Page 5 of Myra’s Monster (Romance Among the Stars #3)

5

MYRA

T he forest stretched on in all directions, dark and glorious and beautiful. It was like being in a place of worship, some gigantic alien cathedral of plants. One more impressive than anything humans had built.

Ten thousand years of neglect, and still it functioned. The Tyradyn awed me, and I understood why the authorities didn’t want people poking around in their ruins. If they could do this, what other miracles had they achieved?

I won’t figure that out, I’m no xenoarcheologist. All I need is something worth selling, and I can go. The thought felt almost sacrilegious. Stealing from this place was too close to tomb robbery.

Not that Hess and Volkov cared. The pair of them took anything that looked interesting and did so without a care for the damage they did. I winced as Volkov snapped a branch off a tree, and Hess used a laser cutter to sever a length of vine.

Doing my best to do as little damage as possible, I pushed past the branches of a pitch-black miniature tree and stretched up for a glowing fruit. As I closed my fingers on it, a strange sensation washed over me. Like curiosity, but not my curiosity. Which made no sense.

I looked around, shining my light into the darkness, and saw nothing. But I didn’t know what I was looking for, and the weird shadows of the jungle could have hidden anything.

There wasn’t the time to worry about it. I plucked the fruit and dropped it into a sample bag. Behind me, the mobsters talked in Russian as they cut their own samples.

If I had something to worry about, I told myself, it was them.