Lindsay Buroker - Encrypted

Tikaya lay down, head propped against her pack. “Not bad.”

“ Easy,” Rias said, “your lavish praise will inflate my ego.”

Tikaya pulled him down beside her, hoping to shake the gloomy mood that shrouded her. “I’d rather inflate other things.”

“ I’m always amenable to that.”

She slid her arms inside his parka. If body heat was the way to warm up an igloo, then she was all for hastening that process along.

Sometime later, and with fewer clothes on, she asked, “How did you know Sicarius would let us go?”

“ That was always my plan,” Rias murmured, his lips brushing her ear.

Tikaya chuckled. She lay snuggled in his arms “And how did you know he would go along with your plan? Especially after we betrayed him and destroyed the weapons before his eyes.”

“ I read him.”

“ You read him? The kid emoted less than a rock.”

For a moment, Rias did not answer, and she wondered if she had offended him. But, as she formed an apology, he spoke, his tone somewhere between amusement and bemusement.

“ What do you think a military strategist does?”

An image filled her mind: Rias, leaning over a map-filled table surrounded by his officers. They pushed miniature battleships back and forth while debating numbers of troops, cannons, practitioners, and the like. Then she realized those battleships and troops were commanded by people. People he had never met face-to-face but that he had to analyze and outthink. She thought of the time Rias had spent working with Sicarius on the trebuchet, talking to him when no one else did, treating him like a promising young officer. As worldly and educated as the assassin seemed, he was still a seventeen-year-old boy, one who had doubtlessly grown up hearing of Rias’s exploits. Whether he showed it or not, Sicarius must have felt a little hero worship for the distinguished veteran. Tikaya smirked. All that time, she had thought Rias was succumbing to his fate. He must have seen Sicarius as the one person he could not escape or physically force his way past, and the one person he needed to befriend.

“ I see now,” Tikaya said. “I was being obtuse. Military strategist isn’t a career option where I grew up.”

“ Sounds like a lovely place.”

“ Yes…about that.” She had told Rias she would follow him anywhere, and she would, but-

“ You need to go home and let your family know you’re safe,” he said.

“ Just for a week or two. Do you want to come or…” When she had learned his name, she told him he would never be welcome on her island, and she suspected that true, at least not until people’s memories of the war faded, but if he had saved the president from assassination, surely Rias could finagle visitation rights. The president owed her too. He had said as much after her decryption work proved so valuable. But maybe she was being presumptuous. “Or do you need to visit your own family? Let them know you’re alive?”

“ I’ll write them a letter from some distant port. The emperor will be irked when he finds out about this, and I don’t think it’d be auspicious for my life expectancy to linger on imperial soil.”

Yes, the Turgonian emperor had never come across as the magnanimous type in the orders she decrypted.

“ Besides…” Rias found her hand and linked his fingers with hers. “I have little interest in going home. I seem to have fallen in love with an exotic foreigner, and I have the urge to follow her wherever she wants to go.”

Flutters stirred in her belly. She had hoped that would be his response. “Well, we’ll have the sphere to work on, and as far as places to go, I know of all sorts of ruins around the world with unsolved puzzles and mathematical oddities. Of course, many of them are surrounded by dangerous aborigines, crocodile-filled swamps, and pistol-toting relic raiders, all ready to end your life if you let your guard down for an instant.”

“ My dear,” Rias breathed, “if you’re trying to seduce me…it’s working.”