Page 95 of Stardusted

I sniffed in amusement. “Definitely not to me, but to Kelly, sure.” He arched a brow slowly, like he didn’t believe me. Blushing, not sure what to do with that, I rotated my palm to study the marks. “So what the hell is this, then?”

“That’s the thing,” Sky said, growing somber again. “I don’t know how it happened, but that’s an old Pladian dialect. Like what would be inside the halix.”

“Halix?”

“The crystal. The nexus tech,” he clarified, crossing his arms over his broad chest, then uncrossing them. Like he couldn’t decide what to do with his hands. “That’s what it’s called.”

Sure. Of course. Sounded sufficiently science-fiction-y.

I took a deep breath, and my exhale came out shaky. “I’m not following. So these markings…are, what, burned into me from the crystal going boom while I was touching?”

I didn’t miss how Sky’s expression closed. The calm mask. That didn’t bode well for me.

“Essentially, those markings are the first part of the halix’s greeting. In ancient Pladian. It basically says, ‘Greetings to those who inhabit this planet.’ That’d be a…” He caught my horrified look and grimaced. “That’d be a rough translation.”

My ears were ringing. “I’ve got an alien greeting. On my hand.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you do.”

“I’m a walking, talking alien greeting card.”

Sky watched me carefully. “Basically.”

“Basically,” I echoed dully. Panic tried to kindle, a tight ball of it cinching in my middle. I pushed it back down. “The stone part of the tablet disintegrated.”

“It did. It’s gone.”

“Why?”

“My guess?”

I gave him an incredulous look. “It’d be better than mine.”

“Fair,” he said, a faint smile touching his lips. “I think it was triggered by the…other alien tech present. It backfed and shorted.”

“Exploded,” I corrected, remembering the flash of light and heat and thatpain,the burn.

Sky bit the inside of his cheek. “Correct. It exploded, and you were touching it. So all that energy…”

He didn’t have to finish the sentence. My insides twisted. “You think it went into me.”

“It’s a hypothesis,” he murmured. “One backed up by the fact you emitted energy at Oasis. When you…” He cleared his throat, looking away. “When you touched me.”

“When I touched you and you went all silver and shiny.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, suddenly very interested in my cluttered coffee table.

“And what I saw. That was…you? The real you?” I whispered. I needed to hear him say that, too. To confirm I wasn’t losing it and hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

His wide shoulders rose and fell beneath his jacket. Slowly, he turned his head. At least an arm span separated us, but I felt the impact of his midnight eyes across the distance. There was a flash of something—vulnerability, maybe—in them and he nodded gravely. “Yes. What you saw…that was my Pladian form.”

I mulled that over. His Pladian form had looked shockingly…homo sapiens. Well, besides the skin and those eerie eyes. He’d had a nose, a mouth, two eyes. Hands with five fingers. Two legs.

He seemed to have all the parts.

Well, the parts I could see, anyway.

Another flush threatened to crawl its way up my neck. I tried not to think about Sky’s parts and battled it back.