“Hold on,” he warned. “I’m gonna have to ram them to get out.”
She gripped the armrests and held her breath, watching in horror as they approached the rear of the shuttle with dizzying speed. The guard station buzzed past her periphery, and she braced for impact. Instinctively, her eyes clenched shut. The scream of steel on steel tore through her ears as she slammed against her harness. Her head flew forward and back just as quickly, and the next thing Solara knew, they were outside the security shield with a chorus of alarms blaring inside the cockpit.
Renny’s glasses had flown off, but he didn’t miss a beat. He veered right, separating them from the other shuttlecraft and away from the cannon’s line of fire. An energy blast nicked the port hull and forced them into a barrel roll, but he corrected quickly and hit the boosters. The shuttle rocketed toward the nearby moon, and an instant later, they were out of the cannon’s range.
But that didn’t mean they were safe.
Renny was too busy hugging the moon’s gravity field for a slingshot of acceleration to tend to the dashboard, which lit up like a Christmas tree. The buttons and switches were unfamiliar to Solara, and without her diagnostic equipment, she couldn’t tell which systems had failed.
“What can I do?” she shouted above the beeping alarms.
“Radio the Banshee,” he said, and clutched the trembling wheel. “Tell the captain we need a track-and-intercept. He’ll know what that means.” Darting a glance at the dashboard, he added, “Make sure he knows our emergency system’s fried. We’ve got, maybe, thirty minutes of oxygen left.”
And nowhere safe to land, Solara thought. Then she realized that if they died, so would Doran, because the Banshee would never find them in time to deliver his medicine. The possibility made her shiver. She sent out a distress call, but there was no reply. “I don’t know if our com is out, or just the receiver,” she said.
“Keep trying.”
She did, over and over again, until her skin puckered into goose bumps and her teeth chattered. Without heated oxygen coursing through the cockpit, the temperature had plummeted so low that her breath condensed into clouds—not the best conditions to fly half naked.
Renny shrugged out of his jacket. “Put this on,” he said, then unbuttoned his shirt and handed her that, too. “And cover your legs.”
The coat was warm with body heat, so she wrapped herself tightly between the lapels before it cooled. When she thanked Renny, she noticed a scattering of pink lesions marring the bare skin on his shoulders. She frowned at the scars. Round and precise, they looked like laser wounds.
“What happened to your back?” she asked.
After engaging the autopilot, he reached blindly across the far end of the dash until he found his glasses, then grinned when he saw that they weren’t broken. “Remember what I said about stealing from the wrong people?”
“They shot you?”
“Thoroughly,” he said with a wry smile. “While I ran screaming for my life, a lot like how you did back there at the satellite.”
Solara wondered if those men had known Renny couldn’t control the impulse to steal, but she supposed it wouldn’t matter to the kind of people who’d shoot an unarmed man in the back. “What about the lady?” she asked. “The one who loved you. Where is she now?”
Renny’s mouth lifted in a sad smile. “I wish I knew…or maybe I don’t.” He shook his head. “Look at the mess we’re in now. This is no life, running in the shadows, never settling in one place. I wanted something better for her—a real home and a family she could be proud of. That’s why I left her behind.” A faraway look crossed his face, and he sighed with so much longing that it plucked at Solara’s heartstrings. “Some days, I hope she moved on,” he said. “And some days I don’t.”
Solara didn’t know what to say, so she took his hand, and they stared silently out the front window as the time and distance passed, along with their oxygen supply.
At some point, their grip loosened and it took a few tries to reconnect. They became clumsy in their movements, dizzy with confusion. Solara let her gaze wander around the cockpit but couldn’t make sense of the blinking lights or remember where they were going. She gulped breath after breath, never able to satisfy her body. The sensation reminded her of the city trams on Earth, how stifling they’d become in the summer until the tram operator had to lower a window.
“Hey, we sh-should open the h-hatch,” she stammered. “And let in some air.”
Renny peered at her through his glasses and tried to scratch his chest, but his hand fell into his lap. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She was about to ask why when a sudden movement caught her eye, and she turned to find an old, ugly ship keeping pace beside them. She knew that ship—couldn’t remember its name but desperately wanted to be on board.
Renny saw it, too, and released a whoop of joy. “We’re coming in hot,” he said, turning his gaze to the control panel. “Need to slow down.”
But all he did was rub his forehead.
A set of thick, metallic cables snaked out from their shuttle and latched onto the ship, then towed them closer. As if by remote control, their engines fell silent and they nestled into the ship’s port with a loud click. Solara tried standing from her seat, but straps held her in place until a boy with blond dreadlocks unfastened them.
He dragged her into the ship’s cargo hold and then went back for Renny.
The air inside the ship was clean and pure, so refreshing that she filled her lungs in great breaths that strained the linen straps binding her ribs. Her mind seemed to sharpen with each rise and fall of her chest, and by the time Renny recovered, she was already hugging him and laughing hysterically.
A while later, after they’d given Doran his medication and made sure he was stable, the crew reconvened in the galley. There she’d learned that the captain had never received her transmissions. He had tracked the shuttle the entire time they were gone. Sitting at the table, she thought about what Renny had said, what he’d wanted to give his lady on Earth: a real home and a family she could be proud of.
Solara still didn’t know this crew’s secrets or how their paths had crossed, and yet these strangers had done more to protect her today than her own parents had done in eighteen years. In her opinion, that was definitely something to be proud of. Renny was wrong when he’d said this was no life.
In that moment, there was no place she’d rather be.
In the days that followed, Doran learned to dread nighttime.
He’d spent so long in bed that his body had forgotten its sleep schedule, and now the eight hours when the ship was still and quiet had become a mental prison sentence. He wished he’d lied and told Cassia that he needed pain pills. Then he would be in a medicated coma right now instead of lying awake, worrying about what Solara had told him.
Your father’s in jail.
The echo of those words still had the power to make his stomach clench, because they revealed a terrifying truth—Doran was alone.
He couldn’t remember a time when his father hadn’t been there to help him. Even when he hadn’t needed a hand, he’d moved through life with more confidence knowing that his dad would catch him if he stumbled. Now that the safety net was gone, Doran couldn’t shake the sick sensation of falling.
And what about his father? Was he lonely and afraid, too, or had he transformed his cell into a makeshift office and let his lawyers do the worrying? Doran had no way of knowing, and he hated that. He missed the sound of his father’s voice. He missed making his dad laugh. There was no way for them to talk now, and Doran had never learned what he was supposed to do once he reached the coordinates in the outer realm.
He would continue with his mission, but he no longer felt confident about clearing their names. Yesterday he’d borrowed a data tablet and learned a detail about the case that made him believe someone had framed them—someone within the government. The Enforcers claimed to have found Doran’s DNA on a crate of s
tolen Infinium from their transport. But Doran had never set foot on board a government ship, and he’d never heard of Infinium. That could only mean the Enforcers had planted the evidence, and if that was true, he wouldn’t get a fair trial.
Panic squeezed his rib cage, and it occurred to him that no matter how hard he fought, things might never be the same. His old life could be over, replaced by this new existence of running and hiding.
No. He shook those thoughts out of his head. His father was depending on him to stay strong and do his job. Whatever awaited him at those coordinates in the fringe was the key to their freedom.
He had to believe that.
The next morning, he squinted against the starlight filtering through the porthole and glanced down at Solara’s balled-up form, hidden beneath a heap of blankets so that only her nose peeked through.
“Why are you still sleeping on the floor?” he asked, then cleared the gravel from his throat. She couldn’t possibly be comfortable down there. Just looking at her made his shoulders ache with the remembrance of those unforgiving steel panels.
To dispel the sensation, he reached both arms above his pillow and arched his bare back in a stretch, elongating muscles that had grown stiff with disuse. In response, a few wayward vertebrae popped into their rightful places along his spine. It felt so good that he repeated the movement, then pulled each knee to his chest to stretch his legs. Much like his shower privileges, he hadn’t appreciated his full range of motion until he’d lost it, and he vowed never to take his body for granted again.
Solara yawned and rolled onto her back, her naked fists poking through the blankets in a stretch of her own. He was glad she’d quit wearing her gloves, but he kept his mouth shut about it. She was sensitive about her markings, and he could never manage to discuss them without pissing her off.
When she didn’t answer his question, he indicated the empty space beside him. “It’s a double bed, remember? There’s more than enough room for two.” He sniffed himself and added, “I don’t smell. At least, I don’t think so.”
She sat up, grumbling and rubbing the side of her neck. She must’ve tossed and turned a lot in her sleep, because a riot of hair had escaped her braids and formed something resembling a bird’s nest at her forehead. It made him smile.
“You know why,” she said. “You need the—”
“Whatever.” He waved off her excuse because that’s exactly what it was. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” He pushed the blankets down to his waist and said, “Come and see for yourself.”
Wearing nothing but a T-shirt that barely reached her thighs, she stood from the floor and took a seat on the edge of the mattress. She seemed to have lost some of her modesty, and Doran didn’t mind that, either.
“You still have bruises,” she criticized, pointing at the yellowy splotches beneath his flesh.
“But they don’t hurt anymore.”
With a dubious twist of her lips, she placed her warm palms on his sides, then ran them up and down the length of his rib cage while Doran’s breath locked inside his chest.
Hot damn.
At her touch, every internal organ between his hipbones tightened—and a couple of external ones, too. His skin hummed alive beneath her fingers, like energy flowing through a completed circuit, and he was grateful as hell to have a thick layer of blankets concealing his lap.
“Am I hurting you?” she asked.
Doran shook his head. He felt an awful lot of sensations at the moment, but pain wasn’t one of them. Maybe sleeping beside her wasn’t such a good idea after all. He gathered her hands and held them at a safe distance from his body.
“See?” he said, and swallowed hard. “Soon I’ll be good as new.”
She studied the tips of her own fingers, not seeming to mind that they were trapped between his palms. “Then you’ll be gone,” she told him. “And I’ll have the whole bed to myself. I might as well wait.”
He didn’t say so, but she had a point.
The Banshee had reached Obsidian yesterday, and they’d been hiding on a large orbiting meteor while Solara repaired the damages to the two-man craft. Once Doran felt well enough to travel, he would shuttle planet-side to the private ship waiting there. After that, he’d never see the Banshee or her crew again.
But he didn’t want to think about that right now.
Instead, he turned Solara’s knuckles to face him and skimmed a thumb over the codes tattooed on her skin. Strange how the markings didn’t bother him anymore. If his assets weren’t frozen, he’d hire a flesh forger to give her a new start. After everything she’d done for him, she deserved it.
“So you can stand to look at them now?” she asked.
“What?”
“That day in the washroom, right before the propellant cell broke. You told me that if you could stand to look at my tattoos, then so could I.” She pulled her hands away and tucked them beneath her thighs.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “You never gave me a chance to explain.”
“Okay, then.” One eyebrow lifted in challenge. “Explain.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
Doran noticed that chills had broken out along her thighs—not that he was staring or anything. Just a casual observation. And since the problem in his shorts had abated, he lifted the covers and invited her to join him. She hesitated for a beat, then crawled in beside him, and soon they lay six inches apart in mirrored positions, facing the ceiling with their hands folded on top of their stomachs.
“All right,” she said, cozying in. “Make it good.”
“This story doesn’t have a happy ending,” he warned, and though he hadn’t intended it, his voice sounded dark. She turned her neck to face him, but he stared straight ahead. It was easier that way. “A lot of this is public knowledge. I’m surprised you never heard about it.”
“No gossip tabloids in the group home,” she told him.
“It was a big deal when it happened, but that was a long time ago. Even if you saw it on the news, I guess you would’ve forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?”
“I was abducted when I was nine,” he said, the rote words rolling easily off his tongue. “Me and my brother, we were held for ransom. The nanny was in on it. She disabled the alarm and let the guys in the back door while everyone was asleep.”
Solara pushed onto her elbows, forcing him to make eye contact with her. “You have a brother? I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t,” he said, and paused to let that sink in. “Not anymore.”
A tattooed hand flew to her breast, and when Doran blinked, he saw the inky knuckles of the man who’d clapped a palm over his mouth and dragged him from his bed that night. There had been so many markings—rows and rows of them, right on top of each other—and he hadn’t understood what they’d meant. Until the next day, when he was locked inside a closet with a concussion and a bloody lip. Then he’d learned.
Solara brought him back to the present with a gentle touch. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “How old was he?”
“Same age as me. We were twins.”
“Twins,” she echoed. “That must have made losing him even harder. I’ve heard that twins have a special bond.”
Doran couldn’t say whether or not that was true, because he had no other siblings, and nothing to compare it to. He recalled that he and Gage were like two sides of a coin—made from the same mold but distinctive enough to anyone who paid attention. Doran took after their father, crushing the other kids’ lemonade stands by undercutting prices, while Gage shadowed their mom in her laboratory, peering over the counter in awe of her experiments. But despite their differences, he and his brother were unstoppable partners in crime. They’d learned at an early age that the nanny couldn’t tell them apart, and because she could never be sure which boy she’d seen jumping on the sofa or dropping marbles inside the piano, neither of them were ever punished.
Of course,
she’d paid them back—in spades.
Doran realized he’d fallen silent, and he turned to Solara with an apology in his eyes. But Solara didn’t seem to mind. She quietly lay back down and hooked an arm through his, then waited until he was ready to go on.
“Anyway,” he finally said. “My father didn’t trust the Enforcers to rescue us, so he hired a group of mercenaries to do the job.” And to their credit, they had. No one could’ve foreseen what happened next. “They found us two days later in an ancient row house outside the city. The plan was to storm the place and take us by force, but when the team threw a stun grenade through the window, it sparked a gas leak, and the whole house went up in flames.”
Even now, Doran could taste the bitter stun gas that had made his limbs heavy and his sight dim. The grenade had done its job, ensuring that no one in the house could move. From inside the closet, he’d lain on moldy carpet and listened to the screams of men too drugged to haul themselves out of the fire’s path. Above the noise of chaos, he’d heard Gage wailing in agony. It was a horrible sound that no amount of therapy could make him forget, though not for lack of trying.
“One of the mercenaries found me in a closet,” Doran said. “But by the time he carried me outside, the top floor had collapsed, and it wasn’t safe to go back in.”
A dozen men lost their lives that day: three inked felons, eight hired guns, and the other half of Doran’s coin. The fire had burned so long and hot that investigators didn’t expect to find any bodies. But Doran’s mother had refused to give up until Gage was recovered, swearing that her son’s last resting place wouldn’t be in that house. She’d held firm, and the following week they found his remains, still bound at the wrists and ankles.
Doran wished he didn’t know that detail.
“That’s why you hate closets,” Solara said.
“And felony tattoos,” he added, lifting her hand to study her knuckles. “The men who took me had them.”
Starflight Page 17
