Chapter 12 Sem
After a few too many beers, I tiptoed carefully over the diamond-patterned carpet, trying not to touch any of the lines on the way back to my pod.
This was surprisingly difficult, because I was fairly drunk.
But I enjoyed the distraction. Until loud, determined footsteps thumped down the hallway in front of me.
I raised my head and rubbed my eyes. “What the…?”
Elanie, clad in pink silk pajamas, marched toward me, stepping on all the lines and looking too gorgeous to be real.
“Elanie?” I said, rubbing my eyes again.
She didn’t respond. Just kept walking.
“Hello!” I waved my arms above my head. “Elanie, hello!”
Ignoring me like I wasn’t even there, she picked up her pace, her expression alarmingly blank. I’d seen that same dead-eyed gaze once before on the ship’s Vlog, on another bionic who’d been marching silently toward the docking bay.
Darius.
“Elanie, where are you going?” I asked, my heartbeat lurching to a gallop as she bolted past me.
Spinning on my heel, I followed behind her, fueled by a sudden and knee-buckling fear.
Something was wrong. Her eyes weren’t her eyes.
Her steps weren’t their usual smooth glide but a swift and jerky stomp.
Her shoulders were hunched, drawn forward like she was a puppet attached to a string yanking her onward.
I commed on his private channel.
Declan’s voice was stern.
I was about to explain the situation when Elanie broke off, rushing full speed toward the elevators. I had to sprint down the hall so I could jump inside with her before the elevator doors slid closed.
“Elanie, what’s happening?” I asked, breathless and terrified. “Where are we going?”
She said nothing. Her face was set hard as stone, her eyes boring holes into the elevator door.
Declan demanded.
I commed. I watched her press the button for the docking bay. I shook her shoulders and snapped my fingers in front of her face. Panic skyrocketed inside me when nothing worked.
It was Co-Captain Isla Jones this time, her voice calm but grave.
I promised, even though it was a losing proposition.
One Portisan who hadn’t done a single push-up in months against a bionic wouldn’t be much of a fight.
But then I remembered Darius’s bruised and swollen skin, his rigid body and irradiated eyes, and adrenaline flooded my bloodstream.
I’d push planets out of orbit with my bare hands to make sure that wouldn’t be her.
Isla commed.
The elevator dinged, and Elanie burst through the open doors.
“Elanie, please stop!” I cried, grasping her arm, her hand, anything I could cling to while she sliced like a knife down the hallway.
When she turned the corner toward the airlocks, my heart plummeted.
“Elanie!” Digging my heels into the carpet, I leaned back, pulling on her so hard something in my elbow popped. “Stop!”
She slowed, turning back toward me. Thank the Saints.
“Elanie, what—” My brief moment of relief vanished when her hand whipped out and grasped my throat, her eyes cold and black as onyx.
“Stop,” I tried to plead as she dragged me down the corridor. I clawed at her fingers around my neck, kicked my feet out behind me at the floor. “Stop!”
It was useless. She was too strong.
Turning abruptly, she slammed her hand over one of the airlock sensors.
Craning my neck, I tried to shout, to scream. But I could barely get a breath out through her grip around my throat. The airlock she was about to enter was empty. No shuttle, no escape pod. Only the icy grip of space waiting to crush the life from us both.
I commed her desperately, my heels scrabbling, my lungs burning for another breath.
But she wasn’t Elanie. She was gone. A program following its code, carrying out its orders. All I could do was hope that whatever her programming wanted her to do, it wanted her to do it alive.
“Elanie…please,” I begged, the words tearing through my compressed vocal cords. “This…is…suicide!”
She stopped, frozen in place like someone had hit her pause button. Her grip on me loosened.
I gasped for air, sucking in a lungful. “Let’s go back to deck twelve,” I managed while black spots swarmed my vision, my pulse pounding in my ears. “Let’s go home. You”—I coughed—“don’t want to do this.”
Stepping back from the door, she turned her head, her blank eyes examining the adjacent airlock. Then she let me go, and gravity claimed me. My head rebounded off the floor.
Rubbing my throat, I clambered to my feet and stumbled after her down the hall.
I roared over the comm now that my brain was capable of a thought other than I’m going to die in my laundry-day boxers.
Elanie pressed her hand over the control panel of the airlock, triggering blaring alarms and flashing red lights.
Captain Jones’s voice filled my head.
Not even halfway through my relieved exhale—because even though someone or something out there was still controlling her, at least she wouldn’t be able to leave the ship—my breath reversed course, sucked back into my lungs as I watched Elanie’s fingers move at warp speed over the control panel.
A whoosh of pressurized air made my ears pop, killing any last vestige of hope inside me.
I commed the captains, defeat thick in my voice as the alarms went silent.
Elanie took no notice of me as I crawled into the airlock behind her. She was too busy entering a code to open the door to the escape pod.
Everything I was about to do was ridiculous and dangerous and would most certainly get me killed. I didn’t care.
Putting one foot in front of the other, I followed her into the pod. A very small, very stripped-down, single passenger pod. Super.
Captain Jones commed.
Elanie sat in the jump seat, buckling herself in with a methodical efficiency, her eyes closed, her brow furrowed in deep concentration. Which could only mean—
I told the captains.
Isla commed.
When Declan’s voice went soft, my jaw set hard.
Like hells.
I spun around frantically, searching for anything I could hold on to or buckle myself in with before we shot away from the Ignisar and into the cold blackness of space.
growled either Rax or Morgath. I didn’t really care.
I growled back.
one of them snapped.
Nearly wouldn’t cut it.
The Aquilinian’s barely suppressed rage rumbled between my ears.
I cut the comm. The last thing I needed was some overbearing wall of muscle threatening my life when blunt force trauma was sure to kill me in a few short minutes anyway.
Grasping the thick black cargo webbing along the curved wall of the pod, I tried to tangle myself into it, wrap it around my arms and legs, weave myself through it.
It didn’t work. As soon as the pod detached, I’d be hurled into the walls at supersonic speed, my organs liquefied and my bones smashed to dust. I only had one chance. Elanie had to wake up.
I knelt in front of her, but she wouldn’t look at me, just stared straight ahead with a preternatural calm.
“Elanie, you have to stop the launch.”
Nothing.
I took her face between my hands. “Wake up. Please wake up.” When she still didn’t respond, I released her face and clapped my hands as hard as I could in front of her eyes. Nothing. Not even a blink.
It was over. There was nothing else I could do. “I won’t survive this,” I said, hanging my head. “But it’s not your fault. And I don’t regret—”
“Sem?”
My head whipped up, my heart stuttering between beats. “Elanie?”
She blinked once, twice, her eyes clearing like the sky after a storm. “What are you doing?” She surveyed our surroundings. “What’s happening?”
The outer door slammed down. Then the inner door slid closed. We were locked in.
“Why are we in an escape pod?” Her head tilted at the telltale whirring. “Why is the drive spooling up?” Finally noticing me on my knees in the middle of the floor, she asked with wide, horrified eyes, “Why aren’t you strapped in?”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said, so relieved I almost laughed, even though I was still probably about to die. “You were being controlled by something, I think. Compelled. You came in here, and I…followed you.”
“You followed me?” She shook her head. “Why?”
We definitely didn’t have time for that conversation. “Can you stop the launch?” I asked as the onboard AI intoned, Please secure your safety harness. Ejection in ten, nine, eight… “You have to stop the launch.”
She closed her eyes, opened them again. “I can’t. I’m locked out.”
I crumpled to the floor as the countdown hit seven, six, five… This was it. I was going to die. Horribly. Painfully. And I’d probably leave a disgusting mess behind.
But then she grasped my shirt and yanked me up, pulling me into her lap. She wrapped her arms and legs around me and squeezed.
“What are you doing?” I grunted.
Three, two…
“Saving your life,” she whispered into my ear as the countdown hit one and the pod detached from the Ignisar, hurtling us into space.