Hotter on the Edge by Erin Kellison Page B

end her family's lives.

 
     
     
    Chapter Five
     
     
    A thin-lipped man in the deep golds of the Sol livery showed Simon to his room. Simon knew the palace well enough to know that his quarters—a narrow cell—were located in the servants' hall, and were in their clean modesty better than most of the places he'd laid his head during his life. Very nice, but the room was located on the opposite side of the palace from Mica's—yet one more intervention by Drum Sol.
    However, no self-respecting consort wouldn't show up for work his first night. And definitely not because of a disapproving father. At twenty-six, Mica was well into her majority.
    As Simon suspected, Mica's father didn't know that Simon possessed the family passcodes and could move freely about the palace proper as long as he didn't draw the interest of any of the guards. He'd used the codes often five years ago, planned to use them to get to Pilar's dowry, and even now tapped the override into the light panel to the side of a fielded passageway.
    The common spaces of the Sol palace were vessels of softly filtered light and air, with wide, flat benches to aimlessly count the minutes of the day; all this the rank opposite of the conditions in the mines, which he preferred. Every time he had to cross one of those wide courtyards, his skin tightened. Scaling the wall to her palace rooms was an act of devotion.
    He found her as he'd always found her, in her cluttered study, with her head bent over a textlet. She still wore that filmy dress, but now absently brushed her dark hair while reading. Something about the text made her sad, but when he looked over her shoulder, he discovered an academic rendering of some kind of alien animal.
    She looked up, amusement at his sudden appearance pushing away a bit of her melancholy. "Just like old times?"
    Old times would've involved a welcome kiss. Why not?
    Simon leaned down and brushed his mouth across hers. Yes. Then he tried for a full Mica smile. "I've come to perform my duties."
    The bedroom was just through there. All feminine blues and golds. Curtains to enclose them in a world of their own. And he'd be staying to see to her safety. Sol needed Mica just as much as he did.
    But she didn't smile; she lifted the mandible of some creature for his inspection. He wanted to laugh. Only Mica.
    "See here?" She pointed to a depression in the bone that he would've never noticed otherwise, nor would be able to locate again. "This is a true adaptation; not a bioformed one. Took two hundred years on Sol for it to happen."
    "I see you're in the mood for sexy talk." He lowered his voice suggestively. "Tell me more."
    A light of humor gleamed in her eyes, but her expression hadn't yet caught. He was worried about her after what she'd endured over the past thirty-six hours. And that he was the cause of her distress bothered him even more. He hated her family and their power, but not her.
    "I was thinking about the trials they're doing on Leto," she said. "I've heard that they've been successful in engineering a specialized respiratory system to process the toxic atmosphere."
    Having listened to her dwell on the subject at length, Simon had the basics. There were three major classes of human-occupied worlds. The alpha class, and the smallest, comprised those worlds that had merged perfectly with mother Terra's bios and supported all the strata of life with little impact to the human genome or lifespan. The sacrifice of some indigenous lifeforms couldn't be helped. Humanity was reaching farther and farther into the deep.
    A beta class world, like Sol, had been terraformed, but nevertheless couldn't support human life without artificial aids like breathers. Terran flora and fauna were adventive; time would tell whether they would survive the native species, but all indications—the dimple in the mandible excluded—pointed to Sol weeding out the foreign matter.
    A gamma class world, like the aforementioned Leto, had no hope of