Atrophy by Jess Anastasi Page A

no one refused to eat. The guy might be a genius when it came to engines, but he could just as easily have made a career as a chef on a first class luxury cruiser.
    She glanced at the galley hatchway for the millionth time. Tannin hadn’t come out of his cabin all day. She’d sent messages to the room at lunch time and again a few minutes ago, before everyone sat down at the large table in the middle of the common room. She could understand him feeling like an intruder, but going without food definitely wasn’t the answer to that problem.
    So she hurried through her meal and only half paid attention to the conversations going on around her, deciding that she would just have to take him a plate like she had at breakfast.
    Luckily, Rian ate faster than she did and disappeared across to his quarters, no doubt to follow up his meal with a few glasses of Violaine, like usual, and continue plotting his grand plans against the Reidar. Not that she thought he actually had any kind of grand plan in mind.
    It seemed like they spent more time avoiding the Reidar while Rian flew them around the galaxy searching for ways to link all the separate pieces of information he had about them. Maybe if her brother did have an actual plan in mind, besides the unfocused goal of total annihilation , they might gain some ground in what had become a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
    Putting her brother’s problems out of her mind, she took her dishes over to the galley bench and loaded up a clean plate of what little remained. It wasn’t much. Callan had already consumed three servings, which pretty much left scraps. But it was better than nothing, or worse, repli-rations. After grabbing some utensils, she left the chatter in the common room and made her way down to crew quarters, finding Tannin’s door still closed over.
    She knocked the same as she had earlier and waited. At least this time he was likely to be fully clothed and not send her brain flat-lining like it had this morning when she’d gotten a glimpse of his muscled chest and abdomen. Seriously, she didn’t know why it had affected her that way. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen a naked chest before. Occasionally she’d seen Callan and Jensen with no shirt, especially when it was hot or they were working out in the cargo bay.
    But she’d never all but had a stroke at the sight of a guy with his shirt half on the way she had over Tannin. And then her rambling. Frecking hell . If a section of the hull had given way and sucked her out, she would have been thankful, because she’d totally embarrassed herself and every self-respecting woman in the galaxy.
    The door slid open, but Tannin wasn’t standing on the other side. Curious, she stepped through to see him sitting at the table, concentration on the inset crystal screen. The hatchway closed behind her as she moved farther into the room.
    “Is your door malfunctioning or something?”
    He shook his head, not looking up at her as she walked over and set the plate down next to the screen that seemed to be running some indecipherable stream of numbers and letters.
    “No, I just opened and closed it from here instead of getting up.” He glanced at the food and then tugged the plate a bit closer. “Oh, thanks.”
    “I didn’t know you could open the doors from anywhere other than the door controls.” How had she been on this ship for four years and never been told that?
    “Well, technically you can’t, unless you know how to access the ship’s data streams and echelon systems.”
    She was about to ask him if he could do that, but realized the answer was obvious before the words even left her mouth.
    “Right. Because of your mad hacking skills. So what are you doing now?” She really hoped he hadn’t been messing around in the Imojenna’s systems, because Rian would blow a pressure hatch if he found out about it.
    Tannin leaned back in the chair and stretched his arms above his head, then sat forward to grab the