“She is. I know her. She’ll find us.”
“You trust her?”
“With my life.” I wanted to hold him, skin to skin. Feel his heat. Taste his air. All I could do was stare at his face on a screen. “And yours, Darius. She’ll find us.”
“All right. Your call. I trust you.”
And there they were, the words I’d been waiting to hear my entire life. Even as I smiled with pleasure I realized I didn’t need them. Not anymore. I knew who I was and what I was capable of. I didn’t need anyone else to tell me what I could or could not do, who I was. What I was worth. I made that decision. No one else.
“I love you.”
“You said that before.”
“Are you tired of hearing it?”
“No. Never. But I would prefer to have you naked and gasping for air when you say it.”
“Of course.” I began to see the nearly infinite appeal of Tor’s favorite response. So many layers of meaning.
“If you two are finished, I have set the detonation systems to active. The moment the beams experience increased tension from a detachment event, it will set off a chain reaction. Failing that, I have set a timer on the initial explosive for ten minutes to initiate the event. We need to go,” Tor said.
“Copy that.” Darius looked at me, or rather, directly into his screen. “Ready?”
“Always.”
“Magboots off and maximum jump in three...two...one...jump!”
Tycho and Tor took care of deactivating our magboots as we used every ounce of power our Titans’ possessed to leap away from the ship and into space.
Clinging to one another, we floated away as the Battlestar continued on its journey. “Do you think the others made it?”
“Yes.”
“I think so, too.” I had a good feeling about this. If we had figured out a solution, I had to have faith that the other Elite Starfighters had a well.
“Lily?”
“Yes?”
“I read your books last night.”
Oh. My. God. “I threw those away.”
“I knew they were important to you. I retrieved them.”
“And you read them? Why?”
“I was trying to understand where I’d gone wrong. What you needed.”
Oh shit. “I don’t need an Atlan beast, Darius. Not when I have you.”
“I’ll make sure of that.”
“So? Why are you telling me this now?”
“There was one part of the story in particular that I feel I must ask about.”
“What part?”