Unchained Memory (The Interstellar Rescue Series Book 1)

by Donna S. Frelick

  “No, you haven’t. We’ve talked about this before, and it’s always ended badly.” Dozen snarled a warning. “I don’t have time to explain it again. We’re leaving this place, Sphinx. Now move your ass before I have to knock you out and carry you.”

  Fourteen-oh-Eight wanted to scream. Her head felt like it would split open with confusion and pain. She wanted to run back the way they had come. At least the mine, with its routines, was something familiar. She was lost here without any hope of direction. She couldn’t go back, and she didn’t know how to go forward. All she could do was follow the insane woman who stalked off ahead of her without another word.

  They circled the rim of the central dome that was Corridor Three, finding little of the damage that affected Corridors One and Two. The shape of the space had protected its support structure from the collapse the more conventional tunnels had experienced. There were a few scattered debris piles, a few rockslides off the walls, but nothing to hinder their progress as they searched for the access passage to the emergency service lift that Dozen swore existed.

  At last a dim glow on the wall indicated an emergency exit sign. They turned into the tunnel and immediately ran into trouble of the kind they had encountered on the other side, with one difference.

  “Someone’s already been here!”

  “I told you, Sphinx.” Dozen was triumphant. “Some people I know take advantage of this place at times like these. Come on.”

  They squeezed and pulled each other through the gaps in the rock, in a hurry to catch up with the ones who might have blazed the path. One hole nearly closed up on them as they stumbled through, and another was already collapsed and had to be re-cut before they could go on.

  Dozen spat out a mouthful of dust. “Who was the fucking moron who cut these holes? He’s gonna get us all killed.” She stumbled across a bed of broken rock and climbed through the next cut. She was waiting on the other side when 1408 came through.

  Across a small clear section of tunnel two workers lay beside a stuttering headlamp. Above them in the collapsed tangle of rock and metal was the start of a hole that looked like it had closed up again further in.

  One of the two sat up to look at them. She might have been a young girl in her teens, though the dirt and the rags made it difficult to tell.

  Dozen took a step toward the girl. “Where’s your blazer?”

  Shaking, the girl pointed to the rock heap.

  “How long ago?”

  The girl started crying, the tears running through the dust on her face. “An hour or more. I think she’s dead.”

  “I think you’re right.” Dozen didn’t bother coating her words with any sympathy. “What about this one?”

  “My sister. She’ll be okay if we can get her to the other side, our blazer said.” The girl’s chin lifted. “I’m not leaving her.”

  Dozen looked at her with interest. “You and your sister have names?”

  “I’m Lucy. That’s Laura.”

  “Excellent! Well worth saving, then. I’m Dozen. That’s—“

  “Sphinx,” 1408 blurted out.

  Dozen looked at her with a slow smile. “Just as I was going to say.” She took out the sensor pack and read the area around the failed cut. She glanced up at 1408, then took another reading at a different place on the obstructing pile and yet another reading further along. At each reading her frown grew deeper.

  She blew out a breath. “Well, your blazer had the right idea, but made the wrong cut, I guess. This pile is a bitch, for sure. No matter which way we go, it’s going to be unstable. The best bet is the same way she tried, which means we have to go right past her and hope that section holds this time.”

  Fourteen-oh-Eight—no, Sphinx—saw the look of horror on the girl’s face and knew she must have worn the same one on her own. She tried to smile and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders.

  “Don’t worry. Dozen is the best blazer there is. She’ll get us through.”

  Dozen nodded a fraction, encouraging her to distract the girl while she made the cuts and went through to test the stability of the passage. The woman who made an effort to think of herself with a name now, instead of a number, knelt beside the small figure on the ground.

  “What happened to Laura?”

  “She broke her leg jumping off a transport car when the quake started. The guide gave her something for the pain to keep her quiet, and I carried her.”

  “Where were you working?”

  “Corridor Two, Section 20. You?”

  “New part of the mine. Blazing off the map.”

  “They say that’s the best job in the mines.” There was admiration in the girl’s voice.

  A new emotion—pride—rose to respond in Sphinx. “Yeah, it was.”

  Dozen made a number of cuts with the laser about shoulder height, surgically precise, carefully calculated to chip away at a point of weakness in the structure of the rockfall without destroying its overall integrity. But it took much longer than it should have to open a usable thirty-foot-long passage to the other side, and Dozen didn’t seem to trust it even then. She checked and rechecked with the sensor pack for signs of instability in the pile, then insisted on crawling through the passage and back again before she let them try it.

  “Okay,” she pronounced. “We’re good. Sphinx, you’re going first, then Lucy. We’ll strap the kid up so you two can pull her through, and I’ll come behind her, okay?”

  Sphinx nodded. Lucy looked scared, but she said nothing as they put the harnesses in place, the ropes leading behind to her younger sister.

  Dozen grabbed Sphinx by the arm as she was about to hoist herself into the opening. “Watch yourself. I don’t like the way this bastard is shifting. There’ll be a little drop like this one at the other end, remember.”

  “Sure. I got this.” She grinned to make the blazer believe it. Then she climbed up into the entry and led the way through the rough, narrow passage, slithering on her stomach, pulling herself along with elbows rubbed raw by the sharp rock. She could hear her breath catching raggedly in her throat as she worked her shoulders past the pinching turns in the tunnel, but she knew she would not give in to panic. She was not the same creature she had been so many weeks ago when Dozen had led her through the rock to the crystal cavern. She had a name now, and a purpose.

  As she clawed across the rock, her hand touched something soft and pliable off to the left. She realized with a shock it was a bit of clothing, part of the blazer’s body crushed by the failure of the previous hole.

  She glanced back at Lucy. “Keep your eyes on me. The turns are tricky here.”

  Sphinx reached the end of the cut and fell through to the tunnel floor on the other side. There were a few low red emergency lights gleaming in the darkness down a mostly clear corridor. She managed a sweaty grin. Maybe Dozen was right about the service lift after all. She stood up and helped Lucy out of the hole, and together they pulled on the ropes that were attached to the harness around Laura’s shoulders.

  “Hold up!” Dozen’s voice wasn’t coming from far inside the hole, but they couldn’t see her or Laura. “The rope must be tangled on something. She’s getting twisted in the passage.”

  Sphinx re-entered the hole without hesitation, crawling back up until she could see Laura’s head and shoulders. She freed the constriction and tugged on the ropes, then backed out ahead of the child, while Lucy pulled. At last, they brought the unconscious girl completely out of the tunnel and stretched her out on the floor.

  Sphinx heard a sound, just a whisper of sliding sand and shifting stone. She turned, expecting to see Dozen emerge from the tunnel, but no one was there.

  “Dozen? You okay?”

  “Sphinx! Give me a hand, will ya?”

  She ran back to the hole, thinking maybe the gear was in the way, and ducked inside. It was dusty. It hadn’t been dusty before.

  “Dozen! Where are you?”

  “Here! My damn leg is stuck!”

  She reached
out and found Dozen’s hands, then her shoulders. “What happened?”

  “Fucking hole shifted again. Now my leg is stuck. Damn it! I think it might be broken. Hurts like a sonofabitch! Come on. Pull! I don’t think there’s too much weight on it, but I can’t move it myself.”

  Sphinx pulled as hard as she could. Dozen screamed, but she didn’t move.

  She couldn’t see past the blazer’s shoulders in the confined space. But the light from her headlamp showed her something she had never seen before—fear on her friend’s face. Sphinx swallowed hard and took any sign of a tremor from her voice before she spoke.

  “Can you get any leverage with your other foot?”

  “I—wait, yeah, I think so. Okay, now try.”

  Sphinx braced herself against the sides of the passage and yanked—and felt something come loose as her partner yelled and lurched forward. She dragged and Dozen crawled the last few feet toward the corridor. Sphinx felt her feet dangle. She twisted and got her legs, body and head out of the hole, leaving her right hand still gripping Dozen’s overalls where the blazer lay just inside the passage.

  There was a sound—a deep, rumbling groan—then the mountain gave way and the hole snapped shut.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I woke up screaming into the pillow, my right shoulder an agony of shattering pain, my mind a deep morass of terrifying loss. I opened my eyes, but there was nothing but darkness. I tried to move, but the weight of a world held me down by one arm and my nerves shrieked with the torture of splintered bone and shredded muscle. I called out, but I knew the dead wouldn’t answer.

  From somewhere else, a light appeared. A voice I should have recognized spoke in my ear.

  “Asia? Asia, wake up.”

  “Dozen! Where’s Dozen?” I still couldn’t move, couldn’t see. Where the hell was I?

  “She’s not here, Asia. It’s okay. It’s me, Ethan. Where are you right now?”

  “Corridor Three.” My voice scraped against cold stone. “Dozen’s dead, isn’t she?”

  I felt a warm hand on my forehead, my neck, then, very gently, my shoulder. “Jesus! It hurts!” If I had an arm, a hand, anything below that mangled shoulder, I couldn’t feel it.

  “I’m sorry, shhh, I’m sorry. Take a minute and rest. Breathe. We’ll have you out of here soon. Do you remember what happened?”

  The makeshift tunnel. Dozen was trapped inside. I opened my eyes, expecting to see a mine corridor, lit with emergency lights. Instead, I saw a hotel room, lit with a single lamp. Ethan knelt beside the bed, watching me intently. My heart was hammering, and my throbbing right arm dangled over the edge of the bed.

  “Ethan?”

  He smiled. “Welcome back.”

  I curled from my belly onto my left side and burst into tears. Ethan climbed onto the bed behind me and pulled me into his arms. He held me while I cried, and I cried for a long time, sobbing out all the pent-up grief from a trauma I’d long forgotten. Then he listened without judgment while I told him what I remembered of a place and time that couldn’t possibly exist by anyone’s rules of logic.

  “This wasn’t a dream, Ethan.” He must have known that as well as I did. “That’s why you brought me to see Ida. She and I . . . we actually experienced these things.”

  I felt him take a breath. “I don’t know how, but there’s no other explanation for it. You know you have a scar where that rock came down on your shoulder.”

  “What?” I sat up and stared at him. There was no scar that I knew of. And the pain of the injury had faded now to nothing again. As if it had never happened.

  He wrinkled his brow. “On your shoulder blade.”

  When I just looked at him, he got off the bed and held out a hand to help me up. He led me to the mirror and turned me around. Then he lifted my tee-shirt over my head. I twisted and looked over my shoulder to see what he meant.

  There, on my shoulder blade, was a long, ugly welt of scar tissue. I gasped. I’d never paid any attention to it before.

  “What the hell? How could I have missed that?” It burned now where the memory of the injury remained.

  Ethan shook his head, his fingertips tracing the line of the scar ever so softly. “The same way I suspect you ignored other changes in your body after months of hard labor: traumatic memory loss. Your mind simply refused to acknowledge it. The loss of your children compounded it. There’s another scar, too.” He raised a hand, hesitating.

  “What is it? Show me.”

  “Some of my patients believe it’s where the aliens insert a microchip to track them.” He lifted the hair from my neck and rubbed a finger lightly across my hairline. “Right here, at the base of the skull.”

  My blood turned to ice, and I got so cold my nipples tightened. I clutched the tee-shirt to my chest in embarrassment.

  I saw the hungry look in Ethan’s eyes before he turned away to let me dress again. “I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I’d switched places with one of my patients. I’m starting to sound a little crazy even to myself.”

  I shivered. “If you’re asking me to be objective, I think you’re asking the wrong person.”

  Ethan turned back to me and took me by the hand. He led me to the bed and sat down. “Asia, about last night . . .”

  Oh, God! It felt like a lifetime ago, but not nearly long enough to live it down. I’d said a few things I’d give a lot to take back. Shit!

  “I was drunk. I’m sorry—”

  “No, you were right. You kicked my ass, and I deserved it.”

  “Ethan, I—”

  He held up a hand to stop me, then spent a long moment staring at the space between us. The urge to fill that moment with words, to close that space with my body was overwhelming. I was so afraid of what he might say, so afraid that what I had said had presented him with some kind of stupid ultimatum, and now he was going to tell me we were destined to be “just friends.” I was shaking so hard I gripped the bedspread to keep from flying apart.

  Ethan didn’t look up. He just started talking.

  “I felt so guilty after we left Ida’s place. It’s all I thought about that long drive up here. Because of me, two people I love were put in danger and one was dead.”

  I looked at him in shock. Had he said the “L” word?

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  His eyes, dark with self-blame, met mine. “My files, Asia. How else would they have known about you?”

  “Oh, baby.” I touched his hand. “Did it never occur to you that these people might have been watching us since we were taken? That they’re connected to whatever took us? They’ve probably been watching Ida since she was ten.” Of course, that didn’t explain why they were so eager to get their hands on us now, but that was a mystery for another discussion.

  He gave me a wry smile. “No, that never occurred to me.”

  “Well, it might have if you had talked to me.”

  “All I knew was that I hadn’t protected Ida. I hadn’t protected you.”

  My heart melted. He was an idiot. But what a sweet idiot.

  “Jesus, Ethan. How could you possibly have known about those guys? And how the hell was shutting me out supposed to help?”

  “The only thing I could think to do was distance myself from you.” He moved, small tense motions of his shoulders revealing his frustration. “It was wrong. I knew it even as I was doing it, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I couldn’t bear to see you hurt because of me.”

  I blew out a breath, unable to hide my exasperation. “So you hurt me to keep from hurting me? That makes no sense.”

  He touched my face, tracing a line from my cheek to my chin with one tentative finger. “I’m so sorry, Asia. I wanted you so much, and I should have stopped, but I didn’t and . . . we got so close so quickly . . . then when all that happened I thought it would be better if I ended things sooner rather than later, but—”

  “But it was too late,” I finished for him, my gaze locked with his. “After that
night, it was way too late.”

  “For both of us. I know that now.”

  “And yet the man I spent that night with disappeared and was gone for days. What the hell were you hiding from, Ethan?”

  A shadow fell across his face. “A ghost.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He shook his head. “Another night.”

  “Hiding again?” I started to pull away.

  “No. I will tell you. Just not tonight.” He blocked my retreat with a hand at the back of my head. He drew my face close to his; I could feel his breath warm on my lips. “I’m tired of running; I’m tired of hiding. I’ll stay as long as you want me.”

  My heart was thrashing wildly in my chest, anger morphing into something else entirely. I could barely find the breath to speak.

  “And what if I said I want you forever?”

  He pushed me down on the bed, his lips inches from mine. “Then I’ll stay with you forever, Asia. Forever.” He kissed me at last, his mouth hard against mine, his tongue, his taste, his heat, his desire opening me, pouring into me, creating a hunger in me only for him. I was instantly wet and throbbing, aching for the promise of satisfaction I felt pressing hard against my belly. He could have entered me then and there, and I would eagerly have come for him, but he had other plans.

  He broke off his kiss, sucking at my lower lip as he withdrew, hard enough to leave it tingling. “I’ve missed touching you so much.” His lips moved at my ear. “Do you know what it’s been like watching you prancing around this hotel room the last few days—not being able to touch you?”

  “Prancing?” I pretended to be outraged. “First of all, I haven’t been prancing. Second, whose fault was it that you couldn’t touch me? I was ready any time. And third, weren’t you zoned out on pain pills most of the time?”

  Ethan laughed, a sound that warmed me like a touch. “Well, yes, and thank God for that.” He was still smiling as he brought me forward and lifted the tee-shirt over my head, then lowered me once more to the bed and pulled the panties off my hips. He stripped off his own clothes and straddled me, but before he could lower himself on top of me again, I put my hands on his chest to stop him.