Page 56 of Star-Born Anomaly
“No.”
“But you perceive something from me.” It was a statement, not a question, rushed out frantically.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I experience your emotions, but cannot taste your thoughts.”
Confusion furrowed her brow. “Why not?”
“You are an anomaly.”
A strangled sound left her just as Knox emerged from the ship dressed in a flight-suit, helmet engaged. Clad all in black, his physique muscular, he wore two large guns strapped to each of his thighs. After a brief pause to survey the icy terrain, he advanced toward the outpost.
Wynn’s distress mounted, and her breaths quickened with each step Knox took toward them.
Iax did not want Wynn distressed. It hurt the empty spaces in his chest. “I will speak with him.”
He turned on his heel and headed toward the decontamination room.
“Wait. What?” Wynn’s breathless words bounced inside the lab, then her bare feet slapped against the floor as she followed. “Like how you spoke to the beasts?”
He stopped where his jacket lay inside the compartment and put on his glasses first. “I believe I will need to rely on verbal communication.” Though he could taste the man’s thoughts, Knox was not aware of his presence in his mind.
Iax slipped his jacket over his shoulders, then slid his hand upward to fasten the closures.
Wynn stared at him, her jaw slack and her body still, until he touched the control to open the inner decontamination door. Out of the corner of his eye, she snapped straight and stepped forward.
“Get back in here and put on a suit, you idiot.”
The door closed on her words. They wouldn’t reopen again since the second door was already opening. Sunlight spilled inside the last section of the decontamination room, illuminating the grated floor.
He did not look back as he advanced toward the last door, though he felt Wynn’s emotions tumble toward him in a toxic combination of fear and dread. All the more reason to deal with Knox quickly. Iaxhatedto feel her distress.
Just as the second door closed, she shouted something else, the words muffled by the transparent aluminum. He could not stop now. Knox drew closer, and Iax had tasted the darkness of his mind.
The last door opened, and Iax stepped out into a frozen, sunny world.
Chapter twenty-one
Everything about this place was a shithole.
Carver scanned the horizon, his helmet interface sending streams of data. The desert of cakey dirt had turned into an icy mess, each step hard and uneven. There were no trees, no rivers, nothing to make the surface of Earth anywhere he would want to spend time. Just an ugly building attached to an even uglier greenhouse, both on stilts, like even it knew better than to allow its belly to touch dying filth. A surface-to-station tether shot up in the distance, the returning storm already obscuring its slender shape.
Thick clouds swirled in a foreboding circle. He didn’t have much time before he had to get out of here. He’d waited long enough to land, gauging the span it would take to retrieve the doctor and exit the atmosphere.
Movement grabbed his focus, and his hand went to his gun. His steps slowed as a person strode around the edge of the main building.
There had been nothing about a secondary target in his package, but during his short flight across the surface, his sensors had picked up a single-person pod, one that had self-destructed after landing.
The man heading toward him was definitely not Wynn Lambdin.
He was dressed in black.
He wore glasses.
He didn’t have a protective suit of any kind.
His skin was vulnerable to the elements, his body exposed to lethal levels of radiation.
Everything Carver had just read on the way here, why his superiors seemed fit to load him down with terabytes of data, clicked into place.
