🔥 Item Fourteen 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Salvaged by the Alien Queen
by Talia Orin

Item fourteen on June’s list says Do absolutely nothing. On the big bunk. The queen of Avarra has never done nothing in her life.

Item Fourteen: June

On the third morning of the leave, June woke up alone in the big bunk and knew exactly what that meant.

She lay there for a minute anyway, floating loose inside the sleep net with the blanket drifting off her shoulders, listening. Magpie was quiet in the way only a ship in free orbit could be quiet. No docking clamps. No station pumps. No blower in Section C with a bearing going bad. Just the soft tick of the hull cooling on the night side, the hum of her own scrubbers, and, from somewhere aft, the small, guilty, unmistakable sound of a socket wrench.

Click. Click. Click.

June unzipped the net, pushed off the bulkhead, and drifted down the length of the cabin with her hair floating around her head like a dandelion.

The queen of Avarra was in the engine bay. All four arms. Upper hands braced on the frame, lower hands deep in the attitude control housing, a headlamp strapped over her short black hair and an expression of profound, private happiness on her face. Every tool June owned was floating around her in a neat orbit, tethered by little loops of wire to the bay rail, sorted by size.

“Ilyra,” June said.

Ilyra went very still. Her fans, which had been loose and easy along her throat, folded halfway.

“Your number three thruster,” she said, without turning around, “was firing four milliseconds late. I could feel it in my teeth every time we corrected.”

“It’s been firing four milliseconds late for six years.”

“I know. I have fixed it.”

“Before breakfast.”

“Before breakfast.” A pause. “And I have relabeled the parts drawers. And the galley lockers. Your labels said stuff, June. Three drawers said stuff. One said other stuff.”

June folded her arms, which in microgravity sent her into a slow backward spin. She caught a handhold with her foot and stopped.

“What’s item fourteen?” she said.

Ilyra’s fans folded the rest of the way.

June had written the list on the back of a Bay Four schematic the night before they cast off, because that was where she wrote important things now. Fourteen items for fourteen days off-station. Item one had been Ilyra sees a planet from orbit with nobody needing her. They’d done that the first night: a ringed blue ice giant called Corva, two days past the interchange, hanging in the forward glass so big and so cold and so beautiful that Ilyra had stood in the cockpit for an hour with all four hands flat on the console and not said a word. Item four had been the coffee. Item nine said bad holo serials, the worse the better.

Item fourteen said Do absolutely nothing. On the big bunk.

It was underlined twice.

“Ilyra.”

“It is a very difficult item,” said the queen of Avarra, to the thruster housing.

“It’s the easiest item on the list.”

“For you.” Ilyra finally turned. The headlamp caught June full in the face and June squinted, and Ilyra reached up with one hand and switched it off, apologetic. “I lay there for an hour, June. In the dark. Beside you. I listened to you breathe and I counted the hull ticks. Then I counted the scrubber cycles. Then I began to think about the four milliseconds, and once I had begun to think about them—” Her upper hands spread helplessly. “I do not know how to do nothing. I was never taught. Sareth did not do nothing. Nobody on Avarra does nothing.”

“You haven’t done nothing in nineteen years,” June said, “because you were busy holding a whole station shut with your hands.”

Ilyra looked at her.

“Put the wrench down,” June said.

Ilyra put the wrench down. It floated a centimeter off her palm and hung there, turning slowly, until a lower hand caught it and clipped it to the rail with the others.

“Come here.”

Ilyra came. She moved through Magpie’s cabin the way she moved through the spine, all four hands finding rails without looking, long and dark and graceful in nothing but one of June’s old shirts, which on her was a crop top. Her fan guard caught the light at her throat, dark metal over the pale line of the scar.

June took her by the hand. The lower left one, which had a faint tremor in the mornings still, and which did not have one now.

“I’m going to teach you,” June said. “Item fourteen. You’re going to lie on that bunk and do absolutely nothing, and I’m going to make sure you don’t have to try.”

The big bunk filled what used to be half of Magpie’s galley. June had salvaged it off the dead freighter at Tamsin Yard and Niko had welded the frame, and it was the size of a small room: a deep padded shelf with a soft quilted wall at its back and a sleep net strung across its open side on elastic cords, the kind every long-haul crew bunk had, so you didn’t wake up drifting into the cockpit.

June pulled the net back, and Ilyra floated inside, and June followed her in and hooked the net closed behind them.

“Lie back.”

Ilyra lay back. There was no back to lie on, not really; in microgravity she just drifted against the quilted wall and stayed there, because June put a hand flat on her sternum plate and pressed, lightly, until she did.

“Now,” June said. “Hands.”

All four of Ilyra’s hands came up at once, like she was waiting for an instruction about where to put them.

“No,” June said. “That’s the thing. You don’t put them anywhere. You don’t hold anything. Not the wall, not the net, not me.” She took Ilyra’s upper wrists and lifted them gently away from her body and let go, and they hung there in the air, open-palmed. Then the lower ones. “Just let them float.”

“They will drift.”

“Let them drift.”

Ilyra’s jaw worked. June watched her fight it. Watched every instinct in that big body reach for a rail, a handhold, a lever, a valve: the habit of a woman who had held something up with every one of her hands every single day for nineteen years. Her fingers kept curling. Her fans kept lifting and folding, lifting and folding, fast and anxious, like gills.

“Breathe,” June said. “Like the Gallery. Like the first night. You breathe, I’ll match you.”

Ilyra breathed. Slow. In. Out. June laid her palm on Ilyra’s ribs, just under the soft swell of her breast, and breathed with her.

And slowly, very slowly, the queen’s hands opened.

They drifted. All four of them, up and out from her body, fingers loose and spread, turning a little in the still air like seaweed under water. Her fans stopped flickering. They eased off her throat, a centimeter, two, and lay open, and quivered, and turned toward June the way they had in the Quiet Gallery with the pool between them and nothing at all being asked.

“There you are,” June whispered.

She pushed the old shirt up and off over Ilyra’s head. It floated away and caught in the net. Underneath, Ilyra was bare and bronze and cool, all those plates catching the soft amber light of the bunk lamp, the copper nipples already drawn tight. She shivered. Not from cold.

“Do nothing,” June said. “That’s your whole job.”

Then she put her mouth on the seam at Ilyra’s shoulder.

She knew this body now. She’d had nine months to learn it and she’d been greedy about it, the way she was about any machine she loved. She knew the shoulder seam made Ilyra’s breath stutter and the one under her left breast made her hips lift. She knew the soft inner skin of the upper arms, and the join where the lower arms met the ribs, and exactly how long she could press her thumb into the keel at the bottom of the sternum plate before Ilyra’s whole body started to hum.

She did all of it. Slowly. In order. Like a full inspection.

She traced the shoulder seam with her tongue, top to bottom, and Ilyra’s breath went ragged. She sucked a copper nipple into her mouth and rolled it against her teeth, and Ilyra’s back arched off the quilted wall, and her floating hands jerked toward June—and stopped. Opened. Drifted again.

“Good,” June murmured, against her breast. “Good girl. Leave them there.”

Ilyra made a sound that wasn’t a word.

June worked lower. The join of the lower arms. The soft, unarmored waist. The pale skin of her belly, where June dragged her blunt nails in long slow lines just to watch Ilyra’s hips chase her. She didn’t touch her between the legs. Not yet. She could smell her, cool and mineral and citrus-sharp, and see the slick shine of her on the soft bronze folds, and she went right past it and kissed the insides of both thighs and kept going down to her knees.

“June.“

“Mm?”

“I am doing nothing,” Ilyra said, in a strangled voice, “very badly.”

“You’re doing great.” June came back up the length of her, slow, letting the weight of her own body drag over Ilyra’s in the zero gravity, skin on skin, all the way up until they were face to face. Ilyra’s eyes were dark gold and enormous. Her second lids were sliding across them over and over, fast, and she didn’t seem to know it. “You’re doing so well I’m going to give you a present.”

She reached up to Ilyra’s throat and unclipped the fan guard.

It came away with a soft click. June held it for a second, the crescent of dark metal Niko had cut from the clamp that wouldn’t let her go, and then hooked it carefully on the net. Under it, the scar at the base of Ilyra’s left fan was a thin pale line, smooth and healed.

Ilyra had gone utterly still.

In nine months, June had touched those fans a hundred times. With her fingers. With her palms. Held them while Ilyra came under her, stroked them in the mornings until the queen purred like a big armored cat. Both. Always. You do not have to ask again.

She’d never put her mouth on one.

“Can I?” June whispered anyway.

Ilyra’s voice was barely there. “Yes.”

June bent her head and pressed her lips to the base of the left fan, right over the scar.

Ilyra’s whole body seized.

All four floating hands snapped closed at once, on nothing. The thrum tore out of her chest, sudden and helpless, a deep stuttering note June felt in her own teeth. And the fan under June’s mouth bloomed—flaring out against her cheek so fast and so wide that June felt it as a rush of warm air, the delicate ribs fluttering against her lips.

June kissed her way up it.

She went slow. Base to edge, rib by rib, the way she’d learned to with her fingertips, but with her mouth now: soft lips, then the tip of her tongue tracing the fine raised line of a rib, then her lips again. The membrane was thin as paper and warmer than anything else on Ilyra’s body. It tasted faintly of salt and resin. It trembled against her tongue like a held breath, and the pulse in it was racing, light and frantic and doubled.

“Oh,” Ilyra was saying. “Oh. Oh—June—June, I cannot—”

“You don’t have to do anything,” June breathed, against the fan. “That’s the point. Just let it.”

Her hands slid up and found the right fan, too, and stroked it in time with her mouth.

The thrum went from a stutter to a roar.

It came out of Ilyra so deep and so loud that June felt the whole bunk vibrate with it, the quilted wall, the frame, the elastic net humming like a plucked string. It ran through every place their bodies touched—Ilyra’s breasts pressed to June’s, Ilyra’s thigh between June’s legs—and went straight into June’s cunt so suddenly that June gasped against the fan and nearly came herself. Ilyra’s floating hands were clenching and opening, clenching and opening. She didn’t grab. She didn’t hold. She let it happen.

And then she came, untouched, with June’s mouth on her fan.

It went on for a long time. June felt it through every inch of her. The thrum broke and broke and broke, the queen’s back bowed clean off the wall, both fans flared wide and flushed violet to the very edges, and the sound she made was June’s name, over and over, wrecked and astonished, while her open hands drifted in the air beside her, shaking, and didn’t reach for anything at all.

Afterward Ilyra floated in the net with her eyes closed and her fans half open, breathing like she’d hauled a coupling shut by hand.

June hung beside her, very pleased with herself, and waited.

“That,” Ilyra said eventually, “was item fourteen.”

“That was item fourteen.”

“I would like to do item fourteen every day.”

“Yeah? That’s the spirit.” June grinned. “See? Doing nothing. You’re a natural.”

Ilyra opened her eyes.

June knew that look. She’d seen it on the spine on Day Three, and on Sareth’s desk, and on a pallet by the Gallery pool. It was the look of a woman who had just been given a technical specification and found a flaw in it.

“June,” Ilyra said. “What is the rule of item fourteen?”

“You do nothing.”

“I do nothing.” All four of Ilyra’s hands came out of the air at once, slow and sure. “And you, I think, have been doing a great deal.”

“That’s—hang on—that’s not how—”

Ilyra caught her.

There was no gravity to fight. There was no floor and no up and no wall unless Ilyra decided where the wall was, and Ilyra decided. Upper hands at June’s hips. Lower hands at her knees. One easy turn and June was floating on her back in the middle of the bunk, held perfectly still in the air in four warm hands like something precious on a workbench, her legs spread wide, her arms drifting loose.

“Your hands,” Ilyra said, low. “Let them float.”

“You’re cheating.”

“I am doing nothing,” said the queen of Avarra, gravely. “I am doing nothing to you. Very slowly. For a very long time.”

June’s laugh broke in half when Ilyra bent her head.

She went down on June the way she’d done it the first time on Magpie’s cabin floor, except there was no floor now, nothing under June at all but Ilyra’s hands. Long flat strokes of that ridged tongue, from the bottom of her to the top, dragging over every fold. Then her lips closing over June’s clit, and sucking, and—because she could, because she’d learned exactly what it did—the thrum.

June shouted.

There was nowhere for the sound to go. It filled the bunk and came back to her. She hung there in Ilyra’s hands with her back arching in midair and her own hands floating useless at her sides, and Ilyra hummed into her, deep and steady and relentless, and held her open, and didn’t speed up. Didn’t slow down. Just kept that same terrible patient rhythm, tongue and lips and that low vibration rolling up through June’s whole body until her thighs were shaking against Ilyra’s palms.

“Ilyra—oh my God—Ilyra—”

One lower hand left her knee. Slid along the inside of her thigh. Two long ridged fingers pressed inside her, slow, curling, finding the place without searching for it, and dragged over it in time with the thrum.

June came screaming.

She’d have kicked loose if Ilyra hadn’t been holding her. Her body jerked and bowed in the air and clamped down on Ilyra’s fingers in long hard pulses, and Ilyra kept her mouth on her through all of it, gentler, softer, humming her down—and then, before June had come all the way back, began again.

“Wait—wait, I can’t—”

“You can,” Ilyra murmured, against her. “Nothing is on fire. Nobody is coming. We have eleven more days.”

“Oh my God—”

The second one built slower. Ilyra made it slow. She took her mouth away and used her hands instead, all four of them, because she had four and she wanted June to feel every one. Upper hands holding June’s hips steady in the air. One lower hand inside her, two fingers, deep and slow. The other spread flat over her lower belly with the heel of the palm pressing just above her clit, and the thrum running out through that palm, so the whole soft swell of June’s belly buzzed with it.

June floated there and fell apart by inches.

She didn’t know how long it took. She lost track of everything except Ilyra’s hands and Ilyra’s voice—low and close, murmuring in Veyr and then in Standard, there, there, beloved, let it, let it—and the blue light of Corva’s rings coming in through the forward glass and sliding over the queen’s plates like water. When she came the second time it wasn’t a scream. It was a long, helpless, rolling sob that went on and on, her hands finally finding Ilyra’s shoulders and holding on, and Ilyra didn’t tell her to let go.

They ended up tangled in the middle of the bunk, drifting, the net bowing gently against Ilyra’s back.

June was wrapped around her from the front, legs locked around Ilyra’s waist, arms around her neck. Ilyra had all four arms around June. Upper ones across her back. Lower ones at her hips, holding her close, and June could feel how wet the queen still was against her own thigh, cool and slick, and how Ilyra’s breath caught every time June shifted.

“Again?” June said into her neck.

“You are exhausted.”

“I’m floating. I don’t need my legs.” June rocked her hips, deliberately, and felt Ilyra’s whole body shudder. “Come on. Both of us. Together. No more taking turns.”

Ilyra looked at her for a long moment.

Then she slid one lower hand down between them and spread June’s thighs wider around her waist, and settled her, and pressed their bodies together—June’s hot swollen cunt against Ilyra’s cool slick one, the hard full bud at the top of Ilyra’s sex pressing right against June’s clit.

They both gasped.

“Hold on to me,” Ilyra said.

June held on.

They found the rhythm the way they’d found it under the Bay Four coupling, without a word: one body, too many hands. Ilyra’s upper arms held June against her chest. Her lower hands held June’s hips and moved them, slow rolling grinds, and June rocked back. Every slide dragged June’s clit against that firm cool bud and every time it did, Ilyra’s breath stuttered and the thrum started up again in her chest, and the thrum went through her own sex and straight into June’s, a feedback loop with no gravity to interrupt it. June put her mouth on Ilyra’s fan. Ilyra’s whole body jerked. The thrum doubled.

“June—”

“I know. I know. I feel it. Don’t stop.”

“I am not stopping. I am doing nothing.”

June laughed, broken and breathless, against the fan, and Ilyra laughed too, the deep real laugh with the purr under it, and the laugh went through both of them as well, and that was what did it.

They came together, floating, holding on, in the middle of Magpie’s big bunk with nothing beneath them and the rings of a cold blue planet turning slow in the window. Ilyra’s fans flared wide. June’s back arched. Their bodies locked and pulsed against each other, and the thrum rolled and broke between them, and neither of them let go.

Later, a lot later, the bunk lamp clicked to its dim night setting on its own.

June didn’t move. She was lying on Ilyra’s chest, or Ilyra was lying under her, which in microgravity was mostly a matter of opinion. The sleep net held them both in a loose curve. The fan guard was still hanging from the net where June had left it, turning slowly on its clip. Somewhere aft, the socket wrench drifted against the bay rail with a tiny tink.

“I have not thought about the thruster,” Ilyra said.

“No?”

“Not once. Not for—” Her chest rose and fell under June’s cheek. “I do not know how long. I did not count.”

June smiled against her sternum plate.

“Item fourteen,” she said. “Done.”

“Mm.” One of Ilyra’s lower hands came up and stroked slowly down June’s back, all the way from her nape to the curve of her ass, unhurried, for no reason at all. “June.”

“Yeah?”

“Your list says fourteen days.”

“Yeah.”

“And item fourteen is only on it once.”

June lifted her head. Ilyra’s eyes were half closed and very gold, and her fans lay open against the quilted wall, perfectly still, and her mouth was doing the thing it hardly ever used to do and now did all the time.

“Every day,” Ilyra said. “Until we go home. And then, I think, once a week. In the Annex. With the door shut, and Hamm on nights, and nothing on fire.”

June put her head back down on the queen’s chest and listened to that slow, doubled heartbeat, steady as a ring turning.

“Visit or work?” she murmured.

Ilyra’s hands settled on her back. All four of them. Not holding anything up. Just holding.

“Neither,” said the queen of Avarra. “Home.”

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