through Ava, and she sighed dreamily, remembering the
feel of her body melting into Kenzie’s on the street outside
Sloane’s house as they’d made out in the Seattle twilight. If only
she hadn’t had to leave…

Stupid meeting. Stupid investors. Stupid
freaking Hyperion.

As CEO, Victoria should have been the one on
her way to New York to hold the investors’ hands, but she had
conveniently insisted that Ava was more “the face” of Hyperion.
Which was just—ugh. Why was she doing this, again? Why had
she let herself be talked into sacrificing her happiness to make
sure that her family’s legacy survived? Yes, they had taken her in
after her mother’s untimely death, but that didn’t mean she owed
Hyperion the best years of her life, did it?

Climate change, she reminded herself.
The West would be on fire again in a couple of months, the coasts
would be under water in a matter of years, and only money and power
could possibly change the outcome of the current mass extinction
event. An environmental group had recently proposed an idea that
had piqued Ava’s interest: creating desalination plants to use
excess water from rising seas to fight climate change in drought-
and fire-ravaged areas. Of course, this would only be a stop-gap
measure. The most serious problems facing the planet included
greenhouse gas emissions, overpopulation, and over-consumption, but
Ava was willing to embrace short-term measures while the best minds
on the planet tried to figure out how to reverse the impact of
centuries of short-sighted industrialization.

Honestly, if she were Mother Earth, she would
probably try to rid the planet of its most pesky residents: human
beings. That would be one way to stop climate change and the
current mass extinction event. Then again, if humanity were to be
threatened by a global calamity, the chronic over-consumers and
problematic industrialists—i.e., Westerners—would probably
develop the capability to fight any such menace while leaving the
people who had the least impact on the planet—i.e., everyone
else—to suffer and die. That was just the way the world worked.
The wealthy and powerful survived and thrived while those who lived
without didn’t.

That was why she was here, she reminded
herself. As Hyperion’s COO, she was in a unique position to use the
wealth and power of the Thornton-Westbrooks to try to shift the
course of global energy production and consumption. Well, that
wasn’t why she was here on this airplane at this specific moment in
time. She was flying back east because one of the company’s oldest
investment groups had threatened to pull funding, which she was
ninety percent certain was only straight white male posturing. If
not for those conservative bastards, she could have been with
Kenzie right now. In fact—she checked the time on her phone—they
might have been enjoying a nightcap back at Kenzie’s apartment at
this very moment. Assuming Galaxy Girl hadn’t been called away, of
course.

Dating Kenzie was more of a challenge than
she had anticipated. And yet, she probably should have seen the
difficulties coming. She helped run a company worth billions of
dollars, and Kenzie effectively worked two jobs, one of which
involved regularly saving the citizens of Seattle. There were bound
to be scheduling issues. And yes, she recognized that it was the
height of entitlement to sulk over not being able to see her
superhero girlfriend while sipping whiskey in business class, but
to be fair, she had never claimed not to be entitled.

She leaned her head back against her
in-flight pillow and reached for her phone. She might be crap at
sleeping on airplanes given her general fear of flying, but there
might be other ways to distract herself. With her phone connected
to the plane’s WiFi, she pulled up her messages app.

“Hi,” she wrote, and waited.

Less than a minute later the reply came: “Hi!
You’re not in New York already, are you?”

“Nope. Still on the plane. What about you?
Still at Sloane’s?”

In reply, a photo popped up revealing Sloane
and Jane leaning against the kitchen counter, involved in what
appeared to be a deep, possibly hostile conversation.

Kenzie texted again: “Ben, Mika, and I are
playing cards while the other two face off in the latest
mother-daughter fracas.”

Ava knew all about those. “I’m glad you have
Sloane,” she typed back.

“Me too, but playing hearts with my family
isn’t quite what I want to be doing tonight.”

“Oh, really? What would you rather be
doing?”

“Honestly, I’d rather be alone with you.”

“So would I. So much.”

There was a brief pause, and Ava imagined
Kenzie slipping into another room before typing, “What would we be
doing if we were?”

“Whatever you want,” Ava replied.

She’d had sex for the first time in high
school, and she could still remember how intimidating it had been
to have another person touching and kissing parts of her body she’d
never even seen herself. She didn’t want to rush Kenzie. Well, she
did. She just didn’t want Kenzie to feel rushed or to do anything
she wasn’t ready for. Kenzie choosing her as her first potential
sexual partner felt like a gift, and Ava didn’t want to do anything
to make her regret that choice.

Three dots appeared, and then the message
popped up: “What do you like?”

And this was yet another situation she had
never anticipated: sexting with Kenzie Shepherd from an airplane
six miles above the earth, the light of the Milky Way beyond her
tiny window brighter and more beautiful than she’d ever seen it.
But then, she thought as her thumbs moved and her teeth worried her
lower lip, she could probably grow to love doing just about
anything with Kenzie.

Now, if only they could manage to find a
solid chunk of time to be together in person. Ava didn’t want a
long-distance relationship with someone who lived in the same city.
She wanted to spend as much time with Kenzie as she could, as much
time as they could carve out of their jobs and other commitments.
Because when it came to Kenzie, she couldn’t escape the nagging
worry that there might not actually ever be enough time.

#

Out of the corner of her eye, Ava glimpsed
her server approaching again, a determined look on his face.
Purposely, she looked down at her phone and refreshed her text
thread. Her last message remained unchanged.

“Hi. Are you ready to order yet?” the server
asked, his voice flat, expression clearly unimpressed. The
restaurant was busy, and Ava had been sitting here for a half hour
waiting for a brunch date who had yet to appear.

“Yes, fine,” Ava said. “I’ll take an order of
blueberry pancakes and one avocado toast with salad. Balsamic,
please.” She pushed her menu aside as the server faked a smile and
stalked off.

What were the odds the food would reach the
table without being spat upon? Probably not very high. New York.
Now that she was back, Ava wasn’t sure she’d missed it as much as
she’d thought. Her apartment had seemed louder than usual, the
smell of urine and rotting trash on the streets stronger than she’d
remembered, the service at this, one of her favorite brunch spots,
snippier than it used to be. The server—probably a struggling
actor, writer, or other artist—had a right to be irritated, but
wasn’t the customer always right? And anyway, this wasn’t like
Madi. She usually ran a little behind, but this was different—just
like everything else about this visit, apparently. What could be
keeping her? She’d caught the train from Boston as planned this
morning, and the train had reached Grand Central on time, according
to her last text. But after arriving at Grand Central, she’d gone
silent.

Ava glanced around the Gramercy Park
restaurant, sizing up her fellow diners. Most of the tables were
occupied by twenty- and thirty-somethings in pairs and groups, but
one table near the restrooms stood out: two white men of
indeterminate age with unremarkable features eating their food in
silence and, if she wasn’t mistaken, stealing occasional glances at
her in the mirror on the opposite wall. Had her New York security
detail noticed? She caught the eye of Amir, one of her plainclothes
guards currently perched on a stool at the coffee bar, and nodded
subtly in the direction of the goons, gratified when Amir flashed a
hand signal that indicated he was aware of the overly interested
patrons.

Unnerved, Ava refreshed her texts again. Was
the surveillance about Madi, and if so, what had she found? Even
more to the point, where the hell was she?

Ava didn’t wait for the food to arrive.
Instead, she grabbed her purse and headed toward the bathroom,
video camera open and running on the phone she held casually at her
side. She made sure to amble slowly past the two goons, keeping her
gaze trained on the hallway ahead, and then ducked into the women’s
room at what she hoped was a normal, unremarkable pace. She may
have been raised in a family of pathological liars but acting had
never been her forte.

In the restroom, she leaned against the wall
outside the stall and checked the video. A little shaky, but both
men’s profiles were clear and visible. Okay. What now?

Opening her text thread with Madi, she typed,
“I’ve got company. What about you?”

A thumbs-up returned quickly, followed by a
blurry photo of two nondescript white men seated at what looked
like a coffee shop.

“Are you still at Grand Central?” Ava
typed.

“Yep. Tried to shake them, but they’re
persistent.”

“Hang tight. I’ll send help.”

Another thumbs-up.

Ava bit her lip, wondering who she should
call. There was really only one person, wasn’t there?

Rifling through her bag, she retrieved the
burner phone she kept for emergencies and turned it on, waiting
impatiently as it started up. The musical chimes it played were
particularly irritating, and she turned on the faucet to cover the
sound. Water still running, she sent a terse text message to a
number she had known most of her adult life.

A moment later, the phone rang, vibrating in
her hand. Her screen told her it was an unknown caller—probably a
burner, too. She answered with the phrase they’d agreed on: “The
night is always darkest before dawn.”

“The day is always brightest before dusk,”
the familiar voice at the other end answered. “You do know today is
my day off, don’t you?”

Ava huffed in irritation. “I’m sorry. I
didn’t exactly plan to be followed by my brother’s goons
today.”

Angelica, Hyperion’s New York assistant chief
of security, sighed. “I swear, Ava, you haven’t even been in the
city that long. What are your coordinates?”

“I’m okay right now. But I need you to make a
switch with someone at Grand Central.”

“Who’s the target?”

“Madi.”

“I should have known… Have her meet me at the
women’s restroom in the station master’s waiting room.”

“Got it. What about me?”

“Is your security team intact?”

“Yes.”

“Then head back to HQ. I’ll text you the
address for a meet-up.”

The line went dead, and Ava rolled her eyes
as she relayed Angelica’s instructions to Madi. Angelica was so New
York that sometimes it was difficult to remember that she wasn’t a
native of the city or even of Earth. Ava, as a teenaged science
nerd enamored with a DNA test kit her parents had given her, had
accidentally discovered that the stern security officer was a
Xandilan, a refugee from a planet of shapeshifters who were
carefully monitored by the Alliance thanks to their history of
helping overthrow assorted empires across the universe. Rather than
turn Angelica in, Ava had apologized for invading her privacy and
had carefully guarded her identity ever since. Angelica was a good
person, and Ava had been raised to distrust authority, particularly
of the galactic type. That was probably one of the few things she
had in common with the rest of her family.

The food arrived shortly after Ava returned
to her table, and even though she wasn’t all that hungry, she
tucked into the avocado toast and salad, leaving the pancakes
(Madi’s favorite) untouched. The short stack reminded her of
Kenzie, who Sloane had bragged over brunch the previous weekend
could easily demolish a dozen hotcakes at a single sitting.
Interestingly, Madi and Kenzie had similar appetites. Come to think
of it, they were similar in more ways than one—both beautiful,
strong, loyal to a fault, and willing to risk their own safety to
help Ava. Plus, fun to kiss, as Ava’s early relationship with Madi
had proven before they’d realized they made better friends than
friends with benefits.

When the salad was down to its dregs, she
paid the check and packed the pancakes in a to-go box. No need to
let those go to waste. Then she caught her guard’s eye and nodded
toward the restaurant door. Amir gave her a subtle thumbs-up.

Time to flush out a rat. Or, in this case, a
pair of rats.

She slipped her purse over her shoulder and
headed for the door, cardboard box in hand. Unsurprisingly, the two
goons who weren’t fooling anyone immediately rose to follow. In the
mirror over the bar, she watched as her guard intercepted the pair,
bumping into them “accidentally.”

“Hey!” Amir said, scowling at the first guy.
“Watch it!”

The goon attempted to shove Amir out of the
way, but that was easier said than done, Ava knew. She slipped out
of the restaurant just as her car pulled up. As they drove away,
she caught a glimpse of Amir pinning both of her would-be stalkers
to the bar. Angelica certainly knew how to pick her team.

The car turned toward Midtown, and Ava
watched the shops and street corners flash past, her adrenaline
slowly subsiding. Angelica had been right—she’d been back less than
a day and already she was being followed. She really hadn’t missed
the part of her life on the East Coast where she was constantly
looking over her shoulder. This city was where a sniper had tried
to kill her shortly before she was due to testify against her
brother, where a second shooter tried to end her life shortly after
the trial had concluded. Bulletproof glass and her accomplished
security team had saved her in both instances, but the intense
terror of those moments still came back to her sometimes when she
was tired or had too much to drink.

She hoped Madi was okay. Otherwise… Well,
worrying wouldn’t accomplish anything. Madi could take care of
herself, and Angelica would look out for her. Ava would just have
to trust that everything would turn out all right.

Sliding lower on the car seat, she closed her
eyes against the city that had once felt like home but now seemed
more like an elaborate maze with passageways that constantly moved
and shifted underfoot. Did that make her the lab rat in this
scenario? Yes, actually, she was pretty sure it did.

Appropriate,
then, that she wait for Angelica’s all-clear in her laboratory in
the basement of Hyperion’s Midtown skyscraper. The lab was still
windowless and stark as ever, with the same nerdy posters Ava had
hung on the walls, the same fading family photo her mother had
given her the day she’d started at Hyperion as an entry-level
research associate. Despite her mother’s expectations, Ava hadn’t
been all that interested in working her way up the Hyperion rungs.
She’d been more than content when she’d reached the position of
running her own lab with the help of a team of hand-picked
researchers, mostly women who had endured years in male-dominated
labs where they were tasked with making the coffee while
less-qualified men were rewarded with substantive projects and
funding. Science wasn’t a level playing field any more than
business, law, or medicine were, and being a Thornton-Westbrook
meant assassination attempts, yes, but also power and wealth. She
hadn’t minded wielding her limited clout here in the labs.

If she’d harbored any hope for her career
path, it had been to possibly one day serve as the head of the
National Science Foundation, where she could impact national policy
on a broader stage. But apparently that wasn’t to be. Or not yet,
anyway. There was still time, assuming her family didn’t take her
down with them.

With her data saved to the cloud, it was only
a matter of minutes before she’d logged in to the network and her
private VPN on her laptop. Intimately familiar with Hyperion’s
security protocols, she knew how to mask her Internet activity
using a proxy server and multiple layers of encryption. Using both
a VPN and a proxy might seem like overkill, but in her book, you
could never be too careful when the stakes were literally life or
death.

To distract herself from waiting, she
navigated to her file on Labyrinth and reviewed the limited data
she had been able to unearth since Madi’s cryptic text. Labyrinth
either referred to a new video game, a YA novel series, or a
weapons tech company whose ownership was shrouded in secrecy. Her
money was on the latter, but either way, she hoped Madi had more
information. They would need it to intercede in whatever fresh hell
Sentinel was up to.

As the minutes passed, her restlessness grew.
What was she doing here? Why hadn’t she insisted on going with
Angelica to meet Madi? Angelica had probably thought she would only
get in the way, but Ava might have been able to help. It was her
fault Madi was embroiled in this mess, which made it her
responsibility to make sure Madi emerged unscathed.

In fact, if Ava didn’t hear from Angelica
soon, she was going to have to call on Galaxy Girl. She knew Kenzie
could reach New York in a matter of minutes because Kenzie had told
her as much when she’d offered to come visit her over the
weekend—“You know, if you wanted?” When Ava had picked her jaw off
the floor and questioned how anyone could fly cross-country at such
speed, Kenzie had suggested that theoretical physics as conceived
by humans might have some holes.

Ava had turned down the visit mostly because
she didn’t want anyone connecting the dots between Kenzie visiting
her during her business trip and Galaxy Girl making a quick jaunt
to New York the same weekend. Today’s little escapade proved she’d
made the right decision. If something happened to Angelica and
Madi, though, she might need to reconsider.

Her burner phone buzzed, and Ava held her
breath as she clicked on the text icon: “All good,” Angelica had
written. “Let’s meet. Coordinates to follow. Use protocols.”

Ava rested her elbows on the desk, face in
her hands. Thank god. Madi and Angelica were both okay. For
a minute there… Her phone beeped again, this time with a coded
message that, when translated, contained an address in—was that the
Lower East Side?

“No guards,” Angelica had added.

Ava stared at the note, the hair on the back
of her neck prickling. Was this really Angelica? But of course it
was. The sender knew the ridiculously esoteric code that they had
developed together in the off-chance Ava ever needed help. She was
grateful now that they had planned for this particular contingency,
as far-fetched as it might once have seemed.

Gathering herself, she locked her laptop,
purse, and cell phone in the lab safe and headed for the hallway,
burner phone tucked into the pocket of her blazer jacket, the to-go
box from the restaurant under one arm.

“Dane,” she said, smiling at the guard
stationed outside her lab, “I’m going up to the cafeteria. Can I
get you anything?”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” the fresh-faced
company soldier said. “But shouldn’t I come with you?”

She waved him back to his station. “No.
There’s plenty of security in the building. I’ll see you
shortly.”

He nodded, frowning slightly. “I’ll just
alert the rest of the team, then.”

“Sounds good,” she said, and walked down the
hallway, trying not to seem in too much of a hurry.

The elevator bank was around the corner from
her lab. At the last second, she detoured and took the stairs
instead. Elevators had cameras, and the last thing she wanted was
for anyone to know that she wasn’t, in fact, headed to the
cafeteria. While she would hope the tail earlier today wasn’t an
inside job—for one thing, it hadn’t been very sophisticated, and
Hyperion’s security was better than that—there was no real way to
be sure.

She exited the building through a side door
and checked over her shoulder as she hurried down the alleyway. No
one appeared to be following. When she was younger, Ava used to
make a game of slipping her security detail. They had never been
very happy about it, but Angelica’s training on the subject had
come in handier than Ava had ever expected in the years since her
brother had gone rogue. Four blocks and several detours later, she
waved down a yellow cab and settled into the back seat, headed
northwest. A second cab change would make certain no one was
following her—or at least as certain as she could be in the middle
of a huge city—and then she could head south as directed.

Who were the men following her and Madi? Were
they really connected to her brother? It seemed likely. Ava
couldn’t think of anyone else who would care this much about what
she did. But were they only interested in her movements on the East
Coast, or would they follow her back to Seattle? If they did, she
wasn’t sure who, other than Angelica, she could trust. Sloane was
the definition of professional when it came to human/alien
relations, and she obviously knew how to keep secrets. Case in
point: Panopticon would never have promoted her to her current
position if they’d known her sister’s true identity. What about
Mika? Could she be trusted as well?

Forget “Super Friends.” They were rapidly
becoming the Lesbian Justice League. Honestly, Ava thought,
preparing to switch taxis, it had a nice ring to it.

#

The safe house Angelica had chosen was
located at the back of a Dominican restaurant on a narrow, crowded
street five blocks off FDR Drive. The aproned server who showed Ava
to the space blinked eyes that glowed green in the dim lighting,
and Ava had to take a deep breath to steady her nerves before
pushing through the cracked wooden door the server had indicated. A
restaurant that hired off-worlders wouldn’t exactly be in cahoots
with Sentinel, would it?

Sunlight poured into the small room from a
window opposite the door, and it took Ava’s eyes a moment to adjust
to the dazzling rays of dust-moted light. Before she could fully
focus, strong arms closed around her. Fortunately, a whiff of
familiar perfume accompanied the assault, and she relaxed into her
captor’s grasp.

“Oh my god, Madi, I’m so, so sorry,” she
said.

“I mean, you definitely should be,” Madi
said, the lightness of her voice at odds with the way she clung to
Ava.

“I am. I really am.”

Madi pulled back and jerked her head at
Angelica, who was leaning against the wall near the window and
watching them with an unreadable expression. “Thanks for sending
this one to get me.”

“Of course.”

Angelica harrumphed audibly. “I did not need
to be ‘sent.’ I was happy to assist.”

Madi smiled at Ava. “Still doesn’t have a
sense of humor, I see.”

“To be fair, though, is that really her
fault?” Ava asked, head tilted to one side. “Humor is one of those
intrinsic personality traits you either have or—”

“That’s enough from the two of you,” Angelica
said. “Shall we eat while we share information?”

“Absolutely.” Madi slung her arm around Ava’s
shoulders and guided her to a pedestal table set for three, dishes
overflowing with vegetables, rice, and beans. “The food is really
good, and I’m starving.”

“I’ll bet.” Ava took a seat and slid the
cardboard to-go box across the table. “Thought you might like some
pancakes, too.”

Madi made an excited sound and reached for
the box. “Noice! I knew I loved you for a reason.”

“I love you, too. Now, tell me what
happened.”

In between bites of food, Madi explained how
she’d noticed two men following her from the tracks after her train
deboarded. She’d tried losing them in the crowds in the Main
Concourse, and then again in the Market. But when they refused to
be shaken, she’d decided she wasn’t about to give them the chance
to bundle her off into a waiting car outside the station.

“Thanks to Angelica,” she added, nodding
appreciatively at the security chief, “that didn’t happen. She put
on my face and led those dudes on a fun little chase through—what
was it? Lexington Passage?”

Angelica nodded. “You should have seen their
faces when I turned a corner and shifted into an older Asian man. I
almost snapped a photo for you.”

“Aw, man, you totally should have,” Madi
said, cracking up.

Ava smiled, but she wasn’t quite to the
laughter stage. If something had happened to Madi because of her…
But it hadn’t, and they were together in a place no one would find
them, safe and sound. For now.

“Anyway, thanks, both of you,” Madi said
around a sizable bite of blueberry pancake. “I have to admit I was
a little worried there.”

“Happy to help,” Angelica repeated.

“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Ava said. “And
again, I’m so sorry for getting you involved.”

Madi smacked her arm. “Don’t go getting all
guilt-ridden on me. I knew what I was getting into. Don’t you want
to hear what I found?”

She did. Very much.

Angelica caught Ava’s eye. “I can step out
and watch the door if you’d prefer.”

Ava considered the offer. Growing up in the
Westbrook household, she had learned to be suspicious. It had
occurred to her that Angelica could be working for the enemy, and
that this little “rescue” had been staged in order for Sentinel to
plant someone inside Ava’s trusted circle. It was even possible
that the shapeshifter in front of her wasn’t actually Angelica. The
Hyperion security uniform wasn’t incontrovertible proof of her
identity. Nor were the protocols they’d developed. In fact…

“What was the first thing I said to you when
we met?” Ava asked.

Angelica’s lips quirked. “That you didn’t
need a guard.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told you I didn’t need a spoiled brat to
watch over, so we were even.”

Madi choked out a laugh. “Remind me not to
hire you to watch my future kids.”

Angelica pushed up her sleeve and showed Ava
the tattoo on the underside of her bicep, a small blue planet with
a ring of moons around it. “Satisfied?”

Ava nodded. “If you’re willing, I’d like you
to know what’s going on.”

“Does this have anything to do with the
uptick in off-worlder kidnappings?” Angelica asked.

“You noticed that?”

“I think a lot of people have noticed.”

Of course, Ava wouldn’t be the only one
worried about Sentinel’s potential rebirth. Off-world communities
across the planet—and their allies—must be watching and waiting,
too.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I think it might.”

“In that case, I’m willing.” Angelica’s brown
eyes were fierce.

“Good,” Madi said, and crumpled her napkin
beside her plate. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

Ava was glad they were both on her side.

Loyalty established, they got down to
crunching the data Madi had uncovered. As a security specialist at
the Justice Department, she’d used her security clearance to
cross-reference the coordinates in the spreadsheet Ava had
recovered from her secretary’s computer. They appeared to reference
Hyperion Tech subsidiary locations, most of which the federal
government already knew about. A handful, however, weren’t listed
in any known database. All but one of these coincided with
locations of a company named Labyrinth, a shadowy, privately owned
tech firm that, according to the classified files, was a reseller
of an obscure laser, the maker of which was also shrouded in
mystery.

Madi slid a black and white photo of a weapon
across the table. “Is that one of yours?”

“I don’t think so,” Ava said, squinting down
at the photo. “The serial number doesn’t follow our product naming
conventions.”

Something flickered in her memory—what was
the weapon that she and Victoria had argued about? A helium-neon
laser. That couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? Maybe Labyrinth
was the buyer that Victoria had been referring to when she’d
confronted Ava about defunding the project.

“Did you find any connection to Sentinel?”
she asked.

“Not yet.”

That didn’t mean anything, though. Hyperion
didn’t contract directly with Panopticon or the Defense Department
but rather used subsidiaries to get around laws pertaining to
government contracts. Plenty of companies created subsidiaries
outside their balance sheet that could house liabilities or incur
expenses that the parent company didn’t want to disclose. If the
subsidiaries were set up as separate legal entities that weren’t
wholly owned by the parent, they didn’t have to be recorded on the
parent’s financial statements. That way, the company could hide
them from investors, the government, or even their own employees.
Holding companies and subsidiaries were a time-honored method of
hiding your tracks, whether you were buying an apartment or, say,
selling lasers to terrorist groups. Hyperion was large enough, its
manufacturing infrastructure dispersed enough, that it wouldn’t
take much for Victoria to hide a small weapons production
facility.

No wonder she’d been furious about Ava’s
meddling in the laser project. Had Amelia known about her cousin’s
extracurriculars? Had she been involved herself? And if she had,
what was she up to?

“Okay,” Ava said, nodding slowly. “I’d say
keep digging, but I think today has shown that it’s too
dangerous.”

Madi dropped her fork. “No way. We can’t let
them intimidate us.”

Angelica leaned forward. “You’ve been
identified as a target, Madi. Ava’s right. You cannot continue to
look into these matters if only because you’ve become a
liability.”

“But, you guys—”

“Madi,” Ava said, clapping a hand on her
friend’s shoulder. “You’re too smart not to know we’re right.”

“Compliments won’t get you everywhere,
Ava.”

She tilted her head. “But in this case…?”

Madi sighed. “Maybe you have a point.”

“In fact,” Angelica added decisively, “I’m
going to ask a friend in Boston to keep an eye on you for a little
while.”

Madi jutted out her chin. “I can take care of
myself.”

“Be that as it may, I’d feel better knowing
you’re safe.”

“So would I,” Ava said.

“Fine. But you guys better tell me what you
find.”

“We will,” Ava promised, exchanging a look
with Angelica.

“Are you still planning to meet with the
investment group tonight?” the security chief asked.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I would avoid alerting anyone watching to
our suspicions. If you like, I can come to dinner with you.”

“That would be great,” Ava said, relief
spiking through her. She’d gotten accustomed to having Kenzie at
her side or available to help in a moment’s notice. Having a
girlfriend with superpowers was an amazing feeling. Especially
when, despite a life sentence in maximum security, your brother
seemed dead set on pursuing his agenda of ridding the world of
aliens.

But Nick was still in jail, and Ava was on
the job with Madi and Angelica, while Kenzie, Galaxy Guy, Sloane,
and possibly Mika were on call, even if they didn’t know it. With
such a team, they should have a decent shot at figuring out how
Labyrinth and Sentinel were connected—preferably before many more
off-world refugees went missing.

Chapter Six

Kenzie was ensconced in a sweet dream about
snuggling with Ava on the couch in her great room, a mess of
take-out containers nearby and a romantic comedy on the huge screen
television, when a sudden pounding on her door sent her rocketing
up into the ceiling above her bed hard enough to rattle her
apartment’s window panes. Good thing her studio was on the top
floor of the building.

“Kenzie, open up,” Sloane called from the
hallway, her voice only slightly muffled by the door frame.

Disoriented, Kenzie checked her bedside
clock. She’d slept until nine thirty? That had to be a first. As a
not-great sleeper, she was accustomed to being up and about when
the rest of the city was quiet, its citizens mostly sleeping. But
the previous day had been intense, and it had taken her even longer
than usual to fall asleep.

Yawning, she floated down from her loft and
blurred to the door, tugging it open to find Sloane and Mika
regarding her.

“Are you okay?” Sloane asked, checking her
over.

“I’m fine. Why?”

“You disappeared yesterday, and you haven’t
been answering your phone again,” Sloane said, brushing past to
enter the apartment. “I thought—well, never mind. You have to get
ready. We have a reservation at Portage Bay in half an hour.”

Kenzie brightened. Brunch was hands-down one
of her favorite meals, and she and Sloane had been slacking on
their weekly Sunday brunch date lately.

“Did she think I was dead?” she asked Mika as
they trailed Sloane to the great room.

The blonde nodded. “Yep.”

“I did not,” Sloane said. “Or, I mean, I
didn’t think you were definitely dead. It was only one of
many options.”

“So many options,” Mika confirmed, dropping
onto the couch and pulling out her phone.

“Whatever,” Sloane said, settling beside her
girlfriend. “I never used to worry this much before you decided to
do your little vigilante thing.”

Kenzie exchanged a look with Mika that
clearly called bullshit, but neither said anything.
Apparently, Mika had been around long enough to know that
resistance was futile.

“Uh huh,” Kenzie said, not quite neutrally.
“I’m going to shower.”

“Make it fast, okay? I’m hungry.”

“Duh,” Kenzie said, rather than reminding
Sloane for the umpteenth time that as a Zattalian, she was always
hungry.

As Kenzie speeded through her routine,
memories of the previous day’s activities flitted through her mind.
At their breakfast meeting, D’aman had requested her assistance
investigating a handful of alien disappearances on the West Coast
that were far enough dispersed that they hadn’t yet attracted the
attention of authorities or the media. The alien community was
taking notice, though, as D’aman had discovered when they’d started
asking around about illicit substances that might be targeting
off-worlders. Not much had emerged about speed for aliens, but the
stories of people disappearing had piqued D’aman’s interest enough
that they wanted to look into it further. Perhaps, they’d
suggested, the two issues were connected.

Kenzie had joined her friend and
crime-fighting partner gladly, flying as far afield as Southern
California to interview family members of the disappeared. By the
end of the day, Kenzie and D’aman had worked out the beginnings of
an unsettling pattern. The vanished were mainly registered aliens
from planetary systems that were nearly as backwater as Earth, from
the Alliance’s perspective, and the kidnappings—if that was what
they were—had been the work of professionals. No witnesses, no
recordings, no text messages, not even a single cell phone signal
existed to give a hint as to what might have befallen the missing
persons. They couldn’t rule out off-world slavers like the Bryllian
gangster Kenzie had helped Panopticon apprehend, D’aman and Kenzie
had agreed, but usually kidnappers who preyed on refugees tended to
take entire family groups en masse. These abductions felt too
surgical to be the work of intergalactic gangsters. Either way,
Kenzie hoped the disappeared were still on Earth. Otherwise, the
chance of recovery was almost nil.

The detective work had offered a side
benefit—not only had Kenzie gotten a chance to work with D’aman to
try to help the off-world community, she’d also managed to distract
herself from the fact that Ava was in New York for the weekend.
Kenzie could have made it to the East Coast in short order if she’d
flown top speed—which she knew from a certain experience she’d
rather not admit to—but she didn’t want Ava to think she was a
stalker. On a related matter, she didn’t want to actually be
a stalker. Who knew she’d be such a nervous girlfriend?

Girlfriend… Kenzie shut off the shower
and dried herself off quickly. Ava Westbrook was her actual,
honest-to-goodness girlfriend. Too bad her parents weren’t quite as
enthralled by that fact as she was. When she’d caught up with them
at Sloane’s on Friday night, what little decorum her mother had
maintained in the condo parking lot had immediately gone out the
window.

“What the hell are you thinking?” Jane had
demanded before Kenzie had even finished closing the front door.
“First this ridiculous vigilante exercise, and now you’re dating
Ava Westbrook? Really, I don’t even know what to do with you.”

Kenzie had paused in Sloane’s entryway,
debating whether or not to turn around and head home.

Before she could decide, Ben had placed a
hand on Jane’s arm. “Sweetheart,” he’d said, “don’t. Please don’t
push our daughter away.”

At the pained note in Ben’s voice, Jane had
glanced at him in surprise, and Kenzie had watched as the only
parents she’d known on Earth carried out a brief conversation all
without saying a word. Whatever Jane read in her husband had her
shoulders dropping and her face crumpling.

“I’m just so scared,” she’d whispered,
letting Ben tuck her against him.

Instead of flying away, Kenzie had closed the
door the rest of the way. “It’s okay, Mom. Ava is adopted. She
isn’t like the rest of her family.”

Her mother had gazed back at her, tears damp
on her lashes. “You have that much in common, then.”

The words had stung, as had the look of
reproach Jane sent her, and Kenzie had been relieved when Ben gave
her an apologetic nod and guided Jane toward the kitchen.

Her sister, who had been hovering in the
background, had stepped forward then, arms outstretched. “You
okay?”

“No,” Kenzie had admitted, practically
falling into her sister’s hug. “Maybe I should just go home.”

“I’ve got ice cream…”

She’d pulled back, squinting. “What
kind?”

“Cookie dough.”

And that was how her sister, master
peacemaker that she was, had managed to keep Kenzie from running
away. Not that she hadn’t thought of fleeing throughout the
evening. But in the kitchen, Sloane had pulled their mother aside
for what appeared to be a serious talking to while Mika and Ben had
kept Kenzie distracted with shop talk over a game of hearts. His
specialty might be in materials science, but like everyone else in
the immediate family, Ben possessed an overly developed interest in
human/off-worlder relations. In that regard, Ava fit right in,
though perhaps not in the way either of their families might have
wished.

The rest of the night had passed with Jane
casting Kenzie the occasional recriminating glance and Kenzie
studiously avoiding anything and everything pertaining to her
adopted mother. Jane, she knew, needed time to process the Ava
thing, and Kenzie was happy to give it to her. Happy, too, that her
plans with “her neighbor, Susan Cheng” the following morning gave
her a legitimate excuse to miss breakfast with the family before
Jane and Ben were due to head back to Bellingham. They would talk
soon, she’d promised her father before departing from Sloane’s
house on the early-ish side.

The brightest spot of the evening had been
when she’d excused herself from the kitchen and texted with Ava for
a little while. Somehow, knowing that she and Ava were continuing
to get closer despite all the obstacles in their way had given her
the courage she’d needed to return to the kitchen and ignore her
mother’s frosty looks.

They could do this. They wouldn’t end up like
Romeo and Juliet because she and Ava were actual adults living in a
far different world than fourteenth-century Verona.

“Kenzie, hurry up!” Sloane called.

And, right. Brunch, glorious brunch, was
waiting.

She didn’t bother with make-up—it was a
Sunday morning in Seattle, and besides, there was no point fancying
herself up when Ava was on the East Coast—and soon she was seated
across from Sloane and Mika at an outdoor table, sipping apple
juice and trying to choose from the many delicious dishes on the
popular restaurant’s menu. Portage Bay’s motto was “Eat like you
give a damn,” and Kenzie was more than happy to accept the
challenge.

“Ava would love this place,” she said out of
the blue, and then glanced up as her sister snickered. “What? She
totally would. You know she’s obsessed with sustainability.”

“Among other things,” Sloane said.

“Pretty sure it’s mutual,” Mika said.

“Face it, little sister—you’re whipped.”

“Takes one to know one,” Kenzie started to
say, but she interrupted herself with a screech as Matt ducked out
from behind a nearby bush.

“I knew it!” he said, pointing accusingly at
her. “You are dating someone, aren’t you?”

Behind him, Antonio emerged more slowly,
giving the table a wave that seemed mildly apologetic. As well it
should, Kenzie thought, scowling at them both. Apparently, this was
the week for coming out and ambushes.

“Sloane,” Kenzie hissed, carefully
relinquishing her grip on her juice glass. One more broken dish and
she would likely be banned from this location, too. “What are
they doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Sloane said, her frown
genuine. “Unless… Did you let Matt mess with your phone?”

“No, I—” Kenzie stopped mid-sentence. Come to
think of it, she hadn’t been able to find her phone before her
meeting with HR on Friday. It had turned up in her desk drawer
later, though, so she hadn’t thought to worry. “He put a tracker on
me, didn’t he?”

“That’s it. I’m seriously going to end you
this time, Greenie,” Sloane said.

Kenzie glanced at Mika, who was gazing warily
at Sloane. Sometimes Kenzie suspected Panopticon trained their
agents to think more like sociopaths than government employees.
Case in point: Nick Westbrook and his Sentinel minions.

“Yeah, yeah, Sloane. Now out with it,
Kenzie—you’re dating someone, aren’t you?” Matt repeated, hands on
his hips as if he somehow possessed the moral high ground.

Come to think of it, maybe he did.

“Excuse me?” Kenzie said, pushing up her
glasses.

“Don’t bother lying,” Matt said. “You went to
dinner at Café Vittoria on Friday, and there’s no way that wasn’t a
date. Hey, is that homemade bread?” he added, diverting the
conversation as he reached for the basket of fresh bread and jam at
the center of the table.

Without thinking, Kenzie slapped his wrist.
Literally. “Sorry,” she said as Matt immediately clutched his hand
to his chest.

“Jesus, Kenz.” Matt gazed down at her like a
wounded puppy. “That hurt.”

“Really, Greenie?” Sloane scoffed. “If you
ask me, that’s getting off lightly for breaking into her phone.
Which is a felony, you know.”

“It wasn’t technically computer tampering,”
Matt said. “She lets me add apps to her phone all the time.
Besides, she left it out on her desk, and it doesn’t have a
passcode.”

The disappointed look Sloane sent her
reminded Kenzie eerily of their mother. No escaping the biology in
that relationship.

“I just want it known that I had nothing to
do with the cell phone tracker,” Antonio said, holding up his
hands. “He told me you guys invited us to brunch.”

“It’s an app, not a tracker, man,” Matt said,
rolling his eyes. “God, you guys are so technically backward.”

“That’s your argument?” Mika said, sounding
more amused than her girlfriend.

“No, I mean…” Matt trailed off and scrubbed
his hands through his hair. “I didn’t know what to do. You’ve never
shut me out before, Kenzie. I guess I went a little overboard. I’m
sorry.”

He sounded so sad that Kenzie’s resolve
melted. “It’s okay. I have been acting weird. You can totally join
us for brunch, okay?”

He brightened and went to find a couple of
extra chairs. Sloane muttered “Sucker” under her breath, but since
Kenzie was the only one who heard it, she let it go.

The server wasn’t pleased at first that
they’d added two more brunch attendees to their table for four, but
when Mika pointed out that the tip would be larger, he shifted
gears and made the boys welcome. Mika, Kenzie thought, might have a
bit of the family peacemaker in her, too. That would come in handy.
As long as they were here, Kenzie might as well tell Matt and
Antonio about Ava. They wouldn’t make a scene in public, and
anyway, Sloane and Mika were here to back her up should she need
it.

She waited until the food had arrived and her
human counterparts had had time to absorb enough nutrients to
positively impact their blood sugar levels before saying, “So,
Matt. You know how you asked if I’m dating someone?”

All activity at the table paused except for
Matt, who nodded quickly, his eyes wide.

“You weren’t wrong,” she admitted. “I have
been seeing someone. But if I tell you who, do you promise to keep
it quiet? I’d rather—we’d rather it not get out, at least
for now.”

“Of course,” he said, frowning slightly. “You
know you can trust me.”

Antonio’s eyes narrowed. “Please tell me this
isn’t what I think it is. Even you aren’t that naïve, Kenzie.”

Her gaze swung to him, and as she stared into
the deep brown eyes that used to make her swoon, she wondered what
she’d ever seen in him. Setting her jaw, she shook her head. “I
don’t think that’s the approach you want to take here,
Antonio.”

Matt glanced between them. “What are you
talking about? Kenzie, who’s the guy? Is it someone from work?”

“Sort of,” she said, fiddling with her fork.
Sloane caught her eye and smiled at her encouragingly. Here went
nothing. “It’s just, it’s not a guy, Mattie. I’m dating a
woman.”

Matt looked at her blankly while Antonio
leaned away from the table, his body as stiff as the scowl on his
face. This time when he spoke, he directed his words at Sloane.
“You can’t possibly tell me you think this is a good idea.”

Sloane stared him down, her face cold, and
Kenzie remembered belatedly how she’d had to make her sister
promise not to kick Antonio’s ass when they found out he’d had a
girlfriend the entire time he’d been trying to get into Kenzie’s
pants. Sloane’s words, not hers.

“Seriously, what am I missing?” Matt asked.
“Who’s the lucky woman?”

At least he wasn’t freaking out that she was
bisexual. That realization gave her the strength to say, “It’s Ava.
I’m dating Ava.” A thrill ran through her, and she smiled at Matt,
unable to repress the joy the words evoked.

Matt’s smile widened. “You’re dating—you and
Ava? Oh my god, that’s amazing. Get in here, you idiot!” He
shoved his chair back and launched himself at her, arms open.

Kenzie caught him easily. “You’re okay with
it, then?”

“Okay? Well, no, I’m kind of jealous, to be
honest. But if I can’t date Ava, I’m glad you are.”

Behind him, Antonio was still shaking his
head. “This is crazy. She’s a Westbrook, for god’s sake!”

Kenzie pulled away from Matt and turned to
face Antonio. “Thanks. I’m fully aware of that.”

“But you can’t date Nick Westbrook’s sister!”
he said. “I mean, Kenzie, come on.”

She willed herself to channel Sloane’s cool
since her own was long since gone. “No, you come on, Antonio. You
do not get to tell me who I can and cannot date.”

“This is about common sense, Kenzie. How can
you be sure that getting close to you isn’t part of some long con
her family is playing?”

Matt squeaked slightly. “Dude, that’s…” He
trailed off, apparently unable to find the words.

“Incredibly ugly,” Kenzie said, folding her
arms across her chest. Her anger was rising, but she pushed it
down. Nothing good would come of losing control. “Ava is a good
person, Antonio. She doesn’t deserve your prejudice.”

“I’m the prejudiced one? She grew up
in the same household as the man who, if you’ll remember, kidnapped
and tortured too many off-worlders to count.”

If Antonio was trying to rain all over her
bisexual pride parade, he was doing beautifully. But she wasn’t
going to let him know he was getting to her. That was the point of
pride, wasn’t it? “So, she grew up in a family of alien-haters.
What matters is that she cut ties with her brother when she found
out what he was doing. Not only that, she helped get him convicted.
Can you imagine what it must have taken for her to testify against
her own brother?”

“She doesn’t get bonus points for doing the
right thing, Kenzie. The fact she turned in her terrorist brother
doesn’t mean you can trust her.”

Kenzie shook her head. “I disagree. And if
you’re truly my friend, you’ll treat her with the respect she
deserves. If you can’t do that, then I don’t know, Antonio, maybe
we shouldn’t be friends at all.”

He looked at Sloane again, his gaze
incredulous. “Are you honestly telling me you don’t have a problem
with this?”

Kenzie watched as Sloane lifted her chin and
declared, “I trust my sister. If Kenzie says Ava isn’t working with
Sentinel, then I believe her.”

“This is ridiculous! You know what? I’m out.”
And with a last piercing glare, he rose and tossed a few bills on
the table before stalking away, his angry steps taking him back
toward Green Lake.

Matt sighed, squinting after him. “I got
this. But when I get back, we are totally dishing,” he said to
Kenzie.

She nodded, somehow managing a smile.

“Oh, and don’t eat my French toast!” he
added.

Normally, Kenzie would have joked back that
she couldn’t make any promises on that front, but now she only
shrugged.

Matt’s gaze softened, and he leaned in to
squeeze her shoulder. “I got you,” he said softly. “It’ll be
okay.”

Would it, though? She wasn’t so sure.

As Matt jogged after Antonio, she knew she
should respect their privacy and tune her enhanced hearing to
another frequency. Instead, she listened in, hoping she would hear
something that might make her throat a little less tight.

“Hey,” Matt said when he caught up, grabbing
Antonio’s arm to stop him. “You need to back off, man. You can’t
fault Kenzie for trying to be happy just because you wish things
had turned out differently between you two.”

Antonio’s scowl deepened, which Kenzie
wouldn’t have thought possible. “Screw you, Matt. I want her to be
happy too, you know.”

“Really? Because you’re not acting like
it.”

“I’m being realistic. In order to be happy,
she has to still be alive. Have you forgotten Sentinel’s obsession
with tracking down a Zattalian? Doesn’t this all just seem a little
too convenient?”

Kenzie winced. Frankly, she wasn’t sure she
wanted to hear Matt’s answer. The very same questions had occurred
to her, of course, but she had long since learned to trust her
instincts.

“Hey.” Sloane reached over to squeeze her
hand. “I thought that went well.”

“Me, too,” Mika put in, speaking around a
large bite of tofu scramble.

Kenzie shrugged. “I mean, the coming out as
bi part wasn’t so bad. But the Ava reveal could have gone
better.”

“Don’t let Antonio get to you,” Sloane said.
“He’s just jealous. Besides, if Ava is pretending to be into you as
some sort of complicated con, then she deserves a freaking
Oscar.”

“If?” Kenzie tugged her hand out of
her sister’s grip. “You don’t really think that’s a possibility, do
you?”

“No, of course not.” But Sloane’s gaze was
focused on Kenzie’s right ear, and she was blinking too quickly—one
of the tells she was always teasing Kenzie about.

“Oh my god!” Kenzie pushed her chair back.
“You seriously believe Ava is only dating me because she wants to
sell me out to Sentinel?”

“Of course she doesn’t,” Mika said. “Right,
Sloane? Tell Kenzie you don’t think that.”

“I don’t think that,” Sloane said dutifully,
still blinking faster than normal. “Come on, Kenz. Let’s just enjoy
brunch, okay?”

“I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.” Kenzie
threw down her napkin, only just remembering to temper her
strength. She closed her eyes for a second and took a steadying
breath. She couldn’t afford to lose it. Or rather, the people and
objects around her couldn’t afford it. “If Matt comes back,” she
added, opening her eyes and rising, “tell him I’ll call him
later.”

“You don’t really have to go,” Sloane said,
gazing up at her with the dark eyes that always reminded Kenzie of
their father. Sloane’s characteristic refusal to apologize for her
behavior, though, was all Jane.

“No, I don’t,” Kenzie agreed. “But I’m going
anyway.” And she turned and sped away, just barely keeping her pace
in human range.

How could Sloane honestly think Ava was up to
something? Kenzie had assumed her sister was defending Ava to their
mother the other night, but maybe Jane had gotten into Sloane’s
head. Kenzie expelled an angry breath as she stalked along the
sidewalk, the traffic on I-5 roaring overhead. And what about
Antonio? He was apparently jealous, judging from the conversation
she’d overheard. Sloane had said Antonio’s feelings for her could
be seen from space, but if that was true, then why couldn’t
Kenzie—the only one among them who had actually been to space—see
what her sister and Matt evidently did? Aargh. Being from
another star system could be so frustrating sometimes.

At other times, though, it was super awesome.
For example, when you detected your girlfriend’s heartbeat
somewhere nearby the moment before she called you.

“Where are you?” Kenzie greeted her, slowing
her blistering pace to glance up and down Queen Anne Avenue. She
had decided to walk home from 65th Street—what was a handful of
miles when you were pissed?—and didn’t have far to go now.

“In Seattle,” Ava said, a smile evident in
her tired voice.

Kenzie nearly ricocheted off the sidewalk.
“What?! I thought you weren’t coming home until tomorrow!”

“Change of plans. I caught a lift from a
friend. Where are you?”

“A few blocks from home.”

“Can I see you?”

“Oh my god, of course!” Kenzie picked up her
pace again, weaving over to a side street so that she could speed a
little faster undetected.

“Good, because I’m almost to Queen Anne.” Ava
hesitated, and her voice dropped. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too!” She nearly collided with
a low-hanging branch and cursed under her breath.

Ava laughed. “Don’t go too fast, okay?”

“Too late,” Kenzie said, smiling so widely
she probably looked a bit maniacal. But she didn’t care. Ava was
home.

She made it to her apartment with just enough
time to brush her teeth and whip her hair into a French braid
before Ava rang the buzzer. She let her into the building and
waited impatiently at her door, using her augmented vision to track
Ava’s progress through the stairwell. Only her worry that one of
her neighbors would catch them making out kept her inside until Ava
stopped in front of her door and lifted her hand to knock.

Before her knuckles could make contact,
Kenzie ripped open the door and beamed at her. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Ava said, her smile soft.

The second the door clicked shut behind her,
Kenzie tugged Ava into her arms. She still fit perfectly, her
curves melting into Kenzie just like always. Kenzie buried her face
in Ava’s hair, pulled back into a messy bun, and breathed deeply.
“I’m glad you’re home.”

“Me, too,” Ava said, her breath warm against
Kenzie’s neck as she settled more fully into the hug. “Is it okay
that I came straight here? I just really needed to see you.”

The words sent warmth through Kenzie, but
also a frisson of concern. “Of course. But is everything okay?”

Ava didn’t answer right away, merely burrowed
deeper into Kenzie’s arms. Eventually she said, her voice muffled
against Kenzie’s collar, “Everything’s fine. New York just wasn’t
quite what I’d hoped it would be.”

Kenzie frowned. What did that mean?

“Do you mind if I grab a shower?” Ava added,
pulling away slightly. “I hate how the smell of airplane fuel
clings to everything.”

“Of course. Take your time.”

Ava leaned up and kissed her cheek. “I’m glad
you were here when I got back.”

“The feeling is entirely mutual,” Kenzie
said, trying to tone down the radiance of her answering smile.

Ava laughed a little, and then she was
ducking into the bathroom, towing her carryon behind her.

Kenzie dropped onto her couch and, eyes
closed, called up the opening forms of Zalia-Kree, the ancient
tradition practiced by followers of the Zattalian deity Alia. She
was still agitated from brunch, and she needed to be fully in
control of her powers if she and Ava were going to be remotely
intimate. The memory of Chris’s nose gushing blood after a slightly
overenthusiastic kiss junior year at U-Dub came back to her, and
she winced at the memory. Fortunately, soccer season had already
ended. If he’d had to miss even a single game because of her, she
was pretty sure the relationship would have ended on the spot.

As the sound of the shower filtered through
the apartment, Kenzie inhaled deeply. She could still smell Ava’s
perfume, rich and earthy with just a hint of something floral. The
scent was a custom blend designed specifically for her, Kenzie
knew, and she tried not to think about how much a monthly supply
might cost, or what exactly “catching a lift with a friend” meant
to someone who was used to first-class travel and lavish hotel
suites. Kenzie gave up on any pretense of Zalia-Kree as the usual
doubts rose: Why would Ava want to be with someone like her? What
were they even playing at? But then she remembered the feeling that
had suffused her entire being when Ava had called to say she was
home early, and she hoped that Ava’s hug meant that she felt the
same about seeing Kenzie after almost forty-eight hours apart.

Forty-eight hours—was that all? It
felt like so much more. But Ava really was here. Kenzie could hear
the shower running and tried not to imagine her girlfriend standing
under the hot spray (naked), washing every inch of her soft (naked)
skin... And, sheesh, why did Kenzie suddenly feel like she was
channeling Antonio and his sportswriter bros? But she didn’t want
to think about Antonio and his ridiculous comments about Ava’s
intentions.

Still, she couldn’t entirely rid her mind of
the fracas at brunch. Sloane’s apparent lingering doubts about
Ava’s loyalty were even more distressing than Antonio’s general
douchebaggery. Sloane claimed to have Kenzie’s back, but how could
that be true if she had even the slightest suspicion that Ava might
be in league with Sentinel? Antonio had accused her of being naïve
to trust Ava, but Ava hadn’t shown any sign she was loyal to her
family. Admittedly, she had left her position in R&D to assume
a leadership role within her family’s company, a corporation not
known for its warm, fuzzy approach to alien-human relations. She
had even attended the Americans for Fairness in Tech luncheon, lest
Kenzie forget. Ava had since apologized for the lapse in judgment,
or rather for placing profit above equity and inclusion, but she
should have known better than to attend such a meeting in the first
place.

The water shut off, and Kenzie waited, biting
her lip as her mind cycled through the damning evidence. Antonio
might be a jealous jerk, but Sloane wasn’t. Neither were Benjamin
or Jane. Was Kenzie being naïve? It had happened before. She
just couldn’t believe anyone would be so calculating. Or, rather,
she didn’t believe Ava could be so calculating. If she hated
off-worlders as much as her brother did, why would she ever consent
to kiss one?

Ava appeared in the hallway, rubbing her hair
with a towel. She was dressed in leggings and a T-shirt, and with
her skin free of makeup and her hair tousled and damp, she looked
more like a U-Dub student than a powerful corporate executive.

“Hi,” she said, smiling at Kenzie.

“Hi.” Kenzie touched her glasses and fiddled
with the pocket on her jacket.

“Everything okay?” Ava asked, stepping
farther into the room.

“Yeah. Fine.”

Ava stopped, her smile losing its original
star quality. “You don’t seem fine. Did something happen?”

“No, of course not.” She frowned a little,
focusing on a sound in the distance. Was that a siren?

“Don’t lie to me, Kenzie,” Ava said, her
voice sharper now.

“What? I’m not.”

“Right.” She shook her head, looking less
like the warm, caring woman Kenzie had gotten to know and more like
someone who relied on coldness as a defense. “You know what? I’m
more tired than I realized. I think I’m going to head back to my
place.”

Kenzie stood up and moved toward her, arms
held out conciliatorily. “No, you’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just
being weird and awkward as usual.”

Ava tilted her head. “Is this about your
parents? Were you not ready to come out?”

“No!” Kenzie gripped Ava’s elbows carefully.
“I was proud to tell them. Are you kidding?”

Ava shrugged and looked down, her eyelashes
dark against skin tinged pink by the shower. “I’m not exactly the
kind of person you bring home to the family.”

“Actually,” Kenzie said, “you’re the only
person I’ve ever wanted to bring home to my family.”

The moment the words were out, she recognized
their truth. Forget Antonio. Forget Sloane and her doubts. Before
Ava, Kenzie had never felt such an instant connection to a human
being. That was what she would trust—the energy linking them
together and making it difficult for either of them to go an entire
weekend without seeing each other.

Ava looked up. “Really?”

She nodded. “I dated this guy Chris for two
years in college, and we never spent a single holiday together. Not
spring break, or Thanksgiving, or even the Fourth of July. We
didn’t see each other at all the summer we were apart. We had
separate friends and separate interests, and I thought, that’s just
the way I’m built.” She shook her head, smiling in what felt a
little like wonder. “And then you came along, and suddenly I can’t
get through a single day without wanting to see you. I
hide things about myself like it’s my job—which, I guess, it is.
But this? I don’t think I could hide it if I wanted to. And,
to be clear, I don’t.”

As she’d spoken, Ava had slowly relaxed in
her grasp, her muscles and tendons becoming softer, looser. Her
gaze, however, was perplexed when she asked, “Was he gay? Your
college boyfriend?”

Kenzie blinked, suddenly remembering how
close Chris had been with Andre, his best friend on the U-Dub
soccer team. As in, crash in each other’s dorm room several times a
week close. Last time she’d checked Facebook, he and Andre were
still “roommates” in San Francisco, where they’d moved together
after graduation. She was such an idiot. They’d been each other’s
beards in college—she’d provided Chris a cover for his sexuality,
and he’d helped her hide her off-world identity.

She shook her head. “You know, he said he
didn’t want to have sex with me because he was Mormon, but now I
wonder.”

Ava slipped her hands into Kenzie’s. “Okay,
so if you’re not struggling with the queer thing, do you want to
tell me what’s really going on? Because apparently I’m not very
good at guessing.”

She couldn’t really tell Ava that her family
and friends thought she might be a Sentinel operative, could she?
Nor was she ready to talk about the information she and D’aman had
uncovered. Their investigation was still in the early stages, and
she didn’t want to upset Ava unnecessarily. She didn’t want to lie,
though. Ava, like Sloane, was far too accomplished at detecting
untruths.

She cleared her throat and opted for a less
contentious truth: “I wish you had told me you were flying back
today.”

Ava frowned. “I’m sorry. I wanted to surprise
you.”

“I don’t like surprises,” Kenzie said, her
voice loud in the quiet apartment. She blinked down at Ava, who was
staring up at her with a look Kenzie couldn’t read. Had she
frightened her again? Fricking frack. “Sorry. I didn’t
mean to yell.” She started to pull away, but Ava held on tight.

“It’s okay, Kenzie. That wasn’t yelling.
Trust me. Besides, I don’t break easily. If I did, I wouldn’t still
be here.”

Kenzie rubbed her thumb against Ava’s wrist
almost absently. The skin there, so thin that she could see veins
and tendons even without her augmented vision, was also the
softest.

Ava tilted her head slightly. “Is there a
particular reason you would have liked knowing I was flying back
today? Other than not liking surprises?”

“Maybe?”

Ava lifted an eyebrow.

Kenzie hesitated, and then she moved back to
the couch, tugging Ava along with her. When they were seated,
bodies pressed together with almost no space between them, she
rested her chin on Ava’s shoulder and took a calming breath. “I,
um, might have checked on your flight to New York a few times.”

“Checked on it? Like, online?”

“Um. No. More like in person.”

She felt Ava go still. “I thought you said
you were at Sloane’s house.”

“I was. But after I left her place I, well, I
made sure you landed safely,” she said in a rush, hardly believing
she’d actually admitted the embarrassing truth aloud. She had
intended to take that secret to her grave.

“You what?”

“I followed your plane from a distance,” she
clarified, her voice small, and smiled into Ava’s shoulder as she
felt a breath of laughter rattle the smaller woman’s frame. “I know
that sounds creepy. I swear, I’m not trying to stalk you.”

“And yet…” Ava pushed back gently until she
could catch Kenzie’s eye. “Honestly, I think I get it. But do you
want to tell me why you think you felt compelled
to do that?”

Kenzie blinked. So much of the time she acted
on instinct or emotion, and rarely did anyone call her out. Sloane
was pretty much the only person in her life who regularly asked her
to analyze herself and come up with an explanation for her
behavior, and even then all she had to do was turn up the pout and
her sister folded.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.” As Ava stared
at her, gaze unwavering, she realized that wasn’t true at all. She
sighed and looked down, chewing the corner of her lip. “Your
brother is still a threat, even if he’s in prison, and his
flunkies—”

“—probably hate me as much as he does,” Ava
finished, her voice a mix of frailty and assumed indifference that
made Kenzie’s chest ache.

“It’s possible,” she said, looking back up
into Ava’s eyes. “And the thing is, you’re
so—so human.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they don’t have to try very hard to
hurt you. Which, I don’t know…” She shook her head and looked
away.

Ava rubbed her thumb over the back of
Kenzie’s hand. “Yes, you do.”

She took another breath and closed her eyes.
“I don’t know what I would do if something happened to you. What I
might be capable of.”

“I feel the same way,” Ava said.

Kenzie’s eyes flew open. “You do?”

She nodded. “You’re one of the only people
I’ve met recently who hasn’t seen fit to doubt my moral compass,
usually quite loudly and to my face. But if anyone were ever to
hurt you—well, I’m not sure I would be able to live up to your
faith in me.”

Kenzie’s jaw clenched. “It’s so unfair that
people see you for who your family is and not
who you are.” Even more unfair was that Kenzie’s
own family and friends viewed Ava through the lens of her brother’s
terrorism, and that their doubts had managed to worm their way into
her head. But Ava didn’t need to know that part right now. Possibly
not ever.

“It is unfair, but that’s just the way
people—humans—operate.” She shook her head. “My brother has
said that off-worlders can’t be trusted because if you turn against
humanity we don’t stand a chance, and there is some truth to that.
But the more I think about it, the more I realize that human beings
have done far more damage to ourselves and every other living being
on this planet than off-worlders have even thought of doing.”

It was true.
Humans were fairly brutal—to each other, to other
species, to Earth—and always had been, as far as written history
was concerned. Zattalians had followed a similar historical arc, as
had many other civilizations Kenzie had studied growing up. In
school, she’d learned that most people had both dark and light
inside. The battle between good and evil, greed and generosity,
cruelty and kindness was similar no matter what part of the
universe you lived in.

“Even Nick,” Ava said, her voice taking on
the sad timbre that seemed to show up anytime she so much as
thought of her brother, “has done more harm to humans than any
off-worlder.”

“Which is sort of my point,” Kenzie said.
“He’s still dangerous, Ava, even behind bars. He hurt so many
people.” And still might be, she thought but didn’t say. It
was possible the kidnappings had been done by a copycat, not the
real thing. Although making aliens disappear seemed a lot like the
real thing.

Ava nodded. “Yes, but whether I’m human or
not, whether you’re human or not, we’re all vulnerable.”

“Some of us more than others.”

“True.” She paused. “If being nearby in case
my plane experiences engine failure or someone launches a
ground-to-air missile at it—”

Kenzie felt her eyes widening because that
had not occurred to her and why had that not
occurred to her?

“—makes you feel better, then you have my
blessing. To be honest, I like knowing you’re looking out for me. I
feel safer when you’re around. I only wish I could do the same for
you.”

Kenzie forced the air out of her lungs in one
long exhale. “You do, Ava. Honestly. But do you ever get the
feeling we’re starring in a Shakespearean tragedy?”

“All the time. We’re like the Montagues and
the Capulets—intertwined whether we want to be or not.”

“I definitely want us to be
intertwined.” Kenzie leaned in so that their lips almost touched.
Ava’s laugh sent a puff of warm air across her skin, and Kenzie
tried not to preen too much before pressing her mouth to Ava’s.

The kiss picked up where the one on Friday
night outside Sloane’s house had left off, and Kenzie could feel
her temperature fluctuating, her heart rate stuttering, even her
breathing accelerating just as it had done every other time they’d
made out. It was odd—she’d only felt these particular sensations in
response to fear or adrenaline before. Now that she was neither
scared nor in the middle of a violent fight, she wasn’t sure how to
react.

Ava pulled away after a moment. “What’s
wrong?”

“Noth—” Kenzie only just stopped the
automatic lie. “Actually, would it be okay if I made some tea and
we just, I don’t know, snuggled for a while?”

“Of course,” Ava said, and smiled her old
smile, the one that made Kenzie feel like she was the most amazing
person in the world. “Though I have to warn you, I might fall
asleep.”

“Sounds good to me.” Kenzie rose and headed
toward the kitchen under the loft. “What kind of tea would you
like? I have, like, a thousand varieties.” Tea reminded her of life
on board her family’s ship, where previous generations had made
flavored water into an art.

“Surprise me,” Ava said, lifting her feet
onto the coffee table and leaning back with a sigh.

Kenzie putzed about the kitchen, assembling
mugs and assorted boxes of tea. “So, how was your trip,
anyway?”

“Um…”

Kenzie glanced over to see Ava smoothing a
hand over her leggings. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing that wasn’t fixable.” Ava rolled her
eyes. “Investors can be such babies. I’m glad to be home.”

“Are you?” Kenzie asked, turning back to the
electric kettle Jane and Benjamin had gotten her as a housewarming
gift. “Home, I mean?”

Ava’s footsteps were soft behind her, and
then she was slipping her arms around Kenzie’s waist, her chin on
Kenzie’s shoulder. “I think so. I hope so.”

Kenzie leaned back into her hug. “I hope so,
too.”

It didn’t really matter what her friends and
family thought, Kenzie decided a little while later as Ava dozed
beside her on the couch. It didn’t matter what Nick Westbrook or
any of his followers did, either. What mattered was this feeling
unfurling inside her with Ava cradled carefully against her chest,
her arms tight but not too tight as Ava’s breath dusted over her
skin and the world turned slowly, its motion invisible to the human
and off-worlder eye alike.

Chapter Seven

Ava hit the speaker button on her cell phone
and carefully lifted the comb and flat iron, angling the hot
surface away from her face. No need to revisit the Hair
Straightening Incident of 2000. She still had the scar that certain
classmates had teased her about for years for its unfortunate
resemblance to a hickey.

“You really don’t know where she’s taking
you?” Bea’s tinny voice echoed in the spacious, slate-tiled
bathroom.

“No. She’s been sneaking around all week,
though, and seems pretty pleased with herself.”

After their initial rash of doomed dates,
they had been more successful lately, even managing to get through
dessert on one memorable occasion without a single interruption. Of
course, staying in one place for multiple hours had its downsides,
too. An LA-based gossip rag had posted a photo of the two of them
from that longer-than-usual date, with the caption, “Nicholas
Westbrook’s Sister Woos Reporter.” Luckily, Kenzie had already met
with her boss to discuss their dating situation, and her family and
friends all knew. They might not all be supportive of the
relationship, but at least the paparazzi hadn’t blown the door off
Kenzie’s closet before she was ready.

Now it was Friday again, and Kenzie was
plotting to whisk her off to an undisclosed location for the night.
Which was fine. Good, even. Except that Ava had never been
particularly fond of relinquishing control, and now that the press
had the scent, she wondered if any destination, however remote,
would be truly private. Ava might be used to being in the public
eye, but Kenzie relied on anonymity to keep her identity a secret.
When Ava had reminded her of this fact, Kenzie had merely winked
and told her not to worry.

At least the goons from New York hadn’t made
an appearance in Seattle, and neither Madi nor Angelica had
reported any fallout from the previous weekend. Yet.

“Not knowing is driving you crazy, isn’t it?”
Bea asked.

“Yep.”

“What’s the dress code?”

“Business casual, but she said I should wear
pants.”

“No skirts—ooh! Do you think she might take
you somewhere windy?” Bea asked.

It took Ava a moment to translate the code,
but when she did, she almost burned her neck with the flat iron.
Bea meant flying, didn’t she? That, or something similarly
death-defying. “God, I hope not.”

“What? Why not?”

Ava unplugged the iron, trying to come up
with a way to word what she meant without revealing too much. Bea
might be safe, and her hotel room had been swept for bugs the day
before, but no phone line was one hundred percent secure. “I’m not
a fan of rooftop picnics.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about a
picnic tonight,” Bea said, her voice far too smug for Ava’s
liking.

“Excuse me? How would you know what I do or
don’t have to worry about tonight?”

Bea cackled in a way that meant she
definitely knew more about Kenzie’s plans than Ava did. “That is
for me to know and you to find out. Send me updates, okay? And
selfies.”

Ava sighed, half-irritated and half-charmed
that Kenzie appeared to have conspired with her best friend for
their date. “I’ll try, but no promises. What are you up to
tonight?”

It was James’s turn to cook, so Bea and the
baby were “chilling with some books” in the living room. This
translated to Bea attempting to read Dr. Seuss board books to Rowan
while he tried to pry said books out of her hands and chew on their
yummy, shiny corners.

“Aw, I wish I could see you guys,” Ava said,
pausing in applying her lip liner. Even though she knew Bea and
Rowan were safer without her presence, she still missed the hell
out of them. “How’s the teething going? Did you try any of the tips
from my new assistant?”

“The one about freezing washcloths has been a
godsend. Thank her for me, will you?”

“Of course.”

Ava’s new assistant, Rose, had a niece only a
few months older than Rowan and was only too happy to pass along
her favorite baby-wrangling tips. Talking about her sister’s child
was one of the few topics that could get Rose to drop her
professional mask, Ava had learned in the week since transferring
Chloe to sales reception and promoting Rose from the local R&D
division. Having an assistant with a science background made her
feel better—especially one who had no discernible ties to Amelia or
Victoria.

“But,” Bea added, “I think it’s safe to say
that my nipples will never be the same. Speaking of which, I’ve
been thinking. You should totally come to LA for the Fourth. Oh,
and bring Kenzie so that we can double-date.”

“How does us double-dating have anything to
do with your nipples, or do I even want to know?”

“Um, hello—my breasts look good,
even if they hurt like a bitch, and you and I haven’t been out
together in too long.”

“We went out last month!”

“It wasn’t LA, so it doesn’t count. What do
you say—are you and Kenzie in for the Fourth?”

“Ummmm.” She blotted her lipstick and checked
her reflection. She was ready. Now if only they could get away
before an emergency cropped up in one (or both) of their
domains.

“What does ‘ummm’ mean? You better not be
messing this relationship up already.”

“I’m not!” She wasn’t. She was just worried
about Sentinel. How could she plan more than a few days in advance
when her brother might be getting his bloodthirsty, anti-alien band
back together? Until she, Madi, and Angelica could find more
evidence about what Nick and his cronies were up to, they were in a
holding pattern.

“I’m serious, A. I like this girl. And more
importantly, so do you.”

“I know that. I was only going to say that
it’s difficult for Kenzie to get away from work for more than a
night. You know…?”

“Oh, that’s right,” Bea said, picking up on
her cue. “Those reporters, always chasing after ambulances and fire
trucks.”

“Exactly.” The emergency vehicles usually
ended up trailing Kenzie, but close enough.

“Even reporters get the Fourth off. I’m sure
her boss can spare her for one weekend.”

Ava wasn’t sure of that at all, but she made
an agreeable sound anyway as she busied herself with putting away
her make-up. Should she pack it for the morning after? They had
continued to progress in the intimacy department, and Ava was
hoping that Kenzie’s blushing hints at spending the night together
after their date meant what she thought it did.

A knock on the door caught her attention.
“Gotta go, Bea. Give the boys a kiss for me.”

“Give your girl a kiss for me. And have fun,
sweetie.”

“I will,” Ava said. “Ciao, bella.”

“Ciao, bellissima!”

Ava stored her phone and lipstick in her bag
and headed toward the living room, low-heeled boots in hand.

“Now do I get to know where
you’re taking me?” she asked playfully as she opened the door to
the suite.

Kenzie was standing before her looking
lovely—and, frankly, excessively gay—in a blue button-down tucked
into dark green fitted slacks. “Actually, about that…”

Noooo… “I jinxed it, didn’t I?” Ava
said, stepping into her boots. Her eyes focused on the bag Kenzie
was clutching. “Wait, what’s that?”

“Hello to you, too,” she said, smiling at
Ava. “You look great.”

“Sorry. So do you, as always.” Ava leaned up
to kiss her cheek lightly, careful not to brand her with lipstick.
“Now back to the mystery bag, please.”

Kenzie laughed and pushed up her glasses.
“Yes, ma’am. Right. Well, I was thinking… Would you like to try
dinner somewhere a little farther afield?” She lifted her eyebrows
and waggled them at Ava in the way that meant she remembered there
might be bugs in this Hyperion-owned building, and she was being
careful not to give away anything incriminating.

This was why it was always better to meet at
Kenzie’s place. It was also why Ava’s new apartment couldn’t be
ready soon enough. The inspection had gone well, and everything
else was moving along. Closing was set for next week. Fingers
crossed nothing happened to derail the deal.

Ava reached for her purse. “Farther afield
sounds perfect.” As long as it didn’t involve flying.

She had given her security team the night
off—despite Treadwell’s grumbling—so there was no Ramón to look
after them tonight. The Uber Kenzie had arranged dropped them off
outside a residential building on a nondescript block on Capitol
Hill. Ava glanced around curiously, wondering if Kenzie had a line
on a pop-up dinner party. But then Kenzie led her through the lobby
and up several flights of stairs to a door that opened onto the
roof, and Ava’s anticipation waned. Was Kenzie planning another
outdoor meal like their lunch at ECM a few weeks earlier? Because
if so, Ava needed to come clean.

“So, funny story,” she said, moistening her
suddenly dry lips. “I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it, but I’m not
really a fan of heights.”

Kenzie, who had started across the roof
toward what appeared to be a small utility building, froze.
“What?”

“I don’t really like heights. I mean, inside
a building is fine, but outside in the open air? Not so much.”

Kenzie deflated, almost comically so. “Oh.
Well, crap.”

Ava moved to her side, which fortunately
brought her into the center of the roof where she could better
pretend that they weren’t, in fact, five stories up. “A picnic is a
sweet idea, but could we maybe do it closer to the ground?
Volunteer Park is near here, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t planning a picnic tonight.” Kenzie
glanced around, eyes narrowed, and then, seemingly satisfied,
opened the bag to reveal its contents. “I thought we could go
flying.”

Bea’s unsubtle hints from earlier meant that
instead of gasping in horror at the sight of the flight suit and
helmet resting innocuously inside the bag, Ava managed a mildly
strangled, “Oh. Well, that sounds interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“Um…” Ava gazed at her helplessly.

“Never mind,” Kenzie said, closing the bag.
“We don’t have to see Hamilton tonight if you don’t want
to.”

Ava couldn’t hold back her gasp this time.
“Wait, what? You have Hamilton tickets? For
tonight?”

In a moment, it all came out: Bea had helped
arrange for them to see Hamilton in Vancouver, B.C., only a
short flight from Seattle, with dinner at a restaurant near Stanley
Park before the show, and afterward, an overnight stay at a
downtown condo owned by one of the artists on Bea’s label.

“But if you’re not comfortable with me flying
us to Canada,” Kenzie said, “I guess there’s always sushi and
Netflix at my place.”

Normally, Ava loved sushi and Netflix with
Kenzie, but compared to the night out Bea and Kenzie had
masterminded, the back-up plan sounded spectacularly unappealing.
“No,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “You can’t let fear
rule your life, right? Let’s do it.”

Kenzie’s eyes lit up. “Are you sure?” she
asked, vibrating like a puppy. “I mean, we don’t have to…”

“I’m sure.”

She wasn’t, but she also wasn’t about to pass
up a chance to see Hamilton. She’d never found an
opportunity to see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece on Broadway,
probably because it had become popular around the time her brother
was arrested for global terrorism. She had watched a bootleg on
YouTube and the HD version on Disney Plus, but seeing it on the
small screen wasn’t the same, not even if your “small screen” took
up most of one of your apartment’s interior walls.

Kenzie didn’t have to be told again. Still
vibrating with excitement, she unfurled the flight suit and helmet,
on loan from Panopticon care of Sloane, and explained that they
were designed to allow their wearer to safely withstand up to 7Gs
of force.

“Seven Gs?” Ava echoed, her anxiety
returning. “But, I mean, we won’t be going that fast, will we?”

“Not tonight,” Kenzie said. “We’ll only need
to fly about half as fast as a commercial jet to make our dinner
reservation.”

How, exactly, was Ava expected to keep a meal
down after flying half as fast as an airplane with only a flimsy
suit to protect her? She closed her eyes, picturing the iconic
wooden scaffolding and double turntable from the Hamilton
set. She could relinquish control. She could trust Kenzie.

“Anytime you need a break, though, just say
stop,” Kenzie said. “We can always change the plan.”

“What if you don’t hear me?”

“I will. Super hearing, remember?” she said,
her smile encouraging.

“Right. Of course. How long will it take at
that speed?”

“About half an hour, give or take.”

Give or take what? But Ava kept the
embarrassing screech inside her head where it belonged.

“We don’t have to do this if you’re not
comfortable,” Kenzie said, her voice soft.

Ava chewed her lip. She could say no and they
could spend the evening in Seattle doing normal Seattle things, but
she knew herself well enough to understand that even a date with
Kenzie wouldn’t be enough to distract her from the might-have-been
of seeing Hamilton.

“No,” she said. “I want to go.”

Actually, she wanted to have already gone,
but that obviously wasn’t an option.

Time speeded up as it tends to do when you
wish it would slow down, and soon Ava found herself standing in
front of Kenzie dressed in the Panopticon flight suit, the helmet
creating what felt like a protective cushion between her head and
reality. Kenzie was dressed in a dark suit and cowl similar to her
Galaxy Girl get-up but plainer, their belongings tucked into a
hidden suit compartment.

“Are you ready?” Kenzie asked. “Because sushi
and Netflix is still on the table.”

“I’m ready,” she said, the helmet swallowing
up her unsteady voice.

“Good girl.” Kenzie’s smile gentled in that
slow motion way Ava loved, and they stood staring at each other.
They were so different, Ava thought not for the first time, and yet
Kenzie’s lightness of spirit perfectly complemented her own darker
qualities. Besides, beneath Kenzie’s sunshine were layers upon
layers of sorrow, grief, even anger. Ava had only ever seen
glimpses. Sometimes she wondered how long it would take for Kenzie
to feel comfortable enough to reveal herself fully.

As the soul-gazing continued, Ava’s libido
jumped, but she tried to push it down. Not for long, she hoped.
Because tonight, if she was lucky, she would not only see
Hamilton in person, but she also might have sex with her hot
superhero girlfriend for the first time. Assuming said girlfriend
didn’t drop her mid-flight. At least her personal effects were in
order. Were she to plummet to an untimely death on the way to
Vancouver, Beatrice, Rowan, MIT, Smith College, and a dozen of her
favorite charities—including several “bleeding heart” nonprofits
that catered to off-world refugees—would be significantly better
off.

Silver linings could be her thing. They
totally could.

“Are you ready?” Kenzie asked, voice low and
throaty.

Ava’s insides clenched again, but not from
fear. She nodded, touching her tongue to her lips behind the visor,
and smiled as Kenzie appeared to follow the motion with avid eyes.
“I’m always ready.”

Kenzie laughed a little, but her eyes were
darker than usual, her voice still low. “I guess we’ll find out if
that’s true, won’t we?”

There was a promise there, but also a
delicious hint of teasing, and Ava shivered. She hoped so. She
really did. After weeks of increasingly intense make-out sessions,
it didn’t take much to rile her up. Her vibrator had seen more than
its share of action lately, and she was hoping to change that
pattern soon.

In the meantime, they had a flight to take.
This time, Ava’s shiver was less
I-can’t-wait-for-sexy-times! and more
holy-shit-I-hope-I-don’t-die! What if this was all an
elaborate plot by Panopticon—or the Shepherd-Hendersons—to take out
Nicholas Westbrook’s sister? Or what if Kenzie took her some place
remote to hold her for leverage against Nick and his lackeys?

Even as the thought formulated in her mind,
Ava rolled her eyes at her own paranoia. She had come out publicly
against her brother, so the odds she could be useful in any
anti-Sentinel plot seemed slim. Besides, Kenzie wasn’t exactly
skilled at masking her emotions. If she had been plotting something
nefarious, Ava would have sensed it. Probably.

Speaking of nefarious plots… Ava glanced
around. “Are you sure it’s safe to take off from here?”

“Yep. Sloane says there are no security
cameras or doorbell cams to track us up here.”

Ava didn’t bother asking how Sloane could be
so sure. After all, her father had run Panopticon for more than a
decade; she knew exactly how far the bureau’s reach extended. She
straightened her shoulders again, reminding herself that plenty of
people would have given anything to go for a private flight with
Galaxy Girl, which she knew because Bea took way too much delight
sending her links to tweets and Instagram posts featuring thirsty
lesbians with a thing for the masked hero. Speaking of Bea, her
best friend was probably taking bets on her chickening out tonight.
Well, they couldn’t have that, could they?

At Kenzie’s behest, she stepped forward and
waited as Kenzie affixed some sort of webbing about their bodies,
securing it through metal fasteners on each of their suits. Ava
tried to ignore the way the straps brought their lower bodies into
contact. Damn. Those lesbians on social media had no idea
what they were missing.

Finished with the safety straps, Kenzie
smiled down at her again. “Here we go.”

For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then
Ava realized that they were rising higher and higher above the
rooftops of Capitol Hill. She’d been staring into Kenzie’s eyes so
intently that she hadn’t even noticed they were airborne.

“Hold on tight,” Kenzie said as they drifted
through a low-flying cloud.

In the next minute, Kenzie angled them north
and accelerated steadily, until soon they were tearing through the
air at a seemingly impossible speed. They were high enough that the
earth seemed to pass below at a leisurely rate, and inside her
suit, Ava was surprisingly warm, her breathing easier than she’d
expected. The helmet provided a steady flow of oxygen while the
suit regulated her pressure through unseen mechanisms. Maybe Sloane
would let her keep the suit for a day or two. Ava was pretty sure
that once she understood the tech, she could make it even better.
Modifications were sort of her thing.

Despite her fear of heights, Ava felt secure
in Kenzie’s arms. It helped that they were relatively low in the
atmosphere. This despite the fact Kenzie had said one night over
dinner that she preferred to fly higher where the air was thinner.
The reduced friction allowed her to go faster, and there weren’t as
many commercial flights to worry about. Ava’s innate curiosity had
kicked in, and she’d listened with interest as Kenzie described
how, on longer flights, she liked to use the curvature of the earth
to shorten her travel time even more.

Now, Ava wondered: Had Kenzie taken that
interest as a signal she wanted to go flying with her? Was that why
she’d planned this date?

“How are you doing?” Kenzie asked, her voice
clear in the helmet’s speakers.

“Okay,” Ava said, and as she gazed down at
the beauty of the earth below unmediated by a jet’s window, she
realized she was starting to enjoy the experience. She was still
terrified, as her heart rate no doubt signaled, but she was
starting to breathe more easily. Kenzie hadn’t dropped her yet.
Seemed like a good sign.

Kenzie slowed into a barrel roll, arcing her
neck so that she could get a look at Ava’s face. “Really?”

“Really,” Ava said, smiling at Kenzie through
the helmet. “It’s beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?” Kenzie said, giving her a careful
squeeze.

It truly was. Being pressed against Kenzie
like this was an exquisite form of torture, too. Perhaps she would
need to revisit her fear of heights, especially given she was
involved with someone who she couldn’t imagine would ever let her
fall. She snuggled closer and watched the world pass below them,
determined to enjoy every moment of the adventure she was glad
she’d let herself be talked into.

#

Incredibly, Ava found herself wishing that
the flight wouldn’t end. But if they wanted to see Hamilton,
they would have to land sometime. After flying steadily north for
twenty minutes over the hilly, green San Juan Islands and the rocky
coastline—during which Kenzie slowed only once to point out the
neighborhood where she’d grown up in quaint, scenic Bellingham—they
dropped lower as the urban sprawl of Vancouver came into sight. The
view from above was a study in contrasts: the city neat and
bustling on one side, Puget Sound unfurling wild and rhythmic on
the other, the sun only just beginning to set over the mountains of
Vancouver Island in the distance. Kenzie flew slower and slower,
finally drifting to a stop over the water.

“I’m sorry, I don’t really know where to go,”
she said, sounding embarrassed as they hovered in place. “I’m going
to just…” And with that, she took out her phone and typed an
address into the GPS.

“It’s fine,” Ava assured her. “I would rather
not get lost, even if it is only Canada.”

Kenzie cast her a grateful smile. “Okay. I
think I know where we’re going.”

Ava forced herself to breathe deeply.
Everything was fine. It was okay if they wandered a bit. Vancouver
was a beautiful city, and Kenzie would get them where they needed
to be. And if she couldn’t—well, there wasn’t much Ava could do
about that, was there?

Kenzie began flying with more purpose, and
soon they were setting down on the penthouse balcony of a building
overlooking the forested expanse of Stanley Park.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Ava
asked, hoping her voice sounded more curious than doubting.

“Nope,” Kenzie said, and reached for the door
to the living room. It opened, and she smiled at Ava over her
shoulder. “One way to find out.”

It was the right place, fortunately, and soon
they were in the apartment’s master bedroom changing out of their
flight suits. Ava was relieved to see that her purse had survived
the journey intact, as had Kenzie’s phone and wallet. Although
perhaps it would have been better to be there without official
identification, given they’d entered the country illegally. Ava
could only hope that no one in Canada would recognize her.

As if sensing her anxiety, Kenzie pulled two
headbands out of another compartment in her suit. “Here,” she said,
handing one to Ava. “These are of Taammen origin, which means they
mask the identity of the wearer.”

“Taammen?”

“You know, the planet in the Proxima Centauri
system?”

“The planet—what—where did you even get
these?” Ava added another illegal activity to the evening’s growing
list.

Kenzie tilted her head sideways. “Sloane
borrowed them from the evidence room?”

Ava barked out a noisy laugh that her
stepmother had tried unsuccessfully to drill out of her. “You mean
they’re from Panopticon.”

“Um, yeah.”

“You’re just full of surprises tonight,
aren’t you?”

“I thought it might be nice to go out without
having to worry about being recognized,” Kenzie said, offering her
the smaller headband.

Ava was all for that. She took the headband
gingerly and, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped it on. The
mirror above the dresser revealed a woman who looked more like her
than not, but no one would mistake her for the sister of one of the
most reviled terrorists in the world. She studied her reflection, a
little surprised that the change in her appearance was more
soothing than troubling. Was this what Angelica felt when she
shapeshifted? Free to do whatever she wanted without worrying about
the consequences?

“What do you think?” Kenzie asked.

Ava glanced at her in the mirror, taking in
the slightly snubbed nose, the different jawline, the eyes that
were still, fortunately, all Kenzie. “I see you in there,” Ava
said, and turned to pull her into a kiss. Yep, she still tasted the
same—like mint and something else that Ava had never quite been
able to identify.

Kenzie pulled her in more firmly, connecting
their bodies from breast to thigh. “Flying with you so close was
killing me,” she said, dropping her head to kiss her way along
Ava’s neck.

“I know,” Ava said, arching into her.

Kenzie pulled away, eyes dark as she stared
down at Ava’s lips. “We could always miss our dinner
reservation…”

They could, but then they’d miss
Hamilton, too, and Ava was not prepared to forego tonight’s
theater experience, not when they’d have the rest of the night to
themselves in this lovely apartment.

“Raincheck,” Ava said, and pecked Kenzie on
the cheek before tugging her toward the bedroom door.

She was pretty sure Kenzie muttered something
about heartless humans as they left the apartment, but Ava
pretended not to notice.

It was even more freeing to be in public as
her slightly altered self. No one knew or cared who they were here,
and Ava enjoyed the delicious, unfamiliar sense of anonymity as
they strolled the few blocks to the restaurant hand-in-hand. Bea
and Sloane were the only ones who knew they weren’t in Seattle, and
the freedom the image scramblers offered was seriously addictive.
For tonight, they could be themselves but different, easier,
lighter. For tonight, Ava didn’t have to worry about Hyperion, or
Madi, or her brother, or even Sentinel.

A momentary
flicker of guilt passed over her as they waited on a corner for the
light to turn. She still hadn’t told Kenzie what had happened in
New York. Not because she didn’t trust her, but because Kenzie
struggled to keep things from her sister, and Sloane worked for
Panopticon, which had too many ties to Sentinel. For now, Ava would
quietly use her position inside Hyperion to try to unearth the
connection—if any—between Sentinel and the mysterious Labyrinth.
Her name would protect her, and if not, there was always Galaxy
Girl.

The light changed, and the Kenzie who was not
Kenzie smiled at her and tugged on her hand. “Come on. I’m
starving.”

The Ava who was not Ava smiled back and
stepped off the curb, because of course Kenzie was hungry. Even a
high-tech image scrambler couldn’t change that.

Chapter Eight

Kenzie glanced around the restaurant. No one
seemed to be giving them a second glance. Their table was
significantly more exposed than she was normally comfortable with,
in a center row with aisles on either side, but even Ava didn’t
appear to mind. She was scanning the menu avidly, giving small
exclamations of delight that made Kenzie regret leaving the condo
even more.

“Sounds like you might have found something
you like,” she said, eyeing the list of entrées somewhat dubiously.
The servings didn’t seem that large, and she always needed extra
food after a long-distance flight. Fortunately, Google claimed that
there was an ice cream shop on the way to the train station. If
dinner didn’t fill her up, there was always dessert.

“It all looks so good, I’m not sure how to
choose,” Ava said, offering her a radiant smile.

Kenzie’s irritation at the small portions
ebbed, and she smiled back. Bea had evidently been right to suggest
a farm-to-table restaurant that specialized in locally grown and
sustainably farmed food.

After taking their order, their server
brought a basket of bread to the table, further lifting Kenzie’s
spirits. Ava poured small amounts of oil and vinegar onto plates
for them both, and soon Kenzie was munching happily on warm,
freshly baked bread while Ava looked on with obvious fondness in
her eyes.

“No wonder you were so excited about this
date,” she said.

Kenzie perked up. “Are you liking it so far?”
Ava’s fear during the early part of the flight had not seemed to
bode well for the evening’s outcome, but her stress responses had
calmed down as they flew, allowing Kenzie to hope that maybe, just
maybe, she could still salvage the night.

“I’m liking it very much,” Ava said. “Thank
you for planning this.”

Kenzie ducked her head and jammed more bread
into her mouth. “You’re welcome,” she managed to say without
spraying crumbs everywhere.

It was strange to look at Ava and see a
slightly different face. But the headband didn’t mask Ava’s
personhood entirely. Kenzie could still see her essence beneath the
altered visage. She had to admit that Sloane had been right about
borrowing the alien contraband. When she’d protested that Sloane
could lose her job, her sister had only shrugged and said, “Nah. If
anyone finds out, D’aman can just wipe their brains.”

Which, while true, was so not the point.
Kenzie knew—or suspected, anyway—that Sloane had offered up the
alien tech to try to appease Kenzie’s anger with her, but while
Kenzie had grudgingly accepted the headbands, she hadn’t forgiven
her sister’s lack of faith in Ava. Kenzie was not someone who could
be bought, as Sloane should know. She could, however, be
simultaneously grateful for the loan and still pissed at her sister
because, like Walt Whitman, she contained multitudes.

Right now, though, she was focused on the
multitudes of flavor her palate was experiencing. The server
brought more bread with their entrées, and even though the portions
didn’t seem overly generous, the food was delicious. Like, possibly
the best she’d ever tasted. Since arriving on Earth, Kenzie had
made it her goal to sample every type of cuisine that came her way.
Food onboard her family’s ship had been bland and practical,
focused on efficiently delivering the calories and nutrition
required to sustain life in the harsh environment of space.
Zattalian culture privileged all things scientific, and the nomadic
space life made accumulating a variety of ingredients difficult.
Earth, on the other hand, provided an almost overwhelming excess of
foods to choose from.

She especially loved the human tendency to
tinker with recipes. Like this fresh-caught salmon, for instance.
The lemon-butter sauce the chef had added proved to be the perfect
touch to melt-in-your-mouth grilled salmon, already one of her
favorites. She’d grown up in the Pacific Northwest, after all.

“My goddess,” she said, fighting back a moan.
“This is—it’s—divine.” Other than Alia, goddesses weren’t a
traditional part of Zattalian spirituality but rather a human
concept Kenzie had chosen to embrace. Living on Earth offered a
wide array of spiritual methods and practices to choose
from—another shift from fleet life.

“Divine, hmm?” Ava’s smile was curious. “Are
goddesses part of religious doctrine where you come from?”

Kenzie blinked. How did Ava read her mind
without being psychic? Or, at least, Kenzie had assumed she wasn’t.
D’aman would have warned her if she were dating someone with
psychic powers, wouldn’t they?

“I’m sorry,” Ava said, her chin dipping as
the silence lengthened. “Would you rather I not ask about your
past?”

“No,” Kenzie said quickly. “Not at all. I was
just thinking… Anyway, to answer your question, we had one main
goddess in particular: Alia. You might have heard me mention her
name.”

Ava nodded. “Tell me about her?”

Kenzie did, and it was like a floodgate
opening because Ava, it turned out, had a lot more questions where
that one came from. She wanted to know what had driven Kenzie’s
people into space to begin with—the destruction of natural
resources on their planet similar to what humans were currently
doing to Earth; what it had been like to grow up on the ship—cold
and lonely, but interesting, too, especially when they visited a
planet that allowed them to visit the surface in small, controlled
groups; what she would have been doing right now if she hadn’t
become a refugee—attending extensive schooling aboard the
university ship, for lack of a better term; and, lastly, what had
happened to make her a refugee.

“I thought your people were—” Ava glanced
around and lowered her voice even further—“invulnerable?”

Kenzie nodded, staring down at her nearly
empty plate. “Generally speaking, but our hyperdrives relied on
power that makes nuclear fission seem like nothing, and each ship
carried a particle collider that, if destabilized—”

Ava looked horrified. “Your ships were
powered by particle colliders?”

“I mean, they were very protected,” Kenzie
said. “But the asteroid storm we ran into during our final
hyper-jump was new, so the navigators couldn’t have known it was
there. It created a cascade of increasing disasters that led to the
fleet’s destruction. I know other pods launched, but I don’t know
if anyone else survived. My parents were part of the fleet’s
navigation team, so we had more advance warning than the average
family.”

She paused, remembering the last, panicked
moments she’d spent with her parents, her father trying to tell her
everything she might need to know if she found herself on her own,
her mother trying to launch the pod sooner, faster, desperate to
save her life. Kenzie had begged them to come with her, but they
had to try to save the rest of the fleet. They’d sworn an oath of
service, and Zattalians were nothing if not loyal. There had been
no long, loving gazes, only quick, hard hugs and an avalanche of
sobs as they shoved her into the pod and evacuated her as fast as
they could.

Kenzie wasn’t sure why final moments held so
much power. The hours she and her parents had spent playing games
and watching holos together, the time she’d spent with her mother
in the family garden, the joy she’d felt playing music on various
Zattalian instruments with her father while her mother hummed
along, the meals they’d shared and the laughter and the learning
and the exploration of other planets and cultures… All of those
things had been more emblematic of life with her family of origin
than those last frantic moments. And yet, her mind dwelled on the
end more than the middle, on the few moments of terror and sorrow
instead of the million unremarkable moments of peace that had been
the hallmark of their lives together.

This was a survival mechanism, she knew. Her
brain returned to the moment she’d lost her loved ones in an
attempt to understand what had occurred before so that it wouldn’t
happen again. Her ancestors had managed to modify themselves
genetically in powerful ways, but instincts were so deeply
ingrained in neural pathways that they were difficult to alter,
even after generations of trying.

“But couldn’t your people survive in space?”
Ava asked. “Without ships, I mean?”

“In theory,” Kenzie said, “but in practice,
we need air, particularly air that’s rich in—”

She stopped and stared down at her plate,
suddenly aware that she had been about to tell the sister of
Nicholas Westbrook her people’s greatest weakness. Antonio’s words
echoed in her head again—tell me you aren’t that naïve—and
she remembered how Sloane couldn’t meet her eyes at brunch the
previous weekend.

“What is it?” Ava reached out to touch her
hand.

Automatically, Kenzie flipped her hand so
that their fingers intertwined. As their palms connected, her body
calmed the way it almost always did when she and Ava touched. Her
breathing slowed, her shoulders relaxed, and any tension she might
have felt melted away. The body doesn’t lie was an old
Zattalian saying, a nod to those pesky instincts their scientists
had never quite been able to influence. Kenzie’s body was telling
her she could trust Ava, even as the people she counted on most
suggested otherwise.

What was the truth? Kenzie thought she knew,
but there was no way to be certain. So instead of answering Ava’s
question, she squeezed her hand and said, “I’m going to need more
food than this.”

Ava laughed and went back to her meal. “I
never had any doubts about that.”

No doubts sounded good. Kenzie just wasn’t
sure she could say the same.

#

Even Ava ordered ice cream, which they ate as
they walked the dozen or so blocks to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
Their seats were in the very center of the balcony’s front row, and
they reached them just before the curtain rose. Ava gave her an
excited grin and took her hand, squeezing tightly as she turned her
gaze to the stage. And then the orchestra played the strident,
familiar opening chords that always reminded Kenzie of Beethoven’s
Fifth, and she heard Ava’s breath catch even as her own chest
suddenly felt tight and goose bumps rose on the back of her neck.
The lights hit the stage, and Kenzie and Ava cheered along with the
rest of the audience, and then the crowd quieted as the actor
playing Aaron Burr recited his opening lines.

Kenzie shook her head a little, shifting
closer to Ava. They had made it. They were actually
watching Hamilton. How lucky they were to be alive
right now, indeed.

The show was an experience. Somehow, it
managed to be everything she’d hoped for and nothing she’d
expected. This was the first time she had attended a Broadway
musical in person, and now she wondered what other human
experiences she’d been missing out on. She sat beside Ava in the
beautiful theater with its broad columns, crimson seats, and
delicate chandeliers that rivaled the crystalline light fixtures
Zattalia had been famous for, and she wished she could slow time
down to make this night, this show, this collection of moments
last.

The musical
itself was nearly as complex and lovely as the theater’s interior,
evoking laughter, tears, and sighs of appreciation from the
audience with its rousing score and imaginative recasting of the
American Revolution through a modern lens. As she’d already known
they would, a few of the lines hit close to home. Her shoulders
hunched when Hamilton declared that he imagined death so much that
it had grown to feel more like a memory—for her, death was the
memory she couldn’t escape. But then Ava shifted closer and covered
her hand with her own, and Kenzie’s breath came easier, her
shoulders relaxed, and the ever-present image of ships exploding
against her eyelids faded.

Beside her, she heard Ava’s breath hitch, and
when she looked over, she could see tears in Ava’s eyes, too. She
held tight to her hand, wondering if Ava was thinking of the people
who’d died at her brother’s hands. Sometimes—and she wasn’t proud
of this—Kenzie fantasized about crashing through the roof of the
maximum-security prison where Nick was being held and ending the
threat he represented with one punch. She fantasized about killing
him, and then she pictured Sloane’s reaction, or D’aman’s. She
imagined Ava’s face when she learned that Kenzie had turned into
the very monster Nick and his followers insisted humanity needed
protection from.

But would killing Nick Westbrook make Kenzie
a monster? When she’d first come to Earth, she would have said
yes with resounding certainty. Her view of the fixed nature
of right and wrong had become skewed in her years here, warped by
the things she had witnessed. Sometimes people were just bad, and
there was nothing you could do but learn to protect yourself—or
others. At what point did violence become justifiable, if at all?
Was murder immoral if it prevented the deaths of innocents? When
she was younger, the answers to such questions had seemed obvious,
immutable. Now, though, she wasn’t sure what she believed.

When she was in high school, Benjamin had
tried to explain the difference between heroes and villains after
the family had gone to see an Avengers movie. According to his
world view, a hero was someone who put the welfare of the
collective above their own.

“Look at you,” he’d said to Kenzie. “If you
decided to privilege your own needs and desires above those of all
others, few people on Earth would be able to stop you. I know it’s
a lot of responsibility, but with great power comes great
responsibility. Never forget that.”

This was the danger in someone like her
living on Earth. She would always be tempted to bend the rules, to
quash her moral code, to ignore her own convictions. Still,
what was the right thing to do in this situation?
If she killed Nick, would she save hundreds of innocent refugees,
or would Sentinel simply find a different leader for their cause?
But what if they didn’t? What if Sentinel disbanded? Even if Kenzie
ended up in a Panopticon cell for the rest of her days, even if Ava
never spoke to her again, wouldn’t it be enough to stop Sentinel
once and for all?

“That would be enough,” Kenzie whispered as
the actor on the spot-lit stage crooned the same words to Alexander
right before George Washington called him back for the final
showdown of the American Revolution.

She knew how the story ended. Long before
she’d heard of the musical, she’d learned of the duel that had
taken Alexander Hamilton’s life. But until she’d started listening
to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s addictive soundtrack, she hadn’t known
about the other duels in his life—the one during the Revolutionary
War where he and Burr served as seconds for opposing rivals; the
one where his son died defending his father’s honor on the very
field where, only a few years later, Alexander would fall to Burr’s
pistol shot.

Such a waste, Kenzie thought, resting
her head on Ava’s shoulder as Alexander and Eliza mourned the loss
of their eldest son. Why did humans kill each other so needlessly
and ceaselessly? People on Earth were in a constant state of
potential conflict, both as nations and as individuals. If her
parents had been able to choose, would they have sent her to a more
peaceful planet where she could have lived safely among other
aliens who wouldn’t treat her like a potential threat to their
existence? Then again, maybe there wasn’t such a planet anywhere in
the known universe. Otherwise, it seemed like her people would have
settled there long before now.

Beside her, Ava sniffled, and Kenzie tuned
back in—to the actors on stage, to the hushed crowd intent on the
tragedy unfolding before them, to the beautiful woman gripping her
arm, eyes awash with tears. Kenzie leaned into her shoulder and
pressed a kiss to her hair.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I got you.”

No matter what Jane and Ben thought, no
matter what Antonio or Sloane said or did, she didn’t intend to let
go of Ava anytime soon.

#

“So, what’s the verdict?” Kenzie asked,
leaning against the railing beside Ava, their arms barely touching.
They were back at the condo sharing a bottle of wine and taking in
the lights of Vancouver from the living room balcony. “Good date,
bad date, in between?”

“Honestly? I think you’ve ruined me for
future dating experiences,” Ava said, her smile her own again now
that they’d set aside their Taammeni headbands.

Kenzie bumped her hip gently, careful not to
send her (or her glass of wine) flying. “I can live with that.”

She gazed into Ava’s eyes, wondering
how she had ever thought she and Ava could be only friends.
She’d felt starstruck that first afternoon at Hyperion, a response
that had only intensified on subsequent interactions. But as time
passed, that sense of awe had morphed into respect and genuine
affection. In hindsight, it seemed obvious they’d been headed
toward this night since almost the first moment they’d met.

“Thank you for taking me
to Hamilton,” Ava said, leaning into her side.

“You’re welcome. It was pretty great, wasn’t
it?”

“Incredible, really. What was your favorite
part?”

“Ooh, that’s a tough one.” Kenzie paused,
considering. “I think I liked the theme about never having enough
time. It was a miracle that Alexander even made it to adulthood,
and I liked how that sense of the miraculous shaped his drive to
accomplish great things.”

Ava leaned her chin on her upturned palm.
“Wonder who that reminds me of,” she said, lifting an eyebrow at
Kenzie.

“I was just thinking the same thing.” And she
lifted her own eyebrow at Ava.

They chatted idly as the air slowly cooled
around them, and Kenzie tried not to worry about what the rest of
the night might have in store. It had been after eleven by the time
they’d returned to the penthouse suite, and she was more tired than
she’d expected. But she didn’t want to cancel the potential sex
part of the date, especially since she’d hinted heavily to Ava that
it might happen tonight. She couldn’t help worrying that Ava might
grow bored or frustrated (or both) if she kept ducking the issue.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to have sex with Ava. She was almost
positive she did, if the way she got worked up every time they made
out was any indication. It was just that it never seemed like the
right time to deal with the momentous nature of losing one’s
virginity.

Also, she still wasn’t quite sure what
constituted losing your virginity when intercourse wasn’t
involved. She tried not to sigh out loud. Poor Ava. She was for all
intents and purposes dating a high schooler when it came to sex,
which might have been okay had she not been a sophisticated
thirty-something with previous significant others. Kenzie was so
far out of her depth, it wasn’t even funny.

“Tonight must have taken quite the planning,”
Ava said.

Kenzie waved her hand. “It was nothing.
Besides, Bea did the heavy lifting.”

“Right.” Ava’s tone indicating that she
wasn’t buying that argument in the least.

Kenzie smiled. “Okay, it might have
taken a bit of finagling, but you’re more than worth it. With
everything you’ve been through, you deserve a thousand nights like
tonight.”

Ava looked amused. “I own three homes,
Kenzie. I’m not exactly suffering.”

“Three? I knew I was dating you for a
reason.” She waggled her eyebrows, pleased when Ava laughed in that
free, open way Kenzie rarely got to witness. “Seriously, though,
I’ve seen interviews with your mother. She’s scary even in
2-D.”

“You know,” Ava said, her eyes focusing on
the distance, “I mostly feel sorry for Amelia. She comes from this
cold, WASPY, Orange County family who probably didn’t ever hug her
or tell her they loved her, and then her husband was murdered and
she had to watch as their only child went criminally insane.”

“He wasn’t their only child,” Kenzie
said.

“You know what I mean.”

And yes, Kenzie did know. She knew that Dr.
Amelia Thornton had refused to allow Ava to feel a sense of
belonging, and yet somehow Ava still sought out her approval. What
she didn’t understand was why the Thornton-Westbrooks had adopted
her in the first place.

“The thing is,” Ava added, “I think she does
care about me. In her own way.”

“I’m sure she does.” Kenzie paused before
asking, “So, does she share your brother’s views about
off-worlders?”

Ava swallowed more wine. “Yes.”

“What about the General?”

“Both of my parents were hateful xenophobes,
Kenzie. They were racist, transphobic, and homophobic, too. That’s
the reason we weren’t close when my father died. We’d barely spoken
in years.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenzie said, and slipped a
tentative arm around her shoulders, tugging her closer.

Ava glanced at her, smile edged with pain.
“So am I.” She hesitated. “Do you want to know something really
sad?”

It was an odd way to phrase a question,
Kenzie thought, almost as if she were trying to predispose the
listener to say no. “Yes.”

“I’m pretty sure he was actually my father,”
she said, running a fingertip along the edge of her wine glass. “As
in, biologically.”

Kenzie blinked. “Really?”

“It would explain so much. My biological
mother worked at Hyperion before she became pregnant with me, and
then she mysteriously retired and ended up with this ridiculously
generous pension. Also, one of my great uncles came to visit right
before I started at Deerfield, and he stopped when he saw me and
said, ‘I thought you said she was adopted?’ I’d always wondered,
but that day kind of confirmed it for me.”

“And your father never told you one way or
another?”

“Nope.” She shrugged, squinting out at the
city. “Maybe he was ashamed of me, or maybe he thought there would
be more time. He was only sixty-eight when he died.”

“That’s really sad.”

“Told you it would be.”

Kenzie set her glass down and wrapped her
other arm around Ava, hugging her as tightly as she dared. Ava
moved one of Kenzie’s hands to her chest, holding on as if Kenzie
were the only thing keeping her from floating off into the night
sky.

They stood like that for a little while until
Ava finally gave her hand a squeeze and said, “I know the night
isn’t exactly over, but would you be okay with going to bed early?
Just to sleep?”

“I would be fine with that,” she said, her
legs nearly buckling in relief.

“Good.” Ava kissed her cheek. “I loved our
date tonight.”

“So did I,” Kenzie said, trying to keep her
mind from spiraling around the word love.

Wine glasses in hand, they headed inside. As
they deposited their glasses in the kitchen, Kenzie felt a familiar
pang tightening her stomach. Dang it. She was starving.

“Do you mind if I…?” she asked, nodding
toward the refrigerator.

“Go ahead,” Ava said, her smile indulgent.
“I’m going to take a quick shower, okay?”

“Of course!” Kenzie nodded quickly. She was
definitely not thinking of Ava in the shower, eyes closed, steam
rising around her luscious shoulders and even more luscious
breasts. Definitely, absolutely not.

“You know, Kenzie,” Ava said, smirking over
her shoulder as she disappeared into the hall, “you could always
join me.”

Kenzie simultaneously choked on air and
sighed. Ava Westbrook was going to be the death of her, one way or
the other. Or, well, hopefully not literally.

She gazed into the refrigerator and nearly
gasped. Where had all this food come from? There was a pre-cooked
chicken (organically fed, free range, according to the label), a
carton of eggs, tons of sandwich fixings, a veggie and hummus tray,
and six kinds of cheese in the dairy drawer. The crisper was
similarly jammed with grapes, cherries, oranges, and apples. She
peeked into the freezer—chock full of ice cream. The condo’s owner
was rarely here, supposedly, which meant that Bea must have ordered
groceries for her. Or, she guessed, for them.

Kenzie was totally planning another date with
Bea in the near future.

It took her less than five minutes to devour
two chicken breast sandwiches along with an apple and a bag of
potato chips, washing everything down with a tall glass of
milk. Much, much better, she thought as she cleaned up
after herself.

Even before she reached the master bedroom,
she could hear Ava in the shower, her voice barely audible over the
sound of the spray. Inching closer, Kenzie allowed herself to lean
against the bathroom doorway and hum quietly along as Ava sang in
clear, lovely tones about legacies and money and peace of mind,
about narratives and stories and deciding to stay. About being
enough.

The water shut off, and she heard the drip of
water on the tile floor, focused her enhanced hearing on Ava’s
quiet singing as she went about her post-shower routine.

Then Ava paused. “Kenzie? Are you there?”

She moved away from the doorway. No need to
add this moment to the long line of stalking incidents. “I’m here,”
she said from farther away.

“Good,” Ava said, and Kenzie could hear the
smile in her voice.

She couldn’t help smiling back as she
stripped down to boy shorts and a tank top and slipped beneath the
covers. “Come to bed,” she called, hoping Ava would hear the pout
in her voice.

Ava poked her head out of the door. “Hey, no
pouting on Perfect Date Night!”

“Sorry,” Kenzie said insincerely.

“Sure you are.” Ava’s semi-scolding look
morphed into a sweet smile. “I like sharing a bed with you.”

“I’d like sharing a bed with you more if you
were in it.”

Ava laughed. “Who knew Galaxy Girl could be
so demanding?” She turned away. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Good,” Kenzie echoed, and closed her eyes to
wait.

Chapter Nine

“Wait. Let me get this straight. You
guys still haven’t had sex?”

Ava winced and held the phone away from her
ear, glad that Kenzie had decided to go out for coffee. This was
why she hadn’t wanted to tell Bea about their… issues in the
bedroom. Not that there were issues, per se. Admittedly, she was
worked up a majority of the time, and it was as if her body were on
strike, and the terms were Kenzie or no orgasms. Which was—well. It
was fairly vexing, to be honest.

“Not for lack of trying,” she told Bea,
putting her feet up on the coffee table and gazing out at the view
of Stanley Park. They had awakened in bed that morning and agreed
that there was no reason they couldn’t stay one more night in
Vancouver, a plan that Bea had immediately approved. “We were
really close the other night.”

“Don’t tell me. She got called into
work?”

“Uh-huh,” Ava said, because it was easier
than telling Bea the whole truth.

They’d been making out half-naked in Kenzie’s
bed two nights earlier, and in theory everything had been fine. But
she could tell something wasn’t right. Kenzie was going through the
motions, her mind clearly elsewhere. Despite the fact that Ava had
been dreaming of this scenario all day—Kenzie shirtless and leaning
over her in the half-lit room, swoon—she’d forced
herself to pull away.

“Are you all right?” she’d asked.

“Of course.” Kenzie had smiled and started to
move closer again.

But Ava had stopped her with a hand to her
supple, incredibly firm… to her chest. “No, really. What’s going
on?”

Kenzie had stared at her for a moment, and
then her smile had slipped and she’d flopped onto her side. “I want
to, Ava, I swear I do, but I’m afraid Panopticon
is going to call me or there’ll be another emergency at a really
crucial moment, and then the first time will be ruined!”

Ava had wanted to say that it wouldn’t
be ruined. But then she’d remembered experiencing a
similar panic at sixteen after she’d discovered she was the only
one among her friends who had yet to be “deflowered,” as Bea had
called it. How much worse would it be at twenty-five, especially if
you were dating someone older?

“There’s nothing wrong with going slow,”
she’d said. “It’s okay to not be ready, you know.”

“But I am! I am beyond ready, trust me.”

Ava had felt her eyebrows rise as her mind
prodded her to ask in a low and sultry tone, How
ready? But it wasn’t the right moment for her sex kitten
side to kick in, no matter how sexually frustrated she might
be.

“In that case,” she’d said instead, forcing
her voice to remain even, “maybe don’t put so much pressure on the
first time? It’s not going to be perfect. It might not even be that
great, although I’d like to think it won’t
be terrible.”

“I’m not—it doesn’t have to—” Kenzie had
stopped and sighed. “Am I that obvious?”

“Maybe a little, but also I remember how I
was about my first time.”

“Wow, you can remember that long ago?”

Ava had pretended to gasp. “Just for that,
you can sleep alone tonight.”

Kenzie had gazed at her with a startlingly
sex-kittenish look of her own. “You’re not going anywhere.” She’d
dragged her fingernails lightly up Ava’s ribcage, eliciting a very
real gasp this time.

“No,” she’d agreed, and bit her lip in the
way that had always made Kenzie blush. “I’m not.”

“Maybe we should practice some more,” Kenzie
had said, kissing her way along Ava’s jawline. “You know, for
science.”

But before Ava could voice her assent to this
plan, Kenzie had straightened, her eyes focusing somewhere outside
the apartment in a way that alerted Ava she was about to be left to
her own devices.

“I don’t know, A,” Bea said now,
uncharacteristically hesitant.

“What don’t you know?” Ava checked her phone
notifications, but there were no new texts. She hoped Kenzie hadn’t
gotten waylaid by some Canadian emergency. Galaxy Girl popping up
in Vancouver would definitely attract attention, and not the good,
Twitter-frenzy kind.

“Well, you do know that some people are
asexual, right?” Bea asked.

“Right, and obviously that’s a totally valid
orientation. But I don’t think she is.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, she’s a little obsessed with
my cleavage.”

“Oh. Well, that tracks,” Bea said, and Ava
could practically hear her nodding. “You do have some damn fine
boobage.”

“Who exactly are you talking to about your
cleavage?”

Ava glanced up to find Kenzie standing in the
doorway, coffee tray and pastry bag in hand, forehead furrowed.
And, interesting, Ava hadn’t thought Kenzie could look that irate.
It was kind of hot. Of course, that could just be her hormones
talking.

Still, macho displays of jealousy were not to
be tolerated, let alone encouraged, so she merely rolled her eyes
at Kenzie and said into her phone, “Speak of the devil—Miss Hangry
herself just arrived. Give the boys a kiss, and I’ll talk to you
soon, okay?”

“You better,” Bea said. “And I mean it—stay
for as long as you like. Oh, and good luck!”

“Thanks. I think I’ll need it.” Bea was still
laughing when Ava ended the call and shot Kenzie a pointed look.
“Do you want to try that again?”

“Sorry,” Kenzie said, looking slightly
mollified as she moved into the living room. “Was that Bea?”

“Yes. But even if it wasn’t, I can speak
about my body to anyone I please, Kenzie. It’s my body.”

“I know, but you’re my girlfriend,” she said,
more grumpy than domineering.

“And my own person.”

Kenzie huffed out a breath. “Fine. I was out
of line.”

“Thank you. Now, what did you bring me?”

The pout cleared, and Kenzie flopped down
beside her. “Your usual,” she said, passing Ava a cup that smelled
deliciously of Italian roast, “and a croissant.”

The croissant smelled and tasted delectable,
she soon discovered as she took a bite and delighted in the
sensation of delicate buttery goodness melting on her tongue. With
her phone’s notifications turned off and no one at Hyperion having
any idea where to find her, she was starting to feel more like her
old self, back when she was free to ignore her work commitments for
entire weekends.

In the time it took Ava to finish her
croissant, Kenzie plowed through half a dozen donuts. Apparently,
Zattalians could gorge on all the sugar they wanted whenever they
wanted without impacting their impressive physiques.

The whole genetic modification thing was
looking kind of good from where Ava was sitting.

“So,” she said, sipping her coffee, “we have
the entire day ahead of us. What should we do?”

“So many things! There’s the market on
Granville Island, and the First Nations totems at Stanley Park, and
the suspension bridge over the Capilano River—although, since you
don’t like heights, we might want to skip that one. Maybe we should
rent bikes and ride around Stanley Park instead.”

Ava couldn’t remember the last time she’d
ridden a bike outside of spin class. “You sure know a lot about
Vancouver,” she said neutrally. She’d been thinking maybe they
could stay in and relax, but Kenzie’s sightseeing enthusiasm was
hard to resist. One of the challenges of dating a tireless
superhero, Ava supposed.

Kenzie mock scowled. “Duh, I grew up twenty
miles from the Canadian border, Ava.”

“I’ll duh you,” Ava said, and leaned in to
kiss Kenzie before she could pull away.

She didn’t seem to mind the sneak attack,
however, and soon they were sprawled on the couch, hands and lips
wandering in a pattern that had become increasingly familiar. Ava
was starting to think they might stay in, after all, when Kenzie
paused, gazing into her eyes, her own darker than usual.

“Ava,” she said.

“Yes?” Ava asked, her voice hushed.

“I really want to show you the sea otters at
the aquarium.”

Ava blinked. “I’m sure you do,” she said, and
laughed at Kenzie’s earnestness. “I guess we should get going,
then.”

They extricated themselves from the comfy
couch and made their way to the master bedroom. Kenzie had risen
early and flown to Seattle and back to pick up extra clothes,
raiding her own apartment and accompanying a member of Ava’s
security team to her hotel suite. As a result, they both had comfy
casual clothes and shoes to don for the day’s adventure.

And what an adventure it was. The early
summer day was warm and sunny, the breeze off the water—variously
the Burrard Inlet, Vancouver Harbour, and English Bay, Kenzie
helpfully supplied—notably mild. Safely disguised by their Taammeni
headbands, they caught the SkyTrain to Granville Island, where they
wandered the aisles of the indoor Public Market, sampling food and
admiring hand-crafted jewelry. Kenzie bought Ava a necklace made of
hematite, and Ava bought Kenzie a hand-carved jade comb to keep her
blonde curls in check when she wasn’t galivanting around as Galaxy
Girl.

“This is my favorite place in Vancouver,”
Kenzie confided as they wandered the rows and rows of food
vendors.

“I can see why,” Ava said, squeezing her
hand. For someone who loved food a much as Kenzie did, this place
was heaven.

After watching a violinist play to an
appreciative crowd, they ate fresh mozzarella sandwiches—or “second
breakfast,” as Kenzie called it—seated on steps behind the market
overlooking the water, chatting about memorable family vacations
they’d enjoyed and/or endured. Whenever Nick’s name came up, as it
inevitably did, Ava waited for Kenzie to recoil. But she only
listened quietly, her gaze occasionally edging up from her plate of
sandwiches to take in Ava’s expression.

“It must have been difficult to grow up with
a brother who resented you so deeply,” Kenzie said after Ava
finished a tale about the time her brother pushed her off a gondola
in Venice and then laughed at her behind their parents’ backs when
they scolded her carelessness.

Ava gazed up at the underside of the bridge
that spanned False Creek. The structure was intricate and immense,
and her interest and training in engineering allowed her to spot
the bridge’s recent earthquake retrofitting.

“It was very difficult,” she admitted,
twisting her paper napkin into tight spirals. “But the hardest part
was realizing as an adult that he’d never loved me, even though
he’d said a few times that he did. Nick and I had this push-pull
relationship—mostly he pushed me away, but there were a few times
where it felt like we were actual siblings who cared about each
other. Usually, I would find out afterward that he had needed
something from me, and once he got it, the closeness ended, just
like that.”

“Ava, that’s terrible.” Kenzie reached for
her agitated hands and covered them with her warm palm. “I’m so
sorry.”

“Thanks,” Ava said, blinking against the
familiar press of tears. She had cried what felt like far too many
tears over her brother, but she had no intention of following in
her mother’s family’s footsteps: pushing difficult feelings down
until they exploded. If she needed to cry, she had learned to give
herself the space to do so.

“I won’t let him hurt you again,” Kenzie
said, her voice low and almost vibrating with some dark
emotion.

Ava glanced over at her, startled. “I—what do
you mean?”

Kenzie looked like she wanted to say
something. But then she glanced away, shaking her head slightly.
“Just, you know, superpowered girlfriend over here. Should we get
going?” And she practically floated off the steps, zipping past
other tourists to deposit their empty plates in a trash bin.

She was acting oddly, and for a moment, Ava
was tempted to ask Kenzie if she knew something about Sentinel or
the missing aliens. Even if she didn’t, she would be an amazing
resource for Ava’s ongoing investigation. There were so many
subsidiaries and outside corporations to analyze, so many potential
manufacturing locations to examine, all without triggering anyone’s
suspicions. Kenzie’s ability to fly anywhere on short notice would
significantly speed up the investigation. But as much as she wished
she could ask her superpowered girlfriend for assistance, she knew
there were more reasons not to involve Kenzie. Not only were Kenzie
and Sloane a package deal, but Ava couldn’t in good conscience take
a Zattalian anywhere near Sentinel. To do so would be to risk
Kenzie’s life, and Ava wasn’t about to do that.

Besides, it was a lovely Saturday and they
were on vacation, and Ava didn’t want to spend their limited
quality time together thinking about Sentinel. She set the question
aside for now and let Kenzie lead her to an art gallery not far
from the Public Market, where they explored exhibits that featured
the work of up-and-coming painters, glass blowers, and jewelry
makers. Definitely a better use of their time than worrying about
things they couldn’t control.

Back in New York, one of Ava’s favorite
weekend pastimes had been to visit museums and galleries. She loved
how art offered different windows onto life. Like science, art
recalibrated her understanding of the world and her place in it. A
good exhibit allowed her to journey through someone else’s neural
pathways, thereby expanding her own perceptions in ways that
otherwise might never have occurred to her.

When she said as much, Kenzie glanced up from
a sculpture made of colored glass arranged in delicate strands that
twined about a clear center. “Yes! I don’t think I could have put
it into those words, but that’s exactly how I feel about art,
too.”

They shared a smile that made Ava feel a
little bit like falling. Or maybe flying was a better analogy. Yes,
that was it. Like flying.

Speaking of… Kenzie wanted to fly them to
Stanley Park, but Ava refused. It was broad daylight, and even with
their image scramblers, they would cut too obvious a figure if they
were sighted zooming across the Vancouver skyline.

“You sound like Sloane,” Kenzie groused, but
her smile was affectionate, as was the squeeze she gave their
joined hands. “By the way, D’aman is going to shift into Galaxy
Girl today and fly around Seattle. You know, so no one connects our
absence to her.”

Ava resisted the urge to tease Kenzie for
speaking about herself in the third person. “They are?”

“Yep. It was their idea, but I thought it was
a good one.”

Ava had to agree.

Soon they were back on the SkyTrain, the
city’s above-ground metro system, winding along the downtown area’s
neat streets between shiny metal fifteen- and twenty-story
buildings. Vancouver reminded Ava of a more cosmopolitan version of
Seattle, complete with its own rendition of the Space Needle: the
Vancouver Lookout, a circular tower that stood atop a skyscraper
not far from where they were staying.

“Wanna go up there?” Kenzie asked, nodding at
the tower.

“No, thanks,” Ava said quickly. “You’ve
already shown me the best view of the city, haven’t you?”

Kenzie pretended to puff out her chest. “I
mean, I don’t want to brag or anything…”

“Yes, you do,” Ava said, laughing.

“Maybe a little.”

The train continued racing smoothly along its
elevated track, and Ava thought about the day so far, about
lightness and laughter, freedom and exploration. She hadn’t
traveled this freely in public since her brother’s trial had made
the Westbrooks a household name. Not only had there been the sniper
attack before her brother’s trial, but shortly after her testimony
had been streamed across the globe, her New York security team had
fielded a drive-by shooting outside her apartment building in
which, thank god, no one had been injured. But the assailants had
never been found, and the windshield in her company car wasn’t the
only thing that had nearly shattered that night. Ever since then,
she’d experienced varying levels of anxiety whenever she left the
safety of her own home.

Until now. Not only did no one in Vancouver
know who she was (thank you, Sloane), she was accompanied by
a bulletproof, fire-proof woman who could fly. Ava was sure she’d
never been safer. Or, possibly, happier. It was strange. Her
brother and his cronies were up to something, she was almost
certain; her mother had vanished again; and Victoria, Hyperion’s
CEO, had been in and out of the office the past couple of weeks for
sketchy “personal” reasons. Off-worlders were under siege again,
though no one seemed to realize it yet, and the anti-alien lobby in
America was solidifying its power in state legislatures and
governor’s mansions across the country. And yet, Ava was happy for
the first time in a very long while. How could that even be?

But she knew how. Kenzie Shepherd. Galaxy
Girl.

“Ready for the sea otters?” Kenzie asked as
the SkyTrain slowed for the Stanley Park stop.

“I was born ready,” Ava said flirtatiously,
smiling when Kenzie’s eyes widened and she swallowed hard.

Now if only Kenzie could say the same… Maybe
the aquarium would have a dark corner or two. And anyway, there was
always tonight.

#

By the time they returned to the condo, the
sun was a fiery ball hanging on the horizon. Ava groaned slightly
and kicked off her shoes as they entered the quiet penthouse suite
with its modern art and thick, shag rugs and runners.

“Are we staying in, or do you have a club
night out planned for us?” Ava asked as Kenzie followed her inside
and dropped the keys on a small secretary desk near the door.

Kenzie fidgeted slightly and then met her
eyes. “In, I think. If you don’t mind.”

She didn’t mind at all. “Perfect. I’ll be
right back.”

“Is it cool if I make something to eat?”

They hadn’t finished their sushi dinner all
that long ago, but Ava knew that didn’t mean much to Kenzie’s
metabolism. “Of course. I told you, you never have to ask.”

“In that case…” She blurred toward the
kitchen, no doubt to demolish half of its contents. Good thing Bea
had stocked the house.

As she headed toward the master bedroom, Ava
made a mental note to have Rose assist with her first order for her
new place. Who could have guessed how much Galaxy Girl would eat?
An X-rated image flashed into her mind, and she tamped it down
quickly. Soon, if she was lucky, she wouldn’t have to fantasize
anymore.

In the bathroom, she took a quick shower,
washing off the day’s dust and grime from her body while keeping
her hair mostly dry. By the time she brushed her teeth and changed
into her sleep clothes, the sun had set, leaving the condo shot
through with pink-orange light while the park below was dark, and
the city twinkled in the waning daylight.

In the kitchen, she strolled deliberately
toward Kenzie. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Kenzie looked up from her nearly empty
plate and watched her approach. “You got ready for bed?”

“I figured since we’re staying in…” Ava
crowded into Kenzie’s space, nudging her backward until she bumped
up against the refrigerator door. “Plus, it’s getting late. Want to
go to bed?”

Kenzie set her plate carelessly on the nearby
counter and caught hold of Ava’s waist, her grip sure. “I thought
you’d never ask.”

Ava slipped her arms around Kenzie’s neck and
tugged her head down. Kenzie obliged, hands slipping to her hips as
the kiss deepened. Ava closed her eyes, weeks of longing welling up
in her, and Kenzie’s fingers tightened on her for a moment almost
painfully. But Ava didn’t care. Just then she wanted Kenzie any way
she could have her.

Suddenly, Kenzie lifted her and carried her
into the hallway, covering the distance to the master bedroom in a
few long strides. Before Ava even realized what she had in mind,
Kenzie was levitating them across the room and onto the bed.

“Is this okay?” Kenzie asked, holding herself
carefully above Ava.

“More than okay,” Ava said, and pulled her
down until Kenzie’s toned body was sliding against her already raw
nerve endings.

And then they were kissing again, and Kenzie
was pressing her into the mattress, and the condo was silent except
for the humming of appliances and the thrumming of Ava’s heart,
furious enough probably to drive someone with super hearing more
than a little bit crazy.

#

An hour later, Ava watched Kenzie sit up on
the bed, lit by the glow of the city through the wooden blinds. She
didn’t look happy. She didn’t look unhappy either, just maybe a bit
disappointed. Ava, on the other hand, felt fantastic, the maddening
itch she’d been living with finally ably scratched. Kenzie had been
just what she’d expected in bed after their weeks of
build-up—intensely interested in exploring her body and learning
what turned her on the most. She’d been a bit tentative here and
there, but she had clearly enjoyed the sensation of making love to
Ava. When it was her turn to receive, though, she’d tensed up, and
no matter what Ava did, she’d remained awkward throughout. Ava
wasn’t even sure she’d had an orgasm, which, honestly, wasn’t how
she’d hoped this night would go.

Fortunately, for once, they had all the time
in the world.

“Can I ask you something?” she inquired
delicately. She knew enough about Kenzie to realize she would have
to approach this discussion with care.

Kenzie hummed noncommittally.

“What was it like the first time you
flew?”

After a moment, Kenzie lifted her head and
gazed at her, the brow furrowing. “Clumsy. Kind of terrifying,
actually.”

“What about learning to ride a bike?”

Kenzie rubbed the back of her neck as she did
her adorable hemming and hawing thing. “Um, let’s just say that it
didn’t go well.”

“Okaaay.” She would definitely need to get
that story from Sloane at some point. “But my point is that sex is
like anything else you do with your body—it takes practice to learn
what you and your partner like, how you fit together. But with a
little time and patience, and a lot of communication, I promise it
gets better.”

“But I don’t know what I’m doing. Aren’t you
getting bored with having a clueless wonder in your bed?”

“I wouldn’t call you clueless, Kenzie.
Inexperienced, sure, but experience isn’t everything. It’s like
music—someone can be technically proficient and yet lack passion.
You more than make up for your lack of experience with passion. You
are probably the least selfish person I’ve ever been with, and with
a little time and practice, you’ll probably feel more comfortable
and less self-conscious about being on the receiving end, too.”

Kenzie shook her head, and Ava could see the
furrow in her brow deepening. Obviously, they couldn’t have that.
This was their idyll, their chance to be themselves away from all
the external forces threatening to break them apart. She leaned
over and kissed Kenzie, who rolled onto her side and returned the
pressure, hesitantly at first and then more enthusiastically.

Ava placed her hand on Kenzie’s waist,
feeling her tense up slightly, so she focused all of her attention
on the kiss. After a little while, Kenzie relaxed against her,
remaining so until Ava slipped one leg between hers. Almost
immediately, Kenzie stiffened again. Ava kissed her until she was
once again pliant beneath her touch, and then she pulled away.

“It seems like you might be having a hard
time relaxing,” she said softly, smoothing her thumb against
Kenzie’s cheek.

“I know. I’m really sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, but you do have
to be honest with me. Is this too much? Are we going too fast?”

“No! No, I swear, I wouldn’t have brought you
here if I didn’t want to be with you like this.”

Ava believed her. Kenzie wasn’t very good at
lying, and she didn’t have any reason to lie about intimacy. “I
know sex can be kind of embarrassing,” she said. “It took me a
while to get comfortable sharing my body with someone else when I
was first sexually active.”

Kenzie shook her head. “That’s not what’s
going on. When you grow up on a ship, privacy isn’t much of an
option. Besides, Zattalian culture is super pragmatic. For us,
bodies are like living machines that occasionally have unpleasant
odors and messy by-products.”

“Then what is going on? Or do you need
some time and space to figure it out?”

Kenzie sighed. “No. I was sort of hoping I
wouldn’t have to tell you, but obviously that’s not working.”

She sounded so downcast that Ava held her
breath. Had she been assaulted at some point? But no, she was
Galaxy Girl. Unless it had happened before she was placed on Earth?
Or maybe she was asexual and just hadn’t wanted to
tell Ava for fear of losing her.

Kenzie balled her fists on top of the covers,
and then just as quickly unclenched them. “Look. I’m having a hard
time letting go because I’m afraid I’m going to hurt you.”

Ava blinked. “Oh. Okay. Well, that’s a pretty
common concern. I worry about hurting you, too.”

“No—” She made a frustrated noise. “Not like
that. Not in a human way.”

“All right. In what way, then?”

Kenzie closed her eyes. “Like, in the
moment. My moment. I’m afraid I might lose control
and accidentally break your hand. Or worse.”

And that, Ava could admit, hadn’t occurred to
her. “Could that actually happen?”

Kenzie’s eyes snapped open. “I break things
all the time without meaning to. Do you know how many phones I’ve
gone through? Human bones are more fragile than you think. I have
to be so careful all the time. If I lose focus for even a second,
someone could really get hurt.”

“Is that why you’ve never been with anyone?”
Ava pictured a young Kenzie holding herself away from anyone who
showed interest, setting aside her own potential happiness to
protect the people around her.

She nodded. “In college, Chris was the
perfect boyfriend because he didn’t want to have sex with me, so I
didn’t ever have to worry about hurting him. And
I still managed to break his nose once, just by
kissing him too hard.”

“Wow.” Ava nodded, thinking quickly. She
certainly would prefer not to have a broken nose. She could only
imagine the gossip at Hyperion. “Can I ask you something
personal?”

Kenzie stared at her. “I’m in bed with you
naked and you just had your fingers inside me. What could possibly
be more personal?”

She smiled a little. “Do you masturbate?”

“Oh.” Kenzie buried her face in the pillow
and said, her voice muffled, “More personal, check.”

Ava tried not to laugh, but it was impossible
faced with the adorable idiot in front of her. She kissed Kenzie’s
shoulder, feeling her shake with laughter in return. “Well, do
you?”

“Yes, Ava, I get myself off. Especially
lately.”

That made two of them.

With a little cajoling and a lot of kissing,
Ava managed to extract from Kenzie her favorite position for
self-stimulation—lying face-down on her bed, hand between her
legs.

“Never on your back?”

“Not usually. I have a hard time, you
know, finishing if I’m on my back.”

While it wasn’t unexpected that Galaxy Girl
would meet the exact definition of a top, it was a tad surprising
to think of Kenzie Shepherd as one. As a reward for her honesty,
Ava kissed her deeply and dragged Kenzie’s hand up to her breast,
smirking as she felt Kenzie’s sharp intake of breath. Then Kenzie
pushed her onto her back and held her arms above her head as she
had her way with her again, and Ava forgot about anything other
than Kenzie’s insistent lips and faster-than-human fingers. She was
a lucky woman, indeed.

When she came back down, Kenzie was still
flushed and breathing hard beside her, as worked up as she’d ever
been during their make-out sessions. Ava reached out and traced her
jaw with her thumb, and then murmured, “Would it be okay if I tried
again?”

Kenzie nodded without hesitation, eyes wide
and unblinking.

They kissed, and Ava took her time exploring
Kenzie’s lips and tongue as her hands drifted downward. Slowly, she
rubbed her thumb in teasing circles around Kenzie’s nipples,
applying the tiniest bit of pressure to the stiffening skin as she
kissed her way along Kenzie’s jaw. Kenzie was still tense, but not
nearly as nervous as before, so Ava sucked and bit her way down
Kenzie’s neck to her collarbone.

“You are so beautiful,” she said, gazing up
at Kenzie.

“So are you.” She smiled a little, and Ava
felt her relax even more.

Encouraged, she lowered her mouth to Kenzie’s
breast and bit gently at the dimpled flesh, smiling as she felt
Kenzie’s hips twitch beneath her. As she slathered the small, taut
breasts with attention, she slipped her leg between Kenzie’s and
pressed, barely able to contain her own moan as she felt the
wetness against her thigh. Kenzie wanted her, that much was
certain. They just needed to figure out a position that worked.

When they had reached the point where Kenzie
was clutching at Ava’s hair, fingers clenching and unclenching in
an obvious bid for control, Ava slid back up her body and murmured
in her ear, “Roll over.”

“You mean…?” Kenzie asked, her voice
raspy.

“On your belly,” Ava confirmed, shifting onto
her side to give her room.

Kenzie licked her lips and then complied,
turning her head so that she could see Ava.

“Doing okay?” Ava asked.

She waited until Kenzie nodded. Then she ran
her hand down Kenzie’s spine and over the firm curve of her ass.
Kenzie closed her eyes, and Ava just barely slipped a finger
through her warmth.

“Still okay?”

“Uh-huh,” Kenzie murmured.

“Good.”

With her near hand, she took Kenzie’s wrist
and pulled it down, tugging it into place so that she could touch
herself the way she did when she was alone. Kenzie’s eyes flew open
and she seemed about to protest, but then Ava pressed Kenzie’s
fingers against her clit as she feathered her own knuckles against
Kenzie’s wetness, and her eyes drifted shut again.

“This way,” Ava said, “you can let go without
having to worry about me.”

Kenzie hesitated. But then she bit her lip
and nodded.

“We can stop any time,” Ava added, pressing
open-mouth kisses along her shoulder. “Just say the word.”

“Okay.”

Spoiler alert: She didn’t tell Ava to stop,
and this time, she didn’t seem disappointed in the least.

#

Later, when Ava had recovered the power of
thought, she pressed her cheek against the smooth skin of Kenzie’s
back. She was so still that it almost seemed like she wasn’t
breathing.

“Are you okay?” Ava asked, carefully
extricating her fingers.

Kenzie didn’t flinch the way most women did
when Ava pulled her fingers out, only sighed and stretched
languidly. “No, I’m definitely not okay.”

Ava pushed away from Kenzie, trying to get a
look at her face. Had it been too much, too fast? Had Ava hurt her
in some way?

“I didn’t mean it like that,”
Kenzie said, rolling onto her side to face Ava. “I just meant
you’ve ruined me for future sexual experiences.”

Ava tilted her head, a smile beginning to
form. “Is that so?”

Kenzie quirked an eyebrow at her. “It is.”
She shook her head, and her voice grew softer. “Thank you. I
couldn’t have—I never—just, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but you don’t have to thank
me.” She leaned up and kissed Kenzie’s cheek, her hair forming a
curtain around them. “I’m glad your second time wasn’t terrible, at
least.”

“Far from it,” Kenzie said, and pulled Ava
against her side. “Is it okay if we go to sleep now?”

“Of course.”

“Even if we don’t brush our teeth?”

“I think our teeth will survive one night
without fluoride, Kenzie.”

“Good,” she said, practically purring as she
kissed Ava’s hair.

Ava pulled the covers up over their shoulders
because even though Kenzie might not get cold no matter how low the
temperature dropped, she was only human.

She was almost asleep when she thought she
heard it: “I love you, Ava.” But in the morning when she awoke to
an empty bed and the smell of coffee and bacon drifting through the
strange apartment, the unfamiliar landscape outside hidden under
Vancouver’s marine layer, she had to wonder if maybe, after all,
she had only imagined the whispered confession.

Chapter Ten

Blowing into the office late used to be more of an exception to the
rule for Kenzie. Now, however, it had become almost habit. It
wasn’t that she slept late. On the contrary, she was usually up by
five, not only because she couldn’t sleep but because her favorite
time to patrol was first thing in the morning, when the city was
just waking up. Very little happened that actually required her
intervention at that time of day, other than the occasional traffic
accident, but she loved soaring from one end of the city to the
other as the sky lightened, peeking in at the tiny children banging
their spoons on their high-chair trays, the middle-aged workers
getting ready for their days, the elderly taking their morning
constitutionals around the grounds of their independent living
facilities.

D’aman was more of a night owl, so while
Kenzie liked patrolling early mornings and the hours between work
and dinner—the peak time for daytime crime, not to mention traffic
accidents—D’aman preferred the middle of the day and late at night,
when most violent acts took place. Kenzie had offered to help, but
D’aman had assured her that they were comfortable handling the
dicey hours on their own. Which, honestly, was a relief. Kenzie
wasn’t sure she was up for confronting the worst of humanity on a
daily basis.

With their new patrol schedule, the Galaxy
Duo, as Seattleites had taken to calling them, now had most hours
of the day covered, and Kenzie was grateful for the structure the
schedule provided. During her patrol hours, she was on, but
otherwise—assuming Panopticon didn’t reach out—she could focus on
her own life and not beat herself up for being unable to save every
last person (and animal) that needed saving. She was only one
person, and there was a finite limit to what she could do on any
given day. D’aman’s willingness to share the load combined with the
framework they’d helped her build were the only things that were
keeping Kenzie from burning out. It was still possible she would
hit a wall given enough time, but boundaries were important.
Difficult to maintain at times, but critical to her sanity.

The structure was good for the city, too. The
resulting drop in crime in metro Seattle had been so dramatic since
they’d implemented their unofficial patrol schedule that Mika had
joked they might put her out of a job. Kenzie knew that wasn’t
really a possibility at this point. Incidents within the off-world
community had been climbing, fueled by growing anti-alien rhetoric
and, Kenzie was pretty sure, the alien amphetamine she and D’aman
were still trying to trace. Earth’s governments may have uniformly
condemned Sentinel’s past actions against the off-world community,
but far too many humans approved of Nick Westbrook’s ideology—and
his methods.

As the evidence mounted, Kenzie and D’aman
had discussed bringing Panopticon and/or SPD in on their
investigation, but they didn’t trust the human-led organizations to
handle such a delicate matter. Neither humans nor off-worlders
would be thrilled to hear that the government was investigating
speed-addicted aliens, and the authorities would undoubtedly leak
the information to the media. Kenzie could only imagine the
explosion of 4chan and Reddit conspiracy theory posts about the
Alliance’s supposed long-term plan to destroy Earth by settling
criminal alien refugees on every continent. That was exactly what
Sentinel wanted, so for now, Kenzie and D’aman had decided to work
the case within the off-world community. If and when they needed
help, Sloane would be their first contact.

The day after she and Ava returned from
Vancouver, Kenzie spent extra time on her early morning patrol,
checking in on the neighborhoods she’d gotten to know from the air
the past couple of months. As usual, the city was at its quietest,
the streets even emptier than usual now that school was out for
summer break. Just as Kenzie was about to head home to get ready
for work, a shout from a homeless encampment under I-5 caught her
attention, and soon she was transporting a woman who had overdosed
on opioids to the nearest hospital. She stayed to make sure the
woman would be okay and then detoured by the homeless camp to pass
on the good news before finally heading home. Off-worlders weren’t
the only ones struggling with an influx of illegal substances these
days.

At ECM a little while later, she nodded to
the receptionists, who buzzed her into the main office. Normally,
she liked to hang out and chat with them over coffee—they knew
everything that went on at the media company—but not only had she
skipped her coffee run this morning, she was running late.
Fortunately, Aaron’s view of the main office was obstructed by his
giant monitors, and Kenzie was fairly certain she managed to slip
into her cubicle without being noticed.

Seriously, she needed to try to be more on
time. The stress of being late was getting to her. She had never
enjoyed breaking rules the way Sloane did. Ironic, then, that her
sister had become a government agent charged with enforcing the law
while she was a vigilante operating outside of it. Jane and
Benjamin should be proud of her, given that they were the ones who
had always preached that laws were only as moral as the people who
made them.

Her computer had barely started booting up
when a head popped up over the low wall behind her monitor.

“Dude,” Matt said, his tone aggrieved.

“Dude,” she said back, trying to resist the
pull of guilt. He had sent her half a dozen texts this weekend, and
she had only replied once. But whatever. She’d been busy. She could
take a weekend off, couldn’t she?

“So, you’re here.”

“Of course I am.”

He scoffed. “Um, yeah, there’s no ‘of course’
in this scenario. You’re never around anymore. When’s the last time
we hung out, just the two of us?”

“I don’t know. It hasn’t been that long.”

“It’s literally been weeks.” He shook his
head. “I never thought you would be the type to ghost your friends
just because you met someone.”

Kenzie folded her arms across her chest. “I
know I’ve been busy, but it’s not just because of Ava. There’s this
whole other part of my life. A part that you bugged me about for
years, if you’ll remember.”

“Um, yes, I remember.” He lowered his voice
to a semi-irate whisper. “I also recall that I was supposed to be
your Q, and then Sloane butted in and now I have to watch you
rescuing cats and fighting off-worlders on Twitter like everyone
else.”

Kenzie sighed and leaned back in her chair,
careful not to move too quickly. She and office chairs had a
love-hate relationship. She loved their wheels and soft cushions,
and they hated how she got all embroiled in a story and forgot to
temper her strength.

“You’re right,” she said after a moment. “I
have been neglecting our friendship, and I’m sorry. It’s just,
there’s so much all of a sudden, and I’m really struggling to
balance everything, Mattie.”

His angry stance shifted, and he nodded
slowly. “Yeah, I can see how being you might be overwhelming. I
just really miss you.”

“I miss you, too. I’m sorry about this
weekend. I actually went away with Ava.”

Matt squinted at her. “As in, a romantic
weekend getaway?”

She nodded.

“But I saw you-know-who on Twitter flitting
about the city. There was even a rescue of a lost Boy Scout troop
on Mt. Rainier!”

She tilted her head sideways and squinted
back, smiling a little. “I mean, are you sure it was you-know-who,
or could it have been someone who looks a lot like them?”

He blinked a few times, and Kenzie waited for
him to get it. Matt and Antonio were among the few people who knew
Galaxy Guy’s identity and power set. Sloane hadn’t been a fan of
including Antonio in the loop, but Matt had never been good at
keeping secrets from him, and besides, he needed someone to talk
to. Even though Antonio could be a “total jock tool,” as Sloane put
it, Kenzie trusted him. Mostly.

“No way,” Matt said, his smile breaking
through. “It was them?”

She nodded. “Pretty awesome, huh.”

He disappeared from view, and a moment later,
he was spinning his chair around the end of the cubicle divider to
join her at her desk. “All right,” he said, leaning an elbow on her
filing cabinet and cupping his chin in his hand. “Whose idea was
the getaway?”

Kenzie was only too happy to dish about the
surprise she’d planned for Ava, though she was careful to leave out
identifying details. She and Ava had agreed that by keeping the
location a secret, they were much more likely to be able to enjoy
the condo’s peace and quiet again in the future.

Matt rolled his eyes at her refusal to
specify their getaway location, but he sighed dreamily as she told
him about their musical theater experience, the condo’s giant
Jacuzzi tub, and the hours of alone time she and Ava had managed to
carve out together.

“Wow,” he said, his eyes far away, “you are
so lucky.”

“I know.” Kenzie’s smile was just as
dreamy.

She and Ava had stayed in Vancouver for most
of Sunday, too, despite the fog that had socked in the city, wispy
strands of ice crystals parting and coming back together silently
almost as if the world had turned into a winter wonderland
overnight. Kenzie had been up early as usual, and when Ava had come
up behind her in the kitchen and kissed the side of her neck, only
years of impulse control training had kept her from flinging Ava
across the room.

“Good morning,” her girlfriend had
murmured.

“Good morning.” Kenzie had turned and smiled
as she rested her arms on Ava’s shoulders, coffee mug still in one
hand. Ava’s hair was tousled and loose, and she was dressed in
sweatpants and a faded T-shirt. Kenzie felt privileged that she was
one of the only people in the world who got to see Ava like
this—genuine and relaxed, her usual armor noticeably absent.

“I missed you when I woke up,” Ava had said,
pouting prettily.

“Sorry—I wanted to let you sleep in. You
don’t get to very often.”

“True. In that case, thanks.” Ava had paused.
“Couldn’t you sleep?”

“Nope. Stupid metabolism. I wish a certain
amazingly brilliant scientist would develop a delayed-release type
of food.” She’d nudged Ava meaningfully.

“As much as a certain brilliant scientist
might want to pursue such a project,” Ava had said, “the reality is
that with only you and a handful of other people as potential
consumers, it wouldn’t be likely to yield positive marginal
values.”

Kenzie had laughed. “Sometimes I forget that
you’re a financial genius, too.”

“Pretty sure Hyperion’s board members and
investors would disagree with that assessment.”

“Only because they’re complete and utter
idiots.”

Ava had smiled. “Did you ever consider you
might be biased?”

“Absolutely.”

And then, unable to resist Ava’s smile, she’d
lowered her head and kissed her. After a respectable amount of
kissing, Kenzie had revealed the plate of pancakes and bacon
warming in the oven.

“Oh,” Ava had semi-gasped, “I knew there was
a reason you’re my favorite.”

Which wasn’t exactly an admission of love,
but Kenzie would take it. Maybe Ava hadn’t heard her confession the
night before. Maybe Kenzie hadn’t really said it out loud, all warm
and sated and pleasantly sleepy.

Whereas Kenzie had dragged them to all of her
favorite Vancouver sites on Saturday, they’d spent much of Sunday
eating, watching movies, and playing games on the resident gaming
machines that occupied one of the guest bedrooms. Kenzie was pretty
good at Overwatch, if she did say so herself, but Ava had
easily kicked her ass at Titanfall 2.

“How did you get so good at this?” Kenzie had
asked at one point.

“You didn’t think I was actually working all
those late nights at Hyperion, did you?”

“Wait, what?”

“I didn’t stop being an R&D nerd just
because I joined upper management,” Ava had said, her gaze still
fixed on the screen. “My old team had some epic network battles,
and after I moved, we set up semi-weekly game nights, since you
don’t have to be on the same network to play most games these
days.” Suddenly, an armed, mechanized spider appeared onscreen, and
her eyes had sharpened. She’d leaned forward, working the player
controls furiously. “Not on my watch, bucko!” And then she’d
cackled evilly as the spider robot exploded.

Kenzie had blinked, trying to decide if she
was horrified by Ava’s momentary resemblance to certain notorious
members of her family or simply turned on by her fierce badassery.
Really, she’d decided, it was a toss-up.

“No wonder Matt loves you,” she’d said,
picking her words purposefully.

“Aw, Matt loves me?” Ava’s face had softened
for another split second before the angry warrior look
returned.

“How could anyone not?” Kenzie had asked,
watching Ava to see if her expression changed. But it hadn’t. Maybe
she really had been asleep when Kenzie let that particular trio of
words slip.

“You guys are so cute,” Matt said now,
spinning around on his office chair almost deliriously.

And, yep. Kenzie wasn’t the only one who was
whipped.

“I don’t pay you to sit around and talk about
your personal lives,” a voice behind them said.

Kenzie glanced back to see Aaron, their boss,
scowling at them as he walked past.

“Sorry, just a cute kitten video,” Matt lied
glibly. “We’re actually working on a story about labor union
busting in Seattle’s tech industry.”

Aaron slowed momentarily. “Both of you? I
like it. Have a draft to me by the end of the week.” And with that,
he moved on, probably chasing after the latest greatest idea to
save traditional news from the current mass media extinction
event.

“What do you think?” Matt asked, holding up
his hand. “Partners in crime reporting?”

“Let’s do it,” Kenzie said, and slapped his
hand softly. He really was her best friend. She would have to do
better at including him.

#

She’d forgotten how fun it was to work a
story with Matt, bouncing ideas and tennis balls at each other
across her cubicle as they called their contacts in the industry in
a race to get someone to go on the record. Or, if not on the record
officially, at least anonymously. Aaron didn’t love anonymous
sources—too hard to corroborate—but the threat of retaliation was
real, and they would take what they could get. Capitalist abuse
went unpunished far too often in America.

“Maybe you should call your girlfriend and
have her order someone on her staff to talk to us,” Matt said at
one point.

“Ooh, good idea.” Kenzie grabbed her phone
and opened her text thread with Ava.

“I was joking!”

Kenzie shrugged and grinned at him. “I mean,
it can’t hurt.”

It couldn’t hurt mostly because Hyperion Tech
wasn’t the focus of their story. With a large share of its products
dependent on the American manufacturing sector, Hyperion was more
enmeshed with labor unions than the average Seattle tech firm. But
any excuse to reach out to Ava was a good excuse, in Kenzie’s
book.

“Hi,” she typed. “Who’s your labor union
manager and can I contact them?”

The reply came back almost immediately: “I’m
wearing a suit jacket, pencil skirt, Louboutins, and… Oh, you asked
about our union manager. Never mind. Contact card attached. Feel
free to drop my name. XOXO”

“She is so awesome,” Matt breathed
practically in Kenzie’s ear.

She spun away from him. “Dude, not okay!”

“Whatever. I have to live vicariously through
you and Antonio since obviously my dating game is excessively
lame.”

“You really shouldn’t call it your ‘dating
game.’ That’s, like, a TV show.”

“Point taken. I’m going to grab a coffee from
Cloudtastic. You want anything?”

“Um, duh.”

Kenzie gave him a detailed order and the
necessary cash to cover it before turning back to her computer to
email the labor union rep at Hyperion. They might have other
contacts who would prove useful to the story. Half of reporting was
schmoozing with potential sources and convincing them to share
juicy tidbits that no one outside their area of expertise had any
clue about. Actually, more than half of the job was asking people
for what you wanted: police reports, interviews, government
reports, photographs. The other portions involved conducting
original research and consuming enough food and stimulants to stay
awake to complete said research. Oh, and write and edit your copy,
of course.

She loved her job, even if the industry was
supposedly dying.

Email complete, she opened another tab to
track down local union contact info. But then her gaze drifted back
to her phone, and she turned it on, gazing briefly at the photo on
her lock screen. Mika had captured a shot of her and Ava smiling
into each other’s eyes at the pub before they’d even started
dating, and honestly, how had Matt not figured out they were into
each other? Heterosexism seemed the likely culprit.

She smiled as she remembered Ava’s text, and
then, inevitably, she found herself wondering what Ava was wearing
under her suit jacket and pencil skirt. Almost exactly twenty-four
hours earlier, she and Ava had been in the condo’s master bathroom,
which possessed the largest steam shower Kenzie had ever seen. With
tiled walls, dual shower heads, and a gray boulder that functioned
as a seat (which they put to excellent use, Kenzie seated with Ava
straddling her as the steam rose about them), the shower looked
like something out of an ECM magazine article. They’d considered
using the Jacuzzi tub instead, but Kenzie had been just as glad
they hadn’t taken the extra time to fill the tub.

After their shower, they’d stumbled back to
the bedroom where Ava had paused only long enough to restrain her
hair before pushing Kenzie onto the bed and crawling on top of her.
Again, they’d used the previous night’s approach—Ava on top of her,
teasing her mercilessly before whispering the same command as
before: roll over. And again, Kenzie had lost herself
to the insistent waves of sensation, carried into an
all-encompassing orgasm she hadn’t even known was possible.

No wonder humans fixated on sex so much. When
you were with someone you trusted and who knew
what they were doing, it was amazing. Buuuttt… probably not what
she should be thinking about at work, Kenzie realized, shoving her
phone away as if that would put the vivid memories out of her mind.
What was wrong with her? A few admittedly incredible orgasms and
suddenly she was a sex addict? Or maybe she was just an Ava addict.
That seemed entirely likely.

An email popped up in her inbox, and she
grabbed a pad of paper. Looked like there was a union rep in
Redmond who was willing to go on the record. Matt was going to be
psyched.

#

She never made it to the interview. That
afternoon, she and Matt were just getting ready to head to the East
Side in his aging but reliable Subaru Legacy when Kenzie heard it:
Panopticon’s audio beacon. She stopped on the sidewalk outside the
ECM building, eyes narrowed as she decoded the broadcast.

Matt paused beside her. “You’re being called
for a team-up right now, aren’t you?”

She glanced at him and nodded. “I’m sorry. Do
you want me to ask D’aman to cover it?”

“No. It’s fine. Go do your thing. I’ve got
the interview.”

“Okay bye thanks talk to you later!” And she
took off running for the nearest safe roof.

The team-up with Panopticon didn’t take long.
The beacon directed her to a wharf in the industrial section of
downtown, where a worker originally from the Tau Ceti system had
climbed to the top of one of the giant container cranes that locals
liked to claim served as inspiration for George Lucas’s AT-AT
walkers. The worker—a Tavaduan named Ran, according to D’aman—was
apparently threatening to jump. D’aman took lead, climbing
carefully along the crane’s arm toward the distraught off-worlder.
Their plan was to calm Ran’s mind, but the second the worker saw
Galaxy Guy headed their way, they tried to climb farther out along
the crane’s arm. Only in their haste, they slipped and tumbled off
the metal structure, plummeting toward ground.

As the crowd below gasped in horror, Kenzie
swooped into action. She had to time her approach just right in
order to avoid injuring the falling off-worlder, but her flight
skills had improved significantly in the past few months, and soon
she was carrying the delirious worker to the ground, where an
ambulance was waiting. One of the EMT’s looked disgusted by Ran’s
pale green neck gills, but the other was gentle and kind as she
spoke with D’aman about the worker’s biochemistry and how to treat
them for a likely drug overdose.

As the ambulance drove away, accompanied by a
squad car from Mika’s unit—more for the worker’s protection than
for official police business—Kenzie and D’aman took flight toward
downtown.

“Was it the same drug?” she asked as they
flew.

In response, D’aman sent her an image of dark
gray capsules almost identical to the ones they’d sketched for the
investigation, inscribed with the same white infinity symbol the
other pills had carried.

“Damn it!” Kenzie swore, putting on a short
burst of speed as they passed the Columbia Tower.

D’aman caught up easily. “Indeed.”

She shook her head. “I should have gone with
you this weekend.”

While she had been in Canada having
mind-blowing sex, D’aman had traveled to Texas to follow up on a
lead from one of the family members of a missing refugee.
Apparently, the off-worlder in question had tried to convince a
sibling to try a new drug that was making the rounds of the alien
bar circuit. Kenzie had almost canceled the getaway—Ava hadn’t
known what she was planning, so postponing wouldn’t have been that
big of a deal—but D’aman had insisted they didn’t need her.

“No,” they said now, “you shouldn’t have. You
were where you needed to be. There is nothing more you could have
done with me other than disappoint Ava.”

Admittedly, missing out on the weekend in
Vancouver would have been greatly disappointing. A memory of Ava
pressed against her back flashed into Kenzie’s mind, and she
quickly strengthened her mental walls. D’aman would never have
listened in without her permission, but she didn’t want to take any
chances with what would have been an embarrassingly X-rated
broadcast.

“I have to get back to work,” she said as
they neared Belltown. “Talk to you later?”

“See you soon,” D’aman said, and gave her a
small salute before veering in the general direction of their
massage studio in Ballard. Or maybe they were returning to their
mid-day patrol. It was a lovely summer’s day, perfect flying
weather. People who thought it rained all the time in Seattle had
clearly never visited during the summertime.

Kenzie made a brief stop at the original safe
roof, and then she flew higher, out of reach of any area security
cameras, eventually crashing down in the middle of the park between
the Seattle Zoo and Green Lake. Other than a few bunnies who
sprinted away, she didn’t seem to have disturbed anyone. Ducking
behind a rock wall, she quickly changed back into her civilian
clothes, slipped the Taammeni headband on, and emerged from the
forest looking like someone else entirely. She was pretty sure
Sloane would approve of the added security step. And if she didn’t,
tough.

Why did it feel like she had to give up her
family to have Ava? Why did her family expect—but no. She stopped
the spiral before it could get started. Those sorts of questions
relied on a binary that she hoped would prove false. Obviously, she
had been around humans too long.

By the time she caught a bus to ECM and
settled back into research mode, Ran’s dramatic mid-air rescue was
all over social media. She knew better than to read the comments,
but she couldn’t do much on her story until Matt returned, and once
she started scrolling, it was difficult to stop. Most of the posts
on the Super Seattleite hashtag were positive, but some from
obvious bots laughed at the Tavaduan’s mental state and jeered that
Galaxy Girl should have let the Tavaduan splat. Or better yet, why
didn’t they both go back to their home planets where they
belonged?

This was typical xenophobic swill, and
actually on the mild side compared to some of the abuse Kenzie had
read. And yet, it hit harder today for some reason. She actually
felt sick as she read the jokes about Ran and their neck gills, as
she absorbed the callous cruelty in the remarks about their
difference. Most of the time she could forget how much some humans
hated people like her because she could pass as a native of Earth.
But for people like Ran and Laquine and Melodie, passing wasn’t an
option. For them, humans were always a potential danger.

Alia, what she wouldn’t give to find a
place where no one cared about any of this. It was exhausting,
fighting these wars inside her head and heart day after day—and she
was one of the lucky ones.

“You okay?”

She glanced up to find Matt standing at the
edge of her cubicle, looking down at her with concerned eyes. And
all at once, she realized she was crying. Geez, hormonal much? She
didn’t get a monthly period like human women did—one of the
benefits of being genetically modified—but her body still went
through regular hormonal cycles. Did sex affect her body
differently? If only there were someone she could ask.

She swiped at the dampness on her cheeks and
shook her head. “No. I mean, yes, I’m fine. Just reading the
comments.”

Matt winced. “Sorry. That can’t be easy.”

She cleared her throat and turned to face him
fully. “So, tell me what you got.”

“Are you sure? We can do this tomorrow.”

She shook her head determinedly. “No. Let’s
keep working. It’ll help.”

He nodded and pulled his chair around to her
space again, notebook in hand. Like her, he was old school and
carried paper and pen wherever he went. He used the recording app
on his phone and backed up his files to the cloud, of course, just
like she did, but their professors had taught them to always be
prepared. Besides, he was an Eagle Scout, and his father had been
his troop leader. Preparation was in his blood.

The rest of the afternoon flew past, and soon
Kenzie was headed home, trying to decide if she was up for her
pre-dinner patrol or not. She was leaning toward not when she
paused outside her apartment door, peering inside to survey the
interior. Wait. Was that…? She almost turned to go, but then she
heard her sister sigh despondently as she dropped her head into one
hand. The other clutched a half-empty bottle of microbrew, which
was a good sign. Half a beer wouldn’t make Sloane even close to
tipsy, let alone trigger the angry drunk she had been known to
morph into.

Against her will, Kenzie’s empathy gene
kicked in, and she unlocked the door and stepped inside. Shoes off,
she moved down the hall at a more sedate pace than usual. “What are
you doing here?” she asked as she neared the great room.

Sloane looked up, her brow furrowed. “I
thought you were only going away for one night.”

“My weekend was great,” Kenzie said. “Thanks
for asking.” She turned and headed for the kitchen cabinet where
she kept her bottle of alien alcohol, another gift from
Panopticon’s evidence lockers. If they were going to do this, then
Sloane didn’t get to be the only one drinking.

“Jesus, Kenzie,” Sloane said, setting her
beer on the coffee table with more force than was necessary, “I
don’t understand why you’re being like this.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you think my
girlfriend might be a criminal mastermind?” Kenzie said, pouring
herself a generous shot of Bandal rum.

Sloane rose. “Don’t be absurd. I gave you
those headbands to keep you and Ava safe. How is that not me
being supportive?”

“That’s not the only reason you stole the
headbands.” She took a sip, wincing as the off-world substance
burned the inside of her throat.

“What are you even talking about?”

“You gave them to us so that I would feel
like I had to let your ridiculous vendetta against Ava slide.”

“It’s not ridiculous!” She raked her hands
through her short hair. “And it’s not a vendetta, Kenzie. She isn’t
safe for you, and you’re not safe for her. Are you really going to
argue otherwise?”

Kenzie ignored the question. “So, you don’t
think she’s in cahoots with her brother?”

Sloane let her hands fall. “I don’t think
she’s in cahoots with her brother.”

“But you also don’t think she isn’t, do
you?”

Sloane sighed. “I don’t know that she
isn’t, Kenzie, but that’s not the same as thinking she is.”

“Do you even hear yourself? You know what? I
don’t even care. Just go.” Kenzie waved at the hallway. “Just get
the fuck out of here.” She didn’t normally swear, especially not at
Sloane, and the words felt blunt and unwieldy in her mouth.

Sloane folded her arms across her chest. “No.
I’m not going anywhere.”

The urge to forcibly remove her from the
apartment swept through Kenzie, and she closed her eyes, waiting
for it to pass. She and Sloane hadn’t fought like this since they
were teenagers, back when Sloane was still hugely embarrassed to be
seen with someone so profoundly uncool. Someone who picked up
strays, both human and otherwise, and brought them home to look
after. Someone who still felt and acted like a stray herself.

“You can’t just shut me out, Kenzie. I get
that you’re pissed at me, but I’m your sister.”

Her eyes flew open. “Yeah, well, she’s my
girlfriend.”

“I know, and I’m happy you found someone, I
really am. But it’s hard not to be suspicious. I’m an intelligence
analyst. Assessing risk is literally what I do, and the optics here
are rough. You know they are. I mean, these are the Westbrooks
we’re talking about. They’re not your run-of-the-mill
villains.”

“Ava isn’t a villain at all!”

“That may be true, but she has access to
Nick, and he and Sentinel have access to her. Which means they have
access to you, too, Kenz.”

“I get that,” Kenzie said grudgingly, because
she honestly did. “But you have to stop being suspicious of her to
my face. And to hers, too.”

Sloane expelled a short, sharp breath. “Mika
said the same thing. It’s just, I’ve been looking out for you for
so long. It’s hard to stop.”

“You don’t have to stop looking out for me,
Sloane, but you do have to let me make my own decisions, even if
you think they’re wrong. Respect isn’t a one-way street.”

“I know that,” Sloane said, unfolding her
arms and dropping onto one of the kitchen stools. “Look, I’m sorry
if I’ve been taking my anxiety out on Ava. I know she doesn’t
deserve it, but it terrifies me to think of what could happen if
Sentinel were to get their hands on you.”

“Thank you,” Kenzie said, her voice stilted.
She had learned not to say “it’s okay” in response to an apology if
the original affront really wasn’t okay, and in this case, it
wasn’t. Sloane could think whatever she wanted, but when it came to
how she treated Ava, Kenzie wasn’t giving her any wiggle room.

“And can I try to be better about Ava,”
Sloane added. “But will that be enough for you? Because I’m not
going to be perfect, given who she’s related to. There’s no way I
can be.”

“Finally, she admits it,” Kenzie said, and
took another sip of her rum.

“I’m serious.” Sloane held her gaze. “I don’t
want to lose you, Kenzie.”

After a moment, Kenzie relented. “You’re not
losing me, Sloane. You just have to figure out how to share me with
Ava, because this relationship is happening. Like, really
happening.”

“So, you had the girlfriend talk, then?”
Sloane asked, batting her eyelashes in the same way Kenzie did when
she wanted to ingratiate herself with someone. In fact, that was
probably where she’d learned it.

She tried to resist, but she found herself
nodding as she leaned against the kitchen counter, glass cradled in
her hands. “It was actually kind of funny.”

“I like funny.”

“That makes sense, since you’re kind of—”

“Funny-looking,” Sloane finished for her,
smiling. Jane’s family were ranchers, and Sloane’s grandfather had
been a great trickster, full of what Sloane referred to as
“granddad” jokes. Kenzie had only met him a few times before he
died, but the rest of the family kept his memory alive through his
many bad jokes and quirky sayings, always delivered with the same
affectionate smile Sloane was gazing at her with now.

Kenzie couldn’t squash the chuckle that
forced itself out of her. She was still pissed at Sloane, but they
were family. Despite their differences, Sloane was her sister in
every sense of the word. Even in the old days when Kenzie
embarrassed her without meaning to—without even trying—she’d known
Sloane had her back. Maybe that was why the previous morning, when
Kenzie had awakened in Vancouver at her usual early hour, her first
thought had been to call Sloane. Instead, she’d left Ava sleeping
and made herself a cup of coffee, only to realize that the view of
the fog-encased bay reminded her of her family’s home in
Bellingham. No getting away from the Henderson-Shepherds,
apparently.

It was ridiculous to feel homesick only an
hour from home, but Kenzie hadn’t missed Bellingham or Seattle the
previous morning as much as she’d found herself missing the people
who made her feel at home on Earth. Jane could be difficult at
times, but she had never rejected Kenzie before. Always in the
past, the mother-daughter fracture had come between Jane and
Sloane, while Kenzie and Benjamin were content to build furniture
together in the garage and tiptoe around the other two whenever a
storm was brewing. Sloane had raged passionately each time she and
Jane had a fight, but Kenzie had never realized how awful it would
feel to have her adopted mother look at her as if she had become
someone unrecognizable. Worse, someone unlovable.

Jane would come around, wouldn’t she? She
would have to if she wanted to maintain a relationship, because not
only did Kenzie have no intention of giving up her role as Galaxy
Girl, but it turned out she was in love with Ava.

That was the real reason she had longed to
call Sloane: to share how amazing the night had been and to ask if
she thought Kenzie might have ruined everything by letting her
truth slip. Sloane had long worried about her self-imposed
celibacy. She’d never said she thought Kenzie should have
a boyfriend; after all, her own experiences on that front hadn’t
been especially notable. But she’d made it clear that she worried
Kenzie was holding herself apart from anyone who might care about
her as a form of penance—which, Sloane had insisted, she most
definitely did not owe her lost friends and
family.

“Are you sure you’re not isolating yourself
out of survivor’s guilt?” she’d asked after Kenzie broke things off
with a guy she’d dated briefly after Chris.

“Of course not,” Kenzie had replied. She
hadn’t been. Or at least, she’d been pretty sure she wasn’t.

Months later, when Kenzie told her what had
happened with Antonio, Sloane had hugged her and whispered, “You
don’t have to be alone forever, you know. Your Zattalian family
would want you to be happy.”

She just wasn’t sure her biological parents
would want her to be happy with Ava. Her memories of them had grown
soft around the edges like an old Earth photo album, but she could
still remember the force of her father’s personality, the heft of
her mother’s intellect. She doubted they would have approved of her
relationship with a human woman, particularly the sister of the man
who was the face of the Earth First movement.

Realistically, she reminded herself now, it
didn’t matter what her parents would have wanted because they
weren’t here. Sloane, Jane, Benjamin, Matt, Antonio, and now Ava
were her chosen family. The thing about chosen family, though, was
that you could always unchoose each other if the going got too
hard. Blood family could do the same, of course. Look at Nick and
Ava. Sometimes, you had to detach to stay safe.

“So?” Sloane prompted, still watching her
with that familiar half-smile. “What’s the funny story?”

Kenzie gazed back at her, fully aware that in
the sibling department, she’d gotten lucky. Sloane was nothing like
Nick. In fact, her issue was the opposite of his: she cared almost
too much. That over-abundant care was why Kenzie found herself
caving and confessing everything to Sloane as they sipped their
drinks in her studio’s warm, bright great room. Well, not
everything. She and Sloane had never really talked much about sex,
but if Kenzie was going to tell anyone about losing her
virginity—and she no longer had any doubts on that score—it would
be Sloane.

Her sister was just as empathetic and mildly
crass as ever, and she seemed to know exactly when to tease Kenzie
and when to listen quietly, when to smack her shoulder and when to
touch her hand comfortingly. Like when Kenzie told her about
whispering her confession when she was pretty sure Ava was
asleep.

“Has she mentioned it?” Sloane asked.

“No. I even tried testing her a couple of
times, but she didn’t seem to notice.” Kenzie covered her face with
both hands for a brief moment. “Oh, god, I ruined everything,
didn’t I?”

“I don’t know. Did she run screaming from you
the morning after? Oh, no, that’s right, you guys stayed another
day. So, yeah, I’m going to have to go with no, you didn’t ruin
everything.”

Kenzie laughed a little. “Point taken.” She
paused, gazing at her sister. “This is nice.”

“It is,” Sloane said. “Thank you,
Kenzie.”

“For what?”

“For being the best addition to the family I
could ever have hoped for.”

Kenzie felt herself flush and glanced down.
“You’re only saying that because you’re glad to have a fellow queer
person in the family.”

“Yes,” Sloane deadpanned, “yes, I am.” When
Kenzie looked up, laughing again, Sloane reached across the butcher
block countertop and caught her hand. “Seriously, though, I love
you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Duh.”

Kenzie cast her hand away and reached for her
phone. “Do you want pizza?”

“Totally. But don’t you have to do your
patrol thing?”

“I think Seattle can survive for one night
without Galaxy Girl.”

“Dude, not in the third person again.”

“Why are people always against Kenzie talking
about herself in the third person? She doesn’t understand what the
big deal is.”

Sloane rolled her eyes and slid off the bar
stool. “I’ll show her what the big deal is,” she said
threateningly. But she only stepped around Kenzie and reached for
the refrigerator door, no doubt to help herself to another of
Matt’s beers.

Kenzie would have to hang out with Matt
sometime soon, too, but tonight was for sisters. Everyone and
everything else could wait.

Chapter Eleven

Having a superpowered girlfriend came in handy
when it came time for Ava to move into her new condo. Or, rather,
the holding company’s new corporate residence. She knew that if
anyone truly wanted to find out where she’d moved, it wouldn’t
require that much effort. Still, she wanted them to have to expend
at least a little energy. Making her enemies work for their
payoff was about principles.

Watching Kenzie lift boxes of books as if
they didn’t weigh anything, on the other hand, had nothing to do
with principle. Ava could admit that her thirst for Kenzie’s body
hadn’t subsided one bit since their getaway the previous weekend.
In fact, it had grown stronger, which was how they ended up
breaking in half of the rooms in her new place while moving her in.
That night, with her apartment still in chaos, she and Kenzie lay
on matching chaise lounges on the private patio watching airplanes
track overhead while the sun slowly sank over the Olympic
Mountains. They were still recovering from their latest sexual
encounter, and Ava was certain that tonight, for once, she would
sleep soundly. In her own bedroom—she couldn’t help but be
excited about that. No more hotel rooms that any number of people
had access to, and no more sleeping in Kenzie’s loft. While she
liked Kenzie’s apartment, Ava was accustomed to considerably more
room than the studio offered.

Beside her, Kenzie looked up from her
phone—probably playing one of her favorite word games, as usual—and
gave her a sweet smile. Ava smiled back and gazed out over the
beautiful view, watching a white and green ferry wend its way
across Elliott Bay. She was really starting to feel settled in
Seattle. Not even Antonio’s low-key suspicion at Game Night the
night before had been enough to bring her down. He was more envious
than jealous, if Ava had to bet. She couldn’t blame him. Kenzie was
incredible, so much so that despite his obvious feelings for her,
he had apparently accepted without complaint his role as one of her
closest friends. In his shoes, Ava would have done anything to keep
Kenzie in her life, too.

Everyone else at Game Night, which Kenzie had
insisted on hosting, had been more welcoming, even Sloane who Ava
had been somewhat worried might give her the evil eye because real
talk: Grumpy 1950s dad types are usually sexist assholes.
Fortunately, Kenzie’s Earth sister’s resemblance to the twentieth
century stereotype didn’t extend to shotgun weddings or shovel
talks. She’d actually hugged Ava tightly in greeting and murmured
in her ear, “Be careful with her, okay?”

Ava had hugged
her back and whispered, “I will. I promise.” And if her eyes had
gotten a little brighter than usual, she wasn’t the only one.
Kenzie, busy setting out napkins for the many snacks, had beamed in
their direction, clearly listening in on the exchange. Ava knew
that the sisters had reconnected the night after they got back from
Vancouver, a reunion she whole-heartedly supported. Ava never
wanted to come between Kenzie and Sloane, especially when she was
already the reason Kenzie’s relationship with her adopted parents
had become strained.

D’aman, appearing as their impressive,
slightly intimidating self instead of as Kenzie’s diminutive
neighbor, had subjected Ava to one of the more piercing stares she
could remember receiving before grasping both of her hands and
telling her how glad they were to meet her. Matt had seemed just as
excited as ever to see her, and Mika had been her typical warm
self. Ava was relieved Sloane’s girlfriend appeared to like her.
For some reason, she kept channeling an image of the blonde as the
captain of her high school softball team, pretty and smart and a
little bit cruel to the kids and hometown she couldn’t wait to
leave behind. Ava didn’t know if Mika had even played softball, but
the chances seemed relatively high.

The only genuinely tense moment of the entire
night had been between her and Kenzie, when Ava had lifted Kenzie’s
drink and sniffed the contents. “What kind of rum did you say this
was, again?”

Immediately, Kenzie had grabbed the glass
from her hand, movements faster than Ava’s eye could track. “I told
you, Ava, it’s not safe for humans! It could kill you!”

“I know,” she’d said, semi-annoyed. “I wasn’t
going to drink it. It has a distinctive fragrance, though, doesn’t
it?”

“I think that’s the ‘poisonous to humans’
part you’re noticing,” Kenzie had replied, her tone snippier than
Ava was used to.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said, squashing the urge
to roll her eyes. She knew Kenzie was just worried about her.

“No, I’m sorry,” Kenzie had said, reaching
out to grasp her hand. “I shouldn’t have snapped.”

In the background, Sloane had rolled
her eyes, but Ava didn’t care. She was enjoying tipsy, handsy
Kenzie too much to let one small argument bother her.

Once the games had begun, Ava and Kenzie had
proceeded to demolish pretty much everyone at nearly every game, so
all in all she’d considered the evening a success. There was a
reason the Westbrook family motto was, “There is no such thing as
failure.” Or as close as you could get to that sentiment in Latin,
anyway.

She’d stayed behind “to help clean up,” a
somewhat flimsy excuse she was pretty sure they didn’t need,
judging from the poorly concealed snorts when Kenzie stuttered it
out. The door had barely closed behind D’aman, Sloane, and Mika
when Kenzie had started apologizing for Antonio: “He just needs
time. I promise, he’ll be better.”

“It’s okay,” Ava had said, placing the
leftover napkins in a drawer in the kitchen island. “He has good
reason to be wary of my family.”

“Yeah, but not of you.” Kenzie paused in
putting away the few remaining food items. “Maybe I should uninvite
him until he can behave better.”

“Please don’t do that.” Ava had crossed the
room and stopped in front of her. “I can’t fault him for wanting to
look out for you.”

“I’m not some damsel in distress!”

“That’s the last thing anyone would ever call
you.” Ava had slipped her arms around Kenzie’s neck and tugged her
head down for a kiss, sucking on her bottom lip until her shoulders
lost their rigid shape.

“All right,” Kenzie had said a few minutes
later after Ava had kissed the anger well and truly out of her. “He
can keep coming to Game Night. I guess.”

Ava had only smiled and pulled her toward the
spiral staircase, more than ready to be done talking about Kenzie’s
fellow reporter.

Now, an image of Kenzie smiling at her in bed
that morning, sunlight turning her sleep- and sex-tousled hair
honey-gold, drifted into Ava’s consciousness, and she stretched
languorously. But it wasn’t just that she was having marvelous sex
with an honest-to-goddess superhero, though admittedly that
fantastical development was positively impacting her brain
chemistry. It was that, in general, the pieces of her Seattle life
seemed to be falling into place. Over the past few weeks,
Hyperion’s stock numbers had been quietly rebounding from the Guild
House attack, and Victoria was still MIA, which meant that work was
going decently. On the personal front, she was falling for Kenzie
more deeply by the day, and Kenzie’s friends and family appeared to
be adjusting to their relationship, with a few exceptions. For
once, Ava was almost (dare she say it?) happy.

And yet, even as the realization settled over
her, she couldn’t shake the sense of time slipping through her
hands like water, the feeling that something wicked was coming this
way. Maybe because when your last name was Westbrook, it almost
always was.

In hindsight, that thought was probably a
jinx. Ava was still mentally trying on the word happiness
for size when, beside her, Kenzie sat straight up, eyes scanning
the horizon in a way Ava had learned to dread.

“Is it the audio beacon?” she asked, her
contentment rapidly fading.

Brow furrowed in concentration, Kenzie
nodded.

“Do you have to go?”

“I don’t know.” Kenzie’s head tilted, and
then suddenly she gasped, her face actually seeming to go pale.
“No,” she said. “It can’t be.” Her gaze shifted to Ava, her eyes
large and luminous in the light from the setting sun.

The back of Ava’s neck prickled. “What is
it?” she asked, but somehow, she already knew what Kenzie was going
to say.

“It’s your brother, Ava. He escaped from
prison.”

She closed her eyes, the last of her orgasmic
bliss evaporating as a chill enveloped her. Nick had escaped.
Damn it. Her murderous brother had escaped. And yet,
she had almost been expecting this. Nick’s followers weren’t about
to let him rot in maximum security. Of course they’d found a way to
free him.

“Do you have to go?” she asked again, her
voice so small she barely recognized it.

“Do you need me to stay?”

Ava looked into Kenzie’s worried eyes.
Yes, she wanted to say. Of course I need you to stay.
But she forced a smile and shook her head. “I’ll be fine. Go do
what you need to do.”

“Your security team is outside, right?”

She nodded.

“I’ll be back as soon as possible,” Kenzie
said, pressing a kiss to Ava’s cheek. And then she raced away,
heading inside to take the elevator down to the street because they
had agreed that flying to or from the condo was too dangerous,
except in the case of an emergency. Or, and this was Kenzie’s
exception that Ava was still on the fence about, in the darkest
part of the night.

As she watched the sun slip away, Ava wanted
to scream because how the hell could Nick be a free man after
everything he had done? But she knew if she gave in to the urge to
vent her rage, Kenzie would come speeding back, ready to save her
from nonexistent danger. Instead, she sat where she was, hands
clenched so tightly her fingernails carved crescent moons into her
skin, her eyes blurring with unshed tears.

She could have opened her laptop and fallen
down the social media rabbit hole, but it was bound to be a very
dark hole tonight. Her best course of action, she decided, rising
resolutely from the recliner, was to occupy her mind by focusing on
the many move-in projects competing for her attention. If she could
only stay busy enough, then maybe she wouldn’t have to face the
fact that in one fell swoop, her worst fears had been confirmed:
Her brother’s followers were both organized and connected, and
might well come after her again. And if they came after her, Kenzie
would be in trouble—either as her presumably human girlfriend or as
her unregistered off-worlder girlfriend. Either way, the target on
her back had just grown a hundred-fold, and there was nothing Ava
could do to protect her.

She was in the bedroom organizing her shoe
closet when a key turned in the outer door, signaling what she
assumed was her girlfriend’s return. That was strange—Kenzie had
barely been gone a half hour. Her Panopticon missions rarely took
less than an hour, and once, the week before the Vancouver trip, it
had taken Kenzie, D’aman, and Sloane’s strike team more than five
hours to corral an alien’s pet that had suffered an allergic
reaction to a native Earth plant that caused it to grow to ten
times its usual size. Social media sites had been practically
delirious with the amount of amusing video snippets that particular
escapade had generated.

“Kenzie?” she called. It was her, wasn’t it?
Her security team had instructions to let Kenzie and only Kenzie in
without contacting Ava first.

“Hello, Ava,” a voice that was definitely not
Kenzie’s said, and then, as Ava’s throat closed around a scream, a
figure materialized in the bedroom doorway: Kenzie, clad in a
similar but different outfit than the one she’d been wearing when
she left, with an expression on her face Ava had never seen because
that was not Kenzie.

Ava leapt to her feet, backing away. What the
actual fuck?

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the person who was
gallivanting as her girlfriend said. And then they flickered, and
instead of Kenzie, D’aman stood before her, their horns glinting in
the overhead light, wings folded against their back. “Don’t worry,”
D’aman said in their calm way. “Kenzie is well. She asked me to
stay with you until she returns. Is that agreeable to you?”

She’d asked…? Oh. Well. That actually made
sense. Still, she was going to kill Kenzie for scaring her like
that.

Ava rose and brushed her hands against her
yoga pants. “Of course,” she said, trying to smile. “Can I get you
something to drink?”

“A glass of water would be appreciated.”

Ava led them to the kitchen and poured Brita
water into a pint glass from a local brewery, part of a
housewarming gift from Sloane and Mika. They’d dropped by earlier
in what now felt like an entirely different day.

“Thank you.” D’aman took a sip and glanced
around the apartment. “You have a beautiful home.”

“Thanks,” Ava said automatically, trying not
to stare at the horns. Or wings. And then, because she didn’t
believe in ignoring elephants in rooms, she added, “Why did Kenzie
send you?”

“To watch over you.”

“Yes, but I mean… Am I in danger?” Maybe she
should have taken a look at ECM’s website, after all.

They blinked and considered her. “You have
been the subject of multiple assassination attempts in the past,
have you not?”

Assassination attempts—the phrasing
sounded simultaneously clinical and terrifying, and Ava crossed her
arms over her chest, hugging herself reflexively. “Well, yes, but
that was back in New York.”

“Nevertheless,” D’aman said, and inclined
their head toward the patio where Ava and Kenzie had been relaxing
what now seemed like forever ago. “May I set up a perimeter
outdoors? I feel it offers the best vantage point while I am
here.”

Ava recognized evasion when she saw it, but
what was she going to do, wrestle an invulnerable ancient being
from a galaxy far, far away? “Make yourself at home. I’m going to
get back to unpacking.”

While D’aman shapeshifted into a human form
that could pass for part of her security team and proceeded to do
whatever was involved in “setting up a perimeter,” Ava went back to
the bedroom and continued to unpack. She was distracted, though,
and after catching herself placing clothing in the drawers of the
built-in desk instead of her new Pottery Barn dresser or
armoire—twice—she gave up and threw herself down on the bed, hands
over her eyes. Why had she allowed the universe to know she was
beginning to feel happy with Kenzie? Events were already beginning
to spin out of control, and now Nick and his Sentinel lackeys would
go on another devastating killing spree to try to prevent Earth
from joining the Alliance, and everything Ava cared about would be
taken from her. Because whether it was safe or wise (it was
neither), she loved Kenzie Shepherd.

Hadn’t she learned long before now that she
didn’t get to keep the people she loved? The old dread rose inside,
swooping over her and sinking its talons deep into the wound that
had never quite healed, and suddenly she was back in the West
Village apartment she and her mother had shared the first five
years of her life, small but comfortable, the only true family home
she’d ever known. It was Christmas Eve, and—according to the
account she’d later learned from the General—the toy store had
called because the doll Ava had asked for from Santa was back in
stock. The store wasn’t far from their apartment, so her mother had
asked a neighbor to babysit for an hour.

“I’ll be back soon, honey,” she remembered
her mother saying with a smile and a kiss. And then she was gone,
suddenly and irrevocably, killed by a drunk driver who’d crashed
his car onto the sidewalk near the toy store. Ava had spent the
next week in temporary foster care until the Westbrooks returned
from a holiday trip to Paris, and then she’d moved in with them
just in time for the new year.

She’d learned then that sometimes people left
you through no fault of their own. No one, not even the person who
loved you the most, could be expected to stick around forever.

Her phone buzzed—Bea’s ring tone. Just for a
minute she considered not answering. But then Bea might do
something crazy like show up at her door, and if anything happened
to Bea because of her… “Hi,” she said, and cleared her scratchy
throat.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” Bea said. “I just
found out. Did you have any idea what your evil stepmother was
planning?”

Her evil stepmother? Ava sat up and stared at
herself in the mirror on the inside of the open armoire door. “Are
you talking about Amelia?”

“Well, yeah, unless the General had another
wife stashed away—sorry. I just heard how that sounded. Are you
okay?”

“That depends. What did she do this
time?”

There was silence, and then Bea said, “Oh,
sweetie, I thought you would have heard by now. Amelia’s the one
who broke Nick out of prison.”

Amelia broke Nick out of prison? “But
I just saw her,” Ava said. The irrational words were barely out
when she added, “Not that that means anything, obviously.”

She rubbed a fist against her forehead,
feeling like an idiot as she struggled to absorb the new
information. It made a sick sort of sense that Amelia would be the
mastermind of the prison break. Freeing Nick was all she’d ever
wanted, as evidenced by the multiple appeals she’d financed after
his sentencing trial. She genuinely believed that he was a hero
trying to save the human race from off-worlders who would destroy
the earth, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Are they sure?” she asked.

“There’s pretty solid video evidence. Unless
there was shapeshifting or some sort of deep fake involved? I mean,
I guess that’s always possible.”

“Possible, but not probable.”

Bea hummed in sympathetic agreement.

Restless energy surged through her body, and
Ava rose and headed for the kitchen. She needed a drink.

“Are you okay?” Bea asked again.

“Nope.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

As Ava poured herself a generous serving of
Scotch—setting up the new bar had been a priority that afternoon—a
slight movement on the balcony caught her attention. All at once,
D’aman’s presence took on a whole new spin. Were they here to
protect her or to keep her under surveillance? Were they reading
her mind right now to ascertain her possible involvement with her
brother’s escape? And who had suggested they monitor her, anyway:
Panopticon, or Kenzie? Ava clutched the tumbler tightly to her
chest. The Shepherd-Hendersons had made their suspicions clear, but
the idea that Kenzie might think she was on the wrong side of
history felt like a literal gut punch.

Ava took a sip of Scotch and closed her eyes
as the liquid heat traveled through her. She was jumping to
conclusions, wasn’t she? The evidence didn’t warrant that line of
thought. Yet.

“Do you want company?” Bea asked. “I could be
on the next flight—”

“No,” Ava said quickly. “Please, just stay
away for now. I couldn’t take it if… Just stay put, okay? I don’t
want to get you embroiled in my family’s shitty crime drama.”

“Isn’t it a little late to worry about
that?”

“I’m serious, Bea. You have a child and a
husband who wouldn’t be able to face life without you.”

“But what if I can’t face life without you?”
Bea asked, her voice wobbly.

Ava’s throat tightened. “I’ll be okay. Kenzie
sent Galaxy Guy to look after me, and I feel totally safe with
them.” This was actually the truth. Even if D’aman was only here to
keep an eye on her for Panopticon, their presence was reassuring.
Unnerving, yes, but comforting, too.

“Well, okay,” Bea said, reluctantly. “But
next time, I’m getting on the plane first and asking permission
later.”

“I love you,” Ava said, smiling through the
tears blurring her vision.

“I love you, too. Don’t die, okay?”

“I won’t.” But she wasn’t sure either of them
believed her.

They hung up a minute later, and Ava’s phone
almost immediately blew up with texts from Matt, Madi, and
Angelica. Matt’s text was sweet, but the other two had written in
code from burner phones. The general gist was that they needed to
meet in person, and soon.

Ava thoroughly agreed. Now, if only her
current unofficial security detail would allow her to leave her
apartment. One way to find out.

She changed into something a bit more
professional than yoga pants, twisted her hair into a messy bun,
and applied a light layer of make-up. Bag and shoes in hand, she
opened the balcony door and caught D’aman’s attention. “I need to
get to work to deal with the fallout of my brother’s escape. Are
you coming, or do you have someplace else to be?”

“Kenzie was very clear that she wanted you to
remain sheltering in place,” D’aman said, their voice gravelly.

Ava lifted a challenging eyebrow and
waited.

“But, of course, Miss Westbrook, I am happy
to accompany you to Hyperion if that is where you decide your
energy is best spent.”

Ava wasn’t sure if she heard a slight air of
judgment because D’aman had intended her to or if her mind was
playing tricks on her. Given how destabilized she felt in the wake
of Amelia’s treachery, probably the latter.

“Excellent,” she said, and waved D’aman
inside.

“I’ll just…” they said, and a moment later,
Kenzie was standing in their place, blinking back at her.

Ava wished she had thought to finish her
drink, but then again, it was probably just as well she hadn’t.

By the time they reached the underground
garage, Ramón had the company car Ava had requested—a Range Rover
with tinted windows and bulletproof glass—waiting. While she
realized that a gas-guzzling behemoth that only got twenty mpg was
a step backward in the fight against climate change, she also knew
that she couldn’t innovate the planet away from disaster if she was
dead. Priorities.

“How are you?” Ramón asked, eyeing her
closely.

“I’ve been better,” she admitted, aware of
Ramón’s gaze lingering on an unusually silent Kenzie. She cleared
her throat, drawing his attention back to her. “Any news about
Hyperion?”

“The building is secure. We’ve got extra
teams sweeping floor by floor to make sure there are no issues
after tonight’s events.”

“All right, then. Let’s get going.”

“Where to?”

“Hyperion, please.”

For a moment, she thought he would refuse,
but he only murmured into the communication device on his wrist and
shifted the car into drive. Soon the Range Rover was emerging like
a shark, silent and dark, onto Seattle’s busy streets, wending its
way alongside the Sculpture Park where Ava and Kenzie had had their
first date. It wasn’t even that long ago that they had eaten dinner
at the sculpture that spelled out “love & loss.” Now she
wondered if their choice of seating had been prophetic. The entire
set-up of their relationship was cursed. Ava’s family were
anti-alien terrorists while Kenzie’s were pro-alien intellectuals,
that politically pure type of human who would never cease regarding
Ava with distrust. She had, after all, been raised within a family
that had done its best to impress their own darkest bias into her
impressionable mind. She could claim not to be like them all she
wanted, but at some level, didn’t she have to be?

In college, her friends had all taken the
implicit bias test that Harvard had made available online,
comparing their results and vowing to work to rid themselves of
learned biases. Ava had taken a few of the offered modules,
unsurprised to find that as a lesbian she strongly preferred women
to men and queer people to heterosexuals, that as a white person
raised within America’s imperialist, white supremacist culture she
had an implicit bias toward people of European descent. But she’d
never worked up the courage to test her human/alien prejudice.
After being raised by the Thornton-Westbrooks, she didn’t have to
take an online test to know where her implicit bias lay in that
area.

Speaking of Thorntons… She had barely settled
in her office, her security team in the hall outside and D’aman
ensconced in the shadows on her balcony, when an impatient knock
she immediately recognized sounded on the door: Victoria. Why was
she in the office on a Saturday night?

“Come in,” Ava said, steeling herself for her
mother’s cousin’s smug face.

Sure enough, Hyperion’s CEO strolled in
looking so utterly pleased with herself that it was all Ava could
do not to order her to fuck off and die. How could she be related
to such abysmal human beings? At moments like this, she was glad
she didn’t know for sure if the General had been her biological
father. Plausible deniability could be such a comfort.

“What can I do for you?” she asked
coldly.

“You’ve heard the news, I presume?”
Victoria’s gaze was predatory as she prowled closer to the
desk.

“What news is that?” Ava asked, hiding a
malicious smile as a look of disbelief flashed across Victoria’s
face, followed almost immediately by rage.

“Very funny,” her mother’s cousin said. “But
we’ll see who’s laughing when the dust settles, won’t we?”

Ava’s gaze sharpened. “What is that supposed
to mean?”

“You’ll see,” Victoria said. “Which reminds
me—our stock is almost certain to take a hit tomorrow. The
investment community has no idea what it’s like to be a real
patriot. I’ll be calling an emergency meeting with Natalie first
thing in the morning.”

Natalie Nguyen was the head of Hyperion’s PR
department, and Ava was fairly certain she was running out of ideas
on how to rehabilitate the Thornton-Westbrook brand. She only hoped
Natalie wouldn’t be tendering her resignation at the meeting.

“Fine,” Ava said, smiling through her teeth.
“I’ll see you there.”

“I’m sure you will,” Victoria said, her own
smile vicious. Then she spun on her heel and headed for the
door.

What the hell? Even Victoria’s walk was smug,
which made Ava want to trip her from behind and force her to share
what she knew. But while the fantasy might be enjoyable, in reality
she knew that Victoria would probably have a knife to her throat
before Ava could say “Galaxy Girl.”

An image of Victoria demanding to know how
“that creature” knew her name flashed into her mind, followed by
the twin memory of Amelia asking the same question, and Ava
shuddered as the door closed behind Victoria. She had to be working
with Amelia and Sentinel, but unless Ava could produce evidence of
the connection, Victoria would be free to operate as a Sentinel
agent with impunity. As the CEO of one of the most powerful tech
firms in the world, there was no telling what kind of damage
Victoria could wreak.

Ava lowered her forehead onto her folded
arms. There was a reason Westbrooks didn’t get to be happy. They
were destined to be weapons of mass destruction, or at least,
massively destructive. What was she supposed to do now?

The balcony slider squeaked, and she looked
up to see Galaxy Girl stride through the glass doors, D’aman
lingering behind her. It really was her, wasn’t it?

“Miss Westbrook,” Kenzie said, her voice
deeper as it always was whenever she donned her alter ego’s
costume.

And yes, that was her. Ava would recognize
her voice anywhere. But what was she thinking? Didn’t she realize
how much danger she was in? There could be—and probably were—bugs
all over this building, maybe even hidden cameras recording
everything they were currently saying and doing.

“I—what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to you about your brother’s
escape,” Kenzie said, ignoring her hostile tone. “Is there
somewhere private we can speak?”

Her remote demeanor was the product of either
her understanding of just how many listening devices were planted
around Ava’s office—or, possibly, of her own lack of trust in
Ava.

“Absolutely,” she said, matching Kenzie’s
coolness. Her mind spun. Where could possibly be safe enough for
them to meet? And then it came to her. “I’ll meet you at this
address in fifteen minutes.” She quickly scribbled a note on a
post-it, folded it in half, and handed it to Kenzie.

Kenzie read it and nodded, her poker face
continuing to impress. “Thank you, Miss Westbrook.”

“Of course, Galaxy Girl,” Ava said, her voice
exaggeratedly polite. “Anything to help the citizens of
Seattle.”

Five minutes later, Ava sat in the back seat
of the Range Rover worrying her lip while Ramón guided the vehicle
toward Capitol Hill. Maybe Panopticon wanted to bring her in.
Congress had given American intelligence agencies carte blanche to
detain and interrogate suspected terrorists, and Panopticon, in its
desperation to separate itself from the Westbrook—and now the
Thornton—name, might think that grabbing the lone remaining
Westbrook and packing her off to a CIA prison could help more than
it hurt.

It was a weekend evening, so the car trip
didn’t take long. Soon Ava was climbing the stairs to a familiar
rooftop, where she found an even more familiar figure leaning
against the small utility shed. As soon as she saw Ava, Kenzie
rushed forward and pulled her into her arms. Ava hesitated before
hugging her back, but then her body took over, cleaving to Kenzie
as if she were offering shelter from a storm. Which, in a way, she
was.

“Are you okay?” Kenzie asked, her face buried
in Ava’s hair.

“I’m fine.” She pushed away slightly.
“Kenzie, what’s going on?”

“Panopticon wants to question you, so I told
them I would bring you in.”

Ava took a step back. “You what?”

“I only said that because I needed to warn
you,” Kenzie said. “There was an anonymous tip, something about a
removable drive in your office. I asked D’aman to look into it. I
hope that’s okay?”

“D’aman?” In her haste to leave her office,
Ava had forgotten about Kenzie’s mentor.

“Yes. You’re obviously being set up,” Kenzie
added.

Ava swallowed, tears flooding her eyes. “Does
that mean you don’t think the tip is true?”

Kenzie scoffed. “Duh.” She blinked a few
times. “Unless… are you saying it is?”

“God, no!” Ava threw herself back into
Kenzie’s arms. “I just—your parents—and Sloane—and Antonio…” She
blinked back the tears, irritated at her inability to keep her
emotions in check.

“Hey,” Kenzie said, ducking her head to peer
at Ava, “I know you, okay? Nothing anyone ever says is going to
convince me otherwise. I promise.”

Ava hid her face against the silky exterior
of Kenzie’s superhero suit, letting the tears flow. She was done
trying to contain her pain at Amelia’s betrayal, her horror at what
her family had become, her sorrow that her father wasn’t still
around to mediate Nick’s insanity and their mother’s enabling
behavior. He had left her alone with the two people who hated her
the most, and now here they were, trying to destabilize what Ava
held most dear. She couldn’t take it. It was too much.

Kenzie held her as she cried, rubbing
soothing circles on her back and murmuring platitudes in her ear.
Ava had never felt so simultaneously betrayed and loved, attacked
and protected. The sobs prevented her from speaking, but at last
she managed to draw a breath and say, “You really believe me?”

“Of course I do!” Kenzie slid a finger under
her chin and tilted her face upward. “Always.”

Ava could feel the tears smearing her
make-up, knew her eyes must be swollen, her cheeks mottled from the
crying jag, and yet Kenzie was still looking at her like she was
the most beautiful woman in the world. And Ava, seeing her
unwavering faith, believed, too.

Kenzie looked off into the distance. “I think
D’aman found something. Is it okay if they come here?”

Ava nodded. “Of course.”

“Good,” Kenzie said, her voice soft. She
pressed a gentle kiss against Ava’s face and then laughed a little.
“You taste salty.”

As Kenzie fiddled with the beautiful silver
ring she always wore, Ava reached into her purse, intending to
repair her face. She’d barely opened her compact, however, when
Kenzie’s crimefighting pal dropped onto the roof, this time
appearing as Galaxy Guy.

“Miss Westbrook,” D’aman said politely.

“Call me Ava,” she said, returning her
compact to her purse. “Please?”

They nodded and held up a thumb drive. “Ava.
Is this yours?”

She squinted at it and shook her head. “I
don’t use removable drives. They’re too easily corrupted. I prefer
secure servers and multiple layers of encryption.”

“That’s what I said,” Kenzie said, puffing
out her chest for a moment before deflating again. “But they didn’t
believe me.”

“Who didn’t believe you?” Ava asked,
frowning.

The whole story came out then: the anonymous
tip phoned in to local authorities implicating Ava in her mother’s
escape plan; the claim that a thumb drive in her office would
corroborate the tip; Sloane’s boss’s suggestion that they bring her
in for questioning and use an experimental, off-world-derived truth
serum on her.

“Sloane didn’t even object all that much,”
Kenzie said, “which is why I asked D’aman to help. I knew we needed
someone neutral on our side.”

Ava paced the rooftop of the nondescript
building on Capitol Hill that Kenzie claimed was safe from security
cameras and doorbell cams, her mind racing. Victoria. It had
to be her, didn’t it? She was the only one with unfettered access
to the executive floor. Besides, her comment about who would be
laughing when the dust settled now seemed obvious.

“Are you honestly planning to bring me in to
Panopticon?” she asked.

Kenzie shrugged. “Not if you don’t want me
to. But for what it’s worth, I think you should go. You have to
show them you have nothing to hide.”

“But what if they want to send me to some
underground black ops site?”

“I won’t let that happen,” Kenzie said, her
gaze so fierce that Ava believed her.

She hesitated, her mind speeding through a
brief risk analysis. With Kenzie on her side, the benefits of
cooperating with Panopticon seemed significantly higher than the
potential cost. “Okay. I’ll go.”

“Shall I dispose of this?” D’aman asked,
holding up the thumb drive.

“No,” Ava said. “I think I know someone who
might find it interesting. It’s possible there might be a way to
hack the drive’s firmware to reveal the tipster’s identity. Maybe
not, but at least it’s worth a try.”

“You were right,” D’aman said to Kenzie. “She
really is quite capable for a human.”

“I know, right?” Kenzie said, her eyes
shining.

Ava decided not to let on how their comments
had landed. “Come on,” she said instead, heading for the stairs.
“Might as well get this over with.”

Ramón wasn’t happy to hear of her plan to
turn herself in to Panopticon, but he reluctantly agreed to drive
her to the building that was still under repair from Sentinel’s
attack earlier in the summer. Her make-up repaired, Ava watched the
black building approach, gray-brown clouds hanging above it in the
evening sky. Was this a mistake? What if one of Sentinel’s moles
took advantage of the opportunity to take her out? But Kenzie would
be there, and so would Sloane. Even if Kenzie’s sister suspected
Ava of colluding with Sentinel, she wouldn’t let anything happen to
her. Would she?

Ava didn’t trust easily. She was more like
Amelia in that regard. Her father, on the other hand, had loved to
quote Hemingway: “The best way to find out if you can trust
somebody is to trust them.” Nick had made a serious error in
trusting her, as his trial had proven, but then again, she’d given
him no reason to think she would support his violent agenda other
than sharing a name and possibly a bit of DNA. Just another way
they’d disappointed dear old dad—the General would have decried
Nick’s lack of strategic thinking as much as Ava’s lack of filial
loyalty.

Alexander had also been a huge Patton fan.
His favorite quotes from the decorated general were, “The highest
obligation and privilege of citizenship is bearing arms for one’s
country,” and “I don’t lose sleep at night over the potential for
failure. Simply put, failure is not an option.” No wonder Nick had
struggled to live up to their father’s expectations. Ava herself
had preferred Twain: “Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the
government when it deserves it.” The country had included people
like Kenzie and D’aman for a while now, whether or not
Panopticon—and Ava’s family, for that matter—approved.

Galaxy Girl was waiting when the car pulled
up at Panopticon’s main entrance. For a moment, a childhood memory
of her father greeting her and Nick outside the New York office
flashed through Ava’s mind, and tears pricked her eyes again. He
had rejected her, it was true, but he’d still been the only father
she’d ever known. She would always miss him, in her own convoluted
way.

“Ready, Miss Westbrook?” Galaxy Girl asked,
eyes narrowed behind her mask.

This was going to be an absolute disaster,
wasn’t it? But it was going to happen one way or another. They
might as well control what they could.

“Ready,” she said, stepping down from the
back seat. Then she took a deep breath and followed Kenzie into
Panopticon, crossing her fingers as the building’s tinted windows
seemed to swallow up the waning light outside. She really hoped it
wasn’t the last time she saw daylight anytime soon.

Beside her, Kenzie’s fingers brushed against
hers, and Ava glanced at her, relieved to see her girlfriend’s eyes
gazing steadily at her from behind the mask. Kenzie would look out
for her; that was a fact Ava could count on. Squaring her
shoulders, she headed down a flight of open stairs to a wide atrium
where the Panopticon crest had been painted in giant letters across
a cold, concrete floor.

Here went nothing. Or everything. Soon enough
she would know which.

Chapter Twelve

Kenzie paced the hallway, chewing on the
inside of her cowl. In a room at the end of the corridor, Ava was
being questioned by two agents, and Kenzie didn’t like their tone.
It was all she could do to keep from bursting in and flying Ava out
of the building faster than the speed of sound. The main thing
stopping her was the fact that her girlfriend would be super pissed
if she blew her cover. But if either of those agents touched Ava,
they would learn the hard way that no one messed with—

“If your goal is to give away your identity,”
Sloane hissed at her through firmly closed teeth, “then you’re
doing great.”

“I am not,” she hissed back.

“Everyone knows who Ava is dating. In fact,
that’s why I’m not the one questioning her.”

Much as it pained Kenzie to admit it, her
sister had a point. She slowed and stopped beside Sloane, resting
her arms behind her back. She could act relaxed. She could play it
cool if she needed to. Totally.

She was so focused on pretending to be calm
that she missed the moment the interview ended. One moment Ava was
facing off against the pair of agents, and the next she was rising
and following them to the door.

“We’ll be in touch if we have more
questions,” the female agent who always triggered Kenzie’s
gaydar—Rodriguez, she was pretty sure—was saying, her face almost
painfully neutral.

“Yeah,” the muscular male agent said, his
voice gruff. “Make sure you don’t leave town. Oh, and we’ll need
the address where you’re staying.”

So much for Ava’s short-lived anonymity. She
hadn’t even been in her new condo for twenty-four hours, and
already Panopticon was demanding to know her whereabouts. Kenzie
hoped Ava gave them a fake address. It wouldn’t stop them for long,
but it would be satisfying to irritate the feds.

The feds—she sounded like Jane and
Benjamin, who had never been happy with Sloane’s decision to work
for Panopticon. Why couldn’t they take a step back and let their
daughters live their own lives? Kenzie wasn’t feeling especially
positive toward her parents these days, and Nick’s escape wasn’t
helping matters. Already tonight, Jane had texted a faux concerned
message about Ava, including a link to a story in the Wall
Street Journal that questioned how much Hyperion’s COO had
known about the prison break. Kenzie didn’t usually resort to name
calling, but in her head she had tarnished her adoptive mother with
quite a few well-chosen curses, including several in Zattalian.

Kenzie pushed away thoughts of her family as
Ava walked toward her. When Ava drew near, she cleared her throat
and managed in as neutral a voice as she could, “May I escort you
to the exit, Miss Westbrook?”

“No, thank you,” Ava said, her voice cold. “I
can show myself out.”

“Actually,” Sloane said, “I’ll be escorting
you. Protocol, you understand. Galaxy Girl, I don’t think we need
anything else from you tonight.”

That was probably true. The breakout had
occurred in Leavenworth, Kansas, where Nicholas and several of his
top lieutenants had been held in the US Military’s only
maximum-security prison, so it wasn’t like Kenzie and D’aman would
be of any use in Seattle. Although perhaps a quick sweep of the
Midwest might be useful…

“Thank you, Agent Shepherd,” Kenzie said.
“I’ll head out, too, then. Looks like you’re stuck with me, Miss
Westbrook.”

Ava shot her a warning look as they followed
Sloane through the labyrinth of windowless corridors at the center
of the building. Their route took them past a section that was
still cordoned off, and Kenzie automatically averted her eyes as
she’d been doing ever since she had flown to the scene of the
attack two months earlier. Had it really only been a couple of
months since her first date with Ava had been interrupted by the
assault on Panopticon? So much had happened since then, it boggled
the mind.

Sloane escorted them outside where they found
Ramón waiting with the Range Rover, and Kenzie wondered if he’d
been there the whole time. But no, Panopticon didn’t allow vehicles
to idle outside their building. Ava must have texted him—but her
phone had been confiscated when she’d entered the building, which
Kenzie only remembered because Sloane handed it over now with a
polite, “Here you go. Have a good night.”

Ava rolled her eyes. “Right. I’m sure I
will.”

Sloane sighed. “What do you want me to say,
Ava?”

“I think you’ve said quite enough, Agent
Shepherd.” Ava turned to Kenzie. “Thank you for your assistance,
Galaxy Girl.”

And with that, she vanished into the Range
Rover.

Ramón slammed the door behind her and,
ignoring Kenzie and Sloane, slid into the driver’s seat and guided
the large vehicle into downtown traffic. How had he known when to
show up? Was it possible he had a contact inside Panopticon? And if
he did, whose side was he—and the contact, for that matter—on?

“What a night, huh?” Sloane asked, glancing
at Kenzie.

“Yeah,” Kenzie said, her voice clipped. “See
you around, Agent Shepherd.” And with that, she shot off into the
sky.

She knew she should be more grateful to her
sister; after all, Sloane was the one who had alerted Kenzie to the
existence of the supposedly incriminating thumb drive at Hyperion.
Without the drive, Sloane’s bosses had decided there wasn’t enough
evidence to hold Ava—or, more importantly, use her as a guinea pig
for their truth serum. Kenzie knew this because she’d overheard the
agency director’s conversation with MacIntosh, the chief science
officer. Well, overheard was a tad misrepresentative. She’d
been actively eavesdropping.

But despite the assist, Sloane had asked
Kenzie if D’aman would agree to snoop inside Ava’s mind to prove
her innocence. D’aman would never do such a thing without Ava’s
permission, of course. Kreedilans lived and died by their code, and
besides, it wasn’t like Panopticon would magically take D’aman’s
word for it. The only advantage to be gained in having D’aman vet
Ava would be to convince Sloane—and, by extension, their
parents—that Ava was on the right side of history. Come to think of
it, maybe that would be worth it.

But, no. As she landed on a lower Queen Anne
safe roof, Kenzie imagined Ava’s face if she asked her to allow
D’aman to read her mind. She had just sworn to always believe in
Ava; such an ask would indicate that either she’d been lying or,
somehow, Ava no longer deserved her faith—neither of which was
true. If Sloane needed some sort of proof of Ava’s innocence, that
was her problem.

Kenzie didn’t bother heading home. As soon as
she was dressed in civilian clothing, she made her way down Queen
Anne Avenue toward Belltown, her phone out and thumbs flying as she
jogged toward Ava’s apartment. “On my way,” she wrote. “Coming in
cold.”

That was the code they’d developed—hot for
flying, cold for everything else. Not that she was supposed to fly
to Ava’s condo.

Three dots appeared by Ava’s photo, then went
away, only to return and disappear a second time. Kenzie was
staring at her phone so intently that she almost stepped on a
little dog—literally one of her worst fears in the world—but
fortunately the tiny, fluffy creature growled a warning and she
shifted her weight in time. Whew. That would have made a bad
night significantly worse.

If only she could go back in time to the
moment before Panopticon had signaled her. She and Ava had been
relaxing on one of the patios after breaking in Ava’s new king
mattress, and Kenzie had been holding Ava’s hand and thinking about
what they were going to eat for dinner that night. The moment had
been pure and simple, and she missed it deeply, for now that Nick
was free and Amelia the apparent mastermind of his escape, life
wouldn’t be that simple again for a long time. If ever.

Ava still hadn’t written back, and Kenzie was
nearing her building now. If she focused her enhanced vision, she
could see Ava sitting at the kitchen island, phone face down in
front of her, head in her hands.

“I’m almost there,” she typed. “Can I come
up?”

Ava picked up her phone and stared at the
screen before setting it face down without replying, and Kenzie’s
breath caught. She’d been so concerned about Ava thinking she might
not trust her that she hadn’t thought to worry that Ava might have
her own doubts.

What could she do? What should she do?
It was tempting to leap into the air and settle down on Ava’s
balcony, to force Ava to talk to her whether she wanted to or not.
But that wouldn’t be right. With great power came great temptation,
as she’d learned over the years, and the Alliance’s guidelines had
come in handy when she was first becoming a supercharged adult
among powerless humans. Or, not powerless, exactly, but
unpowered. Depowered? Whatever. The point was she couldn’t abuse
her power and force her presence on Ava.

Besides, Ava had her own very capable
security team looking after her, and it wouldn’t do for them to see
Kenzie leaping thirteen stories in a single bound. No doubt
Treadwell, Ava’s local security chief, had beefed up her guard
detail in the aftermath of this evening’s events. They probably
weren’t the only ones on site, either. Even if Ava hadn’t given
Panopticon her new address, they could easily have followed her
home. Kenzie had to be careful not to out herself to either entity,
given how closely they were each aligned with Sentinel. The public
knew who Ava was dating, so Kenzie could drop in as herself
whenever she wanted. Galaxy Girl, however, would have to stay away
if she wanted to keep her identity secret.

She took a breath, swallowing at the sudden
tightness in her throat, and typed, “It’s okay. I’m around if you
need me. Just say the word and I’ll be there.”

This time, Ava didn’t immediately turn her
phone face down. She typed a note, which Kenzie received a split
second later: “Thanks. Talk to you later?”

Kenzie sent back a thumbs-up and a heart, her
breath coming a little easier. She hadn’t realized how worried she
was that Ava would never talk to her again. Catastrophizing wasn’t
the healthiest response, she knew, but she couldn’t help it, not
when catastrophe had previously rained down so much death and
destruction that she had barely managed to survive. Too bad her
ancestors hadn’t supercharged their minds with extra emotional
resilience neurons.

Hmm. Would that even work? Maybe in a less
fraught time she would have to investigate.

With the evening suddenly stretching ahead
and her stomach grumbling audibly to anyone within a half-mile
radius, enhanced hearing not required, she decided to grab a bus
home and fix herself a box or two of pasta before deciding what to
do next. The prospect of so many hours to herself felt strange. She
and Ava had spent most nights together even before their trip to
Vancouver. Sloane and Mika had teased her about being in the
honeymoon stage, and Kenzie could admit that her fantasies
might have included wedding bells once or twice. She didn’t
feel too bad about that, though. From what she’d read, insta-love
and overcommitment were normal parts of the lesbian love
experience.

The sex, though—it didn’t seem like every
woman-loving woman could possibly be blessed with such beautiful,
emotional encounters. She’d thought she might never experience true
intimacy with a human, but she had been very wrong. Ava could go
from legitimate sex kitten one minute to soft and snuggly
girlfriend the next, and Kenzie loved each incarnation equally.
Losing her virginity to an older woman had absolutely been the best
decision ever. She only hoped Ava felt the same about dating
her.

As she made her way up the Galer Street
Stairs, a wave of insecurity swept over her. And, yeah. Clearly,
she needed calories now.

Pasta was one of her go-tos because it was
inexpensive, came in a shocking amount of varieties, and offered
large portions of easily digestible carbs. Even better, it only
took ten minutes to cook. By the time the kitchen timer went off,
she’d taken a shower, changed into sweats, and had her laptop open
and tuned to the AP wire for news of Nick’s escape. Being a
reporter meant she had access to information resources that updated
in real time. Her sources might not be as tapped into law
enforcement as Sloane’s, but they were useful, nevertheless.

Just as she took her first bite of angel hair
pasta slathered in tomato sauce and parmesan, she heard a knock at
her door. She squinted through the walls. D’aman. Or, rather, Susan
Cheng.

“You have sauce on your face,” Susan Cheng
said when Kenzie opened the door.

“Don’t care,” Kenzie said, and immediately
headed back to the kitchen to continue wolfing down the meal. “Do
you want some spaghetti?”

Susan Cheng’s forehead wrinkled, and Kenzie
took that as a no. Or possibly an indictment of her decision to
speak with her mouth full. “No, thank you,” the small, older woman
said, and then, with a glance at Kenzie’s closed blinds, morphed
into D’aman. They gestured at her laptop. “What are you
reading?”

Kenzie blinked. She would never, as long as
she lived, get used to watching her old friend shapeshift. “The AP
wire,” she said, and turned the screen so they could see it, too.
“Thanks for your help with the thumb drive, by the way.”

“Of course. It’s the least I can do when
someone you care about is being falsely accused.”

Kenzie’s eyes narrowed. “Did Sloane talk to
you about vetting Ava?”

“Yes. But one does not have to be able to
read minds to know that your Ava is innocent.”

Though their voice was mild, Kenzie felt the
sting of accusation. “I’m sorry,” she said, slumping in her seat at
the kitchen island. “I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean—”

D’aman’s hand was warm on hers. “Don’t
trouble yourself, Kenzie. I know what’s in your heart. Now, tell
me: Are you up for a jaunt to the Midwest? I was thinking a
scouting trip of the prison complex might be in order.”

Kenzie looked up so quickly she would have
gotten whiplash had she been human. “Are you serious? You want to
fly to Kansas tonight?”

“Indeed.”

Kenzie looked to the window, where, through a
small gap in the blinds she could see all the way to Ava’s
apartment, dark except for a light at the east-facing windows.
Ava’s bedroom. “I don’t know. What if Ava needs me?”

“Does she not have her own team of guards
looking after her?”

“Yes, but… I mean, she might want my company
later.”

“Then you can return to her. If it helps, I
don’t believe she’s in any danger. From what I understand, the
United States Disciplinary Barracks is nearly impossible to escape
from. It seems unlikely that a group in hiding could pull off two
complex missions in one night. If they were going to try kidnapping
Ava, they would have done it before liberating her brother. They
would know that her security team would be on high alert afterward,
along with the local authorities.”

Kenzie blanched at the idea of Sentinel
trying to kidnap Ava. Why would they bother unless they were
looking for the most awkward family reunion in history? It wasn’t
like Ava had anything they needed, which meant they were more
likely to try to kill her than hold her indefinitely. Kenzie
clenched her fist so hard the fork in her hand split in half—her
second in as many weeks, along with two mugs and a plate. At this
rate, she was going to have to visit Goodwill sooner rather than
later to replenish her kitchen supplies.

She retrieved another fork and tried to focus
her wandering attention. The important thing was, as D’aman had
noted, that even if Sentinel wanted to go after Ava, they likely
wouldn’t try tonight. They’d be too busy evading the Kansas
authorities and securing a way out of the state. Or, possibly, a
place to hunker down and hide until the heat faded a bit.

“Okay,” she said, nodding determinedly. “I’m
in.”

“Excellent,” D’aman said. “I have already
downloaded the USDB incident report and can share it with you, if
you like?”

Kenzie squawked in alarm. US Military servers
were supposed to be unhackable, and even if they weren’t, you
couldn’t just go around stealing information from them. Then again,
D’aman had ways of obtaining information that didn’t depend on a
computer.

“How did you get the report?” she asked.

D’aman simply stared at her.

“You’ve already been there, haven’t you?”

They shrugged in a very human manner. “I
mean, yes?”

She laughed at the Millennial phrase and
intonation. Having a friend who could morph into anyone—including a
USDB officer, for example—came in handy. “Fine, show-off. Let me
finish eating and we can go.”

“That’s the spirit,” D’aman said, and clapped
her on the back with a force that would have sent anyone else
sprawling.

Maybe they would find something in Kansas,
but even if they didn’t, the trip would be a good distraction from
missing Ava, who at Kenzie’s last check had been blasting rock
music and unpacking her boxes upon boxes of books. Ava was safe for
now, and she would contact Kenzie when she was ready to see her.
If she was ready to see her, Kenzie’s brain unhelpfully
whispered.

The buzzer went off, indicating that her
second box of pasta was ready. As Kenzie turned off the stove and
reached for the strainer, the light above the sink shone directly
into her eyes. For a moment, she froze as the image of one of the
fleet’s ships exploding near her pod bloomed in her mind. Her ship
had been small and maneuverable enough that the on-board AI could
pilot it out of the storm with minimal damage, but the larger ships
hadn’t been so lucky. She closed her eyes, waiting for the light
show to recede.

“Are you okay, youngling?” D’aman asked.

Kenzie opened her eyes. “I’m fine,” she said,
and reached for the pot of steaming pasta.

D’aman didn’t say anything. Kenzie knew they
understood her occasional dark silences. They, too, had lost
everything they had ever known and had come to Earth for a chance
at a new life. She was glad they were with her now. Helping other
people was the only way she’d ever found to escape her own pain. Or
maybe not escape it, exactly, but channel it into purpose.

D’aman, she was pretty sure, understood that
impulse, too.

#

They didn’t find Nick and Amelia or any other
Sentinel personnel that night. After scouting the area for hours,
they gave up and went back to Kenzie’s apartment to analyze the
video and incident report D’aman had managed to obtain via
questionably legal methods. Their skills had certainly been useful
tonight, Kenzie acknowledged as they waited together for the
pilfered file to load on her laptop. Best crime-fighting partner
ever.

Five minutes in, Kenzie paused the feed,
squinting at the pixelated images in all of their non-HD glory. “I
think I know him,” she said, pointing at a uniformed figure who
seemed to be at the center of the escape.

“Who is he?” D’aman asked.

“Sloane’s old boss. I think.” She narrowed
her eyes again, trying to figure out if that could really be
Michael Cooper, the ex-chief science officer for Panopticon’s
Seattle office. He was the reason Sloane had gone to work for the
bureau in the first place, and ever since his disappearance, she’d
vowed to quit Panopticon at least once a month. What the hell was
he doing with the Westbrooks? Last time Kenzie had checked, Coop
was a self-avowed champion of off-worlders. Had he really changed
his worldview that much, or had he been a Sentinel mole all
along?

“Do you think Panopticon has this already?”
she asked.

“Yes,” D’aman said. “I was told it was being
copied and sent to federal agencies across the country.”

That meant Sloane would soon know—if she
didn’t already—that her former mentor was on the other side. Geez.
First Amelia and now Coop? If Sentinel’s goal was to crush the
opposition’s morale, they were doing a pretty good job.

The action was packed into a few short
minutes and didn’t tell them anything else new. Kenzie closed the
file and reached for her phone, checking the time. It was past
midnight; hopefully, Sloane and Ava were both asleep.
Realistically, though, she doubted either was. The question was,
who should she check on first?

“You have other places to be,” D’aman said,
rising, “and I could use some sustenance. Perhaps we can talk in
the morning?”

Kenzie nodded gratefully, smiling up at her
old friend. “That would be great. Thanks, D’aman. I really
appreciate everything you’re doing.”

“Of course.” They inclined their head, horns
flashing slightly in the overhead light. And then, before Kenzie’s
eyes, they morphed into Susan Cheng, much smaller but with the same
calm, powerful energy. “Get some rest, youngling.”

“I will,” Kenzie said as they walked to the
door. “You, too.”

D’aman winked. “Maybe.” And then they were
off, strolling toward the stairwell quickly and quietly.

At least they hadn’t shifted
allegiances. Or, if they had, the shift had been toward good, not
away from it. Poor Sloane. Coop’s defection—if that was what it
was—would shatter her. Kenzie hesitated in the hall, still debating
who to check on first. Then the notification she’d assigned to
Ava’s number went off, and she blurred back to the kitchen where
her phone waited.

“You awake?” Ava had written.

“Yes!” Kenzie wrote back. “How are you?”

Ava ignored the question. “Feel like coming
over?”

“Be there soon.” She checked outside—no moon
meant that the Seattle sky was as dark as it ever got. “Coming in
hot.”

Ava sent a thumbs-up, which Kenzie took as
approval. She locked her door and hurried up to the roof, where she
found a dark spot and shot into the night sky, coming down just as
fast on Ava’s roof. The trick was to come in hot enough to be an
unrecognizable blur on any area camera’s screen but not hot enough
to break anything. While Panopticon’s Collateral Destruction Fund
had already come in handy on a couple of cases she and D’aman had
responded to, it probably wouldn’t extend to her girlfriend’s
condo. She landed safely behind a privacy screen and used it to
shield her from any potential prying eyes as she entered the
apartment through the side door they had agreed Ava would leave
unlocked for her.

“Hello?” she called quietly, stepping around
a pile of empty moving boxes in the hall.

Ava emerged from the master bedroom, eyes
wide in the light that spilled out from the doorway. “That was
fast.”

“You know me,” Kenzie said with a rakish
wink.

Ava tried to smile, but then her face
dropped. “I think I need to be held.”

In a flash, Kenzie was at her side, arms out
wide. “Of course.”

“I meant in bed.”

“Oh. Right.”

Ava led her into the bedroom, shoulders
drooping with either fatigue or sorrow, or both. She had obviously
been hard at work. The bookshelves that lined one wall were now
full of colorful paperbacks and the occasional hard cover, with a
variety of trinkets and framed photos—mostly of Bea and her
family—sprinkled throughout. The boxes that had crowded the bedside
tables earlier in the day had disappeared, replaced by an
old-fashioned clock radio that Bea liked to make fun of, Ava’s
Kindle, her phone and charger, and a framed photo of her and Kenzie
laughing into each other’s eyes at The Queen’s Ale House, care of
Mika.

“You framed it,” Kenzie said as she stripped
down to her T-shirt and boy shorts.

Ava slid under the comforter. “Of course I
did.”

Kenzie crawled in beside her and waited for
Ava to turn out the light. Ava’s favorite position when she was
feeling low was the little spoon, Kenzie had learned, which suited
her just fine because she liked being the big spoon. The room
plunged into darkness, and Ava snuggled back into Kenzie, pulling
her forearm tight across her body.

“I got you,” Kenzie said against her hair,
feeling the tendrils puff outward and resettle. “I’m with you.
You’re safe.”

Ava inhaled and seemed to hold her breath.
Just when Kenzie started to worry about the lack of oxygen, Ava’s
body shook. And then it shook again, and Kenzie realized she was
crying. She tugged Ava closer, careful not to crush her, and
murmured shushing sounds in her hair. Not because she thought Ava
shouldn’t cry but because she’d learned in a babysitting course
that humans found the sound soothing. After a night like tonight,
Ava should definitely cry. In fact, Kenzie thought she might cry a
little with her.

The sobs weren’t as deep as they had been
earlier, and they didn’t last as long, either. Perhaps, Kenzie
thought, Ava was getting herself all cried out. But was that even a
thing? Kenzie had certainly never managed to reach such a state.
She only knew Ava didn’t shake for long, and that her breathing
slowed and settled sooner than she would have expected. Ava didn’t
move away, though, and Kenzie didn’t want her to. After the
emotional roller coaster of the past few hours, it was a relief to
be stationary with Ava in her arms, listening to aircraft pass
overhead on the way to Sea-Tac, to the sound of sparse Belltown
traffic thirteen stories below. Kenzie was content to hold Ava
through the passing moments, as the tide waxed and waned a few
blocks away, as the moon and stars appeared to complete their
circuit from one mountain range to the other.

The constellations didn’t really move, of
course. It was the earth flying perilously quickly through space,
rotating about its axis so fast that it only took twenty-four hours
for a single rotation. And yet, when you stood on the surface, it
felt like the planet was standing still while everything else
turned around you. After starting her life in space, it had taken
her a while to get used to the feeling of standing still. She had
derived comfort in the beginning from the realization that the
earth was rocketing around the sun at nearly 67,000 miles per hour,
that her new home rotated at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour (at
the equator) because the feeling of standing still after a lifetime
in motion had freaked her out initially. Now, though, she rarely
thought about the planet’s motion. She had become entrenched in her
life on Earth, almost literally.

In her arms, Ava was growing heavier, her
muscles relaxing and the terrible tension radiating off her slowly
fading. She was falling asleep at last, and Kenzie was
simultaneously relieved and a tad envious. She didn’t think she’d
be sleeping much tonight, knowing that Amelia and Nick were out
there somewhere fomenting armed rebellion, that Coop had somehow
landed on their side. Shifting carefully, she managed to lift her
phone from the bedside table and, with one hand, navigate to her
favorite word game. Might as well see if she could win the weekend
tournament. At least it would take her mind off of things she
couldn’t hope to change tonight.

“Kenzie?” Ava asked sleepily.

“I’m here,” she said, lowering her phone.

“Okay,” Ava said, and nestled closer.
“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Kenzie said, kissing her
hair.

She waited until Ava fell back asleep before
opening her word game again. She couldn’t just lay here with her
mind spiraling, and anyway, that tournament wasn’t going to win
itself.

She would check on Sloane in the morning.
Tonight, she needed to watch over Ava.

Chapter Thirteen

When Ava opened her eyes to the sunlight
streaming in from the living room, she had a blissful moment of
peace. One single moment, and then the anxiety and dread of the
previous night came swooping back in, erasing any sense of ease.
Her brother had escaped, like Napoleon or perhaps more accurately
John Dillinger, to join his followers. Even worse, Amelia had
joined the fight publicly and unequivocally on her son’s side, and
Panopticon had questioned Ava about her supposed involvement in the
plot. No doubt she had her adoptive mother to thank for the
attempted frame. Really, that bit had been quite clever. If
Panopticon had taken the bait, Ava would have been out of the way
without Amelia having to do anything, and whatever she’d discovered
about Labyrinth would have been discredited. Clever, yes, but also
chilling. With her technical knowledge and leadership acumen,
Amelia was going to be a far more formidable enemy than Nick.

Ava reached for her phone in its charger,
hesitating before turning it on to check her alerts. There was a
text from Bea—make that four texts from Bea; a weather
notification—sunny and beautiful again today in Seattle; and
several news alerts. One headline in particular caught her eye:
“What did Hyperion’s executive team know about the plot to free
Nick Westbrook?” She squinted at the byline—Todd Warren. She turned
off her phone again, leaving her notifications on silent. Maybe
this was a good time for a social media cleanse.

At least it was Sunday. Only Hyperion’s board
expected her to work on Sundays, and right now, they could go screw
themselves. By joining Sentinel, Amelia had effectively destroyed
the company she’d claimed to love so much. Ava needed a day to
herself to rest and recoup, and she was damn well going to take
it.

The mattress beside her was cool, but judging
from the sounds emanating from the kitchen, Ava wasn’t alone in her
new place. She pulled on a faded Smith sweatshirt that reminded her
of Bea and made her way into the condo’s large, open combo room,
the kitchen at one end and the living area at the other with an
informal dining space between. The condo was awash with morning
sunlight, and Ava blinked at the sight that greeted her: Kenzie was
using her superspeed to make breakfast, blurring about the kitchen
like a whirling dervish, flipping pancakes, pouring juice, and
setting the breakfast bar seemingly all at once.

She stopped when she saw Ava, her smile
slightly sheepish. “Oh! You’re awake.”

“I am,” Ava said, and went to press a kiss to
Kenzie’s cheek. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Kenzie said, her smile soft.
“How are you doing after yesterday?”

As her heart rate instantly skittered and
scrambled, Ava closed her eyes briefly. “Can we not talk about
it?”

“Of course. Totally.”

“I’m not sure I can handle all of this,” Ava
said. “I’m not sure I know how to.”

“You don’t have to. It’s okay to fall
apart.”

“I don’t think that’s true. Not for me,
anyway.”

As they stood watching each other in the
sunlit kitchen, the smell of burning butter drifted toward them.
Kenzie grimaced. “Hold that thought?”

“Go,” Ava said, and retreated to the
breakfast bar.

Good thing Rose had arranged for groceries to
be delivered the previous day—in typical Kenzie fashion, there was
soon a veritable mountain of food for the two of them to share.
Kenzie’s portion was always significantly larger than Ava’s, but
today especially Ava found it difficult to drum up an appetite.
Honestly, she didn’t feel like doing anything. Her body ached even
though it had no reason to, and her energy levels were less than
optimal. All she really wanted was a day to go nowhere and do
nothing. She didn’t want to think about what had happened the
previous night, or what her family’s actions might mean to Earth’s
off-worlder community.

Over the past month, a nascent unity had
begun to emerge among alien refugees, from informal murals and
local organizing to national op-ed pieces and social media
campaigns. Earth’s off-worlders had begun to step out of the
shadows and pursue intersectional work with other marginalized
communities. Humans were joining the movement, too, sharing stories
about how to help off-world communities and training each other to
de-escalate any human/alien bullying they encountered. Part of the
inspiration lay with Galaxy Girl and Galaxy Guy, Ava knew, but it
wasn’t just their influence. Nick’s imprisonment and the disbanding
and disavowal of Sentinel by the US government had given many
people, human and alien alike, hope that Earth was moving in the
right direction. And now… Well, Ava really, really didn’t
want to think about it.

Fortunately, Kenzie’s rule-following nature
meant she abided by Ava’s request not to talk about Nick’s escape
or Amelia’s duplicity. Instead, she chattered about the condo,
praising the unpacking work Ava had accomplished and asking about
furniture and other deliveries Ava had planned for the week ahead.
They talked moving logistics and room decorating, and Ava was
grateful for the chance to focus on anything other than the news
that had to be blowing up her social media feeds. Being painted
with the same brush as her extremist, anti-alien family was
agonizing, and there was nothing she could do to escape the
scrutiny.

While Ava left her phone’s notifications off,
Kenzie’s phone went off periodically as they ate breakfast and
cleaned up the kitchen. Finally, she paused in drying one of the
Calphalon frying pans Ava had asked Rose to order, eyes on her
phone screen.

“It’s Bea,” she said, her tone apologetic.
“She wants to know if you’re alive.”

“Bea is texting you?” Ava wasn’t sure if she
should feel charmed or betrayed.

“Well, yeah. We had to talk to make Vancouver
happen.”

Charmed it was.

Ava texted Bea back, letting her know that
she was going to take a break from her phone for the next
twenty-four hours, and also that she and Kenzie were currently
pretending Ava’s family was normal and not, in fact, behaving like
the cast of The Sopranos. Bea sent back a string of
enthusiastic emojis, accompanied by a predictably irreverent
comment that Ava shared with Kenzie: “I find sex to be an excellent
distraction, a good workout, positive skin exfoliator, etc.”

“I mean, we do need a morning workout,”
Kenzie said.

“Absolutely,” Ava agreed, adding what she
hoped passed as a flirtatious wink.

That was how they ended up breaking in the
Jacuzzi tub in the master bath, making out in the hot water for
what felt like hours before eventually moving to Ava’s bedroom,
where they made long, slow love. Afterward, as they cuddled in bed,
Kenzie said sex was starting to feel like a drug she couldn’t get
enough of, which Ava explained was an apt description given the
impact of orgasms and endorphins on brain chemistry. They lay in
bed talking, sharing stories of their lives before they met, before
they became Shepherds or Westbrooks, before assorted educational
and work experiences molded them into the adults they now
considered themselves to be.

“You know,” Kenzie said after a while,
stroking Ava’s arm absentmindedly, “my sister says I’m overly fond
of verbal communication, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to
anyone as much as I do with you. Not even my family.”

Ava lifted an eyebrow at her. “Welcome to
your first woman-loving-woman relationship, macushla.
Oversharing and oral sex are kind of the hallmarks of lesbian
love.”

Kenzie blushed as Ava had expected, but she
only said, “Ma-what now?”

“Macushla. It’s an Irish term of
endearment.”

“Aww.” Suddenly, Kenzie sat up on the bed,
the sheet drifting down to pool at her waist. “Wait, does this mean
we’re in the part of the relationship where we get to have pet
names?”

“Yes, Kenzie, we can have pet names,” Ava
said, trying and failing to keep her eyes above chest level. “Am I
sensing that you have a specific one in mind?”

“Maybe.” Kenzie paused, probably to build
suspense. But she’d never been very good at waiting, so Ava wasn’t
surprised when she blurted, “Dumpling!”

“Dumpling?” Ava tried to minimize her
wince.

“What? Don’t you like it?”

“No, of course I do. Don’t pout, sweet
girl.”

“You should be honored,” she said, sounding a
little grouchy.

“Oh, I am,” Ava replied, giving her best
smoldering, sex kitten look.

Kenzie promptly launched herself on top of
Ava. “Come to me, my delicious dumpling…”

Ava couldn’t hold back her laugh, and after a
second, Kenzie joined her.

It wasn’t like they could ignore reality
entirely, of course. When Sloane called Kenzie halfway through
second breakfast, Ava couldn’t help hearing some of their
conversation, even though Kenzie gave her an apologetic glance and
strode to the other end of the condo to talk in hushed tones. The
apartment was big, but it wasn’t that big.

“So, nothing new?” Ava asked when Kenzie came
back to the kitchen bar.

Kenzie placed her phone face down on the
granite countertop. “They haven’t found your brother or Amelia, if
that’s what you mean.”

“What aren’t you saying?”

Kenzie sat down on the stool and turned to
face her. “The video of the assault on the prison complex revealed
that Sloane’s old boss, Michael Cooper, was involved. He was the
chief science officer before he disappeared and was replaced by
MacIntosh.”

Ava digested the new information. “So, he was
a mole for Sentinel before he vanished?”

Kenzie looked down, toying with her fork. “We
don’t know. Sloane thinks he might not be acting volitionally.”

In other words, Sloane didn’t want to believe
that someone she was close to could betray her and their shared
ideals. Ava wished she didn’t know the feeling.

“Do you need to go see her?”

Kenzie glanced up, startled. “What? No. I
want to stay with you.”

“I’ll be fine, you know,” Ava said. “I need
to go pick up some things for the apartment, and I still have
plenty of unpacking to do.”

“Are you sure you want to go out in
public…?”

Oh, right. She’d kind of forgotten the
necessity of keeping a low profile. But maybe she could do both.
“Do you still have the headbands from Vancouver?”

“You know it. Sloane asked for them back at
Game Night, but then she got tipsy and I ‘forgot.’” She bracketed
the final word with air quotes.

“Then let’s go shopping,” Ava said, pushing
away from the kitchen bar. While she had no intention of going near
downtown, a visit to the University Village boutiques might be just
what the doctor ordered.

#

Retail therapy really was the best, she
decided a few hours later as Kenzie helped her carry her bags in
from the elevator. Ava had only thought about the disaster that was
her life a handful of times while wandering between Crate &
Barrel, Pottery Barn, and Williams Sonoma, snacking on sushi and
slices of Chicago-style pizza. Kenzie had been only too happy to
help her pick out dish towels, bathroom accessories, and other home
decorations, and it had almost felt like they were moving in
together. And yes, Ava knew that it was too soon to consider such a
development, but she was a lesbian and therefore required by
subculture law to think about such things while strolling
hand-in-hand with her girlfriend through Seattle’s best—and
only?—outdoor shopping center.

Kenzie was more the sporty type, so in
addition to the snack stops, she dragged Ava into The North Face,
Levi’s, and lululemon. In return, Ava tugged a blushing Kenzie into
Victoria’s Secret, where they each modeled lingerie that the other
picked out. This impromptu show was probably why Kenzie dropped
their bags on the kitchen floor and picked Ava up, kissing her neck
as she carried her into the master bedroom and proceeded to have
her wicked way with her. Not that Ava was complaining. Endorphins
were always welcome in her brain, especially today.

Afterward, they lay in bed again together,
following the twists and turns of post-orgasmic conversation that
they didn’t often have a chance to enjoy. When Kenzie made a
comment about Ava’s seemingly unshakable confidence, she found
herself confessing that she had long suffered from imposter’s
syndrome, first at school and later at work, and pretty much
permanently in her adopted family.

“Really?” Kenzie said, as if she couldn’t
imagine such a thing.

Maybe, Ava thought, she couldn’t. “We can’t
all be superpowered geniuses,” she said, forcing her tone to stay
light.

“Oh, you mean me.” Head propped up on one
arm, Kenzie gazed at her. “Having powers isn’t always a benefit,
you know.”

“No, I know. It’s just sometimes I feel a
little…”

“Puny?” Kenzie supplied, half-smiling.

Ava tried to shove her sideways, and then
laughed as Kenzie remained unmoved. “That about sums it up, I
guess.”

Kenzie relented and fell back, still smiling
at her. “I think everyone feels that way at some point. I used to
fly up to the very top of the stratosphere when I first arrived and
stare up at the stars, wondering if there was any place in the
universe that would ever feel like home.”

Ava touched Kenzie’s shoulder again, but
softly this time. “That sounds lonely.”

“It was.”

“I’m sorry.” She paused. “I felt something
similar when my mother died. I had a photo of her that I wore in a
locket when I was little, and it seemed almost like a talisman that
warded off the coldness I felt with the Westbrooks. Whenever Amelia
scapegoated me, or Nick had one of his emotional fits, I would wrap
my hand around the locket, close my eyes, and picture my mother’s
smile.” She paused, ducking her head. “It’s kind of sad—I’m not
sure if I remember her actual smile anymore or merely the version
the photo captured.”

“But even if you only remember the photo
version, it’s still her, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. I hadn’t really thought of it
like that.” Ava glanced over at Kenzie, whose golden hair flowed
across the pillow like a scene out of a Maxfield Parrish painting.
“Do you have anything like that to remember your parents by?”

“Kind of. I escaped with a type of photo
album in my pod, only the images are 3-D and, well, dynamic.”

“That sounds like something out of Harry
Potter,” Ava said, trying to wrap her mind around Kenzie’s
description.

“Yeah, except it’s AI-based, and the way you
access the content is through a neural connection. Once the
connection is established, the chip recreates actual experiences
recorded on the device. Like what you would call advanced virtual
technology, but deeper.”

Ava sat up slightly. “Are you talking about a
neurotransmitter? My lab in New York was doing some work on
connectionist systems and artificial neurons, but nothing at the
level you’re describing.”

Kenzie smiled. “If you play your cards right,
Westbrook, I might let you take a peek. It’s in Bellingham, though,
so you’d have to get past my parents…”

“Guess I better not do anything else to piss
off Jane.”

“Sloane says that not pissing off Jane is
kind of a life goal in general. Guess I haven’t been doing a very
good job at that one lately.”

Nodding sympathetically, Ava leaned forward
to kiss the sorrow from her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered
against Kenzie’s lips.

Even her shrug seemed sad. “What can you
do?”

Nothing. Ava could do absolutely
nothing to take back the harm she had already caused to the
otherwise tight-knit Shepherd-Henderson clan.

They cuddled together in the warm bedroom,
dust motes floating about them on beams of afternoon sunlight, and
if not for the Nick fiasco and Jane’s resentment and the general
state of the world, Ava thought she probably could have been happy.
Of course, that might have been the endorphins—not to mention
oxytocin—talking.

“I’ve been wondering,” she said a little
while later. “What were your people’s attitudes like in terms of
sexuality?”

Kenzie didn’t question the subject change.
“Mostly, we were taught to associate sex with reproduction. I think
I mentioned our culture approaches the body like a machine. Even
before we left Zattalia, technology had advanced to the point where
prospective parents could select for the biological traits and
intellectual capabilities they wanted in their future
offspring.”

“Eugenics,” Ava said, frowning slightly.

“Actually, full-on genetic modification. Our
scientists didn’t only have the capacity to select for traits; they
actually improved certain systems and eradicated others. They
thought of it as a method of accelerating the natural process of
evolution.” Kenzie paused. “Matt says I should probably come with a
GMO warning label.”

Ava rolled her eyes at Matt’s nerd humor.
“What about your parents? What did they choose for you?”

“My parents wanted me to be able to decide
between science and the legal field, so my brain is equally
balanced between numeric, verbal, spatial, and logical
reasoning.”

She was discussing her own programming as if
she were some sort of robot. Apparently, Zattalian culture didn’t
prioritize independence the way Americans did. “And which would you
have chosen?”

“Science. Our family had been scientists for
thousands of years.”

“Thousands of years?” Ava shook
her head. “And here I thought Massachusetts was old because it’s
been inhabited since the 1600s.”

“Humans really are only just starting out,
you know.”

She didn’t know that, but she could at least
see why Kenzie might think so. “You must have been so freaked out
when you landed in twenty-first-century America. Talk about going
from one cultural extreme to the other.”

“Right? I went from being told that sex was
this utilitarian process with an occasionally pleasurable
byproduct—if you did it right—to eighth grade in California, where
some of my classmates were already hooking up.”

“Only some of them?” As Kenzie gave her a
look, she added, “Boarding school, remember? There were chaperones,
but it always felt a little more like Lord of the
Flies than Harry Potter.”

“That sounds intense,” Kenzie said, stroking
Ava’s bare arm.

“It was.” She hesitated. “Do you think
growing up in such a sex-neutral environment contributed to your,
um, late blooming?”

“Probably. But also, I had less control over
my powers when I was younger. I didn’t mature physically until my
first year of college, so it was dangerous to get too close to
anyone—both for the other person and for me.”

Ava nodded. “That makes sense. I can’t
imagine what it must have felt like having to grow up hiding who
you were.”

“Isn’t being gay a little like that,
especially in a homophobic family?”

This felt like coming too close to reality
again, but Ava only shrugged. “Sort of. But when you’re queer,
you’re usually less worried about what strangers will think and
more concerned about the people who are supposed to love you
unconditionally.”

“Ah.” Kenzie paused. “Being from another
planet isn’t the only reason I stayed, you know, so
long.”

“It’s not?”

“No. I actually used to wonder if I might be
asexual.”

Ava couldn’t help making a face.

“Hey,” Kenzie said, leaning away from her.
“It’s a valid identity!”

“Of course it is,” Ava said quickly. “I’m
just really glad that you’re not. For purely selfish reasons.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, me too.”

Kenzie reached out and palmed Ava’s breast
with that single-minded intensity she had, and Ava felt her body
responding to the touch as if they hadn’t already had sex twice
that day. Honestly, she was really, really glad
that she didn’t have to miss out on this feeling with Kenzie,
especially when the world seemed determined to fall apart around
them.

#

The theory of staying in the rest of the day
to avoid everyone and everything was excellent, but in practice,
the situation with her family was like a sore tooth—Ava couldn’t
seem to stop poking at it, especially when left to her own devices.
Finally, late in the day, she lowered her Kindle and caught
Kenzie’s attention.

“Want to go out for dinner?” she asked.

Kenzie glanced up from the book she’d
borrowed from Ava’s collection—Jane Austen’s Love and
Friendship—and blinked at her. “With the headbands, though,
right?”

Ava nodded.

Kenzie practically threw down the book. “Heck
yeah!”

Ava wasn’t sure how, after inhaling half the
kitchen’s contents over the course of the day, Kenzie could still
be hungry. But she would take it. After telling her security team
to stand down again, Ava and Kenzie left the building, their
Taammeni headbands safely in place. Maybe she should make a deal
with a Taammen refugee and license their technology, Ava thought as
they crossed First Avenue. But then she imagined her brother and
any number of other criminals scrambling their identities, and she
realized Panopticon had been wise to hide the powerful artifacts
away in a dark evidence locker.

Kenzie led the way to a Chinese restaurant
not far from ECM’s office. With their ringers turned off and no
victims in need of immediate rescue, dinner was almost as
stress-free as it had been during their spontaneous vacation the
previous weekend. And yet, to Ava, the trip to Canada seemed
terribly remote, as if it had happened to someone else. In a way,
she supposed, it had.

The thought depressed her, and as Kenzie
demolished her usual mountain of food, Ava got tipsy on half a
bottle of Beaujolais.

“Wait, what do you mean you don’t have a
driver’s license?” she found herself demanding halfway through the
meal. She wasn’t quite sure how they’d arrived at the topic, but it
suddenly seemed very important.

Kenzie shrugged. “I just never learned. They
didn’t offer it at our high school, and I didn’t want to take
private lessons.”

She lowered her voice. “Is this because of
what happened when you tried to ride a bike?”

At Game Night, Sloane had been only too happy
to relate the story of fourteen-year-old Kenzie flying a ten-speed
into the side of their parents’ house when she panicked and forgot
how to work the hand brakes.

“I told you, I’d never seen brakes like those
before! But yes, it was mostly because of that. At least, that was
Jane’s reasoning.”

Ava’s eyes narrowed at her word
choice: Jane’s reasoning. “Not yours, though?”

Kenzie glanced up from her plate of pot
stickers and moo shu pancakes. “Not—I mean, I didn’t want me
destroying their car, either. An automobile is just a wee, tiny bit
more expensive than a bike.”

Ava nodded and busied herself with her sweet
and sour chicken. She had discovered that Kenzie would sometimes
fill a space if she left it open for her.

“But also,” Kenzie said, “I kind of get
claustrophobic in closed or, like, small spaces?”

“You do?” Ava couldn’t keep the surprise out
of her voice.

“Yeah.” She ducked her head and started
arranging the food on her plate into complex geometric shapes. “I
told you my escape pod was damaged during the asteroid strike, but
I didn’t tell you that the damage to the hyperdrive meant the trip
to the refugee station took a lot longer than it should have.”

“How much longer?” Ava asked, her
semi-drunken mind trying to keep up.

“Nearly twenty-five Earth years.”

Twenty-five years? Ava shuddered. If
she’d been stuck in a spaceship for that long after witnessing the
destruction of everyone and everything she’d ever known,
claustrophobia would probably be the least of her mental
issues.

Kenzie cleared her throat. “I mean, I was in
a controlled state of stasis for most of the trip, so it wasn’t
like I was awake or anything. But I don’t remember feeling nervous
in enclosed spaces before then.”

While “a controlled state of stasis” sounded
like something out of a sci-fi novel, Ava was becoming accustomed
to such statements from her off-worlder girlfriend.
“Most of the trip—what does that mean?”

Kenzie bit into a dumpling and chewed slowly,
her eyes downcast. “Every once in a while, the computer would wake
me up for whatever reason—maybe to test my vitals? I don’t really
know—and I would be conscious for a short period, unable to move or
communicate even through the neural implant, with no knowledge of
how much time had passed. Before I could recover enough to ask the
on-board AI any questions, it would put me under again and that
would be it until the next time.”

Ava reached for her hand, disturbed by the
image Kenzie had described. She had been so young, cast away from
everyone she loved, floating alone in a state where she wasn’t
supposed to notice the passage of time. And yet, apparently, she
had.

“I woke up for the final time right before I
landed at the refugee station,” Kenzie said. “I had no idea I’d
been under for that amount of time until the induction team
informed me.”

Ava shook her head, and then stopped because
it made the room tilt unpleasantly. “How long were you at the
station?”

“Long enough to become fluent in several
languages and study some of Earth’s history and customs. It was a
strange period—to everyone there, my fleet had been gone for a
while, but to me, I’d only just lost them.”

“That must have been really hard,” Ava said,
squeezing her hand.

“It wasn’t easy,” Kenzie said, and offered a
smile that Ava knew was forced. “But then I came here and met the
Shepherd-Hendersons, and everything started to get better. I don’t
know. Maybe part of my brain really did realize how much time had
passed because by the time I came to Earth, my grief didn’t feel
that raw anymore. Maybe I’m lucky I was under for so long.”

That was an extreme version of looking on the
bright side, in Ava’s opinion. But Kenzie’s smile seemed fragile,
so Ava nodded and changed the subject. “How did you learn
English?”

“From an AI. It functions the same as the
neurotransmitter I told you about.”

“Your ‘photo album,’ you mean?” Ava asked.
Her foot tapped the floor as she imagined the technology that must
be present on any Alliance-run space station. Maybe Kenzie would
take her to space one day…? But no, she couldn’t ask such a thing.
It would have to be freely offered.

Kenzie’s indulgent smile told her she knew
exactly why her heartbeat had suddenly ratcheted up. Darned super
hearing.

“Exactly. My English started out all formal
because I wasn’t practicing with the living language, but then I
got here and was exposed to a broader vernacular, and things got
easier. I still struggle with the occasional idiom, though.”

“And yet, you know it’s called an idiom,
which is more than the average native English speaker can probably
say.”

“I think learning a language requires that
you know more about it than the average native speaker.”

Ava nodded. “I thought the same thing when I
was learning Mandarin.”

“You speak Mandarin?”

She lifted a teasing eyebrow. “Just another
thing you don’t know about me, my sweet.”

“Hey,” Kenzie said, pulling out the pout, “I
thought we said no more secrets?”

“We did,” Ava said, “but I have to maintain
my air of mystery somehow.”

Kenzie rolled her eyes affectionately and
turned her attention back to her meal. Ava watched her eat in
silence as her own mind worried away at a particular question.
Finally, she voiced it: “Why did your parents insist you hide who
you were? Wouldn’t it have been easier being out as an off-worlder,
even if you didn’t tell people where you were from?”

“They did it to protect me,” Kenzie said.

Okay, Ava thought, but…
“Wouldn’t you rather have lived more openly?”

“It was too risky. If people had found out,
they might have used my family to get to me.”

People like Nick and Amelia, for example. As
someone currently involved with Kenzie, Ava could see the logic in
that argument. But still, something seemed off. Maybe it was
Kenzie’s too-bright tone or the resolute set of her shoulders.

“Anyway, pretending to be human was better
than always looking over my shoulder,” Kenzie said. “So many
refugees who registered with Panopticon regretted it later, and I
never had to worry the way they did.” She smiled again, but Ava
could tell it was her brave,
making-the-best-out-of-a-shitty-situation smile. She did that a
lot—tossed out a smile when she was obviously hurting. Ava wondered
if it was a conscious response or merely a habit.

“It must have been difficult to be so
isolated, though,” she said, squeezing Kenzie’s hand again. “Other
off-worlders might have been able to understand what you were going
through.”

Kenzie watched her for a moment, and then she
shrugged, the smile slipping. “It was difficult, especially
after Sloane left for college and D’aman got moved by the Alliance.
Still, at least Jane and Benjamin were there for me. Not like your
parents.”

Ava winced.

“Sorry,” Kenzie said. “I forgot we weren’t
talking about them.”

“No, it’s okay. You’re not wrong. Bea and I
used to joke that we were like our own well-intentioned but
woefully ignorant teen parents. I think that’s one of the reasons
we’re so close.”

“You must have done something right—look at
the two of you now.”

“Maybe. Mostly, I think we just got
lucky.”

Kenzie appeared to hesitate. “Were you and
Bea ever, you know?”

“No, of course not. Except for that one kiss
senior year.” Crap. She hadn’t meant to tell her like
that. Stupid wine.

Kenzie’s brow furrow looked almost painful.
“Were you, like… an actual couple?”

“No! We were single at the same time for like
thirty seconds and we were at a party imbibing excessive amounts of
alcohol. It was definitely not our best moment.”

Kenzie’s eyes were still narrowed. “So,
you’re saying this isn’t one of those in love with your best friend
forever stories where you’ve been harboring feelings all this time
and one day down the road she’s going to get divorced, and you’re
going to confess your feelings and move in together and live
happily ever after?”

And, just, wow. Who would have
thought Kenzie’s ability to spin abandonment fantasies would rival
Ava’s own? Although after everything Ava had learned about her,
this particular superpower did make sense, she supposed.

She reached across the table and gripped
Kenzie’s hand. “No,” she said, holding her gaze steadily. “I
promise that I’m not in love with Bea.”

A shadow passed over Kenzie’s face,
momentarily making her seem fragile, haunted even. Then she relaxed
slightly and nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

The words hovered at the edge of Ava’s
tongue. I love you. It would be so easy to say, but once it
was out there, she wouldn’t be able to take it back. Hadn’t this
weekend already given them enough drama?

#

Afterward, she didn’t remember walking home
from the restaurant. She knew that Kenzie made her ginger tea and
rubbed her feet, but she didn’t remember what they’d talked about.
As they got ready for bed in the large bathroom with the his and
hers sinks, Ava could feel Kenzie’s troubled gaze on her, and the
sense of being watched did nothing to help her tipsy irritation.
Maybe she should send Kenzie home to her own apartment. But as soon
as the thought formed, she rejected it. She hadn’t been able to
fall asleep the previous night in this new apartment that still
felt strange, and nothing had changed. She needed rest, which meant
she needed Kenzie—even if she wished she didn’t.

“Are you okay?” Kenzie asked as they slid
into bed.

“I’m fine,” Ava all but snapped. She turned
over on her side, relieved when the room didn’t spin. “Just tired.
Good night.”

Kenzie didn’t say anything right away. She
only slipped her arms around Ava from behind and tugged her back
into her warmth. “Good night.”

Ava tried to hold herself away, but she
couldn’t help how her body became soft and pliant at Kenzie’s
touch. Soon she felt herself snuggling back into Kenzie, her
eyelids drifting shut. She wasn’t sleepy, though. For some reason,
her brain seemed determined to fixate on the photo Kenzie had
texted her of Jane and Sloane facing off the night she flew to New
York. They had been fighting about Ava, clearly, and even though
Kenzie’s sister had apparently been on their side that night,
Sloane still looked at her sometimes like she worried Ava might
lure Kenzie to her destruction.

The thing was, Ava couldn’t blame her. She
worried about that herself, in dreams mostly when her conscious
mind relinquished control and her inner fears surged to the
surface. Kenzie’s family might disapprove of their relationship,
but Ava’s family wanted to kill people like Kenzie. Had
killed people like Kenzie. Sometimes when Ava awoke in the middle
of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep right away, she would
run through worst-case scenarios in her head, imagining how she
would defend Kenzie against any of the bevy of anti-alien weapons
she knew her brother had manufactured and stashed in hidden bunkers
around the world. She wasn’t sure any of them would work against
Kenzie, but she also didn’t know that they wouldn’t. Another reason
she needed to get back to work—her investigation had just gotten a
kick in the pants it didn’t need, and it wasn’t going to go
anywhere as long as she was hiding out here trying to convince
herself that everything would be all right.

Eyes still closed, she focused on her
breathing, trying to relax her mind. But talking about her old
locket, the one that had held her mother’s photo, had brought back
memories she normally tried to avoid. The night before
Christmas wasn’t the start of a beloved holiday tale for
her. It was the last day of a good life she could barely remember.
The last day she’d seen her mother alive.

She’d been little, but there were parts of
that day she’d replayed so often she was sure she would never
forget. When the police lights had lit up the street outside the
neighbor’s apartment, she’d immediately worried that something had
happened to her mother. That morning while playing on their front
walk, she had stepped on a crack, and as the two policemen knocked
on the door, she’d crossed her fingers and prayed to the god she’d
still believed in that her mother’s back wasn’t broken. As it
turned out, it wasn’t. The drunk driver had walked away from his
accident, but her mother’s skull had been broken, among other
things. In her nearly five-year-old brain, Ava had reasoned that
the accident couldn’t be her fault, then. The rhyme very clearly
stated that “your mother’s back” would be
broken, not her head.

And yet, it had been her fault. Her
mother had died on her way to buy a present Ava had requested,
which meant her mother had died because of her. Or at least, that
was how it had always felt. She knew intellectually that the only
person to blame was the driver who chose to get behind the wheel
after drinking three martinis at lunch. An accountant with two
previous DUIs and one count of vehicular assault on his record,
Martin Graylon had been sentenced to ten years in prison for
killing her mother. A single decade. That was all her life was
deemed to be worth. To make matters worse, he’d been released
early—for good behavior, of course—after only serving
seven of the ten years.

Christmas with the Westbrooks had never been
the most uplifting of experiences, but it was what had happened her
final year of prep school that had cemented Ava’s aversion to the
holiday. Back in New York over winter break, knowing it was her
last chance as a legal minor, she’d tracked down her mother’s
killer in an industrial neighborhood in Queens and sat outside his
crummy brownstone watching him through the curtainless windows.
From hacking the county court records, she knew that Graylon had
lost everything when he went to prison: his house on Long Island,
his job, his family. Shortly after the trial, his wife had divorced
him and moved back to the Midwest with their two children.

But had he paid enough? Ava didn’t think so.
Seven years in prison was nothing. Meanwhile, because of this
stranger’s selfish decision to drive drunk, her mother had missed
out on so much, and Ava had been forced to endure a childhood
with Amelia and Alexander as her guardians. What might their lives
have been like if her mother had lived? A futile question, and yet
it had haunted her to the point that, on the cusp of adulthood,
she’d sat in her father’s car on a dark street on Christmas Eve,
his pistol slowly warming in her hands as she contemplated killing
Martin Graylon. A life for a life. That would only be fair,
wouldn’t it?

The minutes had ticked past, adding up to one
hour and then two. When Graylon finally turned off the TV and
headed upstairs, she knew she had to make a decision: Act now or
forever hold her peace.

She could have opened the car door, crept up
to the brownstone, found her way inside through an unlatched
window. She could have climbed the stairs quietly, her heart
pounding, safety off. She could have surprised him in his bedroom
and shot him twice in the chest, or announced her mother’s name
before shooting him in the head, or any of half a dozen other
bloody scenarios she’d contemplated that night. She could have run
back outside and escaped down the street before anyone even
realized what had happened. She knew she could have. But instead,
she’d placed the gun back in the glove compartment, started the
Volvo’s engine, and turned toward home. He wasn’t worth ruining her
own life over. Because even if she’d gotten away with it, even if
she’d been found not guilty because of her age and the Westbrook
name and money, she would have had a man’s death on her hands.
Fantasizing about killing someone was completely different from
shooting them in cold blood.

Besides, his life had already been in
shambles. He was by himself on Christmas Eve, sitting in a beat-up
recliner methodically draining a six-pack while the lights of the
television flickered ghoulishly across his face. He would probably
suffer more alive, slowly drinking himself to death.

No one knew about her plot to kill her
mother’s murderer, not even Bea. Ava had never told a single soul
how close she had come to executing Martin Graylon. What would
Kenzie, with her fixed moral compass, her exaggerated sense of
right and wrong, think if she knew? Would she look at Ava
differently, or would she not be able to look at her at all?

No secrets, they’d said, but Ava wasn’t sure
she believed that was possible. Or, even if it was, advisable.

Kenzie twitched in her sleep and moaned a
little, and Ava turned over, slipping an arm around her waist and
whispering soothing words into the warm skin of her neck. Was she
dreaming about the asteroid storm that had engulfed her fleet?
About the months and years slipping past as her escape pod plotted
its slow course through the galaxy? Or, like Ava, was she now
plagued by dreams of some calamity befalling the woman she
loved?

What were they even doing? How would this
ever work? Off-worlders and Westbrooks didn’t mix. They were like
oil and water—one would always have to rise above the other.

Kenzie’s breathing paused, and Ava knew she
was awake.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“No,” Kenzie said as if she was commenting on
the weather.

The plainness of the confession made Ava
pause. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Kenzie repeated, and turned to face
her, movements slow and controlled. When she stopped, their faces
were only inches apart, and Kenzie drew a finger across her
forehead, down her nose, to her lips. “You’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” she confirmed, her breath
catching a little at the feel of Kenzie’s touch.

They lay watching each other in the dim light
from the bathroom, and Ava could feel the heat rising in waves from
Kenzie’s skin, her eyes, her mouth. In the dark she always seemed
less human, more alien. But that realization no longer startled
Ava. It made her feel closer to Kenzie than anyone else she’d ever
dated. As if what they had together was as special and unique as
Kenzie was.

“I want to kiss you,” Kenzie murmured, eyes
on her lips. “Is that all right?”

“Of course,” Ava said, and leaned forward to
meet her halfway.

This, she thought as Kenzie leaned over her,
slipping her thigh between Ava’s and pressing her weight slowly,
carefully into her, this was why they were
together. Because Kenzie made her feel more, want more than anyone
else ever had. Because what they had
together was special and deserved a chance.
Because they deserved a shot at happiness just as much as anyone
else. Didn’t they?

“I love you,” Kenzie whispered, tattooing the
words into her flesh with her lips, her tongue, her teeth.

Without thinking, Ava gasped the words back,
her hips already moving restlessly: “I love you, too.” Then Kenzie
pushed her sleep shirt aside, and Ava stopped thinking of anything
other than the woman whose hands and mouth already seemed to know
all of her secrets.

Chapter Fourteen

Kenzie lay in bed beside Ava, her mind
spiraling. Ava had told her that she loved her, too, which should
make her happier than she’d ever been. And it had—at first. But the
wave of joy that had swept over her was now being followed by a
wave of terror of equal or greater amplitude. She closed her eyes,
but that made everything worse—her nightmare came back stronger
than ever, and there was nothing she could do to stop the looping
images of Ava falling, dropping like a stone toward Earth while
Kenzie tried to fly after her and somehow couldn’t. Had she dropped
Ava, or had Sentinel murdered her and forced her to watch? It
wasn’t clear. The only thing she knew for certain was that Ava was
dead, and that she had failed to save her.

What was wrong with her? Why had Ava’s
reciprocity landed with the force of a thousand punches? Maybe
because other than the Shepherd-Hendersons, no one else on Earth
had ever told her they loved her.

Ava stirred beside her, movements languid.
“That was amazing,” she said, seemingly pleased with Kenzie and
herself in equal measures. “You’re amazing.”

“Mmm,” Kenzie managed.

In the dark bedroom, she could feel Ava
eyeing her. “Kenzie? Are you okay?”

She shook her head.

“You’re not okay?”

She shook her head again. Why was this so
hard? Why was she lying here in this perfectly lovely condo with
Ava beside her, safe and relaxed (although less so by the second,
judging from her biometrics), and yet in her head she was picturing
Ava in a car damaged by an assassin’s bullet, in the audience at
Guild House caught in the sights of a terrorist’s rifle, in the
back of a windowless van surrounded by masked Sentinel agents? Ava
had just told her she loved her, too, and now Kenzie couldn’t seem
to stop seeing her in danger, dying, dead.

Pain bloomed in her chest, and she rolled
away from Ava abruptly, rubbing her ribcage. It was like a giant
fist had seized her lungs and now she couldn’t seem to draw in
enough air. She choked in a tortured breath, feeling herself begin
to panic. Had a Sentinel agent snuck into the condo and attacked
them? Had Nick Westbrook somehow discovered her weakness?

Ava reached for her arm. “Kenzie, look at
me.”

At first, she ignored her, gazing about the
room wildly. But Ava’s grip tightened, and at last, Kenzie focused
on her.

“I think you’re having a panic attack,” Ava
said, her voice calm. “Concentrate on my voice. I’m going to sing,
and I want you to as well, okay?”

She nodded, dimly aware of her heart racing,
of her body trembling as if she had just carried an airplane on her
back.

“Silent night, holy night, all is calm,
all is bright…”

Kenzie joined in, her breath gradually
regulating as she sang the familiar tune, heartbeat slowing as she
stared into Ava’s eyes, visible in the faint glow cast by the
nightlight in the corner of the bedroom. Ava hated the dark, and
just then, Kenzie did, too. By the time they reached the final
refrain of “Sleep in heavenly peace,” the fight or flight
reaction had mostly faded from her system, taking with it the
irrational sense of fear that had flooded through her.

“Better?” Ava asked, still pressing her
arm.

She nodded, and suddenly, embarrassment crept
up her throat, hot and cloying. “I’m sorry,” she choked out as
sounds from the city filtered back into her awareness.

“You don’t have to—”

“Stop.” Kenzie cut her off, eyes burning. “I
can’t—I can’t do this.”

“Kenzie…”

“Just—” She shook her head and sat up,
pulling on her sleep shirt and shorts as she spoke. “I just need
some air. I’ll be back soon, okay?”

Ava didn’t respond at first. Kenzie was
already a foot off the bed, but she hovered restlessly, waiting
until she heard her girlfriend’s quiet, resigned, “Okay.”

Outside near the privacy screen a moment
later, the patio fell away at a vicious pace as she flung herself
into the sky. Normally, flying was the one thing guaranteed to
remedy (or at least momentarily render moot) whatever had gone
wrong in her life. But her nightmare shadowed her—Ava falling as
Kenzie watched, unable to fly fast enough to save her. It
could happen. She knew it could. What if the dream had been a
premonition? What would she do if Sentinel came for Ava?

She’d said before that she didn’t know what
she might do if anything happened to Ava, but that wasn’t true.
She’d thought of murdering Nick in cold blood so that he wouldn’t
get the chance to hurt anyone ever again, but what she’d wanted
more than anything was to make sure Nick didn’t hurt Ava
ever again. Clearly, the idea of losing her brought out the worst
in Kenzie. Why had she gone and built her life around a frail human
who was almost as shadowed by the threat of alien extremists as she
was? The difference was that Kenzie was mostly invulnerable, while
Ava—

She speeded up, pushing herself until she
heard it: the reverberating crack in the distance that meant she
had broken the sound barrier. She checked the sky for aircraft and
rerouted her path accordingly, and then pushing herself even
harder, she flew faster and farther than she had in weeks, away
from Ava, away from Seattle, away, away, away.

Higher and higher, she climbed until she
neared the limit of the earth’s atmosphere. Then she stopped and
simply floated, gazing toward the Corvus constellation. She tried
to find Alia, the waning star of her ancestral home; tried to find
Zattalia with its rust-colored sands and dried-up seas; but even
her enhanced vision was no match for the light years that separated
her from the planet her people had abandoned generations before.
Would she go there if she got the chance? She had always fantasized
about discovering a method of reversing the ruin her people had
wrought, of using her enhanced intelligence to make it possible for
them to one day return. She’d never understood why her ancestors
had funneled their energy into ships that would allow them to
travel the universe instead of staying and facing the damage they
had done to the planet that had nurtured them through all the eons
that had come before. Why hadn’t they gone back to right the
wrongs, to return the species whose DNA was on file in the
Alliance’s archive to their rightful home? Even the sluggish humans
in Wall-E had gone back to fix a home they couldn’t
remember. Why couldn’t her people have done the same?

But even as she imagined building a new life
among people who would view her as one of their own rather than a
freak, she knew it wasn’t possible to go back. Even if she could
find a colony of other Zattalians somewhere in the known universe
and convince them to go back to Zattalia, Earth had changed her.
Sloane and Jane and Benjamin had changed her. Matt and Antonio had
changed her. Ava had changed her the most, altering her biology at
the cellular level until now Kenzie didn’t quite feel at home
anywhere without her.

Ava, who had told her she loved her.
Ava, who was somewhere far below, her heart probably breaking a
little more with every moment Kenzie stayed away.

With one last glance into deep space, she
turned and began to fly back to Earth, the green and blue blur of
ocean and land slowly sharpening into recognizable features and an
entire spectrum of colors. As she neared Seattle, she wasn’t sure
how much time had elapsed. Enough time for Ava to get up and light
the gas fireplace in the living room; enough time for Ava to cuddle
up on the couch with her toes—always cold no matter the temperature
outside—nestled under a gray fleece blanket, her Kindle resting
against her knees. She was upset, Kenzie could tell as she set down
on the balcony. But at least the side door was still unlocked.

She let herself inside and paced quietly down
the hall to the living room, where she paused uncertainly.
“Hi.”

Ava glanced up. Her heart rate accelerated,
and Kenzie could hear her slight intake of breath. But she didn’t
say anything, only watched and waited.

“Can I join you?” she asked, reaching to push
up glasses that weren’t there.

“Suit yourself.”

And yeah, Kenzie definitely deserved that.
She carefully crossed to the couch, where she took a seat a full
cushion away from her girlfriend. At least, she hoped she was still
her girlfriend. They were still together, weren’t they? Not that
Kenzie would blame her for breaking up with her after… She took a
breath to stop the panicky internal ramble.

“So. That happened,” she said, unsurprised
when Ava gave her a dubious look. “I’m sorry. I know that must have
sucked.”

Ava shook her head. “This is why
I waited to say it back. I thought you weren’t ready, and obviously
I was right.”

“You weren’t, though,” she said.
“I am ready.”

“Could have fooled me. Oh, wait. You
did.”

Kenzie frowned. She had never been confident
in her ability to judge sarcasm. Did it mean what she thought it
did or, in fact, the complete opposite? “Don’t do that.”

Ava’s eyebrow lifted as she set her Kindle on
the coffee table. “Don’t do what?”

“Don’t tell me I don’t feel what I know I do.
I’m perfectly capable of interpreting my own emotions.”

“Says the woman without even a modicum of
self-awareness.”

“That’s not fair! Just because I don’t react
to something the way you think I should doesn’t mean I’m not
self-aware.”

“Right.” Ava threw off the blanket and stood
above her, arms folded across her chest. “Because telling someone
you love them and then running away when they say it back is
clearly a sign of emotional maturity.” The light from the fireplace
shone in her auburn highlights, and her green eyes were fierce. She
had never looked so much like a Westbrook as she did in that
moment.

Kenzie could feel the angry energy rolling
off Ava, and she took a calming breath, trying to resist the
seductive pull of the fight. Ava
wasn’t actually angry, she told herself. Mostly
she was hurt, and humans often used anger to cover their pain.
Kenzie had learned this particular lesson from observing Sloane
over the years, although she hadn’t ever shared that fact with her
sister. Somehow, she thought being analyzed would only make Sloane
angrier. Or more hurt. Or more of some other human emotion that
Kenzie hadn’t quite gotten the hang of yet.

But this she could handle.

She stayed seated and opened her arms
slightly, adopting a non-threatening pose. De-escalate,
she reminded herself. When she’d first started working at ECM,
Alison in Human Resources had taught a three-day workshop on best
practices for de-escalating potentially violent encounters, skills
that came in handy as a reporter. Kenzie regularly used the methods
Alison had taught them to calm belligerent interview subjects
and/or people who accosted her on the street, upset over something
she’d written.

Ava, however, wasn’t belligerent. She was
kind and generous and patient, and right now she was hurting
because of something Kenzie had done.

“Look,” she said, keeping her voice soft.
“I’m sorry. I got scared. I got scared and I did what I always do,
which is take off. Literally.”

Ava blinked and chewed on the tip of her
thumb, gazing down at Kenzie. “Okay.”

“And you don’t deserve that. You’re right, I
did tell you I loved you. Because I do, Ava. I love so many things
about you. But sometimes when I look at you all I can see is one of
your brother’s enemies aiming a gun at you, or worse, one of his
friends trying to kill you. It’s absolutely terrifying.”

Ava sat back down beside her, gripping her
hands. “I get that, Kenzie. I’m scared, too. I’ve seen you fight an
alien ten times your size, and I know better than most that the
humans who want to hurt you are far more dangerous than any
off-worlder. I’m just as terrified of losing you.”

“No, you’re not!” As Ava leaned away from
her, frowning, Kenzie clutched her hands. “I don’t mean—I’m sorry,
it’s just…” She struggled to find the words.

“It’s just what?”

“I lost everything,” she said, looking
up into Ava’s eyes. “I really don’t think you can understand. My
family, my friends, my classmates, my home, everything.
I thought I knew what my life would be like, and then one day, with
no warning, it all ended. Thousands of people were just gone,
obliterated in a matter of minutes, and I didn’t even get to say
goodbye.” Her eyes blurred with tears, and she felt more than saw
Ava shift closer.

“You’re right.” Ava pressed a kiss to her
temple and hugged her against her side. “I can’t understand what
that feels like. I lost my mother and my home, but I didn’t lose my
planet. I still have an entire world’s worth of people I belong to.
So no, I can’t understand what it feels like to be you. But I can
at least be here for you, if you’ll only let me.”

“I’m trying,” Kenzie said, burying her
face in Ava’s shoulder. “I really am. I’m trying so
hard, Ava. But your brother… and my sister… and our stupid
parents…”

Ava’s hand was gentle in her hair, the other
steady on her back. “I know, sweet girl. But I’m pretty tough, and
so are you. We’ll figure it out. We’re the good guys, and the good
guys always win, don’t they?”

“Not always,” Kenzie mumbled as she wrapped
her arms around Ava’s waist. “Sometimes everyone you know just
freaking dies, and there’s nothing you can do. I have all these
powers, but what if I can’t save you, either?”

Ava hugged her close, and when she spoke, her
voice sounded tight. “What happened to your fleet wasn’t your
fault, Kenzie. And if something happens to me it won’t be your
fault, either. Unless you have powers I don’t know about? Like, I
don’t know, the ability to see the future?”

This reminded Kenzie of the therapist she’d
seen in high school—“You’re simply not that important”—and
she had to laugh a little. “Well, I am a superhero,” she said,
leaning back to meet Ava’s gaze. “Aren’t I supposed to have a god
complex?”

“In your case, I believe it would be called a
goddess complex. But even you can’t control who lives or dies.”

“Or who tells my story.” As Ava gave her a
look, Kenzie added, “What? I can’t help it if you insist on
speaking in Hamilton lyrics.”

“I mean, Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius.” Ava
touched Kenzie’s cheek, her own gaze growing serious again. “I’m
sorry I said you have no emotional awareness. You were right, it
wasn’t fair. I was angry, and I shouldn’t have let my temper get
the best of me.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that. But you told
me once to tell you if I needed to take space, so I did and yet you
still got mad.”

“I know, but—”

“No buts,” Kenzie interrupted, surprised by
her own tenacity. “You said you love me. Did you mean you only love
the parts of me that are like you? Because I’m not like you, Ava. I
will always be different. And part of that difference is
how I process things.”

“I get that, Kenzie, I do. And I did say it
was okay for you to take space when you need it, and I meant it.
Honestly. But can you also try to understand my perspective? I told
you I loved you and you disappeared on me. It’s okay that you
needed space, but actually taking it at that precise moment really
hurt.”

Kenzie sighed and leaned her head against
Ava’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I know. I didn’t mean to hurt you, either.
But I’m sure it’ll happen again, probably on both sides. That’s
part of being in a relationship.” Ava’s lips brushed her forehead.
“Where did you go, anyway? Back to your apartment?”

“No. I went to space.”

There was a pause, and then she felt rather
than heard Ava laughing. “Of course you did.”

It took Kenzie a second to recognize the
irony. Then she started laughing too, only then the strangest thing
happened—she felt her face twist and tears rise again, and in the
space of a single breath, her laughter morphed into a sob, and then
another, and then she was clutching at Ava’s shoulders while she
cried in great, gasping breaths. Ava just held her, swaying her
slightly side to side and murmuring unintelligible words of comfort
and caring.

The storm of tears faded eventually, and Ava
tugged and pulled at her until they were stretched out together on
the couch, Kenzie’s head pillowed on her chest, Ava’s lips in her
hair as she hummed Christmas carols and Broadway show tunes and
melodies that sounded vaguely Irish. They lay together for an
indeterminate time until, all at once, Kenzie realized that the
hard, frozen ball of fear and pain she’d carried inside ever since
the day her parents had forced her to abandon them had finally,
without her even noticing, begun to melt.

She pushed herself up and looked into her
girlfriend’s eyes. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Ava eyed her quizzically.

Kenzie cleared her throat of lingering tears
and said, deliberately and slowly, “I love you, Ava.”

Ava blinked. “Is this a test? Like, are you
going to fly away again if I say it back?”

“No, I’m not.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Okay.” She stared at Kenzie intently. “I
love you too, Kenzie.”

The wave of joy wasn’t quite as intense this
time, but neither was the corresponding wave of fear. Kenzie held
Ava against her body and slowly levitated them both into the air,
higher and higher until they were hovering nearly at the apex of
the vaulted ceiling.

Ava gasped as Kenzie shifted them upright,
and then she laughed, tightening her grip around her neck. “I can’t
believe you!”

“What? I didn’t say I wouldn’t fly,”
Kenzie pointed out. “I only said I wouldn’t fly away.”

“You writers and your semantics.” She shook
her head, but she was smiling.

Kenzie spun them around, but slowly so that
Ava wouldn’t be frightened. “You know you love
my… semantics.”

“I do,” Ava said, and leaned in to kiss the
sensitive spot behind Kenzie’s ear. “I really do.”

Kenzie closed her eyes and surrendered to the
sensation of Ava’s lips against her skin, and for a moment, for a
truly blessed period of time, the real world where Sentinel
probably wanted them both dead and the citizens of Seattle couldn’t
seem to keep from hurting themselves and each other almost ceased
to exist.

#

In the morning, Kenzie awoke to the sound of
rain pattering against the skylights. Summer rain was one of her
favorites, but even as she stretched in Ava’s large, insanely
comfortable bed, careful not to jar her sleeping girlfriend, she
heard it: the Panopticon beacon. She and D’aman were needed at
headquarters.

She sighed, momentarily regretting her
decision to fulfill her own—and Matt’s—longtime dream of helping
people. Then she rose and grabbed her suit from the closet at the
end of the bed. “I love you,” she whispered to Ava’s sleeping form.
And then she was up and away from the balcony’s hidden corner,
hoping no one would notice the blur speeding away from
Belltown.

Jane’s voice echoed in her ears: “You make
your own luck.” Another human saying that demonstrated the
immense lack of understanding the people of Earth had for the laws
of the universe. Sometimes, no matter what you did, things turned
out the way you didn’t want them to. And sometimes, they turned out
exactly as you’d hoped. But there was no predicting which outcome
would happen. You simply had to continue moving forward, hoping
everything would work out even in the face of overwhelming
odds.

As she neared Panopticon, D’aman fell in
beside her.

“Good morning, youngling.”

“Good morning, Omatu,” she said, using
the Kreedilan form of respect for an elder.

“Today is a good day to help someone in
need,” D’aman commented.

“Indeed,” she said, “it is.”

She pictured Ava sleeping in her bed,
vulnerable and alone, while her family led Sentinel down an even
thornier path than before. Please, Alia, she prayed,
watch over her while I can’t. Hold her in your hands and keep
her safe.

And then they were landing on the upper
balcony at Panopticon, and a team of agents was rushing out to meet
them. Ava’s security team would have to look after her because
right now, it was time for her and D’aman to go to work.

Kenzie sent a final prayer out into the
universe before turning to the nearest Panopticon agent.

“What’s going on?”

--------------------------------

Thanks for reading Between the Dawn and
Day. If you enjoyed it, would you please take a moment to leave
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Happy reading!

Kate

About the Author

Kate Christie, author of sixteen novels
including the Girls of Summer series, Beautiful Game,
Leaving LA, and Gay Pride & Prejudice, was born
and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A graduate of Smith College and
Western Washington University, she lives near Seattle with her
wife, three young daughters, and the family dogs.

To read excerpts from Kate’s other titles
from Second Growth Books and Bella Books, please visit her
author website. There,
you can also check out her blog, Homodramatica, where she
occasionally finds time to wax unpoetically about lesbian life,
fiction, and motherhood.

Patreon Supporters

One of the faithful readers of the Girls of
Summer series suggested I start a Patreon
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One of the benefits listed on my Patreon
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Thank you, and
happy reading!