by Lea Linnett
She nodded, her heartbeat finally settling back into something more measured. “What if we get lost?”
“We won’t,” Kamanek said, flashing her a grin. He flicked something on his wristlet—the one from the Lodestars—and ordered it to bring up a public transport map through voice commands. He grinned down at her. “See? We got this.”
“Lead the way, then,” she said, grateful to fall into step behind him, away from the dark gaze that threatened her focus. Her lips tingled despite not being touched, desire burning low in her gut.
What was happening to her?
12
It was easier than Taz expected to find their way onto a public transport. They slipped into a stream of inebriated passengers, evading the transport inspectors that hung around the stop, and then they were on their way, rising over the squat buildings of the Keerisar and heading south-east. Pressed between Kamanek and a window, Taz wasn’t sure what to expect of the scenery below.
As it turned out, it was mostly low-lying warehouses, dotted here and there with strips of light marking small residential and commercial areas. The branches of the skyscrapers overhead didn’t reach this far, and the starry sky looked impossibly vast by comparison, reflected in the metallic roof below. The district was bounded by a steep rockface to the east, and when she squinted, she saw strips of light winking from its stair-like peaks.
The public transport set them down in one of the district’s more populated areas. They’d covered a lot of ground, and when Kamanek checked the tracker, he estimated they were only another half hour’s walk away. They set off immediately, Taz making sure to keep a few inches of space between her and the levekk at her side. Her skin had prickled throughout the entire journey on the public transport, and she no longer trusted her body’s reactions.
They headed east, passing through quiet clusters of factories and another, smaller strip of commercial shops and residences, until finally, Kamanek placed a hand on her shoulder.
“We’re close.”
They cut through the final block of buildings, the muted bustle of the open stores falling away behind them, and came out on a near-silent street illuminated only by streetlights. Across the road from them, tucked behind thick bollards lining the road and a chain-link fence that encompassed its rear yard, was a warehouse.
Kamanek pointed at it, sinking into the shadows at the mouth of the alleyway they stood in. “That’s the place.”
Taz studied the outside. It was lifeless, silent, and large enough to span an entire block. It was made of pale levekk cement, with no windows, and no guards that she could see. If it weren’t for the sleek transport parked behind the chain-link fence and the security cameras spinning lazily from side to side along the edges of the building, she might have thought it long abandoned. When she looked closer, she saw a faint blue glow emanating from the cab of the transport, and a blurry figure inside.
“There’s a driver,” she whispered.
“I see him.”
“Is that the transport they left in?”
“Sure does look like it.”
“So, they’re inside.”
Kamanek nodded. “That’s what I would assume.”
The transport was parked before a wide, old-fashioned roller door that blocked any light that might have seeped out from inside.
She hunkered down beside the levekk, confirming with her own eyes that the blue dot tracking Niro was where he reported it to be. “What do you think’s in there?”
Kamanek tilted his head from side-to-side in thought. “It could just be offices, some kind of base of operations. But they have a loading bay, so you’d think they’d keep cargo here.” His voice dropped to a low murmur. “I dunno if I want to know what constitutes ‘cargo’ for these guys, though.”
Her stomach churned, and she glanced up at him. His lips were pressed in a thin line, looking as uncomfortable as she felt.
A metallic crack rent the air, making Taz jump, and a chink of light burst forth from the base of the roller door. It widened slowly, the ancient-looking door groaning open at a snail’s pace, and Taz and Kamanek both pressed themselves back into the shadows.
The first thing Taz saw was multiple sets of feet. Three belonged to the levekk they’d tailed earlier, their hooked legs unmistakable even from this distance, but surrounding them were even more. The trio were flanked by multiple security guards, all levekk, semi-automatic rifles gripped in their clawed hands.
The shortest of the trio was talking animatedly to the levekk at his side, his hands gesturing, while Niro brought up the rear. He was easily a head taller than either of his companions, and had to duck beneath the roller door to join them outside. The light streaming out of the warehouse turned them into silhouettes, their details obscured.
She glanced past them, trying to make out what was inside, and grunted with frustration. “It’s too far away. I can barely see anything.”
“Hold on.”
Kamanek slipped his small, thin satchel from his back, pulling out a compact device. It split apart when he flipped a latch on the side, morphing into two connected cylinders each topped with a circular lens. Taz recognized them immediately as binoculars, as they looked almost identical to the ones she’d found in a trash heap beneath the stratosport as a child. Those, as she’d discovered the day she dropped them, were made up of dozens of glass panes that magnified what you were seeing, but these looked digital.
She accepted them when Kamanek passed them to her, pressing them to her eyes. The inside of the warehouse looked like a loading bay. The room was large and looked rather empty, apart from the fleet of dark transports sitting at the back. But then she shifted her view to the left, and choked on a gasp.
Pressed up against the left wall were cages, stacked three levels high. They were tucked into the back corner, hidden behind pallets of regular goods, and if it weren’t for the angle and the binoculars, she was sure they’d be out of sight. Even with them, she couldn’t see inside, couldn’t tell if they were empty or filled with animals. But then the dark shape of a security guard in the foreground slipped out of the way, and she caught a glimpse of something that made her blood run cold.
Hands. Human hands gripping the bars of one of the cages. And then, a little further along, a human foot slipped through the gaps, toeing something on the ground before it.
She almost dropped the binoculars, her skin turning clammy.
“What is it?” Kamanek asked, nudging her arm.
It took her a couple tries to force the words past her lips. “Humans in cages. To the left.”
Kamanek was silent for a moment, and then he asked, sharper, “What’s that in Niro’s hand?”
Taz swept the lenses back towards the levekk who were now clustered near the transport. The view blurred with the motion, until finally she located Niro, zeroing in on his clenched fist. He was holding some sort of chain, and with the roller door now silent behind them, Taz could hear it clinking as it brushed the ground below. Niro tugged it gently, turning slightly to view whatever was on the other end.
The figure had been hidden up until that point, blocked by Niro’s hulking frame, but now Taz saw them in perfect detail.
It was a human woman, her hair hanging bushy and dark around her shoulders. She was wearing nothing but a simple shift that barely reached mid-thigh, and her brown hair was frizzy and mussed. The light from the loading bay illuminated the strands as they poked in odd directions, creating a halo around her head. Taz couldn’t make out many details in the darkness, but she thought she saw a large, purple bruise on the woman’s upper arm.
“It’s a human,” she growled, her voice shaking, her grip on the binoculars turning white-knuckled. There was a soft intake of air at her side.
Taz dropped the binoculars, her legs coiling. She knew it was foolhardy, but that didn’t matter. She had to help the woman, before it was too late.
But she was stopped by a strong arm catching her around the shoulders, pulling her back in
to the darkness. Kamanek’s chest pressed against her back, solid and unmoving while her own ribcage heaved with emotion. “We can’t be seen,” he hissed.
“We have to help her.”
“You’ll get nothing but a laser charge between the eyes if you go in there.”
She fumed silently, but knew he was right. Breathing heavily, she forced herself to relax against him, too wound up to even notice how their bodies melded together.
They watched the levekk encourage the woman into the transport, which started up immediately. One of them climbed into the back alongside her after touching hands with Niro’s colleague, and the others backed away, giving the transport room to maneuver. It hummed as its thrusters kicked into gear, lifting it off the ground, and within seconds it was gone.
The roller door groaned to life once again, beginning its descent, and the levekk security retreated inside. Niro was the last to join them, crouching down to fit himself beneath the rattling metal, and Taz held her breath as his gaze swept sightlessly over where they hid.
And then the levekk and the light were gone, the warehouse devoid of movement save the rotating cameras fringing it.
Taz sank back against Kamanek, her body shaking with too many emotions to count. Anger, fear, disgust, the toxic bubble of failure. To have come this far and not be able to save a human—multiple humans—that were right under her nose was…
Kamanek shifted, his hard chest rippling against her back, and she rose to her feet. “I guess we found them,” Kamanek said quietly, his expression somber.
“No thanks to Niro. I knew he was responsible,” she growled, her hate for the male feeding the boiling feeling that had taken up residence in her stomach.
“Maybe. There was that other guy with him. Could be the owner.”
Taz made a disgusted noise. “When I find him…”
“But why collect all of them out here?” Kamanek asked. “They could open up a brothel in the Keerisar and make endless amounts of credits on each one.”
“Who cares why they’re here? Let’s focus on getting in there and getting them out. Right now.”
The levekk’s brow plate dipped into a soft curve. “Right now?”
She stepped closer, her eyes burning. “We’ll steal a transport, drive it straight into the loading bay door and catch ’em by surprise. We’ll have the humans out before they have time to mobilize.”
“You’re kidding, right?” he growled. “You saw how many guys they had, and there’s probably more inside. Do you think the two of us can take them on? Plus, you’ll need a way into the cages, and a transport big enough to carry all the humans.”
Taz growled, spinning away from him. Frustration sparked along her skin, making her want to lash out.
“Besides,” Kamanek pressed on, “getting the humans out is barely a step up from staying in New Chicago.”
That made her pause. “What do you mean?”
“You see the size of that warehouse? Anything could be going on in there. There might be more humans, or other kinds of cargo. Stripping that room would only be scratching the surface.”
“So, what do we do?” she asked, throwing her hands up.
“We stake it out, call in your Lodestar friends for backup. Then, when the time is right and we have a plan and some help? We go in.”
Taz opened her mouth to argue, but closed it. Unfortunately, he was right again. This was the kind of lead she needed to convince Mila to act. And with more Lodestar support, they could achieve so much more than just rescuing the humans.
“Fine. Where do we ‘stake out’ the place, then?”
Kamanek stuck his head out of the alley, peering up at the buildings around them, and nodded. “There. That building…” he said, pointing to a six-story building a little ways down the street. “It’s tall, and it runs the width of the block, so we can come and go from the front entrance back there”—he hiked his thumb in the direction of the small commercial street they’d passed through—“without anyone at the warehouse seeing us.”
“We’re going to break in?”
He grinned, his small teeth flashing in the moonlight. “You can try, but it’s really not necessary.”
“Why?”
“I’m a wandering mercenary. I know a worker’s flophouse when I see one. Come on.”
“Kamanek,” she hissed, but he was already moving, retreating away into the darkness of the alley towards the well-lit street that lay behind them. She had no choice but to follow him, even if the thought of leaving those humans behind curdled her stomach.
---
Again, Kamanek was right, and the building did turn out to be a flophouse.
It was a long, narrow building that faced onto the modest commercial street they’d passed over earlier, its facade plain and undecorated like much of the architecture in the area. It wasn’t nearly as busy as the Keerisar, or even the Inner Districts of New Chicago, but there was a steady trickle of sub-species running errands under the moonlight.
She was happy to escape their curious glances and follow Kamanek inside. The flophouse’s entrance doubled as a hub, with a single patron sitting off to one side nursing a glass of something deep red in color. She recognized it as Kirena, her favorite type of liquor, but she couldn’t savor the memory of its flavor. Her mind was too busy running over everything she could have done for those humans, and everything she’d failed to do.
A large pindar female manned the bar, spraying the cabinets behind her with cleaning solution, and when she turned, her gaze stuck unhappily to Kamanek.
She sighed. “How can I help you, sir?”
Kamanek took the frosty welcome in stride. “A room for two, please.”
The pindar frowned, her lip curling as she looked Taz up and down. “Nuh-uh. I don’t do single night reservations this late. Not for that sort of thing.”
Taz clenched her fists at her sides, fighting down the red flush of embarrassment that threatened to stain her cheeks. She thought Taz was a whore. Taz knew why Kamanek had asked for one room—it was all they could realistically afford—but the pindar’s assumption still stung.
Kamanek smiled winningly at the female, breezing past the awkward silence. “We’re not looking for one night. I’d like an open booking, if that’s available, since we’re not sure how long we’ll be in town. Twin beds. A room with a window on the rear of the building would also be greatly appreciated.”
The pindar’s small eyes narrowed. “Why would you want a room on the rear wall?”
“It faces east, right? It’ll have a great view of the sunrise each morning,” he lied easily. “It’s why we came out here, outside the towers.”
Another glance at Taz, and still the pindar looked suspicious. “What’s with the human?”
“She’s my bodyguard.”
“Huh,” she grunted, her eyes narrowing. “I don’t have any twin rooms tonight. It’s one bed or nothing.”
Taz’s heart leaped into her throat, but she swallowed it down, doing her best to look more like a bodyguard and less like the exhausted museum exhibit she was beginning to feel like. At her side, Kamanek waved his hand airily. “She’ll sleep on the floor, then. The window is… very important to me,” he added.
The pindar looked like she wanted to argue further, but sighed. “Ten percent premium on the room location and you have a deal.”
Kamanek smiled sweetly. “Thank you so much. It’s so hard to find the right room at such short notice.”
She sent them up the stairs to the left of the bar with two identical keys, their plastic faces so chipped that Taz was worried they wouldn’t connect with the electronic lock. They did, however, and they shut the door behind them on a long corridor riddled with scratched and scuffed metal doors.
The room looked over the same street as the warehouse, as promised, and Taz immediately moved to check the view. She could see the warehouse clearly from here, as well as the chain-link fence and the yard. She could even see the ancient roller door, but the
angle of the street meant the loading bay’s insides probably wouldn’t be visible even when the door was open. They weren’t exactly close, either, distance eating up small details such as the rotating cameras.
“It’s pretty far,” she murmured.
“Here.” Kamanek paused in his inspection of the room, handing her the binoculars from earlier. When she brought them to her face, they focused the view of the loading bay with surprising clarity.
She pulled them away, glancing up at the levekk, who was now poking his head into the attached bathroom.
“You really are full of surprises, aren’t you?” she said, a little shocked at how tired her own voice sounded.
He paused, cocking his head. “What do you mean?”
She sat down on the low bench by the windowsill with a shrug. “The acting, the bottomless pockets full of tech. You seem to have an answer for everything.”
“It’s what makes me good at what I do,” he said, grinning. “Some mercs, they just run in there with their weapons and their orders. They don’t care about efficiency, or method, or how much damage they cause. Sometimes, I think they enjoy the bloodshed.
“And you don’t?”
“Nah. I’ll do what I’m told to get paid, but I prefer to sit back and work out a less… destructive method, if I can.”
“Huh.”
They fell silent, and Taz realized how quiet the flophouse was. It was a welcome reprieve. She glanced at the bed—well, cot, really—only now realizing how tired she was. It looked enticing, even with its thin pillow and dusty sheets, and she drifted over to it, pulling back the top sheet to find a very old, very brown stain on the mattress cover. She grimaced, but somehow it still looked better than the floor.
“You can sleep if you want,” Kamanek said, perching on the windowsill and peering out at the empty street below.
She shook her head. “I need to call Mila. Tell her what we found.” She should call Cara too. Her sister was worried, if the barrage of notifications on her comm were anything to go by, but right now, she just couldn’t bring herself to.
