“I think it was made for that,” Azdrei’in mused when Artemis compared his ship to something called a ‘pod.’ He didn’t understand every word she used, but it sounded like she had just described the purpose of the Yihai, of which he was a member. To clear up the communication barrier, he telepathically showed her his memory of the day before, when he’d flown his ship down to the Earth with the rest of the vanguard. All of them piloted individual crafts that they had flown to different parts of the planet to explore and scout out threats that they would need to eradicate before the rest of their people landed.

As Artemis obliged his request and sat in his lap, he had to take a slow breath to keep his composure. He’d planned to keep some distance between them to curb the odd attraction he was starting to notice he had toward her, but that was impossible to do when there was only one seat in the spaceship, and he needed to sit in it to pilot the vehicle. She had never left the earth before, so he wasn’t cruel enough to tell her to sit on the floor either. For a first flight, it was better for her to be secured in place, so she wouldn’t accidentally injure herself when the ship punched through the atmosphere.

Still, despite the logic of it, he couldn’t help but notice the warmth and pressure of her body against his, the softness of her skin and even her faint earthy but feminine scent. The sensations were almost distracting, and it took a moment for him to regain his focus enough to realize that she had asked him a question. “Maybe,” he replied, trying to ignore the resonation of her rapidly beating heart—it seemed that humans only had one—and the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. “But try not to. You are sitting on me, and I will not like it if you get sick here.” A slight smile played on his lip, and he reached out to operate the controls that powered on the ship. It was more difficult to express humor in a language that he barely had a basic grasp of, but he tried anyway, if only for the sake of thinking about something over than the fact that she was in his lap.

With a few deft movements, he threw the craft into drive, and the dull hum that had permeated the space grew louder. “Earth is beautiful,” he agreed as she told him about some more places on the planet. “My people are excited to live here. It is like our home, Ashad’te, only… there is less light at night.” Lacking the word to explain bioluminescence, he substituted the thought by showing her another mental image of the Lunvalgans’ planet at night and raised one of his arms in a tactile explanation. The swirling patterns on his skin also glowed a dim white in the darkness of his ship. “It is not easy for me to hunt here. Prey animals see me before I can get close to them.” He’d found that out the night before when he’d realized that the plants and animals on the Earth didn’t luminesce in the dark. Fortunately, there was a simple solution to the problem though. He could just wear clothes that covered more of his skin the next time he attempted to catch his own food.

Monitoring the gauges on the control panel, he waited until the craft stabilized and then steadily eased it into a low hover above the ground. When he was alone, he took off faster, but since Artemis had never experienced this before, he took each step one by one to make it easier for her to adjust to the sensations. First, the ship rose smoothly, just enough for the landing gear to tuck away in its compartment of the belly of the craft. Once that was done, he steered it higher at a forward diagonal until they rose above the tallest buildings around them. The window in the front was slightly tinted against the light but was fully translucent, so they could both see outside as they climbed higher.

“We will go up to space next,” he warned her as the ship hovered over the ruins, adjusting dials and buttons and other controls to ready the ship for the task of pushing through the atmosphere. “How are you feeling now? Are you ready to go on?” He glanced at her, wanting to make sure that she could handle the jump first. She had been excited to leave the earth not long ago, but if she was starting to lose confidence, it was better to know up front rather than find out when they went up into space and she passed out under the force of the pressure and the panic.