by K. Gorman
Nick watched the encounter, an unreadable expression masking his face. After a moment, his gaze slid up and met hers, and she braced herself to see the new question forming in his expression.
“You were here before,” he started, his frown pinching his brow again as he put the pieces together. “Why… Why didn’t you heal us?”
Guilt slid through her gut, tense and immediate. She sucked in a shallow breath. “I didn’t know. We only found out after, at Enlil, and…” she fumbled for words. His words hadn’t been accusing, but she felt them all the same. “There were Shadows. I got attacked. Twice.”
A small pocket of quiet formed between them.
“She left our last visit with a near concussion,” Soo-jin said after a few seconds. “We decided not to stay.”
Though her words carried her usual bluntness, Nick’s frown deepened. He didn’t seem accusing so much as curious, and he hadn’t been around when they’d given Charise and Arren a quick-note version of what had happened, but he still hesitated, his gaze rounding back on Karin.
Seeing that hesitation, she opened her mouth to explain more, but Ethan beat her to it.
“She came back. That’s all that matters.”
His voice, strong and bold, caught her by surprise. When she looked back, a well of emotion pulled at his expression. Something passed between them as their eyes met, and a knot of long-standing tension loosened in her chest.
He had forgiven her, then. Forgiven her for leaving his father and the Ozark behind, for not finding out about her powers on Caishen. They still had a long way to go before his hurt was healed, but some of the damage had been repaired.
Nick stared at Ethan for a few more moments, the unreadable expression back on his face. Then he shrugged it off, pulled the strap of the medkit over his shoulder, and nodded toward the door he’d just come through. “All right, then.”
They passed through several empty hallways, checking the doors on either side and locking them after. The Ozark’s worn, gunmetal walls gleamed like dulled, aged quicksilver under the yellow tint of its overhead lights. With the ship on low emergency power, they flickered on only after doors were activated, often with several seconds’ delay.
By the time they hit the third hallway, Karin’s blood was jittery with adrenaline.
They found their next Lost five hallways down, lingering in a loose formation by a communications interface on the wall. There were three—two men and a woman, all clothed this time.
The light probably attracted them.
Karin stepped to the side as Soo-jin doubled back, inputting the security code into the door. It hissed closed behind them, locking with an audible click.
“Marsa, Emin, and Tommy.” Nick gave the group down the hall a prolonged study, arms crossed over his chest. “They seem… all right?”
He hadn’t seen a Lost yet.
Soo-jin snorted, then shouldered her pack and pushed past. “Just wait till you get closer.”
Light pulsed as Karin flexed her fingers, and Nick’s eyes grew wide when he caught sight of it. She ignored him, rolling the stiffness from her shoulders and making to follow Soo-jin. After so much practice, she was getting used to it.
“Come on,” Soo-jin called from ahead. “Let’s get this done.”
After a few more moments, she felt him follow them up the hall.
They had all three in recovery positions on the floor a few minutes later. Karin and Soo-jin checked them over, attaching medkit monitors to their fingers. The expression on Nick’s face had shifted into a tense, rigid seriousness. He stood over them, keeping one eye on their work and the other on the hallway. He hadn’t said anything, but she could tell he had more questions.
Ethan milled around between them and the locked door. After a minute of kicking his toes into the floor and wall and fiddling with his light, he wandered up to one of the side doors. The doorpad flashed green when he pressed it, and he stepped inside.
Karin stiffened as he vanished, frowning. They hadn’t checked the rooms yet, so there was a danger there might be a Shadow in one—but, when several seconds ticked by with nothing happening, she relaxed again, turning and catching a similar look on Soo-jin’s face.
The sharp edge of her stare flicked off as she rolled her eyes.
“Just look at us. We’re mother hens.” She re-wrapped the monitor around the woman’s finger, frowning at its readout. “Mine’s fine. You?”
“Yep.”
“Three for three, then. Good.” Soo-jin pulled the monitor away, shoved it back into the bag, and made to stand. “Let’s—”
“Hey, guys! Guys!” Ethan’s excited voice jumped through the door toward them. “The Alliance ship! I can see it!”
Karin’s breath caught. For a second, she couldn’t move. She felt her eyes go wide.
Sol.
They hadn’t found them, had they?
No. The Alliance didn’t have that kind of monitoring. No one did. All they could tell were the number of people on the ship—and even then, they could get false readings if people clumped together. And if anyone had an ident tracker embedded in her body, it wasn’t the Alliance.
But a cold feeling followed her as she stood, pushing against the wall for support. Soo-jin ran by her, shouting something. A moment later, the hallway went dark. A glimmer of light reflected in her palms like an afterthought, gleaming on the metal wall as she moved. Someone brushed by her.
Slowly, the world returned.
She found her breath.
They’d cut the light to prevent it from getting outside. That made sense. The Alliance would be able to read the ship’s status through its emergency broadcast. Keeping the Ozark dark helped with their cover.
And she’d known the cruiser would be by. It had to pass the Ozark if it wanted to follow the Nemina.
It was just a matter of if it decided to stop or not.
Numbness spread through her legs. The others were ahead of her, silhouetted around the edges of the room’s small porthole and in the light Ethan still held in his hand. As she stumbled over the lip in the threshold, Soo-jin bent down and shut it off.
Silence fell over the room as they stared through the glass. Karin’s knees bumped into the crate under the window, but the brief pain was soon ignored when she caught sight of the ship outside.
It was huge. Massive. It dwarfed the Ozark in the same way a sun might dwarf a planet.
She known that. The Enmerkar's specs had been one of the first things she’d pulled out of the relay when she’d been setting their course, and they had read like an entire city—but seeing it in person, with her own eyes, sent a tense shiver through her spine.
Designed in a vague, triangular shape, its sides flared out narrowly from its frontal point, making it look like a knife, and nothing about it was smooth. Every part of its surface screamed lethal practicality, filled with launch bays, comms arrays, cannons, shield generators, and more.
That, at least, it shared with its much-smaller sister ship, the Lamassu, which hovered around Enlil’s orbit, keeping the quarantine.
But they’d discovered a lot about space warfare since its sister had been designed, and Enmerkar looked a lot more lethal than the Lamassu.
“Sol,” Nick said. “They’re chasing you?”
“Technically, they’re chasing Marc,” Soo-jin said. “Not us.”
“We don’t know that yet.” Karin’s breath slipped out of her as she spoke, like a deflating bag. Nick knew about her history, and what had gone down on Enlil. He also knew her reasons for evading capture.
Whether he agreed with them remained to be seen.
His eyes narrowed, barely visible in the thin light from the window. “I’m not sure you’re going to win.”
"Nemina's Fallon, and smaller. Much quicker on acceleration.” She breathed shallowly, her gaze never leaving the ship outside. “They might catch her up with sheer speed, but they'll have to slow down to break atmo."
It was atmo capable. She’d lo
oked that up in the specs. Seeing only confirmed it. It had no wings, but several thrusters lined the bottom of the ship, near-rivals to its rear ones. “Nemina will add the distance on the return.”
She would. Karin had done the math. They could out-pace her on the short distance.
It was the fighters she worried about now. Seeing those launch bays…
She swallowed hard.
This was a stupid idea. We should have just run. Taken our chances in the asteroid belt.
But even that wouldn’t have worked. The big ship might not be able to navigate through the belt, but its fighters could. With it this close, her doubts of Marc somehow defending himself against a tow line seemed much more probable now.
Nick said something else, but she didn’t hear it. A roar rushed through her mind, her eyes widening on the cruiser.
Sol. What have I done?
In the hallway, a comms link activated. A low tone rang throughout the ship, so loud, the floor vibrated with its sound.
"Shit." Soo-jin jerked her head around. "Nick, do you think the others—?"
"On it." He jogged to the door and ducked around the corner toward the comms station. A few seconds later, his voice filled the ship, speaking over-top of the call tone. "Don't answer that, people. If they come in here, our savior is doomed. Don't answer it, and don't panic."
His message ended, and the comms crackled as he put down the microphone. The tone continued, knelling through the ship.
She didn’t remember putting her hand on Ethan’s shoulder, but the warmth of his skin seeped up, and she felt him shift. The movement grounded her. As she stared at the ship through the porthole, she found that she could breathe again.
Please, she thought. Just go.
Just go.
Slowly, the Enmerkar moved farther and farther away.
The comms tone ended several minutes later. It did not come back.
Chapter 13
The Shadow burst out at an angle.
Karin flailed as it bowled into her, wrenching her shoulder against the wall. Pain shot through her nerves, bright and immediate, making her hiss. She felt the cold wall behind her as she slid to the floor. One hand dragged down the metal, a feeble attempt to keep her upright.
A cool, hissing sound pulled across her back. It dimmed the light behind her as it rose, and all of the hairs on her back lifted as one.
She twisted.
The Shadow rose above her, great and tall. Impossible, without depth—and yet somehow solid. Its head was looking straight at her.
Light flared, defensive. It flashed like sheet lightning. Pain wrenched through her shoulder again as she raised her hands, and she hissed against it, willing her light to grow stronger.
But the pain made her concentration lapse. The light paused. For a second, it felt like they were the only ones who existed—her and the Shadow, light against dark, a staccato that drummed across the walls in a furious beat. The Shadow stared down at her, not moving.
Then, slowly, it lifted its arm. Wraith-like fingers, their ends tattered, bleeding a dark mist into the air, extended toward her. She gasped. Her grip on the light slipped, like a boat heeling over a wave.
A blaster cracked.
Suddenly, all went quiet.
She stared up as the Shadow faded away. Hands shaking, she registered the tears in her eyes, the rasp in her throat. She forced herself to take a breath as the world returned to her senses. The light hung in the air after she let it go, making a thin mist of the hall and fading much slower than the Shadow had. Some part of her awareness extended into it.
She wondered at that, but only briefly.
A hand pressed into her non-injured shoulder. “Are you okay?”
She looked up at Soo-jin. Then she leaned her head back against the wall, feeling her skull hit the metal. “Sol. Just a bruise, I think. Give me a second.”
It had been more than a bruise, and Soo-jin knew that, but she let it go with a curt nod.
“All right. Take your time.”
“Do they do that a lot?” Nick, blaster still in hand, looked a little paler than when she’d last seen him.
Soo-jin shrugged and turned away, momentarily blocking her from view. “It has happened before. We don’t really have enough of a data pool to give frequency.”
With her back to her, Karin gave herself a little shake. She stood slowly, giving her body time to cope. Pain spiked through her shoulder when she tested it, and, seeing Ethan watching her, she held back a grimace.
Yeah, that was more than a bruise. But it was also nothing the onboard med center couldn’t handle. They’d checked it out earlier.
“What are we up to now?” she asked. “Eighteen?”
“Yep.” Soo-jin glanced back, gave her a quick, assessing study, then turned her narrow-eyed gaze onto the door at the end of the hall. “Just one more, then…”
“The bridge,” Karin said.
“The bridge.”
They’d rounded nearly the entire ship—everything but the topmost levels. It helped that the Ozark had made them harder to access, requiring a keypad entry to activate. As far as Karin could tell, that wasn’t a security trait but a quirk of the ship’s activation and energy-saving systems. With the Ozark’s current skeleton crew, the top levels weren’t necessary. Shut down, they effectively cut off and sealed the entire top section of the ship from power and life support.
A lot of power, over time.
Unfortunately, that still left quite a bit of room for the Lost to roam free in.
Gods. She made a mental note never to sign on to a transport job. They were just too big.
“We need more people for the bridge,” she said. “And I want food first.”
Guilt made her glance back at Ethan, but he only nodded at her. He’d been wide-eyed during the Shadow attack. She remembered that now, and he seemed to know they wouldn’t be abandoning his father to being forever Lost.
She snorted. How could they? It wasn’t like they could leave.
He frowned as she continued to stare, then ducked his face after a few seconds, glancing down to his purple Starcats T-shirt.
“Food sounds good.”
Cloth rustled next to her as Soo-jin dropped to the floor, pulling the monitor back out, and this time, Nick knelt next to her, taking up Karin’s normal spot as he rummaged through the bag and pulled out the equipment. She watched as he averted his eyes, keeping his focus on the medical readings. Like him, the woman in front of Soo-jin had been attacked while missing clothes. That in itself wouldn’t have been so bad, but she had also been on her period. Red-brown stains smeared down her bare legs, clearly visible from all angles.
This must be hard on him. He knows them all.
She turned away, rubbing her shoulder. Her legs were starting to ache with all the walking—the Ozark had a lot of stairs, and they must have checked at least half—and a kind of vague exhaustion pulled at the back of her mind, leaving a stuffed, gauzy feeling around its edges that, as far as she could tell, shouldn’t be there.
They hadn’t been on here that long. Two hours? Three? And she’d gotten a decent amount of sleep on the Nemina. She shouldn’t need any for a while yet.
She dismissed the feeling with a shake of her head. Whatever. I’ll just grab a coffee in Mess.
They waited another ten minutes for the first of their Lost to wake up—which, fortunately, turned out to be the one with pants—then gave them instructions to head for the Mess, and left.
To her great satisfaction, they found their next Lost loitering around a comms station only three hallways later. Another woman, wearing the same shipboard gray as most had, her close-cropped pixie hair all grown out, giving her what someone on Old Earth would have called a shag but was more well-known in the Sirius system as Kama after the anarchist fashion trend that had taken over some of Nova Earth’s more popular dramas.
Nick sucked in a breath. “Ronnie.”
“Isn’t she your girlfriend?” Ethan asked.
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“What? No—” Nick’s eyes widened. “We were just. Well, you know.”
Ethan’s eyes were curious. “Just what?”
“Er…” Nick flustered, back rigid and tense. His hands gestured something indecipherable in the air in front of him. “Well, you wouldn’t understand. She just likes to have fun—” Glancing down at Ethan, and probably remembering how old he was, he backpedaled. “—you know, like watch movies and stuff. Nothing serious.”
Karin raised her eyebrows.
Beside her, Soo-jin snorted. “All right, Romeo, your turn to hold her down.”
His face tightened. The hard look he gave Soo-jin lingered and, for several long seconds, it looked like he was going to argue.
“Come on,” Soo-jin said. “It’s your turn now. Besides, I think she’d prefer you do it over some strange scrounger from the Black.”
From the Black, meaning from space. It was the epitome of the ultimate stranger, as if someone had just popped up like a ghost—but the term tipped on its head when both parties lived and worked around the Black, as they did now, past Belenus and Enlil and into the wide orbit of Amosi and the infrequent space stations. Caishen had only two sisters this far out, Rudra and Hanan, and they were both smaller and less inhabited.
A different motion tightened Nick’s face. He nodded once, tersely, then moved forward.
He didn't say anything as he collected Ronnie. He was gentle, intimate. Not in the way Marc had been when Soo-jin had been taken, but definitely close. His fingers curled gently around her shoulders and, after a few seconds, he bent forward to whisper something in her ear.
Then his hands dropped, catching Ronnie's wrists and pulling them behind her. She struggled briefly, her mouth opening, and a confused frown crossing her eyebrows, but there was no resolve behind her actions.
The Lost didn't think like humans. Her struggles didn't have any true ambition or panic.
Meeting Karin’s eyes across the space, he held her gaze for a few seconds. Then he nodded.
She rubbed her palms together. Light flared between them.
But, before she could do much more, movement flickered in the background.
Beyond them, at the far end of the hallway, the door panel flashed green. It hissed open, rumbling on its tracks.
