Nightchaser

by Amanda Bouchet

  “I will.” She hugged me. “I promise.”

  Mareeka turned and went into the ship. Big Guy followed, having listened to every word. Surral would already be doing everything possible to save Fiona. Mareeka and Big Guy… They’d probably help with Miko.

  My heart suddenly hurt. It hurt so hard it burst.

  I bit back a sob.

  “Baby.” Shade reached for me.

  “Don’t touch me!” I snapped.

  He drew his hand back, his fingers curling into a fist.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said more softly, “or I’ll break.”

  “If you break, I’ll put you back together.”

  Emotion ripped through me. I wanted to believe that. “Says the man who tore me apart.”

  Something flickered in Shade’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Tess,” he said.

  I nodded, acknowledging his words. But I suspected we both knew that the healing I needed now mostly came from the inside, as did forgiveness.

  We stared at each other. I didn’t hate him. I thought I might love him. I wanted to trust. But it scared me to death—the idea of making the same mistake twice.

  “I guess you got your comeuppance.” His leg. His whole life…

  “I guess I did,” he said.

  When I didn’t move, he nodded toward the instrument in my hand. “Want me to do that?”

  His question brought me back to bigger problems than my bruised heart or my fragile new faith in the man I was about to take back into my life.

  “Yes.” I handed it to him. I had to check on Fiona. “But wait a sec.”

  I peeled off his soaked compress, relieved to find the bleeding down to a mere trickle again. Then I picked up a scalpel, pulled up the sleeve of my pink scrubs, and cut my inner arm.

  “What are you doing?” Shade reached to stop me, and I twisted away from him.

  I made four deep slashes, hoping they’d scar. “Miko. Shiori. Fiona.” I looked at Shade. “You.”

  I marked this day onto my skin and then let my blood flow into Shade’s wound, mixing it with his.

  “I’m guessing I should trust you on this,” he said a little warily.

  “Let’s just say you won’t need antibiotics. I’m sparing you a shot.”

  “Thanks?” He didn’t sound quite sure about that. “This is what they want from you?”

  “In a way,” I answered. “I’m just the base ingredient for the enhancer they developed.”

  “Is this going to do something weird to me?” he asked, watching my blood flow, watching ours mix.

  “No. Your system will flush it out. It’s completely compatible.”

  “Then what’s special about it?” he asked.

  I was too sad and tired to lie—and not even sure I wanted to at this point. “I’m life-form A1. Or something like that.”

  He seemed tired, too. Too tired to look shocked. “What does that mean, Tess?”

  “It means I beat you out in natural selection. I heal better and don’t get sick.”

  Shade pursed his lips, absorbing what I’d said. “Should Bridgebane get that blood?”

  Worry about the blood exchange we’d agreed to passed between us with a look.

  “We had no choice,” I said. “They’ll alter it with chemicals and drugs and make super soldiers from it. There’s no doubt. But they’ll make dozens. I still have the lab, and there are thousands of injections in it. It was a necessary risk,” I said, remembering Mareeka’s words from earlier.

  Shade nodded, seeming to agree.

  I wrapped a compress around my arm, not wanting to drip on everything when I went inside to somehow get my blood into Fiona, questions be damned. Maybe I’d answer them. Maybe I wouldn’t. That was up in the air, like everything else.

  I started up the stairs. “The super soldier serum? I think Big Guy might be a test.”

  Shade grunted as though that didn’t surprise him at all. “At least I finally know what you stole,” he said.

  I nodded. I’d even stolen Big Guy, in fact.

  “Good for you.” Shade powered up the laser healer without saying anything else, and I went inside to face the horror I knew I’d find on the bridge.

  Chapter 30

  It turned out that Shade could navigate. That was good, since neither Jax nor I really could. We both saw numbers and our minds went blank. It was kind of a curse. I could steer, but I couldn’t calculate.

  The Fold was no longer where we’d last found it. We got Shade to jump us to eight different systems where we thought we might locate it, all without a result. No one was willing to tell Shade what we were looking for or why we appeared to be leaping willy-nilly around Sector 17, which frustrated the hell out of the guy who was setting the coordinates. We kept searching, anxiety and fatigue growing. Shade did what we asked and didn’t press too hard for information, although I could tell he was damn curious. It was obvious we weren’t ready to trust him with a big secret yet, and he respected that.

  Big Guy stuck around this time when I asked him to, bringing his personal cruiser on board the same way Shade had. He finally gave us a name—Merrick Maddox. He’d been captured and experimented on, imprisoned for six months while scientists and machines monitored the serum’s effect on his body and blood. The result of making someone with a rebel’s heart faster, bigger, and stronger than everyone else was apparently an escaped prisoner who could find a secret lab and nearly blow it up.

  The charges he’d been setting when I came along and stole the lab were still hidden under the refrigerated shelves. That unexpected news made me understandably nervous, but Merrick assured me that the bombs were controlled by a remote that he’d deactivated—after he’d decided he could trust us with the serum.

  He’d initially wanted to bring the enhancer to the Fold but hadn’t had any means of getting the lab to the rebel leaders or contacting them with only a stolen military cruiser and a bunch of goons hot on his tail. No wonder the Dark Watch had popped up all over the place around the lab just after we’d stumbled upon it. They’d been after Merrick, not us. But then we’d nabbed the lab—and their intense focus.

  We’d been willing to die to keep the serum away from the Overseer, and that had made us okay in Merrick’s book. He’d figured the Black Widow would do as well as his bombs to destroy the lab when the Dark Watch had cornered us once and for all in Sector 14, so he hadn’t set off the explosives. When we’d gotten away, he’d left to try to contact his friends but had kept an eye on us, spying to see what we’d do with the serum. If it was bring it to the Fold, then all the better—we had a cargo cruiser to haul it there. If it was something else, he still had that remote.

  I remembered the prickle to my senses, that feeling of being watched, as I’d walked the streets of Albion City. Apparently, Merrick had been that itch on the back of my neck.

  I wished he’d been more straightforward with us, although I couldn’t be too angry, since he’d saved my life by keeping us in his sights.

  I gave him a requisite stink-eye and strongly urged him to remove his tracking devices from inside my ship and find all his charges. I also did a thorough sweep, inside and out, to make sure I hadn’t missed any trackers during my frantic spacewalk—and that none had been added while the ship had been docked on Starway 8.

  I didn’t find anything, and Merrick put his bugs and bombs in our secure weapons chest while I wondered about his confrontation with the Overseer. Everyone knew the Overseer, but why did the Overseer know Merrick? Had he monitored the tests on him? Or was there something else? Something more?

  Fiona didn’t wake up for three days. It was part blood loss, part heavy sedation, and part probably not wanting to wake up and face a reality without Miko and Shiori in it. I understood. I longed for the temporary escape of deep sleep myself. And I would have it—after I found the Fold.

 
Shade’s cruiser was inside the main cargo hold next to Merrick’s, but unlike Merrick, who’d taken up residence in the bunkroom, Shade was living out of his little ship. When I laid my head on my pillow for brief periods of rest and stared numbly at the wall, I wanted his arms around me. When I got up and saw him again, my heart jerked with uncertainty and doubt. But I also warmed all over with anticipation, and attraction, and the memory of his touch. The confusing mix kept crashing together and just hurt.

  Shade looked at me as though he wanted to comfort me, and that just made everything both better and worse.

  Bonk stuck mostly to the bridge and to my room, seeming completely fine after shaking off Shade’s sedative. He gave out affection like he had an endless supply, bumping his head into any leg he could find and snaking his little body under any hand that reached out to touch. Without him purring against me most of the time, the panic and desolation growing inside me might have eaten me alive.

  Jax stayed almost constantly with Fiona until she opened her eyes. I could hardly get him to eat, and he looked like a ghost. Or maybe he was seeing ghosts. Alone in the heartbreak that had never left him, he sat there and watched.

  When she finally woke up, he kissed her on the forehead and then went to bed. I wasn’t sure he slept. His face looked too battered for that when he eventually emerged again, his eyes still bloodshot and stark.

  In the meantime, I looked for the Fold. And looked, and looked, and looked.

  Merrick knew more than any of us about finding the pocket between the stars. Unfortunately, not even he could locate it. But the time we spent searching together gave me a chance to ask how he’d survived so well in the lab for three full days. It turned out he’d had food and water in a small pack and used empty biohazard bags for those bodily functions I’d wondered about.

  On day four of wandering the Dark, I gripped my console, growling and wanting to give the damn thing a good shake.

  “I can’t find it!” I had to get what was left of my crew to safety, finish drawing six bags of blood, and then get to the Grand Temple on Reaginine before Bridgebane’s ten days were up. If he survived the Overseer’s wrath about letting me get away—again—my uncle would expect the deal to stand. If I didn’t pay up, he’d take either Mareeka or Surral to Hourglass Mile, I had no doubt.

  “Then finally tell me what we’re looking for!” Shade whipped his head around. “I can’t navigate without coordinates.”

  “It moves,” I said. “There are no coordinates.”

  “It what?” he ground out in frustration.

  I pressed my lips together. Fuck it. “The Fold.”

  “The what, baby?”

  A ripple of awareness shivered over me every time he called me that. Shade was like a goose-bump-raising plague. “The Fold. The rebel hideaway. Our safe zone.”

  He frowned. “Well, it must be big. A huge spacedock. Or on a planet, right? Why can’t you find it?”

  “Because it doesn’t exist on this side of things.”

  His face went blank. Yeah, I’d lost him there.

  “You have to fly through an almost untraceable gateway to get there. The others say it hurts like hell.”

  “The others?” he asked, frowning again.

  “I don’t feel it,” I admitted to him. I never had.

  “A1?” he asked.

  Shade’s question was a good one. I’d often wondered that myself, although before I’d been using the Overseer’s words for the differences in me—freak, alien, mutant. Really positive stuff.

  I shrugged. “Maybe.” Among us, we’d always chalked it up to the vagaries of the Fold, and I’d let the crew think it was a quirk in the gravitational warp and not a quirk in me.

  But now, I’d done it. I only had one secret left, and that was the blood exchange Shade and I had agreed to. Otherwise, I’d told everyone here everything—called a fucking powwow in the kitchen as soon as Fiona could walk and spilled my guts. Because fuck it, we needed the truth here. We needed to protect each other and survive. Because fuck, fuck, fuck!

  “Where is it?” I yelled, giving the base of my console a kick that hurt me more than it.

  “Look for denser Dark,” Merrick said. Again.

  “I am! We all are!” We had been for days. At this rate, I was going to have to leave the Endeavor and the serum in the relative safety of the Outer Zones while Shade took me to Reaginine in his cruiser.

  That would be fun to explain to the others. Just sit tight for a day or two while I hand over a weapon to the enemy.

  And being trapped in a tiny starcruiser with Shade was sure to go well.

  I glanced at the man in question. We hadn’t spoken about anything that had happened before the attack on the Squirrel Tree. Or touched. Or been alone together. We hadn’t talked about us at all.

  I went back to glaring out the bridge’s windows. Deep breaths. Focus.

  First the Fold. Then Reaginine. Then I’d figure out how to get Shiori back.

  I fought the growing ache in my chest. Her screamed “I forbid it!” haunted me, but how could I not?

  “What if it’s not here?” I abruptly asked. “We’ve scoured all of Sector 17, so what if it’s in 18 instead?” Just because the Fold was almost always somewhere in Sector 17 didn’t mean that it had to be. It could have been anywhere in the Outer Zones.

  Merrick looked pensive. After a moment, he nodded. “Look around the Tarrah System first. It was there about fifteen years ago. That’s the last time I heard about it being outside of Sector 17.”

  It suddenly seemed really handy to have a rebel older than Jax, Fiona, and me on board. None of us knew anything about where the Fold had been hanging out a decade and a half ago. Hell, we couldn’t even find it now.

  “Shade.” I glanced at my navigator. “Set coordinates for the Tarrah System.”

  Shade nodded, raking his gaze over me before turning back to his controls.

  Something quivered in my belly. Despite neither of us addressing the giant elephant in the spaceship, there was no doubt in my mind that Shade Ganavan was more than just my navigator. The only time in the last few days he’d come anywhere near my personal space, he’d inhaled deeply enough to stir my hair. Without even touching me, he’d made me want everything we’d had back on Albion 5.

  I forced my eyes away from him.

  “Coordinates set,” Shade said, swiveling back around.

  Wow, that was fast. He was good at that. He was good at a lot of things.

  I looked around. We were all on the bridge, even Fiona for once. Everyone was seated. Bonk was curled up on a cushion where he’d be safe.

  “Prepare to jump,” I said, sitting as well.

  I pressed the button to activate the hyperdrive myself instead of handing the honors over to Jax, as I often did. Instantly, the Endeavor shot through interstellar space, so fast we left time behind, and our bodies seemed to collapse in on themselves before inflating back out.

  Hundreds of thousands of kilometers away but only moments later, we slowed, and the Tarrah System loomed before us. I looked for stars with long stretches of pure darkness between them.

  “Let’s poke around,” I said, my insides still reeling from the jump. “See if gravity gives us a thump.”

  “I thought you didn’t want a planet,” Shade said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Then how do you expect gravity to give you a thump?”

  I think we both knew we weren’t heading into a star, because that would suck.

  “What’s invisible except for gravitational force?” I asked.

  Shade’s eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about dark matter? Because no one’s really—”

  “Figured that out?” Yeah, maybe that was why the Fold was still hidden, right inside a pocket of it.

  Or maybe it was something else. What did I know?
/>   “It’s not like a black hole. It’s much subtler than that.” I shrugged, at a loss to explain the inexplicable. There were scientists getting things wrong every day for that. “Just keep an eye on the scanners. If something strange happens, you’ll know it.”

  Something strange finally did happen. It took fourteen more hours of searching, but then the darkness between two stars suddenly felt like a sticky wall when we got close enough.

  My pulse accelerated, and I forgot all about my gritty eyes and about being so tired I got dizzy every time I blinked. I moved us in closer and felt the Fold’s familiar tug start to lightly rattle the ship.

  “Starshine?”

  Shade sounded nervous. Basically, a big patch of nothing was shaking us and pulling us in.

  “Sit tight,” I told him, glancing up from my controls. “It’ll be all right.”

  I hoped. The Fold wasn’t nice to everyone, but I had a feeling that Shade would make the cut. And if he didn’t, that meant he had no place on my ship, or in my life.

  Trying not to think about that, I turned us straight into the gluey gravitational warp.

  The Endeavor rattled harder. The point of no return was fast approaching after all these days of combing the Dark. Every single one of us lurched when the Fold finally grabbed us and sucked us in with sudden, jarring force.

  The others started screaming like banshees the second the Fold really latched on to us, contorting in pain, and pressure, and I didn’t really know what else.

  Merrick and I looked at each other, both of us fine.

  “A1,” I said, almost like a bitter toast.

  “A1,” he echoed, but he didn’t sound like it had ruined his life. “This used to hurt.”

  Well, that was bad news. “You know what that means?” I asked.

  “The serum is even more dangerous than we thought. Its A1 base must somehow negate the Fold’s defenses.”

  I thought about Susan’s book on the Mornavail. In the first paragraph, it said the Mornavail had made their home in the “deep pocket of the Fold.” Did they—I—originate here, and that was why passing through the warp didn’t hurt?