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The leaden fear in my legs slowed my pace to match Roxy’s shorter one. Behind the metal railing ahead, the waterfalls and their two-thousand-meter drop looked like a death sentence. Jumping with a rope and harnesses to the balcony was one thing, but jumping with nothing to hold onto? That was madness.

“Ssstop! Sssomebody ssstop them!” Daddy Skirkild’s voice and the cymbal-clangs of his platform shoes stomping the pavement rose above the cacophony. I glanced back to see him in a full-out sprint after us, one hand holding his robes up over his skinny reptilian legs as he closed in on us, a stun-phaser in the other hand.

Three red blasts shot past us. Just one hit would doom us, but I would take the perilous jump extraction that would lead me to a life with Roxy over this casino prison any day.

Roxy may’ve been brilliant and beautiful, but she was a slow runner on her heel-booted little legs. She pulled a blaster from the folds of her dress, and I picked her up from behind, increasing our speed as she shot at the metal railing ahead of us. It melted in a shower of sparks.

She gestured at the still-orange-hot hole with the blaster. “Jump!”

At the end of the platform, I jumped, sailing off the edge with Roxy in my arms into the vast empty air above the waterfall. My stomach leapt into my throat as we free-fell.

“Nooooo!” Skirkild’s voice echoed down as we plummeted. “My sssexy beassst!”

Daddy Skirkild’s scaly face faded into the distance almost instantly. I gripped my mate tight, my heart beating out of my chest as I buried my face against her warm neck. She laughed and whooped as the air rushed past, ruffling her hair and dress. She grabbed my face and kissed me, and at that moment, our freefall paused. The bright violet light of a tractor beam reeled us in.

Within minutes, we were sucked into the cargo hold of a ship. Roxy pulled me into a run toward the cockpit where a Kelki with purple tentacles and half of Count Bordaff’s face was at the pilot’s seat. They directed a tentacle toward me, and I shook it.

“Heya, you must be Dr. Tyos. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m Sha. Sha Herdayn. Heya, Rox?”

“Don’t leave the atmosphere, Sha. I have to get this restraining collar off of him.” She rummaged through a tool chest, opening and shutting drawers, grabbing and discarding various pieces of equipment.

I peered through the windshield. Dozens of copycat ships swarmed in irregular flight patterns, winking in and out of cloaking, spinning and wheeling to avoid hitting each other as if they had barely any control over their steering panels. Sha’s impressive evasive maneuvers would keep us alive for a bit, but we needed a more permanent solution.

“Yeah, well, we got another problem. Your little chameleon trick out there disoriented everybody elseandwas such a drain on our power that we can’t shift into faster-than-light.”

“Not enough power?” I eyed the gauge of the revolving nuclear core, which was dipping into critical. “I can fix that. Where are your spare fuel cells?”

I followed Sha’s jutted tentacle toward a magnetic cabinet with dozens of outdated parts and empty plasma crunchers. Roxy followed, pointing a device at my collar. She tried and failed, recalibrated and tried again, over and over to get the collar to disengage.

“Got any chroniton cleaner?” I pulled two empty plasma crunchers, a fuel cell, and a lubricant injector from the cabinet.

“In here.” Roxy kicked a metal trunk open with her booted heel, continuing her tinkering.

I cracked open the closed plasma cruncher with brute force and eyed the chroniton cleaner level in the canister. It was dangerous to mix these kinds of quantum materials outside the lab, but?—

“We’re not gonna make it,” Sha said. “I’m shutting off the chameleon.”

“No!” Roxy shouted, trying and failing another option to disengage my collar. “Their confusion is our only chance of escape.”

Sha whooped at another near hit. “It’s tanking anyway, Rox.”

I shoved an eye protection shield over my mate’s beautiful green eyes and poured what I hoped was a skillfully estimated amount of chroniton cleanser into the plasma cruncher. I dumped the whole thing into the fuel cell, igniting green flames from the cruncher shell. I leaned my head away as I brought the concoction toward Sha’s panel.

“Faa!” they shouted. “Are you trying to blow us up?”

“Not today,” I muttered, working around Roxy’s continued efforts on my collar to disengage the superfluous fuel line. Blowing off the flames, I syringed the infusion up into the injector and shot it straight into the primary fuel line just as Roxy shut down my collar. As I shut the panel, my collar broke in half with a shrieking chirp and fell to the floor, no longer a threat.

And the ship rocketed into a stable yet meteoric acceleration.

“Go! Go!” Roxy shouted.

Sha jumped us into faster-than-light speed, and in seconds, we were surrounded not by Borrdaff ships but by the cocoon of a speed-induced wormhole.

Our cheering filled the cockpit, and Roxy jumped up into my arms, her legs around my waist.

Sha wiped their wide forehead with a tentacle. “So what in the ever-loving fuck was that all about?”

But my mouth was already clamped down over Roxy’s as I stepped to push her against the wall. It would be weeks before our first mating frenzy was over, but I could feel my extra mouths activating, and I needed to get skin to skin with my mate as soon as possible.