Wren crossed her arms. “Maybe not for you.”
The woman stood. I wished I had a blaster or a knife to defend us if she came over here, but Wren didn’t seem to need my help. She held the woman’s gaze, her chin high and defiant, and for a moment I wondered if she actually was capable of pulling off a murder that gruesome.
Finally, the woman took a step forward. Her hair rustled, more tentacles emerging from beneath the silky strands. They slithered toward Wren, skimming her shoulders before flicking her chin. Then they wrenched her to her feet by the throat.
“Earthan child. When’s the next match?”
“Tomorrow,” Wren answered, her voice rough under the pressure of the tentacles.
“And have you found me a worthy opponent? The last one was too weak. I could have crushed their fragile body in my sleep.”
Wren smirked. “Let’s just say that your new opponent won’t give you that issue.”
“They better not.” She licked her lips. “I like a challenge.” She retracted her tentacles, leaving the column of Wren’s throat covered in dark splotches from the suckers. Wren was shaking, gasping desperately for breath. Seeing her start to break after acting so tough all day long made me feel something sharp in my chest that almost, maybe could have passed for sympathy.
Or maybe it was just indigestion. These prison eggs were disgusting.
Once the tentacled woman headed for the doors leading back to the cell blocks, her posse tagging along behind her like a bad smell, I turned to Wren. “A match? What match?”
She slumped back down at our table. “She just had to steal my thunder. I was getting to it, I swear. Have you ever played Snaps?”
“What’s Snaps?”
“‘What’s Snaps?’ she asks. It’s a betting game played with gems. It’s called Snaps because—”
“Because the winner usually celebrates by breaking the bones of the loser,” Elio interrupted. His eyes flickered as he ran a net search. “Created in Andilly in the year 2126, Snaps has since been outlawed in nineteen different galaxies. The average mortality rate of Snaps losers amounts to 64.61 percent, making it the eighth highest cause of death on the planet, right behind—”
“Yeah, yeah, we get it, Elio.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Snaps is very violent.”
“Only if you lose,” Wren added. “And you’re looking at Ironside’s head Snaps bookie. I rig all the odds. People only lose when I want them to. In the end, it all works in my favor.”
“Wait—you’re actually making money off this?” And how do I get in on it?
Wren shook her head. “Not money. They confiscate all our money here. We trade in gossip. Which brings me to my brilliant escape plan. Drumroll, please…” She beat a quick rhythm on the table. “I have a charter ship. The Starchaser. It’s the largest in this galaxy, thank you very much. I hijacked it from a station near Pluto—”
“The space station you blew up?”
She waved me off. “Accidentally. Point is, the station is dust, but the ship is fully functional. And thanks to all the intel I’ve gained from our gullible fellow inmates every time they make a bad Snaps bet, I now know that the warden here put it in a docking bay beneath the prison. And thanks to a few more bad bets during last week’s Snaps match between Calamari and my old cell neighbor Tito—stars rest his soul—I know the ship’s still here because the guards always complain about how much room it takes up. Apparently, they don’t have any space to set up their card table.” A proud grin split her face in two.
“So how are you going to get the ship back?”
Her grin doubled in size. “We,” she corrected, “are going to have a little fun with some of the guards. But first we need … him.” She nodded to a weight bench at the edge of the yard. Anders was sitting there, sweat pouring off the scales on his forehead. Everyone in the vicinity was giving him a wide berth, as if he were contagious or something.
“The guards will be less suspicious that he’s trying to double-cross them,” she said. “Creepy red lizards gotta stick together and whatnot.”
“Do you really think he’ll help us?” Elio asked.
“Of course, Small Fry. He’s the classic broody schoolyard bully. If we watch closely, I bet we’ll find out he has a heart of gold.” She howled with laughter.
“Can we get back to the plan, please?” I asked. Looking at Anders for too long was giving me a prickly feeling on the back of my neck. He got off the bench and started doing push-ups in the dirt. I swore his dark, pitiless eyes cut a glance to our table, and it made my stomach bunch up like I’d just swallowed a rubber ball. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust anyone except Elio and myself.
“So Anders helps us and then what?” I picked apart a roll until it crumbled in my hands.
Wren took a piece from me and popped it into her mouth. “You come in with your abracadabra aura-manipulating magic and then we’re golden.”
“It doesn’t work like that. I can read the guards enough to avoid running into them if we make a break for the docking bay, but I can’t manipulate them. I—”
“Who said anything about reading the guards? Listen, Cora, this will work best if you don’t know all the details. Element of surprise and all that. Trust me.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I called in sick for my trusting lesson in preschool.”
Wren studied the prison yard again, the guard towers, the chattering inmates, the rotten stench of old cafeteria food, and steepled her fingers beneath her chin. “Don’t worry. If Anders or anyone else interferes, then like I said before, I’ll rip their intestines out through their eyes.”
“That really isn’t possible,” Elio said.
“Maybe, maybe not.” She reached over me to take Elio’s plate. “You done with that? I’m starving.”
I sat at the table, eating day-old bread and peppering Wren with questions about her half-baked escape plan (which she deftly dodged) until a horn blared, signaling the end of the lunch hour. As we lined up and were handcuffed and led back to our cells, a realization struck me, sending a sour wave of nausea lashing through my stomach.
Devious little Wren had more in common with Evelina than I ever did.
And, for some reason, it made me kind of jealous.
6
Back in the murky dampness of the cell, I slammed the piss bucket down at the foot of Anders’s makeshift bed of blankets. “How do you feel about vomiting on command?”
He blinked up at me, frowning. The big guy had his jumpsuit unbuttoned and shoved around his waist, and his bare red torso was streaked with dirt from his outdoor training session. Once again, no aura surrounded his head or beefy shoulders, and I was filled with the overwhelming temptation to smack him, just to make him feel something.
I kicked the bucket closer to him. “Do it. You’ll thank us later.”
“He might kill us later,” Elio muttered.
Anders’s eyebrows bunched together, making the tattoos on his forehead wiggle. Then he picked up the bucket and launched it at the opposite wall.
Wren ducked out of the splash zone before it could hit her. “Easy there, Andy! This is a clean jumpsuit!”
Anders only growled.
“Hey!” a gruff voice came from the cell beside us. “Shut up over there! I’m trying to sleep!”
I pounded the cinder blocks with my fist. “You shut up over there!”
So much for an easy start to the plan. I went to retrieve the bucket, fantasizing about shoving Anders’s head into it. Wren tried slapping my hand in a joyous show of camaraderie, but I ignored her.
I dropped the bucket at Anders’s feet again. “Get to it. When the guards come to take a head count, you need to look sick.” I didn’t know if it was a mistake to tell him the truth, but I figured it was the only way to get him to unclamp his jaw a little. He would crack a tooth or something if he didn’t loosen up.
Not that I cared.
“We’re breaking out of here. And you’re going to ruin everything if
you don’t vomit in the star-forsaken bucket, Andy, so do it.”
The darkness in his eyes seemed to recede a little. For a moment it looked like the spark of an aura surrounded his head, like a happy golden halo, but it was gone before I could really be sure of what I was seeing.
Anders grabbed the bucket, turned his back to us, and then the sound of his gagging filled the cell.
“We have about ten minutes,” Wren said, taking up her post beside the door. I didn’t know how she knew that without a window or a clock to look at. Maybe it was Earthan intuition.
The minutes passed slowly, accompanied by the echo of Anders’s retching and the bitter odor of his regurgitated dinner. When we finally heard the guards’ footsteps outside the cell, the four of us slumped to the floor, faking exhaustion and despair—complete with a few authentic-looking tears from Wren—just as the door opened with a hiss.
“We had a bit of an issue,” Wren said to the guard who poked his head inside. She pointed to the bucket, which Anders had overturned with his foot so that some of the contents spilled out in a puddle.
The guard barely gave it a second glance as he looked us over. He marked something on his comm before shoving the device into his back pocket and turning to leave. My stomach did a nervous flip.
“Wait!” I shouted. The guard whirled around, reaching for his blaster, and I backed against the wall, hoping to appear unassuming.
I nodded at the bucket and Anders. “You’re not going to leave us in here all night with that, are you? He might have an infectious disease or something.”
The guard holstered his blaster, reaching for the holopanel to close the door.
“Wait! If he is infected, you might have already been exposed to it. Shouldn’t you, I don’t know, test him or something?”
The guard only frowned. Stars, my stomach felt like something was burrowing in it. If this plan didn’t work, then my dinner was definitely going to join Anders’s on the floor.
But to my immense relief, the guard took a hesitant step forward, the door sealing shut behind him. Phase one: complete.
He wrinkled his nose, then leaned over Anders.
“S’ichas?” he asked. Sick? Anders looked up though half-lidded, watery eyes and managed a small nod.
A laugh threatened to escape me. Who would have guessed that the big guy could act?
Groaning, the guard took another step closer to the bucket, making the mistake of putting his back to us. Wren sidled up next to him. Before I had a chance to worry that he might turn and murder her right there, she slipped her fingers into his back pocket, replacing his protruding comm link with a square hunk of cement that she’d smuggled in from the yard.
She tossed the comm backward. Elio caught it just as the guard wheeled around. Wren innocently held up her hands, nodding to the bucket.
“So, what do you think? Are we all going to contract some mystery virus that’ll burn our eyes out of our sockets?”
The guard examined the bucket. “Your eyes, no. Your ears … perhaps.”
“Good to know. It’s not like I need those things anyway.” She glared over at me, huddled in the corner. Elio had pulled a wire from a compartment on the side of the guard’s comm and connected it to a second one that Wren had swiped from the kitchen staff. I was hiding the second comm beneath Wren’s blanket, waiting for the two devices to connect.
Just hack into the pass codes for the hangar doors, she’d told me before we started this madness. How long will that take you? A few seconds?
Yeah, sure. If the two comms she’d given me were actually compatible and the net access on the kitchen comm wasn’t as slow as dirt. I’d broken through the encryption on the pass codes, no problem, but transferring the data—and doing it in a way that the guard would have no idea what happened—well, that was a different issue.
Wren gave me another hurry-the-hell-up look, as if the net connectivity issues in a cinder block prison cell on an isolated, barren planet were somehow my fault.
I motioned for her to stall while Elio grabbed the kitchen comm. He held it up to the ceiling, hopping up and down to get a better signal. I snatched it back. He was three feet tall. I appreciated his hustle, but he wasn’t helping.
“It’s, uh, it’s really good to hear that our eyes aren’t going to burn out,” Wren said warily. The comm finally beeped, the pass codes starting their agonizingly slow download, and the guard turned toward the noise. Wren hastily slid in front of him, beaming.
“You have very nice eyes, you know,” she said. “So black and … uh … shiny. Just like a lump of…” She gulped. “Coal.”
I would have slapped myself—or better yet, her—if my hands weren’t occupied. Coal? That was the best she could do?
I glanced down at the comm. DOWNLOAD IN PROGRESS: 41 percent … 42 percent …
The guard gave her a shockingly warm smile, which was less of a smile and more of a flash of teeth that looked like they could shred us into itty-bitty pureed pieces. “Really? You think so?” He preened. “You know, I’ve always said they’re my best feature.”
Wren nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, yes. Definitely.”
57 percent … 58 percent …
“They’re beautiful,” she continued. “I’d go so far as to say stunning.”
The guard’s face darkened. “I am not beautiful!” he snarled, spittle flying across the cell.
Wren squeaked. “Beautiful? Did I say beautiful? I obviously meant horrifying and ugly and nightmare-inducing.”
“Truly?” He relaxed. “Thank you!”
On the floor, Anders looked like he was fighting back the urge to laugh, and honestly, I was right there with him. But when the guard’s gaze swiveled to him, he gripped the bucket and started hacking up something seriously foul into its depths.
Wren stepped closer to the guard. She brought her hand behind her back, wiggling her fingers in an impatient signal. Keep your pants on. It’s not done yet. I watched the download progress climb, willing the numbers to move faster. Come on! You can do it.
89 percent … 90 percent … 91 percent …
“I have always been intrigued by Earth,” said the guard. “Maybe you could teach me about it sometime? I do not understand the fruit known as an orange. Is the food named after the color, or is the color named after the food?”
97 percent … 98 percent … 99 percent …
“Ah, yes. One of the great mysteries of the universe. If you think that one’s intriguing, you’ll love to hear more about jumbo shrimp.”
“Fascinating! Is it really both large and small? At the same time?”
Wren shrugged, innocently folding her hands behind her back. DOWNLOAD COMPLETE. Finally! I disconnected the comms, slapped the guard’s into Wren’s palm, then marveled as she slipped it back into his pocket under the guise of giving him a spine-crushing hug.
“You’ll have to wait and see,” she murmured, tweaking the end of his nose. Okay, she was laying it on a little thick, but I guess it had the desired effect. The guard looked horrified at the physical contact, and when he stumbled out the door, his back slightly bent under the weight of the bucket of vomit à la Anders dangling from his hand, he didn’t even notice that his coveted comm link had exited and reentered his pocket.
“Don’t forget!” Wren called after him. “Jumbo shrimp!” She turned to the three of us and cracked a grin. “Phase two: complete.”
“I don’t know why we couldn’t have just knocked him out and run,” I grumbled, flipping through the stolen kitchen comm. All the pass codes were here. To the hangar, to the doors of every cell, every office, every guard tower. My heart skipped a beat. I held the key to the entire prison in my hands. The key to Elio’s safety. So close. I could feel it …
And then Wren plucked the comm from me, and I felt only irritation.
“Too obvious. Plus, there are too many guards lurking between here and the docking bay. If they think we’re making a break for it, they’ll shut down every access point i
n this prison. Manual entry only. You wouldn’t even be able to hack it. Trust me, I’ve been planning this for ages.”
“Precisely how long is ages?” Elio asked with a beep.
“Fine, you got me. I’ve been planning this for two days, but it feels like ages.”
Anders snorted.
I agree with you, buddy, I thought grimly.
“Look, we can only escape when the guards aren’t looking. And the only time the guards aren’t looking is if we draw all of them far away from the cells and the hangar.”
“Which is where, exactly?” I asked.
Wren’s response was another grin, and that was when I knew I would have been better off remaining silent.
“Welcome to phase three.”
* * *
“No! Absolutely not!”
“Quiet!” Wren snapped. “She’ll hear you!”
I gave a delirious laugh. “I think it’s too late for that.”
It’s funny how sometimes when you wish for something, you end up in a place that’s significantly worse than where you started. I had wanted nothing more than to get off Condor, to have a fighting chance at getting Elio a new body. Now, it looked like we were both going to die.
I should have let Calamari shove her tentacles down Wren’s throat—because I had a hunch she was dangerously close to shoving them down mine.
The morning after we acquired the pass codes from the universe’s most gullible guard, I foolishly let Wren lead me through the yard after breakfast. The second we stepped through the doorway and out into the humid air, I knew I should have grilled Wren a bit harder about what exactly the next phase of the newly dubbed Worst Plan in Existence would entail. At least then I would have been prepared for the stares and the jeers as we drew nearer to the Snaps table set up in the center of the yard.
When Wren said she’d found Calamari a new opponent, I never guessed she meant me.
Anders, sure. He was intimidating enough to play such a violent game. Even Wren, with her feisty, defiant streak. But me? Not gonna lie, I was really attached to my limbs. Literally. And I really didn’t want to see them get crushed to pieces when I lost.
The Good for Nothings Page 6
