Flushing, George shook his head. “Seraphina is too much woman for me.” Utter puppy-love adoration in his tone.

“Women,” Bo said, “they twist a man up.”

George turned to stare out into the black. “Everyone’s saying she kissed Edison Kahananui. Is it true?”

“Yeah.” Bo figured the man might as well have all the information. “I’m sorry.”

Face falling, George sat down at a table. Bo wasn’t sure quite what to do, but he couldn’t leave the dejected changeling alone. He grabbed a couple of coffees from the kitchen, then came to sit with George. They didn’t speak, but neither did George tell him to get lost. It was maybe half an hour later that Dr. Kahananui’s assistant stirred. “I have to go do . . . something.”

Bo watched him leave, lines furrowing his brow. “Does George have many friends on the station?” he asked KJ a minute later, when the other man sauntered over to say hi.

“I totally tried, man, but George is a lone-wolf type.” The orderly shrugged. “He’s welcome to join any table at dinner or to turn up to group swims and walks, whatever—I mean, you joined the basketball game in the central habitat—no stress, right, but George mostly, like, holes up in the lab.”

That was all true. Bo hadn’t realized a game was about to begin when he went to the central habitat for a run, had been cheerfully assigned to a team when he stopped on the edge of the court.

“I figure he’s just one of us who likes to be alone.” Finishing up his coffee, KJ reached in his pocket and pulled out a stick of gum. “Duty calls. Catch you later.”

Bo raised a hand in reply, then restarted his hunt for Kaia. Fate was laughing at him—he eventually backtracked to find her in the lab, having an early lunch with her cousin.

When a tiny bell rang just as he entered, he detoured to scoop Hex up from the maze. Stroking the mouse’s silky white fur, he carried Kaia’s pet over to where Dr. Kahananui and Kaia sat on opposite sides of a lab bench.

The doctor had a large organizer beside her, data scrolling through it.

Angry at the gods for all the things he couldn’t yet say to his siren, he went around the counter and murmured, “Hi, Kaia.” Then he stole a kiss that was all tongue and possession and need.

Breath short, she smiled against his lips. “Have some respect. Hex is watching.”

“He’s a worldly mouse.” Wrapping his arms around her from behind after putting Hex into her pocket, he held her close and tried not to crush her with his possessive need.

Something buzzed into the silence.

Throwing a quick glance at her mobile comm, Dr. Kahananui touched the answer key. “Tansy? I have you on speak—”

“Atalina, someone’s smashed all our Beta Seventeen samples!” a distraught female voice interrupted.

Chapter 48

This isn’t personal and it says nothing of my admiration for you. I’m also sorry that Bowen Knight will pay a deadly price for this—no human has ever harmed me, and Bowen has always treated me with respect. But it must be done. The debt must be paid.

—Note slipped under the door to Dr. Atalina Kahananui’s personal quarters

KAIA COULDN’T BELIEVE the carnage she saw inside the massive lab in habitat three. Unlike Atalina’s lab, this larger one was built against a seaward wall; it had been decided that as the people who worked here had to stay inside for hours at a time, with no quick access to an atrium, it was too much to ask them to do so devoid of the visible presence of the ocean.

To the right side of the huge space, beyond a transparent but hermetically sealed wall, were growing bins, many of which supplied the fresh-goods needs of those who lived on Ryūjin. The area even boasted dwarf fruit trees that thrived under the light of the artificial sun.

But Kaia’s attention wasn’t on the growing area, a place that was often a calm and contemplative retreat for her fellow clanmates. Run by Tansy in her role as the station’s chief agri-scientist, the lush, green space was a stark contrast to the antiseptic whiteness of the lab that occupied the left half of the area.

This was where the station’s scientists ran experiments on materials recovered from the sea, all of it designed to teach BlackSea about the properties of those unknown compounds. Unusual seaweeds, exoskeletons discarded during a molt, secretions found on rocks, those were the types of things that made it to this lab.

Atalina did grow a few cultures in her own lab, but for the most part, she used the communal facilities here. Tansy stood on this end of a large rectangular table clearly marked with the title Beta Seventeen, the two women’s names beneath that.

Kaia’s friend was crying.

She went to move toward her, but Tansy’s pain seemed to jolt Attie out of her own shock. Walking over, she wrapped the other woman in a maternal embrace. “We have the data,” she said in a firm voice. “This is only a small setback.”

Astounded at her cousin’s courage in being able to say that when this represented the destruction of years of painstaking work, Kaia took a quick moment to send off a message to Dex. Atalina would need her mate in the minutes and hours to come.

Then Kaia just stared at the damage. It was as if an enraged attacker had taken a hammer to the curved glass jars—miniature habitats—in which Atalina and Tansy had nurtured various items. Invisible bacteria. More solid seaweed. Each in an enclosed glass environment that mimicked nature or provided an acceptable alternative.

The Beta Seventeen experiment offered the hope of a cure for a disease even the most advanced medicine and their own healers couldn’t fix. A rare disease suffered by only a tiny percentage of the world’s population, and nothing, nothing that could cause such hostility.

Yet shards of glass glinted on the surface of the table, sand and water and soil and agar having spilled across it to drip down to the floor. “This is five years of work,” Kaia murmured to Bowen. “Five years of excruciatingly complex and delicate work. Atalina came up with the idea, but Tansy’s been in from the ground up.”

“Does it have anything to do with this?” He tapped the side of his head.

“No. It’s a secondary project for both of them—they spent hours of their free time on it, including weekends and holidays.”

“Careful.” Bowen snapped out his arm to stop the three of them from moving forward any further. “There’s glass all over the floor.”

Only then did Kaia look down and notice the danger. She was wearing shoes today, but they weren’t hard-soled. The same applied to Tansy and Attie.

“The data’s backed up?” Bowen asked, his hard gaze taking in everything around them.

“Yes, but this is a continuous project. It took time to get each of these environments, cultures, and plants to the stage that they were. Tansy can’t make them grow faster without compromising the study.”

Tansy sniffed back her tears. “But we’ll start again, won’t we, Attie? This is too important to abandon.”

“We’ll ask Eddie to bring in new samples of the things he found for us.”

“And Greta.” Wiping away the wet on her face, Tansy stuck her hands into the pockets of the large gray cardigan she wore instead of a lab coat. “She’s in the area.”

As the two women continued to discuss how to restart the project, Kaia gritted her teeth, her blood hot. “We need to find out who did this,” she muttered to Bo. “There are no strangers on Ryūjin. We are ohana!” Family. “But what possible motive could drive one of us to such malicious destruction?”

Bo knew what it meant to work hard—to have all that work so callously wiped out was an insult and a crime. Unlike Kaia, however, he thought not about the why but about the how. The only access was through the door—Dr. Kahananui had scanned him and Kaia in. People couldn’t just walk inside anytime they pleased. “Where do you store the records from your entry systems?”

Kaia’s eyebrows drew together over her eyes. “What?”

Realizing he was asking the wrong person, he said, “I need to talk to Malachai.” He took out his phone, input Malachai’s direct code.

The BlackSea security chief’s voice was curt when he answered. “You’re calling from an unidentified number.”

“It’s Bo. I’ve got Kaia, Dr. Kahananui, and Tansy with me.”

“What’s happened?”

Soon as Bo told him, the other man knew exactly why Bo had called. “Ryūjin is too far down for the security data to be automatically backed up in the city,” Malachai said. “We do the data transfer manually week by week. All information for today’s entries will be in the security station in habitat four.”

“Thank you.” For trusting Bo to watch out for BlackSea.

“Don’t thank me yet.” A grim tone. “It’s not as if you even know where you are in the ocean—not much of a risk on my part to give you the information, and with Dex needing to be with Attie, you’re the most qualified to handle this. Ryūjin’s not exactly a hotbed of crime—no reason for me to station a security team there.”

Despite Mal’s pragmatic words, Bo knew they both understood the importance of this.

He hung up half a minute later, after memorizing Mal’s instructions on how to access the security station. When he informed Kaia about his next step, she put her hands on her hips. “I didn’t even know we had a security station.”

“It’s a security chief’s job to be sneaky.” He tapped a finger on her nose just to see her scrunch it up and scowl at him, sadness no longer a dark whisper in her expression. “I’m going to look at the footage. Want to come with me?” Three others had just entered the laboratory—and all three were walking over to Dr. Kahananui and Tansy, their eyes huge and their faces pale.

“I’ll stay.” Tansy had stabilized after the discussion with Dr. Kahananui, revealing a steely backbone underneath her fragile exterior—not a woman who’d run headlong into danger, but Bowen wouldn’t count her out if anyone threatened people she cared about.