Faultless

by Kate Rudolph

  For a moment his eyes had gone back to black, but they burned with a red fury as she made that suggestion. “I will not leave you here, you have my word.”

  “But I don’t want your—” a sharp spike of pain made her clutch her head and she sank into blackness for a moment. It ended up being longer than a moment, no matter what it felt like. When she came back to herself, Dru was standing over her, one hand rubbing her shoulder as he made soothing sounds.

  “You need more care than I can give you. Please do this for me. I promise you I can endure it. But you need to survive. I don’t think I... We get out of here together. It’s the only way.” He spoke with such conviction that Laurel was unable to doubt him, unable to question the wisdom of going back into the danger of the ship and risking discovery by Dru’s torturer for just a little bit more medical care.

  Whether it was wise or not, she knew Dru would not be moved. She wasn’t about to waste her energy in doing so. “I’ll try and find an override key,” she promised. “Varrow has given me a bit of freedom. I might as well use it.” She tilted her head up until their eyes locked and the weight of his gaze was enough to hold her frozen in place. “I need you to promise me something.”

  “Whatever, den—whatever you need.” He was the one that looked away, almost as if he were trying to hide something from her, but she didn’t think he’d make a false promise. He didn’t seem like that kind of man.

  “If what they’re doing gets to be too much, you come for me. We’ll get out, even if I’m not 100%. I don’t know if I can do this without you.” She meant the escape, at least that was what she thought she meant, but when she said it, it seemed to mean more, seemed heavier, broader, something she couldn’t take back.

  Dru nodded once. “You have my word.” They stayed locked in that vow for several long moments, and Laurel had the strangest urge to stand up and kiss him, or to hope that he leaned down and kissed her. But eventually he looked away and by the time Laurel could figure out the right thing to say, he was gone.

  Chapter Five

  THE NEXT SIX WEEKS crawled by. Every day Laurel wanted to run out of her room, find Dru, and get the hell off of Brakley Varrow’s ship. She hadn’t heard even a whisper of a scream come from the hallway where she knew Dru was being held. Laurel couldn’t tell if this was a good thing or not. What if he had been moved, or worse? No, she couldn’t dwell on the worse. All of her plans relied on having Dru at her side. She wasn’t going to contemplate what it would mean to escape without him.

  And as much as she hated to admit it, he had been right about her recovery. She still had headaches, but they were bearable, and it had been a full week since her last collapse. Her vision was crisp and the only big hurdle left to overcome was the recovery of her memories. After nearly two months under constant care of Varrow’s team, they were beginning to think that her memory loss that came with a control chip could be permanent. At first the verdict had upset Laurel. It was like she had lost a slice of herself, one even bigger than the pieces that had been stolen away by the abuse inflicted by her captors.

  But the longer she thought about it, the more she was willing to see it as a blessing. Something terrible had been done to her, and she might have done something terrible to others. But she was free of the memory. She could recollect her times back home, could remember everything up until that night several months ago where everything went dark. Laurel had been raised on a farm, she had loving parents, and two siblings, both older, who had come back from college to work the land alongside the rest of her family. She had just finished up her studies and had been in the midst of a fight with her parents. They wanted her back on the farm, wanted her to use her degree to grow their business. She had been offered a job in Washington DC and had been struggling with whether or not to take it.

  Those problems all seemed so distant now. Laurel couldn’t think too much about her family without a terrible pang in her chest. They had to be worried sick. By now they could think she was dead. And she had no way to get word to them that she was all right, or at least that she was in a better situation than she had been. Sure, she was stuck on board an Oscavian scientific vessel was a captain prone to torturing some of his subjects, but she wasn’t being tortured. The confusing monster was actually helping her.

  She just wanted to take Dru and go home.

  Brakley had visited her almost every other day since her aborted escape attempt. At first Laurel had been convinced that he was testing her, that he knew she and Dru had been steps away from escaping. But the longer the visits went on, the more confused Laurel became. Brakley never hinted that he knew what was going on in her mind. No, instead when he came to talk it was only about himself, as if no one else on the ship was willing to put up with his monologues.

  He’d caught her walking around outside of her room several times, but had seemed happy that she was up and about. Laurel hadn’t managed to find the override key, though she was still convinced it was in the box outside the bridge. Every time she got close, other crew had milled about and she wasn’t able to check out her theory.

  Tension had been running high for the last few days. Every time Brakley came to visit he seemed on the verge of saying something. He was strung tight and looked like he hadn’t slept the night through in a week. Laurel hadn’t asked why he was so agitated, and he hadn’t offered an explanation.

  When he walked into her room at first she thought whatever had been bothering him had been resolved, but it only took a minute to realize he was worse than ever. Unspent energy thrummed beneath his skin and he kept making jerky little movements as if he couldn’t stop himself.

  “Come with me,” he ordered, barely sparing her glance. The newly healed part of her wanted to argue with his high-handed command, but her inner survivor knew when not to push. She slipped her feet into her slippers and followed Brakley, having to jog to catch up.

  They walked across the entirety of the ship, taking an elevator up several floors and then walking even more until Brakley led her through an unimpressive door. What she saw on the other side took her breath away. All of space opened up in front of them, twinkling lights on an inky black sky. It made Laurel feel tiny, and at the same time like she was a part of something bigger. Brakley stepped into her field of vision, breaking the spell. She wished Druath were here to see this. She wanted to share this sight with him, not with the man beside her.

  Brakley seemed like he could have cared less about the view. He didn’t spare a single glance out the windows, instead pacing back and forth and shooting her glances every few moments.

  “Did you know I had a brother?” he shot at her after several laps of pacing.

  He didn’t stop moving, and watching him go back and forth was starting to make Laurel a little dizzy. “I... you do?”

  Varrow speared her with his gaze and shook his head as if trying to dislodge the thought. He spun away and faced the window, planting his hand above his head and staring out into eternity. “He was never much of a scientist but he had vision.” Laurel had to strain to hear. “He knew when to follow, who to follow.”

  Laurel didn’t know how knowing when to follow related to having vision, but she kept that to herself. “Did something happen to him? she asked, because Varrow seemed to expect a response.

  “Some bastard killed him!” He rounded on her and Laurel shrank back a step. Varrow’s anger quickly transformed into remorse. “Forgive me, I shouldn’t yell at you.”

  Laurel didn’t know how to respond to that so she remained silent.

  Varrow turned back towards the window. “People don’t understand. They think we’re monsters because we are curious, because we are willing to explore things others won’t, to consider what others don’t.” He shot a glance over his shoulder. “Do you think I’m a monster?”

  There was only one answer to give. “Of course not,” she lied. “You’re fixing me, aren’t you?”

  His smile was wan, but it was there. “They’ll pay for this. Their litt
le base has been sitting practically unguarded since we left it. They will never see the attack coming.” The shift from wan to evil had everything to do with the crinkling of the skin around his eyes and something on Laurel’s face must have given away her discomfort as Varrow’s expression quickly shifted back to something neutral. It was kind of creepy how easily he could slip between his moods. “Don’t worry about anything, I promise you’ll be safe.”

  As she’d been living in a perpetual state of worry for the past two months, Laurel ignored the command. “Who’s going to pay? Who hurt your brother?”

  “The Detyens,” he spat. He pushed back from the window and crossed to where a small entertainment station was hidden behind a partition. “Come here,” he beckoned, pulling something out of his pocket and inserting it into a port in the wall.

  Laurel did as she was bid. Not like she had another choice. He pulled up information about an icy planet on the screen. Several buildings were marked in red and a column beside the image was filled with what looked like military information. “I thought this was a research vessel. Scientific.” She hadn’t seen any soldiers, though there were a few guards with blasters.

  “I told you that I have friends. You’ll see real power when they join us.” Though he was talking to her, Laurel was pretty sure that Varrow wasn’t paying any attention to how she was responding.

  “Why there?”

  “The Detyens killed my brother. It’s my pleasure to finish them off.”

  Ice chilled in her veins. They were out of time. If Varrow planned to murder Dru’s people, they had to get away from him and send out a warning. If they did anything else, innocent blood would be on her hands.

  DRU LOST TRACK OF TIME. He could not say how long it had been since he’d last seen his denya, but he lived with the certainty that it had been too long. Every day the Oscavians visited new tortures upon him, and every day he woke up just a little bit weaker. He didn’t know how much longer he could last like this, and the promises he’d made to Laurel hung heavy on his shoulders. He needed to give her as much time as possible to recover from her injuries, and he was almost certain that he could make it through another day of whatever the Oscavians could throw at him.

  He went to bed with that certainty every night, and every day at some point he faltered, sure that this would be the moment where he broke.

  But he hadn’t given up yet, and if Laurel hadn’t come to him there must have been a reason for that. Maybe she’d had a medical setback, maybe she couldn’t find the override key, or maybe Varrow had caught her after their last excursion and decided that she too needed to be locked up.

  Dru hoped it wasn’t that last one, he hoped he hadn’t failed his mate in that way. If his actions had led to her suffering, he did not think that he could ever forgive himself. That was the thought that led to his near breaking point every day. It had nothing to do with his own pain, and everything to do with his denya’s. He refused to risk breaking out of his cell to see if she was all right. Not until the situation on his end was dire. He’d already broken out twice, once with consequences, once without, and he was certain that the third time would be his last opportunity. He had to make it count.

  Had it been long enough for Laurel to heal? He thought it had been weeks. He tried to count the days, but something his torturers were doing to him messed with the passage of time. Sometimes they fed him more than five times in a day, other times he was only given food twice a week. Or what he thought was a week. They messed with his sleep too, playing loud noises and flashing bright lights when he thought he was on the verge of rest. Other times they drugged him and he couldn’t tell whether he slept for minutes, hours, or days.

  But his hair was a little longer, since they hadn’t bothered to cut it, as were his nails. His claws itched inside of his skin from disuse, and normally he would have buffed them at least once a week to keep them from growing out of control. The changes to his body were something that the Oscavians could not control, and Dru clung to that conviction each and every day.

  He almost groaned when the door to his cell opened. He thought the tortures were over for the day. He’d undergone their ministrations for hours, and his limbs shook every time he tried to move. But the figure who came through moved tentatively, as if she didn’t want to be seen, and as she got closer Dru couldn’t help but smile.

  Denya. The recognition didn’t rip through him so hard this time, but his soul settled into something approaching contentment as he saw her. She looked much better, her skin less sallow, her hair clean, the bandage removed. If he hadn’t been tied down, his familiar state over the last few weeks, he would have reached out to touch his mate. He ached all the way to the core of his being to bind her to him. But they were in no position for that to happen now.

  “What are you doing here?” His voice came out rusty. Other than screaming and groaning and crying, he’d barely used it since he last saw her. He refused to give the monsters who held him captive the satisfaction of speaking to him.

  “It’s time to go.” Relief crashed through him at Laurel’s words. She was better, she was no longer at risk of the escape damaging her. That was their agreement. But her next words had him questioning whether that was exactly true, whether she had taken all of the time she needed to heal. “Some of your people killed Varrow’s brother and he’s out for revenge. He knows where your headquarters are and he’s planning to destroy them.”

  He barely had time to register that Varrow’s threat meant that Dru’s people were still alive before adrenaline surged through his veins, wiping out a good portion of his residual pain, giving him new purpose. “We have to warn them.” He was in a position of knowledge, and he had to use that to his advantage. Varrow didn’t know that he and Laurel had teamed up, he did not know what Laurel was to Dru.

  Laurel was already smiling and something tightened in Dru’s chest at her expression. He didn’t know if he’d ever seen her smile before, was almost certain that she hadn’t. After all, the first time they’d met he was incapable of sight, and they’d barely had time to interact in their second meeting. “I thought you’d say that.” She reached into the pocket of the smock she was wearing, an ugly gray thing that made her look like a hospital patient, and pulled out a small device that sat innocuously in the palm of her hand. It looked like an information chip.

  “Is that the override key?”

  His hopes were immediately dashed as she shook her head. “No, but it has some information about what Varrow knows about your people.” She closed her fist around the chip and put it back in her pocket. “He forgot it in the viewer when he was ranting at me after he showed me some maps and stuff. I’m not really sure what I was looking at, but it looked important. He’s been agitated for days, he’s not thinking straight. This is our best opportunity to get away.”

  The torture must have addled Dru’s mind more than he realized as he struggled to make sense of what Laurel had just told him. “He just forgot a file containing significant military information around you?” It came out sharp and Laurel flinched. Dru wanted to reach out again, this time to apologize, but she hadn’t untied him.

  Laurel seem to realize it at the same moment and reached forward to undo the straps holding him in place. “Well, it is small,” she reasoned. “And he barely thinks of me as a person. You’re telling me you’ve never forgotten an information chip somewhere?”

  Sure he’d forgotten things before, but nothing that important. And how could Varrow think of Laurel as anything other than a person? As the person? She was the center of Dru’s universe, and he would go nowhere without her, could do nothing without thinking of her. But to a monster and scientist like Varrow, it was beyond it easy to see how he might think of her as merely a test subject, not a freely thinking being.

  Laurel finished loosening the bindings at Dru’s feet and took a few steps back. “Can you move? We don’t have time to waste.” Her concerned tone belied the urgency of her words.

  Dru pushed h
imself off of his bed and took a moment to stretch his legs. He was stiff and sore all over and despite the pain that the bed had given him, a part of him wanted to lay back down, to rest his muscles as best he could and wait a little longer before they took off. He didn’t know where the hesitance was coming from and he pushed it to the back of his mind. No, that wouldn’t do, not right now, not when they were finally ready to get off this hellish ship. “I can move.”

  Laurel looked at him for a long moment, perched on the edge of saying something, but she finally nodded and led him out the door. They didn’t have an override key, which made that their first priority. Laurel led him silently down the halls, impressing him with her ability to move with the stealth of a burglar. He wondered where she had learned the skill, but now was not the time to ask. With luck they would have plenty of time later.

  They would have a later, he would do anything to make sure of it.

  He mentally mapped the inside of the ship as they moved. Once they passed the corridor where Laurel had been staying, Dru’s knowledge of the vessel was used up. He’d never managed to get farther than her room. But Laurel showed a knowledge that told him she’d taken advantage of the free rein that Varrow had given her. She walked softly, but confidently to a ladder and led him up it. When footsteps sounded down the hallway, echoing a warning around them, Laurel silently shoved Dru into a utility closet where they waited in semidarkness, staring at each other with the weight of the knowledge that if they were caught now there was no way to talk themselves out of trouble.

  After several minutes the hallway fell silent again, not even a whisper of a footstep to threaten their safety. Laurel waved Dru forward and they turned down another hall, this one as empty as all the others. The hallway ended in a large set of double doors and on the wall right before the entrance, there was a large box, the one that Laurel had spoken of.