Allies

by Bella Forrest

  I stole a look at Lauren, to see if she was paying him any attention. Xiphio was talking to her about a fairytale from back on his home world, but her eyes kept drifting across to Stone, watching him at work. There was something magnetic about him when he was focused, making everyone in the room take note of what he was doing.

  The most enraptured person, however, wasn’t Lauren. Bashrik gazed at Stone with such intensity it was almost comical, his eyes following Stone’s every move, his head nodding at everything that Stone suggested.

  “Have you seen him?” Angie whispered, stifling a giggle. “I keep expecting him to ask Stone to show him how to do it, Ghost-style.”

  I smirked, feeling a giggle rise up. “I think he likes Stone more than Lauren does.”

  “I know! I think he’d start sulking if she openly flirted with him,” she murmured, grinning. “Do you think he’s going to ask Stone to inspect his wiring?”

  Just then, Bashrik turned to Stone and nudged him in the arm, gesturing down at the cabinets beneath the panel. “Stone, would you mind coming under the panel to check the wiring with me?”

  The two of us collapsed into a fit of hysterics, drawing funny looks from the others in the room. I knew I could rely on Angie to bring a bit of levity back, given the somber atmosphere that had permeated the ship since hearing about Brisha’s assassination.

  My good humor didn’t last long, however, as I turned to look at Navan. He was curled up in the armchair beside me, muttering in his sleep, his eyes blinking awake every couple of minutes, before sleep forced them down again. There were dark circles under his eyes and his face looked haggard.

  I didn’t understand what was going on with him, but his nighttime excursions had only gotten worse. Evidently, they’d left him in a state of sleep deprivation. One evening, I’d woken up an hour after we’d gone to bed, only to find him already absent. I’d tried to find him in the ship, but he’d poked his head out of the kitchen door and told me to go back to sleep. I hadn’t felt like arguing about it, hoping he’d tell me what was going on when he was ready to.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” I murmured as his eyes blinked open. “You okay?”

  He nodded, stretching out with a loud yawn. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look too good. Do you want me to put you to bed? I can heat up some blood for you, if that’ll help.”

  “Honestly, I’m fine, just a little tired.”

  I sensed there was more to his daily decline in energy, but he looked too exhausted to press the matter further. After all, if there was something major going on with him, I would get to the bottom of it sooner or later. This ship was small, and he wouldn’t be able to evade me forever.

  “How about if I come to bed with you?” I suggested, offering a seductive smile.

  “Not right now,” he murmured, sleep trying to claim him once again. “I just need a little nap and I’ll be all yours.”

  I very much doubted he’d be up to anything, even after a nap. Angie seemed concerned, too, as I turned back to see her watching us, her brow furrowed. I flashed her a look that said, “What can I do?” and she nodded in understanding.

  “You want to get something to eat?” she asked, with a knowing look. It was code for, “Let’s get out of here and talk about what’s bothering you.”

  I was about to answer when a loud sizzle ricocheted through the ship, followed by the crackling pop of fizzing electricals. Outside, in the main space, the lights flickered before plunging the room into darkness. The cockpit lights remained on, though they dimmed for a moment, and I could still see the dull glow of the hallway lights beyond the main space.

  “What the hell was that?” Angie spluttered from where she’d dived under her chair.

  “Electrical outage,” Ronad replied. “Looks like Bonnie and Clyde managed to hit something important.”

  Bashrik flashed him a warning look. “We weren’t even touching the wiring; we were closing the box back up. Whatever that was, it had nothing to do with us.”

  Stone nodded at the darkened outer room. “Yer man’s right. Nought in that box could’ve done that. That had to have come from the mainframe.”

  “Yeah, exactly—the mainframe,” Bashrik repeated defiantly.

  “Where’s that?” Lauren asked, looking worried.

  Stone shrugged. “Engine room, I ‘spect. I’d have to check yer blueprints to find it.”

  Xiphio stepped in, waggling his hand at Stone. “Actually, no, you do not. This is a merevin ship, and I know precisely where the engines are. Miss Riley and I have already visited them. You, sir, do not need to get your hands on any kind of blueprint.”

  “As yer please. Was just tryna help.”

  “Thank you, Stone. I think we’re all a little tense, that’s all. Electrical outages always do that,” Lauren said, her tone comforting. “Although, usually, it’s the thunderstorm that comes with the outages that gets me!” A forced laugh left her lips, but I could tell she really was frightened. I felt it, too. There was something amiss here—something that left an eerie feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Why don’t you go and check it out, Riley?” Navan suggested suddenly, as he sat up in his chair. “You’ve got the engineering skills; you can probably fix it a whole lot quicker than any of us can.”

  “What about Bashrik?” I replied, a little sad that Navan was so eager to get rid of me.

  “I’ve got to stay here and make sure none of the other systems go down,” Bashrik said, with a hint of apology in his voice. “Navan’s right. You’re probably the best one for the job.”

  I glanced around the room, feeling weirdly distant. “Fine. It’s probably a blown fuse or something. Shouldn’t take me long.”

  “You want some company?” Angie asked. “I can’t help, but I’ll stand nearby and hand you all the wrong tools.”

  I smiled at her, grateful for the offer. “Nah, it’ll be a quick fix. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Besides, I wanted a moment to myself to clear my head. Navan’s behavior was bothering me more and more. I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve his distant manner, but if I didn’t leave the room right now I knew I’d end up snapping at him, demanding an answer. With his eyes drooping shut again, I guessed now wouldn’t be a good time. No, it was better that I kept busy. Sighing, I snatched up one of the guns that had been left on the cockpit dashboard. If I was going down to the engine room alone, I wasn’t going unarmed.

  “Whaddya you need a gun fer?” Stone asked, curious.

  I shrugged. “Just in case.”

  “In case a wire jumps out at ye?” Stone laughed, turning subtly toward Lauren to see if she was laughing, too. To his obvious disappointment, she wasn’t even listening to him.

  “Okay, well, if I’m not back in twenty minutes, send out a search party,” I joked, steeling myself. “I might have tripped in the dark and smacked my head on something sharp.”

  “Be careful… Watch out for the goblins,” Navan murmured, the dimmed light sending him off to sleep again. He was so delirious from lack of rest that I doubted he’d even be able to remember sending me off to the engine room. He probably hadn’t meant to do it in the first place, his fevered mind making him say things he didn’t want to say.

  Shoving the gun into the waistband of my pants, I headed out of the cockpit and crept through the main space of the ship, checking for any sign of hidden monsters. For a moment, I wondered if Mort might be responsible for all of this. Perhaps he’d snuck back on board and tucked himself away in the deepest, darkest crevice of the vessel, just waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Here, out in space, we were at our most vulnerable, and someone like Mort would definitely have played on that.

  Shaking off the weird feeling bristling through me, I pressed on down the right-hand hallway until I reached the hatch that dropped down into the engine room. Clambering down the steps, I was surprised to find that the room was lit. Emergency bulbs had come on, filling the place with an unsettling green gl
ow, which made me feel like I was in a haunted house at a funfair. At any moment, I thought a sheet on a coat hanger was going to come flying out at me, followed by a dime-store Frankenstein’s monster.

  Using the strange green light, I found my way to the electrical mainframe at the far side of the engine room. It was tucked away in a large metal cabinet, underneath the bedroom Navan and I shared. Here, there were no weird symbols to decipher or control panels to understand, just straightforward, good old-fashioned wires, fuses, and circuits.

  “Let’s see what we can do with you, eh?” I said, speaking aloud to calm my nerves. I opened the cabinet door and peered inside, startled by the sight before me. Although there were reams upon reams of neatly tied cables, one section seemed to have been tampered with, the cables pulled out and cut, severing the circuit altogether.

  I followed the thick cable up through the cabinet, using my eyes once the wire went too high for my fingers. It snaked up the wall and across the top of the engine room ceiling, before disappearing out into the main body of the ship, where it was no doubt hidden behind the wall paneling.

  It really was concerning, but the severed cable itself was an easy fix. I just had to use connecters on either end of the cut pieces and reattach them. Some connectors were already tucked away on a ledge at the bottom of the cabinet, but I first needed to find out how lively the cable was. Scanning the room for anything I could use, I settled for a scrap piece of metal with a rubber end. Holding the rubber end tight, I approached the severed section of the cable and touched the piece of metal to it.

  A bright blue light surged up the top end of the cable, racing along the line like a greyhound on a racetrack. I followed it intently, knowing I was going to need to switch off the main electrical systems before I did anything, unless I wanted to be blown halfway across the room.

  As I followed the blue light, I froze. My eyes were drawn to something overhead, clinging to the power cables. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was my eyes playing tricks on me, but then it flickered again, a clear shape emerging. A dark figure lingered above me, fazing in and out of sight.

  It seemed we had a stowaway… and they were wearing an invisibility suit.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I made a show of following the line of cable with my eyes, doing my best to ignore the flickering figure above me. It didn’t look like they knew their suit had malfunctioned, whoever they were, and I wasn’t about to make it obvious—not when they lingered between me and the exit. If they’d gone to the trouble of using an invisibility suit, they would undoubtedly leap to attack the moment they knew their cover had been blown.

  I huffed out a troubled sigh. “Dammit, I’m going to need another pair of hands for this,” I mumbled, keeping up the pretense. “Must be space rats or something.”

  Picking up a few of the connectors from the ledge inside the cabinet, I moved slowly back through the engine room, careful not to draw any attention to myself. I wanted our hidden friend to think they’d gotten away with it, even though I could feel their eyes on me as I made my way toward the stepladder, which led out of the engine room and back into the main body of the ship.

  The climb back up through the hatch was one of the most terrifying experiences I’d ever endured. I was convinced the suited shadow was going to snatch at my legs and pull me back down at any moment. What made it ten times worse was trying to escape while keeping an air of calm, not wanting the shadow-person to know I knew they were down there.

  In fact, without the surge of electricity to help, causing the suit to flicker, I had no idea whether our stowaway had exited the hatch after me. They might have been walking right behind me and I wouldn’t have known. The thought of it sent a shiver up my spine.

  Where had we even picked this person up? Had they found their way in from the depths of space? Had they crept on board while we were still on the Junkyard? Had they snuck on while we were lingering near Vysanthe? It was impossible to know, and even more impossible to ask. All I knew was, we were in very real danger. Already, they’d sabotaged our navigation system, and now they’d moved on to our general support systems; it was only a matter of time before they started knocking out the most important systems we had on board.

  On the way back to the cockpit, I followed the dimmed lights of the hallway, though the light of the main space was still blacked out ahead, I almost jumped out of my skin as Stone emerged from the shadow, stepping into the hazy glow. A wave of relief followed. I knew it was a long shot, but the ambaka’s skills might be the only thing that could capture our stowaway. If he could set his third eye in the right position, we could freeze the stowaway. The only problem was figuring out where the shadow was hiding. After all, I didn’t know if they’d followed me this far—I couldn’t sense anyone, and I couldn’t hear anyone, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  “All done?” Stone asked, with a note of disappointment. “I were just comin’ to see if ye needed a hand. I’ve been wantin’ a look at the wirin’ on this thing ever since I joined yer all.”

  “I hit a bit of a snag,” I replied calmly. “Actually, I was coming to find you. I knew you’d been dying to see the wiring and you’ve got experience with this kind of thing, so I thought you might be able to help me out. It was a bit more complicated than I expected. Something weird has happened with the cables, and I can’t fix it on my own.” I flashed him a look that I hoped told him there was something else amiss. He peered at me curiously for a few moments, before giving a casual shrug.

  “No problem, lass, I’ll help ye out. You want me to fetch anyone else?”

  “No, it’s okay. I think you’re the best man for the job.” I didn’t want to draw more attention to the situation, if the stowaway was watching us. If I went and got a group of people together, they might start to suspect that I was on to them.

  He grinned. His calm demeanor was rubbing off on me. “Always am, Ri.”

  As we headed back toward the engine room, my mind was working overtime, trying to come up with a way I could let Stone in on what I’d seen without the stowaway finding out. It was a delicate tightrope to walk. Even if I wrote something down for him, there was no guarantee the stowaway wouldn’t look over our shoulders and see it.

  “So, whaddya think’s wrong with the wires? Did any jump out at ye?” He laughed, not realizing just how close to the truth those words were.

  “Funny you should say that,” I replied tentatively. “I think there might be some kind of space rats on board. The wires for the main room were all chewed up when I got to the mainframe. I was going to fit some connectors to make it work again, but then I followed the cables up and saw something I didn’t like the look of. I figured I should get some help instead of trying to overcome the problem myself, in case I ended up getting hurt.” I hoped I was being obvious enough, but there was no way of knowing.

  He glanced sideways at me, a look of semi-understanding on his face. “Space rats, ye say?”

  I nodded. “I don’t know when or how they got on board. We might have picked them up on the Junkyard. I don’t really know where these things can come from.”

  “Nasty things if they get into all the wrong places.”

  “That’s what I thought. I figured you’d have more experience with them than I do. I thought you might be able to do something to get rid of them. I’m happy to help,” I said slowly. “I just couldn’t see where they were coming from, you know?”

  “Any sound o’ them?”

  “Not really. Just a glimpse of some when the live current surged through the cable. It’s pretty dark down there with only the emergency lights on.”

  He nodded, letting me know he understood. “I hate vermin… Let’s see what we can do with ‘em.”

  With him going ahead of me, we clambered back down into the overwhelming heat of the engine room, where the green glow was still shedding its eerie light on everything. Down here again, I could sense eyes watching me, but there was no way of knowing if I was being trac
ked or if it was just my own paranoia getting the better of me. Either way, I was glad to have Stone for company—he was exactly the kind of guy to have by your side in a fight.

  “Do you wanna get the hatch, Ri? If we’re flushin’ these rats out, we don’t want ‘em getting into the ship proper,” Stone suggested, a curious look in his eyes. I wondered if his ambaka senses were already picking something up, now that he knew there was something to look for.

  I did as he said, pulling the hatch down behind us. Although it meant our stowaway couldn’t escape, it also meant we were locked in with whatever shadowy creature was hiding from us. I didn’t know who should be more frightened.

  “See what I mean? It’s all been chewed up,” I said, moving over to the electrical mainframe where the cable had been severed.

  “Yeah, some nasty little rodent’s definitely gone to town on this.”

  “Do you think we should put some pest-killer down here or something?” I wanted to play up to the part in case our hiding foe was still listening. Meanwhile, Stone’s perpetual sense of calm seemed to be doing the trick. I’d never have guessed there was anything wrong, if I were only judging by the look on his face.

  A smile curved up the corner of his lip. “You still got that gun on ye? How’s yer aim?”

  “I’m better with a knife.”

  “Well, set it to stun and ye can take a few potshots, see what ye get. Ten points for a biggun, five for a wee one.”

  Reaching for the gun in my waistband, I turned the dial to stun mode, grateful for Stone’s subtle suggestion. After all, we didn’t want to kill whoever was lurking here; we wanted to find out what they were doing here and why they were watching us from the shadows.

  “I’m a pretty lousy shot,” I admitted, forcing a laugh.

  “I can teach ye to be better, if ye’d like?”

  “Let’s see how I do first. I wouldn’t want to intrude on Lauren’s territory.” I flashed him a knowing grin that made him blush a little, before he turned his focus back to the rest of the room.