Rising Tides

by Rebecca Royce

“I will.” He nodded.

  “I can feel them, sort of. They’re not okay.” I paced back and forth. I couldn’t make anything go any faster. I grabbed onto my knees.

  Hold on guys. Just hold on a little bit longer.

  10 A Nightmare

  “I don’t know how we’re going to get on,” Brenden muttered as we pulled up alongside the ship. “It’s not like they’re going to simply open the doors for us. We’re going to have to blow a hole and we don’t know where…”

  His voice trailed off. I stepped up next to him. “What?”

  “The cargo bay door just opened.”

  Matt scrunched up his face. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  The lights on the ship turned off and on twice. If we’d been back on The Farm that would have been the signal for all clear. Canyon had said they would help us. My breathing picked up. “It’s safe. Trust me. I know I’m asking a lot, but a friend opened those doors. Sometime in the distant future, I’ll maybe explain it to you.”

  Brenden shot me a look that told me he didn’t like that answer, but he docked our shuttle just the same. A moment of anxiety passed through me that I pushed away. We boarded the cleaning ship and as I stepped off, I spotted him.

  It was Canyon. He nodded to me before he vanished. When I got back, I was going to thank him over and over again. Of course, he hadn’t done this yet. He would do it. But just the same.

  They didn’t interfere too strongly in the past for fear of Evander discovering the technology. This, they’d been able to do.

  That also meant I was right. My guys were here.

  Brenden and Matt pulled out their laser-targeted guns. I’d never actually seen the Z use weapons before, but I supposed it made sense. We weren’t in a hand-to-hand combat situation and maybe they weren’t as fast as the others in moving energy.

  Matt touched his ear. “The communications are back up. Master Kelton, can you hear me?” That was his fiancé but in this situation they were back to holding rank. “I’m on the service ship with Dr. Chen and Brenden. The Chens are here.” He winced and looked at me. “He’s not happy.” He spoke to Kelton again. “You’re in the middle of a battle, and we couldn’t reach you. We’re fine so far. No resistance.”

  I smiled. That might have been Canyon, too. Small touches of things that could go unnoticed, but made a huge difference. The ship made the loudest ticking noise I’d ever heard. I bit down on my lip. How had they tolerated this for so long?

  Weeks like this would have driven me mad. I closed my eyes. Where were they? I could only feel Hunter, and I wasn’t going to dwell too long on why that was. Amari and Shane were okay. They were just… hurt. They needed me.

  I pointed at the elevator. “They’re below.”

  Brenden nodded. “Come on.”

  Like my guys had said, the ticking got noisier when the elevator was in use. Matt winced. “We need to get them out of here and fast. This place is not steady. I don’t want Kelton to come chasing me after I’m dead to kill me for getting you killed.”

  I shook my head. “He would be upset at me, that is for sure, but more upset to lose you.”

  Matt looked down at his feet. “We’re all loyal to the Z and the Chens first and foremost.”

  I touched his arm. “I know you are. But it’s perfectly fine to put love in there, too. I would never expect you to pick me over the love of your life. And don’t argue. I’m risking all of you to go get my three.”

  The elevator stopped at the bottom floor. Fortunately, this ship was small enough that we didn’t have to try to determine which floor to go to. The first thing as we stepped off the elevator was the smell. I gagged and then covered my mouth. The people being held here were not being cared for. Death, disease, feces, vomit. It overwhelmed me for a second, but I pulled it together. My sense of smell was heightened, thanks to the girls, and it took me a moment to adjust. People moaned in the distance.

  I nodded. “I have to be. Come on. Matt, can you get us some help? Anyone leave the other ship? There are a lot of people here.”

  He touched his ear. “Master Kelton, we need assistance. Dr. Chen is fine but there are lot of captives.”

  He spoke for a while, but I didn’t listen, heading instead to the cages that held Evander’s captives all over the room. Most people were unconscious, which was a small kindness for them. Behind me, Brenden jiggled keys.

  “I found them by the elevator.”

  I touched his arm. “Start opening these up. When Kelton gets here with help, we can all start loading these poor people onto the shuttles. We’re going to need the med bays on both Artemis and Malice. Call over to Wade. Let him know to get ready and tell Dane that if he can steal any med machines from Evander on the other ship that will likely be helpful.”

  He nodded. “On it.”

  I kept walking forward. Evander didn’t have to keep guards, not when the prisoners were so sick and dying. I kept my anticipation down. I had to stay present and not rush through here like a lunatic looking for them.

  “Mrs. Chen,” a small voice caught my attention and I looked down at a Z Warrior whose name I didn’t know.

  I squatted in front of him. “We’re here to help you. Brenden is coming. He’ll let you out and medical assistance is on the way.”

  “They’re two down from here. I tried to save them. I got them on the shuttle. I had to hit Master Shane, but that’s my job. The Z always have some of us assigned.” He started to choke uncontrollably.

  I put my hand through the bars and held onto his. “Thank you. What’s your name?”

  Brenden was right next to me. “This is Bill. He’s been with us a long time.”

  “You took care of her,” Bill managed to squeak.

  “Get him out.” I rose and passed the next cage where the man in it was unconscious. But seeing my three stopped me short. Shane was in the first cage. He didn’t move or look up when I passed him. Amari was in the middle, his arm slung down hitting the floor. Hunter was awake, and as I came into view of him in the last cage, he tried and failed, to sit up.

  “Don’t move,” I commanded him. “Not an inch.”

  “How?”

  Brenden opened the cages, and I scooted inside to Hunter. I needed to check on the other two, but Hunter was awake, and if I needed information, I was going to get it from him.

  The ticking increased, and I hoped that meant Kelton and his crew were coming down the elevator.

  Hunter smiled at me; his eyes weren’t clear. “I had a feeling you were lying. You were on your way here.”

  I nodded. “And you lied when you said they were okay.”

  “I don’t know if they are. I can’t tell if Shane is breathing anymore.”

  His words broke my heart. “They both still are, and the good news, my love, is that you married a doctor. I’m going to take good care of all of you. Help is here.”

  He winced. “I don’t know that I have much energy left to hold on. But I am so glad I got to see your face one more time.”

  “Oh no. Don’t talk like this. I get it. You have to be exhausted but you made me a promise you’d come home, and you are keeping it. End of story. What happened to you guys?”

  His breathing was shallow. I wanted him in the med machine yesterday and my other two husbands with him immediately. Still, I kept my face calm. “They injected us with something. Feels like my insides are burning. That’s when Amari lost it.” He winced. “He doesn’t pass out. Ever.”

  I wiped away the sweat on his forehead. This was Evander torture. They injected all kinds of diseases into people. I had no idea what it was yet, but suddenly Kelton was there.

  “Dr. Chen. We’ll grab them. All of them.” I bent over to kiss Hunter on the cheek. “I’m going to see you really soon even though you won’t remember it because we’re going to knock you into sweet dreams. When you wake up, it’ll be over, and you’ll be home.” I kissed his other cheek. “I love you.”

  Hunter tried to speak, but his eye
s rolled to the back of his head. I somehow managed not to scream.

  I passed him to Kelton, who picked him up to carry him. Shane and Amari were already en route to the elevator, Shane in Matt’s arms, and Amari in Brenden’s. I wanted to rush after them, to get to the med bay to get started in healing them, but I had to be smart about this.

  I didn’t have a clue what they could have been injected into them that made them burn. I grabbed my ear piece. “Dane, can you hear me? Wade?”

  Both of them answered at once. Wade with a yes and Dane with a talk to me. Relief flooded me at the sound of their voices.

  “They’re being burned on the inside. Something Evander injected. Ring any bells?”

  No one answered, and I almost spoke again before Dane finally did. “I’m looking it up.”

  “Me too,” Wade supplied.

  Okay. I had to get more answers than this. There were things we knew about Evander. They never put a disease out to the population they couldn’t cure. They had two reasons for this. The first was that they might decide eliminating a population was cutting into profits and change their minds. Second, they had to be able to cure it in case a member of the board of directors got sick. They never risked themselves.

  Somewhere on this fucking ship was answers.

  I was alone in the sense that I wasn’t actively being watched for the first time in forever. That was fine. Brenden and Matt were doing just what I would have wanted, saving my loves. But that didn’t mean I was ready to leave yet. I wouldn’t be dumb. If I got into trouble, someone would have to rescue me, and I didn’t want that. I wasn’t sneaking anywhere.

  “Guys, I’m going to find the med bay on this clunker. They must have something. See if there are answers. Tell a Z, any Z, that you see. Okay?”

  There was some static but finally Wade spoke. “Careful Amber. I hear that ship is in bad shape.”

  He had no idea. It was a walking death trap, but it would not be the place responsible for my husbands’ deaths. They were going to get to be old men. I would see to it. By sheer force alone.

  The med bay was nothing more than one med machine, a table, and a shelf of drugs. They obviously cared little about saving anyone here. I disconnected the machine. I’d take it with me. Nothing was labeled. There was nothing that screamed poison to me. I would take everything with me, rolling it in the med machine.

  “Amber?” Brenden came over my earpiece. “I’m coming back for you. Don’t move. Not an inch. Where are you?”

  “You can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes at you. I am moving. I am taking this med machine, and I am coming to the bay to meet you there. Thank you for saving them.”

  He groaned. “Fine. Don’t move from the…”

  I didn’t hear what he said because as I flipped open the lid of the med machine to stick everything I couldn’t carry in it, I found a man. Hiding.

  We stared at each other for a second. He wore a white lab coat, the universal sign of medical professional, and as he registered my awareness of him, fear crossed his features, and he paled.

  “I didn’t want to.”

  No good conversation ever started like that. “You didn’t want to what?”

  “I didn’t want to inject them. I never want to inject people. They… they make me.”

  This man had injected my husbands, and he was going to hide in the med machine until we went away? I grabbed a scalpel from the shelving unit, one of the few tools there. “I know how to use this thing. What is your name?”

  His voice shook. “Todd Anderson, I’m a medic.”

  All right. He didn’t make the medicine, but he knew how to administer it. I didn’t know how it worked with Evander, but here we all took oaths to do no harm. They might have made him do these things, but I was afraid he’d find that I had no sympathy.

  “Congratulations, Todd Anderson. You have just earned yourself a trip to the Chen Empire. Whether you live to get out of there will be entirely up to you.” The door behind me swung open. Brenden was out of breath. Whatever problem he would have given me for not being where I’d said I would died on his lips when he saw the scene before him. “This is Master Brenden.” They were all Masters when spoken about to Outsiders. I’d picked that up somewhere. “Master Brenden, this man injected everyone with whatever Evander did to them. I stepped back. Keep him alive long enough to talk.”

  My guard nodded once. “Understood.”

  I might have been just a tad bit fine with pain when it came to revenge. Maybe more than fine with it. For the first time ever, I felt like a Chen.

  “I think it was the green vials and that is pretty much what that man said before he started screaming again.” Dane stared at the bottle in front of him. “This is the one for sure. It’s a virus, and as far as the machines can tell it eats the victim from the inside out. Tears at the tissue. It’s… painful. To say the least. They experimented with it on a Dark Planet. Help got there and with assistance it has a fifty percent mortality rate.”

  My whole body went cold. I walked to the running med machines. With no idea what we were dealing with quite yet, all of the patients, including my husbands, had been put into the machines and told them to give us a readout on what we were looking at. We knew the pathogen they’d been injected with now.

  As I stared at the too pale forms of my beloveds, Dane entered the information on the toxin into the machine. Now, we’d find out what we could do. If anything. I rubbed my arms. Fifty percent wasn’t high enough.

  The Z gathered in the hall outside. I was going to have to tell them something about their leaders.

  “How long a stretch in the machines did those who lived have?” I could look it up myself but I suspected Dane knew that off the top of his head. We’d stayed on Artemis with Wade and all the patients. Melissa piloted Malice, ahead of us, in case we ran into trouble.

  We’d taken down a fleet ship of Evander but there were bound to be more. At least two more if Blaze’s instincts were right.

  Sienna stayed in the corner, monitored by all of us from the silence of her med machine.

  She was silent, no touching of my brain right now. Wade moved between the machines, taking readouts.

  “Someone beat the shit out of Shane.” Wade shook his head. “He must really have pissed them off.”

  I nodded. What would have been said or what happened to make the sweetest of my husbands drive his captors to beat him like that?

  “Amber, I hate to tell you how long it’s going to be,” Dane spoke softly. “You’ve had enough.”

  I shook my head. “Just lay it on me, Dane. I’m as tough as I have to be.”

  “It could be up to a year.”

  Wade winced. That was a long stretch. No wonder there was such a high mortality rate. Some people just couldn’t exist in the machine for that long. They weren’t meant to keep us alive endlessly when we were meant to die. That was the sad truth of it. The machines could perform miracles, but our bodies had to have fight left in them to do so.

  Some doctors took patients who were on extend care like that out for a while, kept them in a medically induced comatose state, but brought them outside to feel the sunshine, hear voices, breathe fresh air. I didn’t see any evidence of that helping anything.

  I stiffened my back. “Well, they’ll have to be strong. They promised me.”

  I was going to hold onto that like a deranged person if I needed to. I squared my shoulders. It was time to go tell the Z.

  “Not so fast,” Dane stopped me. “I’ve been running a scan on you while I do this.”

  I sighed. The old-fashioned doctors were fantastic because they had a life of knowhow behind them. Dane could probably deliver a baby while steering the ship and fixing himself a drink. But they didn’t care about privacy. He should have asked me first.

  “And?” I supposed I should have been grateful he’d done this. “Something wrong?”

  “Your blood pressure is once again borderline. I don’t like it. Particularly with twin
s.”

  I put my hand on my hips. “Dane, my husbands are lying near death. Poisoned. Evander’s manipulations eating them from the inside out like some kind of parasite. Give me a second to pull my anxiety down.”

  “You’re on bed rest.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “You’re on bed rest. And you can’t argue or look at Wade. I outrank him.”

  Wade scrunched up his face. “We have ranks?”

  “I’m on bed rest?” It was almost never used, ever. “Well, I’ve got news for you. I’m not going on bed rest. My husbands are in here. This is where I plan to be.”

  He nodded. “I thought you might say that. But this is Artemis, and I know her better than I know my room on Mars Station. I lived in this room for years. So I know that from the wall there is an attached ottoman.”

  Wade whirled around. “There is?”

  “It’s well hidden. The designer of this ship was very interested in stealth. You are going to sit on it with your feet up and do things like read or redesign the layout of the Chen Empire. You aren’t going to run on ships or send your energy bellowing through space. On that ottoman. Now.”

  I swallowed. I wanted to take care of the babies. I wasn’t going to argue. “For how long?”

  “Until I tell you otherwise. Now, go tell the Z what they need to know and then come back and sit down. This also means you aren’t torturing anyone for information. The Z don’t need you to do that. It is possible to not micromanage everything. That’s a hard lesson I had to learn. You, too, Wade. You don’t have to run the universe.”

  My shoulders sagged. “Dane, if they live through this, if they stay in those machines for a year, then we will be apart just about as long as we were when I ran from them. They will miss the birth of the babies. And… I don’t know how I can do this alone.”

  His face softened. “You’ll do it because you’re full of wonders and so much more than you even know you are. I’ve known you since you were a little girl. You are a survivor. The world spins around you, it gets out of control. Chaos takes over. And somehow you make order of it. Just when it seems like all is lost, you fix it. That’s what you do, Amber. Paloma made scenes. You created order. It wasn’t weakness. It was strength beyond the likes of which your sister could understand back then. Your parents didn’t see. I did. Someone else might break. You never will.”