Page 1 of Last Chance to Save the World (Chaotic Orbits #3)

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I watch as Rian strides across the docking bay platform, straight to the onboard ramp at the back of Glory. He walks as if he has never once doubted gravity, as if the surety of landing on solid ground is a guarantee so irrevocable, it never even occurs to him to question it.

This little layover on the Moon—capital M because it’s the original, the one circling Earth, the other original—was expected, but the delays are absolutely not helping my stress levels. I’ve spent most of the last three hours wrangling with the port authority to get the landing sequence I want. Letting Rian out of my sight was a risk but one I had to take.

Rian draws up short when he sees me opposite the ramp, leaning against the wall of the cargo bay.

“I just went for...” he says weakly, holding up a bag of snacks he must have purchased in the common area.

My eyes rake over him. After the initial shock of being kidnapped followed by the secondary shock of me explaining why the kidnapping was genius on my part, actually, Rian’s been pretty compliant. Sure, he wasn’t thrilled I turned our first date into a felony, but he definitely agrees with me that the nanobots Fetor Tech is going to be releasing on the intergalactic government’s dime and approval need to be reprogrammed first, and this is the most expedient way to do it.

He knows how important this mission is. He knows that what I’m doing is designed to help all the billions of people on my ravaged planet.

Still.

That man is a rule-follower, through and through. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can never trust people who trust the law.

I blow a breath of air out through my lips, shaking my head softly at him. “I wish you would have just slept with me when you had the chance,” I say.

The bag of blue puff cubes drops to the floor with a soft thwump . “Ada—” he starts, and then seems incapable of saying anything past my name.

I bite the corner of my lip. His eyes fall south, his gaze a knife-point at the place where my teeth press into the sensitive skin.

I cross the cargo bay toward him, slamming my hand on the ramp riser button before I do. Rian doesn’t even look as Glory ’s onboard ramp lifts and seals shut into the wall.

I stalk closer to him, and he fumbles backward, eyes wide, like a prey caught in a predator’s path. I don’t stop until his lean shoulders hit the solid metal wall paneling of my ship. When my toes are centimeters from his, I shift my body forward, my hands flat against the wall on either side of his face.

I’m so close to him that I can only take in a piece of him at a time. His warm hazel eyes, open wide and practically vibrating with anticipation. His tongue flicking out, licking his bottom lip. The faint flush creeping up his cheeks. His Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows.

I tip forward. An unsteady position, but he’s seen me in worse. He’s put me in worse.

I can feel his breath, sweet from blue puff cubes.

“Close your eyes,” I say.

He does. Instantly. His breath catches.

I dip my lips to his ear, licking the delicate shell of it before nibbling on the lobe. He groans, the sound guttural, and I wonder if— finally —I’ve taken the gravity out from under him.

“Don’t you realize?” I whisper, watching as the little hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “We had a whole week in the portal pathway to get to Earth. Don’t you know how much we could have done with a whole week?”

“Ada,” he says, more moan than word.

Then his eyes clear.

“Ada,” he says again, sharper now. “I’m not going to sleep with someone who kidnaps me. ”

“Oh my god, are you still on that? It was one time.”

“It was literally this week! I am currently still in the process of being kidnapped! ”

I roll my eyes. “You take the fun out of everything.”

I head toward the bridge. I know he’ll follow. “There’s one bed on this spaceship, Rian, one bed. Plus, I can turn gravity off whenever I want. Have you ever had sex without gravity, because let me tell you, fucking amazing .”

“I—er—” His words trip more than his feet as he tries to keep up with the quick pace I set. “I didn’t know that was an option!”

I roll my eyes. “I thought you were smart.”

“Ada, we’re trying to save the world; we don’t have time to—”

“Well, not now ,” I snap back, spinning on my heel to glare at him. “You have had every chance to sleep with me, and you didn’t, and now you don’t get to.”

He looks aghast, and that does wonders for my confidence. “You mean...” I can see the chaos in his eyes, the confusion that I had just been all sexy-ear-nibbling and now am telling him he lost his chance for some very exciting times. I can almost see the words he doesn’t say: Because you don’t want me anymore?

I let him linger with that for a second. He deserves to have a little angst.

“Because,” I finally say, “we’ve got our landing sequence, dumbass. I like sex to be adventurous, but not burning- through-the-atmosphere-of-Earth-during-reentry adventurous.”

I pause. “Huh. I guess I do have some limits.”

I pause again. “Or...” My eyes trail over Rian’s body.

“No,” he says emphatically.

“Oh, come on. Aren’t you curious? It could be fun.”

“It could be deadly. I am absolutely not going to have sex while Glory is rocketing toward a planet. ”

I jut my bottom lip out, mostly to watch the way Rian tries not to look at it. “I keep telling you not to be boring, and you never listen.”

Turning back around, I step into the bridge and head straight to my pilot seat. “We had literally nothing else to do the entire time in the portal,” I grumble.

“You mean aside from plotting to break into the most secure building on the planet and fuck some shit up?” Rian asks.

“Aside from that.”

We’ve developed a good plan. It’s the whole reason why I had to kidnap Rian in the first place. Over the past week, while the man’s been oblivious to any physical activities we could have been doing, we’ve gone over every schematic of Fetor Towers, mapped out the exact paths needed to get to the nanobot programming unit, and I’ve been perfecting the code I’m replacing within the bots.

It’s painfully simple. Rian’s the only government employee sympathetic to the cause and who also has high-enough clearance to be right beside Fetor during the launch. I’m going to be his guest. Not technically on the list, but we’ll push through. Rian will be expected to leave me behind, with the less-important people and media, while he ascends to the penthouse of Fetor Towers.

I will, of course, not be doing that.

It’s a fucking tight timeline, made more complicated by the fact that I’ve been held up longer on the Moon station than I anticipated. And getting the landing sequence I need was a pain in the ass.

But we’re moving now.

I can hear Rian settling into the jump seat behind me; the metal clicks as he adjusts the harness. “I didn’t even know you were trying to seduce me!”

Heh. He’s still on that.

I toss him my flattest look. “I could not have been more obvious.”

“You absolutely could have been more obvious,” Rian says, fumbling for the harness. “As evidenced by—”

“Your obliviousness?” I offer.

Rian sputters as he straps in.

“Anyway, step one: complete,” I say.

“Step one in...seduction?”

“No. You missed that chance. First step to saving the world,” I remind him.

Our timeline starts tomorrow. Rian and I both agreed that we would need to get into the building only hours before the nanobots designed to clean up Earth’s climate are released. If we try to do it any sooner, it would mean that both (a) it would look suspicious that Rian came so far ahead of schedule and (b) someone could spot the changes we made and revert back to Fetor’s programming—the programming that would mean the bots would critically fail and leave the entirety of the planet at the mercy of one asshole trillionaire.

So, we go in tomorrow.

But before that, I had to get permission to dock my ship in the most secure landing strip on Earth.

And, because I’m fucking amazing, I did just that. Despite the fact that we had to wait for-fucking-ever to get it. I expected some delays, but this has been ridiculous.

“I got the clearance codes to land near Malta,” I tell Rian with exactly the right amount of smugness that little feat deserves.

Malta: the small island nation in the Mediterranean that was once home to the first global government. Revolutions shook some of that up, and so did the shift from true governing influence to the unholy alliance between taxes and tourism boards, but Malta’s still culturally important. And, more to the point, the home of Fetor Tech, where the nanobots are going to be launched.

Although the launch of the climate-cleaner program and all the high-security red tape around it did mean we’ve spent longer on the Moon than I intended.

“Do all these delays mess with the timeline? It’s really cutting things close,” Rian says. I’m pretty sure all the officials invited to the launch of the nanobots are already in the city. They didn’t have to arrange for clearance codes or anything like that.

I don’t like the timing either, but there’s not much I can do about it. “We’ll still have plenty of time,” I think, calculating that for myself as much as for him.

But that’s not true, is it? A running list flashes through my mind—get inside the building, get past security into the room where the bots are, get the code uploaded, get to the other office, do the thing Rian doesn’t know about, and get out without getting caught...by Fetor’s people or Rian’s.

I press a few buttons on my ship’s console, and Glory starts battening down the hatches. I assume. Where did that term come from? Anyway, my ship’s priming for launch.

“I could have pulled some strings,” Rian reminds me. “Gotten us a private relay or something.”

This is dangerous. This plan. And Rian’s connections would have made it easier, obviously.

“I don’t like strings,” I say, perhaps a little too sharply.

Good thing he doesn’t know I have some connections of my own.