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“I know.” Sebastian’s hand twitched toward him but then stopped, and instead, he just pointed his chin out to his targeted ship. “Shall we?”
“Yes. Still one more thing, though.” Leon cupped Sebastian’s jaw and pulled him into a soft kiss.
Sebastian flowed into him, softening like butter on a warm plate, and wrapped an arm around his neck.
Leon wished he could kiss him all night, and he hoped beyond hope that he’d get to kiss him more some night in the future. But those thoughts were for later. He gently pulled back, soothing Sebastian’s needy sound with one last chaste kiss on the corner of his mouth. “I love you.”
Sebastian’s eyes fluttered open, still looking a little dazed. “I love you too.”
Leon smiled but nudged Sebastian’s hip to push him back. “Now, we should go.”
“Right.” Sebastian gave his head a shake, and his eyes sharpened again. He unwound his arms from around Leon’s neck and stepped away. He checked his gun again before stuffing it into an oversized mechanic’s pocket. “Let’s go.”
With a quick check of their surroundings, they stole back out of the toolshed and into the open. They didn’t give each other one last longing glance as they split up. They each had jobs to do.
The hard times the factory had fallen on—for which the Resistance was at least partially to blame—meant that security was light. Leon moved cautiously as he jerry-rigged a window open and slipped in, then crept through the halls as silently as he could. But he saw no one until he made it just outside the control room.
A guard strode, whistling down the hall toward the door, twirling his baton around with his back to Leon. It was such an easy hit Leon would have felt guilty if he hadn’t known that every guard still on the beat in this factory had been complicit in breaking the workers’ strike a few months ago.
Unfortunately for Leon, Sebastian hadn’t been far off the mark when he’d worried that Leon might be rusty. The guard turned at the last moment at the sound of Leon’s too-heavy tread. His eyes went wide, and his mouth opened to yell.
But unfortunately for the guard, Leon wasn’t completely out of practice yet. He slammed his fist into the guard’s face before he could make a sound, then wrapped his garrote around his neck. He twisted, pulled, and then just waited it out.
“Is that a struggle I hear?” Sebastian’s crackled in his ear.
“Nope,” Leon lied through his teeth. “Clean and easy.”
“Mm-hmm.” Sebastian’s cockiness came in crystal clear through the Qeshian military-grade hardware. “Are you in the control room yet?”
“About to be.” Leon stooped and pulled the limp body over his shoulder before walking to the control room door in a crouch. He eased the door open and peered inside. Finding it empty, he pushed in and dropped the body, shoving it under a desk. He approached the console of hardware set up along the panel of windows. “Alright, I’m in. Can you see me?”
A head poked out from behind the maintenance ship Sebastian had pointed out, then pulled back in. “Nope. Too dark and far away.”
“I can see you.” The light of the waxing gibbous moon shone down on the ship park and runway like a spotlight. Leon glanced up at it with a feeling of dread he’d never associated with a celestial body before. There was a ship hidden up there that was about to change everything. How and in which ways, Leon wasn’t sure, but he was certain that nothing would be the same after tonight.
“Well, hopefully, no one else does.” Sebastian appeared on the tarmac again, then climbed into the ship. “Here goes nothing.”
“Good luck.”
“Yeah, you too.” The ship lit up as it turned on, then the headlights dimmed immediately back down. Sebastian started taxying it out to the runway at a much higher-than-regulation speed. “These earpieces can reach the moon, right?”
“Yeah.” Leon surveyed the tarmac and surrounding buildings to see if anyone had noticed Sebastian bringing the ship out to the runway. A smaller ship with thrusters could have been gone by now, but maintenance ships had so much machinery built into them they needed momentum to take off. “I told you. I don’t want you disappearing on me again.”
“Right.” Sebastian’s voice had some sort of quality to it, something thoughtful, but Leon couldn’t identify it. After this. They’d talk about all of it after this. “Right.”
Then Sebastian gunned the engines and rocketed down the runway. He lifted off before getting even halfway down it and then twisted off into the sky, straight into the moon’s light.
Leon shook his head with a little chuckle. “You fly like a maniac.”
“Well, you gotta enjoy the simple things in life, you know?” Sebastian’s smug smile came in clear through his voice.
“No, I’m not sure that I do.” Leon took to studying the console in front of him, taking his best shot at identifying each knob and screen and button and switch.
“Shocker.” And there was Sebastian’s eye roll.
Leon chuckled. He found the main communications panel and tapped the top of it. That was important, and the factory designers had known it—it was plated with inch-thick metal to prevent sabotage. Then he found what looked like the alarm and factory communications system. Those were also important but, thankfully, currently silent.
“You know,” Sebastian mused in his ear after a moment. “I’ve sort of missed having you in my head.”
