Free The Choosing (The Pruxnae Book 1) by Lucy Varna Page A

was doing. If she could read his language, it
would be different. She’d have something to help her, but between that lack and
the language barrier barring full communication with Ryn, she was lost.
    His hands
stilled on the console. On the viewscreen, the other ship drifted ominously closer.
A metallic bang jolted Ryn’s ship, startling Ziri into a small yelp. Her heart
leapt into her throat. She slapped her hands over her mouth and stared
wide-eyed at Ryn. His dark eyes held a kind of hopelessness she’d never seen
before, not in him, not in anybody.
    Slowly, that
look changed, morphing into fierce determination as he looked at her. He
reached past her, popped open a panel to her left, and pulled out two blasters,
gripping them both in one hand. With the other hand, he unfastened the buckles
holding her to the chair and dragged her out of it by her upper arm.
    She stumbled
along behind him toward the room’s other console, an upright fixture situated
halfway between the exit and the main console. He tucked her into the small
space behind it and pushed her legs close to her body. From where she sat,
she’d be hidden from the view of anybody entering the room, at least for a few
paces. She crouched there, watching him uncertainly as he adjusted the
blaster’s settings. He raised it in front of her, touched the trigger
mechanism, and mimed movement away from the other end of the weapon.
    That she understood.
Tersii might be trusting, but they weren’t stupid. Her father had shown her how
to use a similar weapon when she was nearly grown, insisting that she become
familiar with it before he allowed her to move out on her own. She’d tucked it
away and rarely even thought about it. Who needed a weapon in Arden Hollow?
    She glanced at Ryn
and scowled. Right. Trust her to be the first person needing a weapon for
something other than scaring off sand leeches, and even then, she hadn’t
thought to use it.
    Where exactly
had her head been the night Ryn had barged into her home?
    He pressed the
blaster into her icy hands. “Ziri,” he murmured. His eyes roamed over her face,
landing on her mouth, and before she could draw a breath, he leaned in and
captured her mouth with his own.
    His lips were
soft, tender, the kiss so fleeting, she barely had time to absorb what had
happened. He drew back, pressed a lingering kiss to her forehead, then pushed
himself away from her, blaster in hand. At the doorway, he paused and turned
toward her. With a single nod, he stepped through the doorway and was gone.
    The door snicked
shut. A red light flashed intermittently on the panel next to it. Ziri clutched
the blaster and stared after Ryn. She should’ve shot him, should’ve tried to
escape, should’ve done anything besides sit there and let him kiss her, but no.
She was a lanoo, a stinking, onka-brained lanoo without the sense Onu had given
a garri.
    Something on the
viewscreen moved, drawing Ziri’s attention to the ship drifting ever closer to
Ryn’s. The muscles tightened around her spine in a reflexive shiver. On second
thought, anything that scared Ryn into willingly giving his captive a blaster
was something she wanted to avoid meeting. She huddled behind the console and
waited for his return, hoping he’d be the next person to walk through the door
and not whatever was housed within that other ship.
     

Chapter Eight
     
    Ryn pressed his
back against the door to the bridge. His heart pounded in his chest and the
memories of that long ago time crowded into his mind. The swiftness of his
parents’ deaths, the terror of being captured by merciless aliens, the slash of
metal tentacles whipping down across his back, and, Tyornin help him, the
ever-present stench.
    Sweepers. They’d
jumped into a kraden nest of Sweepers.
    How that had
happened was beyond him. Jump points were supposed to be clean. They were
supposed to be checked on a routine basis by the inhabitants of nearby systems
and guarded against the very situation he