by K. Gorman
Except, inevitably, those kinds of thoughts made her feel worse.
She grit her teeth. Now wasn’t the time to think about the past. Not when they had Lost to find and an Alliance cruiser closing in on them.
It’d pass by close. It had to, with the route she’d set.
“Karin? You all right?”
She glanced up into Soo-jin’s eyes. She walked beside her, her body tilted away from the two medkits she’d hauled onto one of her shoulders. Though she’d been prompt and professional in the Mess, and her business-like walk had set a quick pace for them down the hall, her analytical frown softened into something deeper as she studied Karin’s face.
Child, just what do I look like?
Soo-jin had always been observant. It’s what made her such a good scrounger.
But sometimes, that gaze was just a little too knowing.
It followed her as she straightened and gave a flippant, dismissive gesture with her hands. “Yeah. Fine. Just thinking.”
That seemed to clinch it. The immediate concern in Soo-jin’s expression broke. Re-shouldering the medkits, she turned her gaze back to the front, a small smile tugging the corner of her mouth. “Gotta be careful. Some thoughts will kill you.”
Karin didn’t return the smile. Although it was a line from a neo-espionage franchise that had flooded the Alliance-planet theaters several years ago, the stiffness underneath Soo-jin’s expression belied the joke. She watched her out of the corner of her eye for a few moments, waiting a few beats to see if she’d say something more, then turned her attention back to the front.
Soo-jin rarely spoke of her past, but Karin knew there was bad blood in it. Her friendship with the Songbird Sanctuary on Enlil was more than just a happy coincidence. She may have learned her scrounging from her parents and siblings, but she never spoke of them. Karin didn’t even know their names.
Up ahead, the door hissed open. Nick, the third former Lost and the ship’s engineer they’d found without a shirt, ducked through the threshold adjusting his new change of shipboard clothes. His head ticked up as he saw them. “We going?”
“Yeah.” Soo-jin hauled one of the packs off her shoulder and held it out for him. “Here, you take this.”
A small frown knit his face. He glanced up, his gaze going between them, then to Ethan who trailed behind them. It took him a few more moments before he spoke, dropping his gaze back to the bag and straightening, but Karin could see the question forming.
She and Soo-jin watched his expression, waiting.
“Are you…” He stopped, hesitating. “Are you sure that everyone is… sick? I mean—”
“We’re sure.” Soo-jin met his uncertain gaze with her usual blunt, no-nonsense realism, and ticked her head toward Karin. “She and Marc had you all running around last time, playing hide and seek.”
His frown deepened. “Yeah, but—”
“They’re gone, Nick.”
Ethan’s sullen face had the hallmarks of a storm. A kind of darkness dimmed the skin around his eyes, along with a blotchy redness that made it look like he had been crying—but his eyes were dry and sharp, with a vividness that made their green irises jump out amid the gray corridor.
“I was the only one left,” he continued. “Me and Dad. Then… he…” he trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. His throat quivered as he looked away.
Karin put a hand on his shoulder, speaking softly. “Do you want to go back to the Mess? I’m sure Charise and Arren would love some help.”
The muscles in his jaw and neck stiffened. “No.”
Though he didn’t look up, his tone was resolute.
A low grief pulled at her heart. She gave his small shoulder a squeeze and let go, her hand falling back to her side.
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 star
e 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 the engine lag at eighteen-two, and when she has to slow for entry, but they’ll have to slow down even more to break atmo.”
It was atmo capable. She’d looked 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 Thirteen
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.
