by Love, Aimee
Run.
Like hell, I thought, gripping the knitting needle in my hand tighter and wishing I’d brought a better weapon.
A hand, strong and unyielding, clamped over my own where I had it covering my mouth and a vice like arm wrapped around my chest. I felt myself hauled back down the way I had come, away from Quince and any thoughts of rescue or redemption.
Chapter Seven
Band-Aids
I’d been dragged half-way back to the stairs before I recovered from the shock. At least the arms that held me were human, I told myself. I knew how to deal with humans well enough. My left hand was trapped against my mouth and my right was pinned tight against my side from the elbow up but I still had my knitting needle clenched in my right fist.
I went limp, forcing my captor to work twice as hard to drag me. When he stopped and tried to shift my weight, I stabbed backward hard with the knitting needle. There was a satisfying grunt of pain in response as the slim stick met flesh and sunk in, but his arms only got tighter.
We reached the staircase and I saw a lantern, it’s openings partially shuttered, sitting on the floor. It hadn’t provided enough light to alert me, transfixed as I was, but it had obviously been enough for someone to see me and for Quince to make out my shape in the doorway.
He heaved me up a few steps, then tensed as I pulled the needle out and tried to gain leverage for another stab.
“Stop it you idiot,” he growled into my ear. “It’s me!”
He loosened his grip on my mouth and let me turn my head slightly, though it wasn’t necessary. I recognized his voice easily enough. Sebastian.
I struggled to free myself from him, kicking out with my legs, trying to gain purchase on the smooth stone of the floor.
“Stop!” He demanded in a whisper. “They’ll hear you.”
I brought the needle down in his leg, hard, startling him enough that he yelped and released me. I drove my shoulder back into him and we tumbled backward together onto the ground.
“Let them,” I hissed back, springing to my feet and spinning around, ready to take a swipe at his face.
Brave words, but when I heard the scuttling sound from down the corridor I froze.
Sebastian heard it a moment later and began pulling himself up the stairs backward with his hands.
The noise got louder and I realized it wasn’t coming from Quince’s room, but from the closest one, only a dozen feet away.
“It smells the blood,” he whispered, getting to his feet and grabbing the lantern. He pushed me ahead of him, up the stairs and away.
“Go,” he told me.
I needed no further urging. I flew up the stairs, easily out distancing him. Even without his injured leg, he never could have caught me. After nine months of ships gravity set at .7, the .8 of this world felt normal, but I hadn’t been here long enough for my legs to loose all their extra strength. His longer stride helped, but he was still a landing below when I got to the top.
I went into our rooms, having no idea where else to go, and was at the top of the ladder when he grabbed my ankle and yanked me back down. He wrestled me to the ground, using all his extra size and weight against me, and slammed my wrist against one of the bed frames until I dropped the knitting needle.
“Where’s Julian?” He demanded when he had me securely pinned and we’d both stopped heaving.
I motioned upstairs with my chin, not trusting myself to speak and unwilling to look him in the eye.
“Will he know you’ve been gone?”
I shook my head a fraction.
“You’re sure?” He asked, giving me a hard shake.
“Yes,” I barked back.
“For your sake I hope you’re right,” he said, climbing off me and rolling on to his back with a hiss of pain. Blood was oozing from the twin wounds on his thigh, like he’d been bitten by some terrible snake.
The needle was still on the floor, beside my hand, and I knew I could snatch it up and have it buried in his neck before he could react, but I was done and obviously so was he.
“Go on,” he told me, his voice flat and emotionless. “I have to get cleaned up and go back down for Quince.”
He got to his feet and lurched over toward the bathroom.
“We’ll talk about this in the morning,” he promised ominously as I climbed the ladder.
Julian was still deeply asleep when I slammed the hatch closed and knelt on top of it. I took a deep, steadying breath through my nose and released it slowly. I wanted to scream, and cry, and punch something until my knuckles bled, and I knew I probably would eventually, but first I had to survive the next few hours.
Whatever his reasons, Sebastian had granted me a stay of execution and I wasn’t going to waste my borrowed time getting caught by a simple slip. I went into the bathroom and stripped down, looking myself over in the mirror. The skin around my mouth was red and my wrists were slightly swollen. I would have bruises in the morning, and although I could hide my arms and possibly my wrists until they faded, the ones on my face would be another matter.
I stripped naked and scrubbed myself and Quince’s clothes, now crusted with Sebastian’s blood, as best I could in the freezing water. As my hands worked, my mind churned until I finally came up with a plan. It was far from foolproof, but it was a calculated risk I was going to have to take.
I got out and bundled up the stained clothes, wringing out as much moisture as I could, and hid them in one of my crates. I tossed the onesie I had been wearing earlier on the floor and then stripped Julian down, throwing his clothes around the room for effect. The last thing I wanted to see at that moment was a naked man, but it was necessary.
Once I was done, I tried to push the bed over the hatch but failed. Julian looked small only when standing next to Sebastian, I realized. His weight was enough to make the bed too heavy for me to easily slide. I braced my legs against the wall and pulled, gaining only a few inches, but it was enough for me to wiggle in behind it. Putting my back to the wall and my feet against the headboard, I strained until I thought I would rupture something but working inch by inch, finally made it scrape the rest of the way to the hatch.
Exhausted, I flopped onto the bed beside Julian. Then, because rough sex has a price and because it made me feel better, I reached over and slammed my fist into his balls.
I felt Julian shift beside me and cracked my eyes. The room was blindingly bright and it took me a moment to figure out that I’d left my implant on when I went to sleep the night before. I rolled over onto my side with a sleepy moan and reached up to scratch an imaginary itch, turning it off.
Julian sat up in bed and let out a string of expletives, then limped over and snatched up his clothes. He hurried to the bathroom with them, one hand holding his groin, and spent the next twenty minutes shut inside, vomiting. When he came out, I sat up in bed and tried my best to look hurt and frightened, which given the night I’d had, wasn’t much of a stretch.
He took one look at my face and gasped. Coming over to the bed, he sat on the edge and reached a hand up to my mouth. I shied away from him and pulled the covers up to my shoulders.
“Did I do that?” He asked.
I let my bottom lip quiver and turned my face away.
“I don’t think you should come back for a while,” I sniveled. “I just need some time too…”
“Oh course, of course,” he assured me. “I don’t know what could have gotten into me. I don’t even remember coming here…”
I breathed a little easier. Retrograde amnesia was a common but undependable side effect of mixing sleeping tabs with alcohol. I’d hoped for it, but had no way to be sure.
He looked distraught and I might have felt guilty about my subterfuge if it weren’t for his obvious complacency in the horrors going on down below.
&n
bsp; I got up and tried to move the bed one handed, keeping the covers wrapped around myself carefully with the other. He saw my arm, bruised all along it’s length with clear finger marks on the wrists, and quickly took over.
He opened the hatch and gave me one last mournful look, then vanished.
Good riddance, I thought, feeling a completely irrational anger. The fact that he was innocent hardly mattered, since he had no way of knowing it, and he hadn’t even bothered to apologize.
When I got out of the shower, Sebastian was lying back on my bed, waiting for me. I didn’t bother to cover up quickly, letting him take a good long look at his handiwork. Besides my arms and face, there were bruises on my legs and sides from our wrestling match and a large one on my chest where he’d pinned me down with a knee at one point.
I shrugged into a loose onesie and sat facing him in one of the chairs, waiting for him to make the first move.
“You stabbed me,” he said, surprising me. Of all the things on the agenda, I considered that to be one of the least important.
“Twice,” he added pointedly.
Clearly it was the second hit, after I knew who he was, that bothered him.
“You led him down there,” I said coldly, looking him straight in the eye and daring him to deny it. “You knew what was going to happen and you gave them Quince.”
“I did,” he told me plainly. “And I’ll do it again next time they call for a counting.”
I shuddered. “Where is he?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t downstairs listening.
“I sent him on some errands. I think I’ve got him convinced that he hallucinated seeing you last night, so don’t bring it up.”
As if I might mention it over breakfast.
“You’re bleeding,” I said, pointing to a tiny dot of blood on his pants.
“Yeah,” he agreed angrily. “Because you stabbed me. The knife wasn’t poisoned, was it?”
“It wasn’t a knife, it was a hair bauble,” I told him haughtily, reveling in the indignity of it, “and where would I get poison?”
“You seem to have your ways,” he said darkly.
“You should get the wounds closed up,” I told him, focussing on the trivial so I wouldn’t have to ask any of the huge questions looming in my mind, like what kind of sick, demented world have you lured me to?
“Oh sure, I’ll just pop down to the infirmary and ask Jules to patch me up. Funny coincidence, you and I both having mysterious accidents on the same night. What did you tell him anyway?”
“Take your pants off.”
“Isn’t that what you tell him every night?”
“Very funny. Now take your pants off so I can fix your leg,” I said, though I knew he’d understood me the first time. “And you don’t get to be all disapproving of who I sleep with while you’re off on your little jaunts to the koochie spider bordello in the basement.”
I positioned myself between him and the crates when I pulled out the med-kit, hoping he wouldn’t notice the false bottom.
“What is that thing?” He asked when I turned around with the little pack in my hand.
“It’s an emergency medical kit,” I told him patiently. “Now take your pants off.”
“Are you always this demanding?” He asked.
“I usually don’t have to ask more than once, but I guess you got some last night.”
His eye narrowed, but he slipped out of his pants and sat back down on the edge of the bed.
I looked up at the ceiling.
“What?” He asked. “You told me to.”
“I assumed you had underwear on,” I admitted, grabbing a pillow from behind him and putting over his crotch.
I unfastened the case and pulled out an antibiotic cream and the tiny hot suture gun, shaking it and then flipping it on to make sure it had a charge. It glowed white hot.
He inched back, chuckling nervously.
“Maybe we should just let it be,” he suggested.
“You want something for the pain?” I asked.
“Is that what you gave Jules?”
“He just got drunk and passed out,” I said innocently, swabbing his leg with an antiseptic wipe and hoping it stung like hell.
“Sure he did,” Sebastian said, gritting his teeth as I packed the first wound with cream and pinched it closed. “He got drunk and passed out minutes after we left and then you just got bored and decided to have a look around? In disguise?”
I ignored him and flipped the suture gun back on.
“You know what you’re doing, right?”
“The Colony Board offers free classes in emergency medicine to all prospective emigrants,” I told him, lowering the guns nozzle to the wound. “Hold still,” I cautioned as the smell of burning flesh and hair filled the room and his fingers dug into the mattress.
To his credit, he didn’t flinch and the only sign left of the wound was a small red welt.
“That fucking hurt,” he growled when I pulled the gun away.
“I offered you something for the pain,” I reminded him, packing the second wound and pinching it.
“That ones not as deep,” he protested. “Just leave it.”
“Big baby,” I chided and held the gun over it until it sealed. I wiped away the singed hair and dead flesh and slapped a bandage over both of them.
“They’ll itch,” I warned him.
“Great,” he muttered as I packed up the kit and put it back in the bottom of its crate.
“You know, I checked those before I gave them to you,” he pointed out. “There wasn’t a med-kit.”
“I didn’t want it confiscated,” I confessed. “I knew you were short on supplies here and I didn’t want the medicine I bought and gave up some of my weight allowance for just getting put in the communal stores, so I hid it in between two sweaters.”
“Whatever you say,” he agreed, clearly not believing me. “So what did you tell Jules?” He asked, motioning to my face.
“I didn’t tell him anything,” I said honestly. “He woke up hungover and a little ill and I had bruises. I let him draw his own conclusions.”
“So he thinks he did that?”
I shrugged. “He seemed to.”
The door opened downstairs and my eyes went wide. I couldn’t think of a single person it wouldn’t be disastrous to have find me with a half-naked Sebastian. His mind obviously took the same path because he jumped to his feet and pulled his pants on so quickly he nearly fell on his face.
“Hello?” Titus called up.
Sebastian and I looked at each other and I suppressed a nervous giggle.
“We’re up here,” he yelled back, trying to sound as stern and humorless as always.
Titus climbed the ladder and looked back and forth between us. I tried to appear as innocent and docile as I could and Sebastian glowered.
“I can hardly pretend not to know what you two must be talking about,” Titus drawled. “But I assure you, you needn’t convince Sebastian to plead your case for you. I have no intention of sending Julian back here, unless of course you request it.”
I shook my head adamantly.
“Well, lets give things a few days to settle down, then we’ll see what we can do about finding you a new suitor.”
I had to give the man credit, he was a very well mannered pimp.
“I’ll take Sebastian,” I said quickly, before I could talk myself out of it.
They both gaped at me as if I’d just grown horns.
“Really?” Titus finally sputtered.
Sebastian opened his mouth to protest but I cut him off.
“Well, you said it was better if I picked someone who already knows I’m here,” I reminded him. “And I feel as if I’ve already been so much trouble. I don
’t know what I could have done to make Julian so angry, but I know it must be my fault somehow. He’s always been so gentle and kind…”
Sebastian gave me a look. Perhaps I was laying it on a little too thick.
“I hope he won’t be punished on my account,” I continued.
“No, no,” he assured me. “I’m sure it’s all been a misunderstanding. Sebastian?” He asked me again. “You’re sure?”
I nodded, noticing that Sebastian himself wasn’t being consulted.
“I’d really rather it wasn’t a stranger,” I told him, although the truth of the matter was that I doubted Sebastian would press the matter any more than Julian had.
“I’d imagine that would be awkward,” Titus agreed easily. “See to it,” he said to Sebastian and then he smiled at me and patted me on my shoulder. He gave one last little moue of distaste at my bruised face and then departed.
“You’re planning on killing me in my sleep, aren’t you?” Sebastian asked as soon as the door closed.
“Eventually,” I told him with a grin, “but not tonight.”
I slept the day away and woke to find my lunchtime soup beside the hatch, completely congealed. I poked my head down and saw Quince curled up in bed and Sebastian sitting beside him, reading aloud.
He saw me looking, touched the boys shoulder gently and then came over.
“You ready for dinner?” He asked.
I nodded, taken aback by his sudden civility.
“I figured I’d wait to get it until you were awake, so it wouldn’t get cold,” he told me, then left.
I picked up my wand and went down the ladder. Sitting beside Quince on the edge of the bed, I felt a hard ache in my chest knowing nothing I could do would take away his pain.
