Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two by Loren Rhoads

she backed up her notes and went to catch some sleep.
    The sound of their door opening roused Mykah, who smiled sleepily at her. He inched over in their bunk, making room, as she hung up her jacket and stepped out of her skirt. Coni slipped under the coverlet and snuggled close to Mykah, breathing him in. The salty metallic smell of his body had turned her stomach when she met him on Kai, but she’d gotten used to it. Usually she found it erotic, but her brain was too tired to act on her impulses now.
    Mykah stroked his fingers through the fur under her chin. “How’d you spend your evening?”
    “Raena has me setting up a new identity for her,” Coni said sleepily.
    “Really?”
    “Well, it’s only sort of new. She wants to keep her name and masquerade as her own daughter. But she wants a birth certificate and school transcripts and some record of herself as a real person in the galaxy.”
    “That seems reasonable,” Mykah said. “She can’t really leave the ship on any sort of civilized world. If she gets picked up for anything, there are going to be questions about who she is and where she’s been. If they run a DNA trace on her and find out who she was, they’re going to connect her to Thallian—and she’s going to stand trial for his crimes unless she can prove her imprisonment. And we didn’t find any evidence of that. Did we?”
    “No,” Coni said. “We have her word that she was imprisoned all those years, along with the knowledge she had of the grave robbing and the recording she hacked of the avalanche that killed Thallian’s men. But we don’t have any evidence that she was actually imprisoned in that tomb.”
    “Except that she’s physically twenty,” Mykah pointed out. “She hasn’t aged since the War, so some kind of Templar tech was involved.”
    “I’m still trying to figure that out,” Coni said. “She says the Templar stone kept everything inside it from rotting or falling apart. Does that mean it’s like a super-refrigerator, cold inside? Or does that mean that it warps time somehow?”
    “Whoa,” Mykah said. “Are you serious? You think the Templar stone warps time?”
    “I don’t know. There’s no research on it, but that’s not unusual. There’s so little research on most Templar tech. Let’s say that it does warp time somehow. That would explain her apparent age. Maybe if we all slept inside Templar caves, we could become immortal.”
    “That would be a story to unveil,” Mykah said, yawning.
    “Except that who would want to be immortal?” Coni argued. “I don’t know what other use the time warping might be …”
    She realized that Mykah had fallen back to sleep already. She curled up against him, her face buried in his shoulder, breathing his salty metallic smell. This was home to her now.

CHAPTER 4

    H ours later, Raena was still working out. At her request, Vezali had routed the heat exchangers to vent into the gym, just for the day. Raena had kicked over a tub of water, leaving a slick on the floor to evaporate into the air, making the room sufficiently steamy. She was trying to replicate jungle conditions.
    Sweat plastered her short black hair to her head in clumps. She’d stripped off her shirt, leaving a breast band on for modesty’s sake. In general, the others left her alone while she was working out, but she was glad when Coni tapped on the door. She could use some distraction from worrying about her dreams.
    “Wow,” Coni gasped as she stepped into the room.
    “I can come out,” Raena said. “There’s no reason you should come in and be uncomfortable.”
    “No, it feels wonderful,” the blue-furred girl said. “Like home.” She stretched, rolling her shoulders around, soaking in the heat. “What possessed you to warm it up in here like this?”
    “I was bored of exercising at ship temperature,” Raena said simply. “Do we keep it too cold for you normally?”
    “I’m used to it,” Coni answered. “It’s why I always wear a