“I’ll be fine,” her mate reassured her as if he could read her thoughts. “It’s not a blaster.”
Could he read her thoughts? They’d have to discuss this mate thing further.
“Leave us alone,” Naomi tried one more time, giving the man a chance to retreat.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Remember that when you’re bleeding,” Shayn said as he burst out of the tent. And while Shayn distracted him, Naomi ran.
CHAPTER NINE
SHAYN WASN’T HURT. Naomi could tell, since he caught up to her before she’d escaped the clearing where they were camped. He almost overtook her before he slowed down to stay at her pace. When Naomi went to turn towards the main camp, Shayn urged her in the other direction, deeper into the forest and away from the other survivors.
“Safety in numbers?” Naomi pointed out as they left those numbers behind.
“Don’t know how many are looking for you,” Shayn countered. And he had a point. Morgyn had already sent two men to retrieve her; it was completely possible she had more at the camp. There had been thousands of people on that ship and any one of them could have some sort of connection to Sola Corp. Naomi knew the company was much bigger than she’d ever seen. She was part of the medical research arm, but it had tendrils buried in every part of the Oscavian Empire. Naomi didn’t know what kind of influence Morgyn wielded over those other tendrils, but anything was possible.
How the fuck were they ever going to escape?
“Safe enough by morning,” Shayn said, not even winded as they ran. “Can make it back then.”
A whole night spent in the forest of a strange planet. Naomi tried to convince herself it was an adventure rather than a terrifying ordeal. And with Shayn by her side it almost was.
She strained to hear if the man who’d come for her was chasing after them, but the only sounds she heard were the chirps of night birds and Shayn. They took a rest after several minutes, leaning against tall trees and looking out for any pursuers.
Shayn hugged her close and murmured reassurances at her, but exhaustion was catching up with Naomi and a few reassurances weren’t enough. She wanted to be off the planet, out of the Oscavian Empire, and on her way to her new future. She’d never expected that she’d need to run for her life, not from the person who’d saved it, who’d raised her since her parents died.
A twig snapped in the distance and Shayn’s head jerked, following the sound. Naomi’s lungs still heaved from their run and she didn’t know if she had it in her to sprint any more. But Shayn didn’t run. They moved carefully, stepping over twigs and rocks and skirting the edges of the trees to stay out of sight. One of the moons overhead made it bright enough that they weren’t blind, and the longer they were outside, the better Naomi’s eyes adjusted.
Shayn turned left and Naomi’s instincts screamed to go right. She reached out and tugged, nodding in the other direction. He didn’t question and she took the lead, climbing up a shallow hill until they came to a rise and could look out at the forest all around them. She could hear crashing waves in the distance and wondered how near they were to the water, but the vegetation was too dense to see anything.
They stopped again, and after several minutes passed by, when they didn’t hear their pursuer, Naomi began to breathe easier. She didn’t know how late it was, but she’d caught plenty of sleep after their afternoon lovemaking, so she wasn’t that tired. But she didn’t look forward to spending a cold night outdoors.
Shayn sank to the ground and held out his arms for her. Naomi snuggled into his embrace, both for warmth and reassurance, and they sat together like that all night, neither daring to sleep as they waited for the sun to crest the horizon.
Hours passed, and Naomi sank into half-sleep, more like meditation than anything restful. By the time the world lightened around them all of her muscles ached from sitting on the hard ground and she would be thankful the next time she saw a bed.
“Do you think he’s still out here?” she asked, her voice a bit rusty from the chill.
“If he’s smart he’s waiting back at the settlement, or at our tent. It would be easy for a man to get lost in a forest this big and he wouldn’t want to risk it. He’ll try again.” Shayn sounded grimly prepared, but he held her close, as if that would be enough to protect her from the men following her.
“We’ll need to change up our way home,” Naomi decided. “If they’re on the ship, we don’t want to lead them to your brothers.”
“My brothers can handle themselves. And I have another destination in mind.” She looked up and saw him grin. “We have the whole universe open to us, and as soon as we’re out of the empire we’ll be safe.”
“You think so?” Sola Corp had been her entire life and it was hard to imagine that they couldn’t find her anywhere.
“You’re one person. At a certain point it will be too expensive to keep chasing after you.” It was coldly practical, and Naomi hoped he was right.
With the sun up and hope of a restored journey on the horizon, she and her mate made their way back to the campground hand in hand. A few groups of people were sitting outside the main food station and smiled at them as they grabbed their breakfasts and sat at one of the empty tables. A few minutes later more survivors arrived and the tables began to fill up. A group of Oscavian women joined them and regaled them with stories of their troubles setting up their tents.
Naomi shot a sly glance at her mate, remembering just how handy he’d been, and how all of that had turned out. While they ate, her worries about Sola Corp chasing her receded to the back of her mind. She could pretend that she and Shayn were just a couple in love on a disaster prone vacation. But when the Oscavian ladies left, those memories came right back.
She and Shayn stayed in the dining area, hoping there was safety in numbers. And an hour or two after they’d eaten the whispers started as rumors about the ship started to filter through the crowd.
They’d be off the planet before noon, seemed to be the gist of it, and on their way back to civilization in no time.
SHAYN SPOTTED THE MAN who’d come for them in the night in the middle of their meal, and when the man froze in his tracks he was certain that it was the right person. But the Oscavian didn’t approach, and Shayn was content to believe that they were safe.
For now.
Still, he kept to the central area that the crew had set up where all the passengers were milling around, and he was careful not to let Naomi out of his sight. He’d managed to lay the Oscavian out with a single punch in the wee hours of the morning, but that had been more a matter of surprise than strategy.
It was a strange comfort to know the man was near them. At least he had eyes on the threat, rather than needing to search every shadow for hidden thugs. Shayn didn’t know if anyone else would come after Naomi, but he doubted it. Sola Corp had managed to get two operatives on their ship in a matter of hours after Naomi had spontaneously escaped, so there simply couldn’t have been time to get more people to follow them.
That would change once they were back on board and had made their first stop. If he were in charge of recovering his denya he’d have a crew waiting to board at the next port, one skilled in retrieving people from nasty situations.
Naomi seemed to pick up on the sour turn of his mood. “This is about to get a lot more difficult, isn’t it?” she asked quietly. Their breakfast companions were long gone and no one had taken their seats, so it was unlikely anyone would overhear them speaking.
“You said it yourself, you’re valuable. Morgyn is going to put all her available resources into finding you as soon as possible. And I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen.” He’d keep a look out for the man who’d come for them the night before and stay on high alert. It would be a tense few days while they waited to leave the empire, but eventually they’d be fine. They had to be. A thought occurred to him. “Does your AI know anything about Sola Corp? If she’s been hooked into their systems she might know m
ore than you realize.”
Naomi considered it before pulling the tablet out of their pocket. She’d managed to grab it before fleeing their tent; Aileen was too important to be left behind. She powered up the device and they waited for the screen to light up.
“Where are we? What’s going on? Where’s the network?” Was it possible for an artificial intelligence to sound scared? Shayn thought this one did. And why shouldn’t she? When she’d been powered off she’d been plugged into the ship and connected to every computer there. Now she was alone, supported only by what input her human owner could give her.
“There was an accident,” Naomi said, voice soft as if she was comforting a wounded animal. “I had to pull you off the network to keep you with me. We’ll be connected again very soon. But Shayn had a question for you.”
“He didn’t get shut off,” the AI groused. “Must be nice to be able to turn your friends on and off whenever it’s convenient.”
Naomi pressed her lips tightly together as if suppressing a smile at her machine’s grumbling. Whoever had programmed the thing had let the personality processor run wild and he could see the appeal, especially for someone who spent a lot of her time without other living company. “I’m sorry,” she said, and Shayn wasn’t sure he’d ever heard a person sincerely apologize to a machine before. “I’ll try and warn you if something happens again.”
Shayn didn’t know that AIs could make the noise Aileen made. But she quickly relented. “What’s the question?”
“Um...” Naomi took a breath and shot him a look before turning back to Aileen. “Have you realized that we’re fleeing from Morgyn? From home?”
He didn’t like the way the word ‘fleeing’ sounded. They were heading towards a new life, a better one. But now was not the time to argue semantics.
“Finally!” It came out so loud that he was sure someone around them must have heard.
Naomi jerked forward to turn down Aileen’s volume control.
“Hey!” the AI objected, “just ask if you want me to keep it down. That tickles.”
“Sorry,” Naomi muttered, but then she jabbed the volume button once for good measure. “Now what do you mean by finally?”
“That doctor has been up to no good from day one,” Aileen informed them like she was dropping a hot piece of gossip. “And she thought her firewalls would be good enough to keep me at bay. Ha!”
“Quietly!” his denya warned as Aileen’s voice rose again.
She quieted and continued talking. “Turns out she was always looking for a subject like you, and you’re not the only one. She keeps you all separate and gets rid of you when things go wrong.”
His denya’s eyes widened and her cheeks lost some of their color. Shayn reached out and covered her hand with his own, offering whatever comfort she would accept. “Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” She was shaken, but her voice was steady. Shayn hated to see her world turned on its head, but her strength shone through with every blow.
“You didn’t ask, dearie, and I wasn’t going to risk getting reprogrammed or reported. You know what happens to computers who act up.” The AI was unrepentant in keeping her secrets.
“I wouldn’t reprogram you,” Naomi sounded hurt. “You know me better than that.”
“But your doctor would. And she’d know to look for me the second you confronted her. I—”
Naomi reached out and switched Aileen off. She stared at the dark screen of her tablet for several long moments before pulling the device off the table and shoving it back in her pocket. “She didn’t tell me,” she repeated, as if Shayn hadn’t been sitting there the whole time.
He pulled his mate in close, wrapping his arms around her as if he could shield her from the dangers of the world. “She’s a computer. She doesn’t think like you or I. And I’m sure if you were in imminent danger, she would have said something.” At least, he hoped she would have. He didn’t know the ins and out of the AI’s programming and he couldn’t guess at the logic that went into her decisions.
Naomi was quiet for a moment before pulling in a deep breath and steadying herself. “You’re right. And I can’t—I can’t get hung up on this right now. At least now we know that this was the right move, that Morgyn really was doing something she shouldn’t. I was worried that I was overreacting, that I misinterpreted the vision.”
To Shayn, it didn’t matter whether the vision was right or wrong. Naomi had clearly been used by forces that didn’t have her best interest at heart, people who used her for gain and didn’t care how she ended up. “You’re safe,” he promised. “I won’t let Morgyn have you.”
“But what about the others?” Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “You heard Aileen. I’m not the only woman Morgyn’s been experimenting on.”
He had heard that, but his priority was the woman in front of him. “We can’t do anything until you’re safe.”
A blast of engines rocked across the encampment and a cheer went up as a large ship appeared in the sky. “Attention passengers!” A crewman jumped on a nearby table and tried to grab everyone’s attention. “Please find the nearest crew personnel to receive your boarding information. We will be leaving the planet within the hour. Due to environmental restrictions, we will be ferrying two hundred and fifty passengers at a time. Your slots have already been assigned.”
Excitement rose up around them and passengers rushed the uniformed crew, desperate to see how soon they’d be off on their journey. Shayn spotted more people rushing in from where they’d been camped and he met his denya’s eyes and nodded to the growing line. “If we don’t go now, I’m pretty sure we’ll be last off the planet.”
She stood with him and as they joined the others the shakiness from Aileen’s revelations seemed to fade from his mate. There were a dozen or so people in front of them, and now that Shayn knew it was time to go, he was impatient to leave.
He looked around to see if he could spot the man from the night before, to make sure that he couldn’t do anything to hurt Naomi, but there were too many Oscavian males around to identify the one.
They made it to the front of the line and offered their names to the crewman. It took the man a moment to scroll through his tablet and find their information.
“Ah, got it!” He grinned in triumph. “Sorry, some of these are sorted weirdly. We have Naomi Beck as passenger 241 on our first ship and Shayn NaZade as passenger 1235 on our fifth ship.”
“We need to go together.” Shayn wasn’t letting his denya out of his sight, especially not with a dangerous operative of Sola Corp waiting to snatch her.
The crew member’s jaw ticked. “I’m sorry, Mr. NaZade, but the assignments cannot be changed unless you are accompanying a child or you are the caretaker to someone ill. As both of you are adults and clearly in good health, there is nothing I can do.”
“We need to go together,” Shayn insisted. “I’m not going to be split up from my mate just because some computer randomly generated a number.”
“And I am not going to change seating assignments just because a passenger wants me to!” The crew member’s voice rose and his purple cheeks darkened with a flush. “Now please, sir, there are more passengers behind you.”
Naomi placed a hand on his arm. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “Despite everything, I think we’ll be fine if we’re separated for an hour.”
He didn’t need to remind her of the threats, but given the crew member’s reaction, making a scene wasn’t going to get them on one of the ships together. And it wasn’t like the man who’d attacked them would make a move while under the gaze of a bunch of crew and passengers, especially since Shayn was going to make sure that he wasn’t on the same shuttle as Naomi.
Shayn didn’t like it, but short of stowing away or hijacking one of the transports there wasn’t much he could do. “Any sign this will end poorly?” he asked, knocking a finger against his temple.
“It would be useful if I could control the visions,” Naomi groused. “But my instinc
ts are quiet, which I’m hoping is a good sign. I don’t want to be separated either, but it’s an hour, not a month. And I’ve survived for my whole life before I met you. I can last an hour.”
She’d survived by being practically held prisoner and used for medical research for more than a decade. Survival, but not living. But there was no use saying that now. Shayn kissed her, putting all his heart into it, a promise that they’d see each other soon, and that he’d do everything to make sure she was safe.
“I’ll make sure our old friend can’t bother you,” he said when they parted.
She grinned. “That doesn’t sound pleasant. Don’t hit him too hard.”
“Nothing to disappoint my mate.” He led her to the transport and watched as she boarded with the other passengers. There was no sign of the Oscavian from the night before, and Shayn chose to see that as a good thing. But as the door closed and the transport took off, Shayn’s own instincts screamed at him that it was wrong to be parted from his mate and he needed to find her again as quickly as he could.
He didn’t need to be psychic to know that being separated was wrong, and he hoped the bad feeling was nothing more than fear. He would tear the world apart if something happened to his denya, and he didn’t want to know just how far he’d go to get her back.
So he hoped everything would be fine, even as a dark part of his mind knew better.
CHAPTER TEN
NAOMI HAD JUST CROSSED the threshold onto the transport when the vision hit her and she staggered.
A blaster pointed at Shayn’s temple. Trees in the background. She was held back by an Oscavian arm and could hear someone snarling, though she couldn’t make out the words. She needed to drag his attention away from Shayn, needed to save her mate before something even worse happened. They’d escaped Oscavia for a better life, not to be separated permanently on some random noble’s pleasure planet. But there was nothing she could do and the man holding her back pulled the trigger.
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