Chapter 2
What Stays Buried
Horgox
The drones pull northeast. Toward the crash site. Seeking bodies, wreckage, cargo.
The courier is still pressed against my chest, her heartbeat fast beneath my palm where it rests over her mouth. The root cave presses tight around us, bark and soil and the sharp edges of stone against my back. Two threats receding, and a human female I should have left in the undergrowth.
I didn't. That decision will likely kill us both.
ApexCorp's retrieval teams are methodical.
Three months of observing their search protocols have taught me the intervals, the weaknesses, the gaps in their coverage.
They stopped attempting active extraction after the first month; the canyon system is too defensible, the jungle too hostile, and I am too expensive to replace if a retrieval team takes casualties.
So they monitor instead. Drones on rotation, surveillance patterns I can predict to the minute.
The planet is the cage; they are content to wait until I move somewhere accessible or until attrition finishes what their teams couldn't.
The courier trembles against me, and my tactical assessment adjusts.
Not fear. Adrenaline crash. Her body is processing the sprint through hostile terrain, the collision, the sudden confinement.
She's still tracking the shadows through the roots, still alert, still functional.
Most beings in her situation would have locked up or started screaming by now.
She's doing neither. Inconvenient, because it would be simpler if she were useless.
I intended to stay hidden when the ship screamed through the atmosphere.
Hunters arrive in gunships with targeting arrays and suppression grids, not in battered courier vessels trailing smoke and shedding hull panels.
I watched from the upper canopy as the yellow ship fought for altitude and lost, watched the pilot wrestle with controls that were clearly failing, watched the crash tear a wound through the jungle half a kilometre long.
The pilot should have died.
Instead, twenty minutes later, a small human female came stumbling out of the wreckage and into the undergrowth with all the stealth of a cargo loader at full throttle. Talking to herself. Fumbling with a dead beacon. Completely oblivious to the pack circling her position.
I should have let the jungle sort her out. Three months of surviving alone by trusting nothing and no one, and the tactically sound choice was to remain invisible. She could be bait. ApexCorp would absolutely deploy a convincing decoy; they've spent enough credits hunting me.
But bait doesn't run like prey. Bait moves with purpose, with awareness of the trap it's setting. This courier ran blind, branches tearing at her face, roots catching her feet, the pack closing from three directions while she had no idea.
So I caught her. And now I'm pressed into a root cave with a stranger's heartbeat against my ribs and years under ApexCorp's control of survival instinct telling me I've made a catastrophic miscalculation.
The predators haven't left. They know what they cornered. But their attention splits between us and the receding engine whine above, and that divided focus is the first useful development in the last hour.
The courier's breathing has steadied. Her pulse still runs fast, but the ragged edge of panic has smoothed into something more controlled. When I ease my hand from her mouth, she doesn't scream. Doesn't bolt. She turns her head and looks up at me with an expression I cannot immediately categorize.
"So," she whispers. "Escaped gladiator."
Direct. No preamble, no hysterics, no negotiation. Statement of fact, delivered like she's confirming a cargo manifest.
"How did you know?"
"My boss warned me. ApexCorp facility in this sector reported a security breach three months ago. Varkaani gladiator, prison-grade containment failure." Her voice is barely above a breath, but steady. "She told me to dump my cargo and run if I encountered you."
"Wise counsel."
"Terrible timing, though." The corner of her mouth twitches. She's pressed against a fugitive in a hole in the ground with apex predators outside, and she's making jokes. "I'm guessing the drones aren't doing a routine wildlife survey."
"No."
"And those lovely blue lines on your skin aren't decorative."
My jaw tightens. The circuit traceries pulse cold beneath my skin, a constant reminder of every modification they forced on me. "No."
She's quiet for a moment. Watching my face in the dim light that filters through the roots.
Her gaze tracks the traceries where they cut across my forearms, the scars they intersect, the places where technology was grafted onto a body that never consented to it.
Most beings look at the traceries with fear or revulsion.
She looks at them the way she probably looks at a damaged circuit board: assessing the extent of the violation.
"I'm Krilly Baxter," she says. "OOPS courier. And before you ask, I have no intention of turning you in."
"You don't know what I've done."
"You pulled me out of a pack hunt. That's enough." She shifts against me, and I'm abruptly aware of the geometry of her. Small. Curved. Warm in a way that registers against my skin despite the temperature differential between our species. "If you were what they say you are, you'd have left me."
She's wrong about that. What I am and what I chose to do in a single moment of poor tactical judgment are not the same thing. But she states it with a conviction that doesn't invite argument, so I let it stand.
"Horgox Ka'reen." The name feels strange offered voluntarily. For a lifetime of captivity, my designation was a string of letters and numbers. Before that, a lifetime ago, I had a name and a world to speak it in. "That's all you need for now."
"For now," she repeats, and there's something in her tone that says she'll be back for the rest. "Okay. So, Horgox Ka'reen, escaped gladiator. What's the plan for not dying in this hole?"
The predators outside shift. One releases a low call, testing whether the drones have moved far enough to resume the hunt. Another answers from a different angle. They're reorganizing.
"There's a canyon system roughly three kilometres northeast." I keep my voice low, watching the shapes through the roots.
"Narrow passages. Rock formations that interfere with drone scanners.
The predators can't navigate the tight spaces.
" Three months of scouting, of mapping every crevice and game trail and defensible position on this sector of the planet.
Knowledge bought with sleepless nights and close encounters I don't intend to repeat. "If we reach it, we have options."
"Three kilometres through murder jungle with a welcoming committee outside." She processes this with the same matter-of-fact calm she's applied to everything so far. "What's the timing?"
"The pack won't commit while the drones are still in range. They'll wait for full clearance, then attempt to breach the roots. That gives us perhaps an hour."
"And then we run."
"Then we move. Quickly, quietly, and not like prey." I look down at her. "Can you do that?"
"The quietly part might be a challenge." She says it without self-pity, a genuine assessment. "I'm not exactly built for jungle stealth."
"No. You're not." Her boots are wrong, her jumpsuit is wrong, her size makes her vulnerable to terrain that I can navigate at speed. She'll slow me down. She'll draw attention. She'll compromise every evasion protocol I've developed over three months of solitary survival.
I should leave her. Calculate the optimal moment, slip out of this cave, and disappear into the jungle alone. She has her own emergency protocols, her own training, her own odds. Slim odds, but not my responsibility.
Except she's looking at me with those direct green eyes, and she hasn't flinched. Hasn't begged. Hasn't tried to bargain or threaten or manipulate. She asked my name, stated her own, and started planning.
Decades of forced service in ApexCorp's custody taught me every possible permutation of coercion and manipulation. I know what a trap looks like, sounds like, smells like. I know the cadence of a lie delivered under pressure and the precise body language of calculated deception.
This courier is none of those things. She's a terrible liar. It's written in every twitch and expression she makes.
"Stay close to me," I hear myself say. "Move when I move, stop when I stop. If I tell you to run, you run. If I tell you to hide, you hide. No arguments, no questions, no hesitation."
"I can do arguments-free for about twenty minutes. After that, no promises." But she nods, and the agreement in her eyes is genuine even if the words are deflection. "What about my ship?"
"What about it?"
"My AI. Bebo. He runs on a portable quantum core, about the size of my fist. If the core survived the crash, I could get him back online. Maps, environmental scans, communication protocols, maybe even a way to reach my dispatch."
Communication protocols. A way to reach help that isn't ApexCorp.
"The crash site is crawling with drones."
"Right now, yes. But you said they search in patterns. They won't stay on the wreckage forever." She tilts her chin up with a stubbornness I'm beginning to recognize as foundational to her personality. "Bebo's been with me for four years. He's family."
Family. She applies the word to a machine with the same conviction most beings reserve for blood kin.
"The canyon first," I say. "We survive the next three kilometres. Then we assess."
"But—"
"Non-negotiable. The canyon is defensible. The crash site is not."
She wants to argue. I can see it in the set of her jaw, the way her fingers tighten against my forearm. But she reads the situation accurately, because underneath the reckless optimism, the courier has a tactical mind that's sharper than she lets on.