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“I’m sure you will, Captain.” Kira teased, but her heart felt heavy, as if someone had dropped stones in it. West was a snake, but she expected it of him. She did not expect another to take the same approach, nor did she know if she could trust Watson anymore, not fully. She shook her head, deciding to take care of it immediately. “Ann, ask Watson to meet me in the lockbox, please.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Morgan.” Asking after Watson had reminded her. “Make sure they do not go into the storage where Watson’s fabricator is. Feign the door won’t open if you have to.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Gabby crawled across her fingertips, moving from one to the other as she stretched them out to give the Gecko half of a challenge. The dim light enough for both to see clearly after adjusting to it. The lockbox, as it was called. A reinforced section of the ship in the shielding that kept from being scanned openly by another ship. Five feet by five feet. It hardly gave one space to do much and held only a short armchair from the times Kira had been subjected to the location. Splayed across it lounging, she sat upright when the door opened but did not stand.
Watson’s arrival made it feel cramped, but neither of them felt claustrophobic.
“You asked for me, Captain?”
“Yes, reset the door, please. You’re staying in here until we get the all clear.”
His emoters were on, so the frown that crossed his face cleared when he did as asked. “Am I being penalized for something?”
Kira scoffed. “Would you like to be Watson? I found the messages you kept from me.”
The moment he went from on to off was as clear as Quinn. Quinn lowered his barriers to be emotional with her, to be vulnerable. Watson threw them up to keep himself from doing it. Knitted shoulders unknotted, tense posture released, and when he stood opposite of her, the safeguards back in place, his hands clasped behind him tightly.
“Did you think I would not find them?” Kira flushed with anger. Every rise and fall quicker with every breath.
“I did not wish to put you in a compromising position, Captain.”
“A compromising position?” Shooting up, she lacked a bit of height. He towered, but she was larger emotionally.
He gave away nothing, merely bored in appearance. “You had already interacted with our passenger and a sudden change could have threatened the delicate balance you had struck.”
Her hand itched to slap him. It would break her bones and do nothing, not even make him react. “But you replied as well. You told Toke- you told him I was trying. I would have never-“
“Therein lies the problem. Out of spite, you would have done the opposite, allowed him his isolation. It went against what was being asked of you and, considering your initial refusal, it would have jeopardized the mission.”
Clarity struck her. “You only replied once you learned about your body?”
Without access to the computer system, it was a stab in the dark to guess this. She’d not memorized the dates, but it had to be the reason.
“Yes,” he confirmed, his neutrality painting him truly indifferent.
“You’re a selfish, absolute-,” Kira slipped from the common tongue to Praetorian, painting an absolutely colorful picture of her opinion of the man.
“I had other reasons as well.”
How unbelievable it was to her, how utterly inconceivable that he could have thought those reasons were enough. “How can I trust you when you won’t even speak to me as you? Are you so changed by your years of only being a consciousness that you won’t allow yourself to feel this?”
“It is because I would feel too much.”
She sagged downward, knees threatening to give out, on the one hand she had the socially inept laboratory experiment who saw her as the sun, on the other she had the A.I. who wasn’t an A.I. who would just shut her out when he felt it necessary. Quinn may not have been capable of more, and Watson was capable of everything, but she couldn’t trust him.
He braced her at her elbows, holding her up. Her forehead hit his collarbone, her hands rested on either side of the warmed skin as she said, “I cannot trust you.”
“That was never my intention, Kira.”
“Nevertheless, it is what you have caused.”
Chapter Nineteen
KIRA
