Chapter 10
10
Toorin
Juniper gave up her seat to Marc and stood behind him with her blade. I knew she wouldn’t hurt him, but I couldn’t be certain he did. She gripped a handful of hair at the back of his head.
“Be sure to cut my hair and not my throat,” Marc said.
“Sorry about before,” she said. “I didn’t mean…”
Marc looked at her over his shoulder. “It’s a bloody bad deal what my sire did to your captain. You have no qualms from me for trying to protect him.”
I stared at Marc, watching the exchange. He was nothing like the spoiled spawn of the chancellor I’d imagined. Except he wasn’t spoiled. And he had more understanding and empathy than most people I’d met. The fringe tended to beat any inherent goodness out of its inhabitants.
Bodie leaned against the gunwale next to me. “Say you get in undetected, then what? You expect the doctors not to turn you in?”
Juniper started slicing through the ponytail she’d made of Marc’s hair. He raised his hand to feel, but she batted it away.
“I’ve befriended one of the organ regenerators at the lab,” Marc said. “He hasn’t said as much, but I think my surgeon would be on my side. Neither have any love for my sire.”
“What about loyalty?” Bodie asked.
Marc considered that. “Valid question. I doubt my sire fosters loyalty from anything other than financial dependence and abject fear. I’d like to think they wouldn’t turn on me.”
Bodie scoffed. “Not a resounding endorsement.”
Marc raised his hands and let them drop at his side, his resignation palpable. “It’s all I have.”
“I don’t like it,” Bodie said.
Lyric and Darwin remained inexplicably silent. Juniper kept quiet, her attention on the task at hand.
“I don’t see where we have much choice.” I held my hands out wide, speaking to my crew. My family. But mostly Bodie. “It’s either that or wait until my heart gives out and it doesn’t restart no matter how hard you hit me.”
“Done.” Juniper held up her hand with more than six inches of Marc’s thick, curly hair in her clenched fist.
Instinctively, his hand went to the back of his head. She’d shorn it above his shoulders, the sides swinging down. He swept them out of his eyes, the length too long for him to see but too short to tie back. “Shorter.”
I took the ponytail from her hand and shot him an apologetic look.
“Moon and mars and the stars,” Marc said, nearly breathless. “I have your heart, and you feel bad I’ve had to cut my hair? The hair will grow back. Your heart won’t.”
I stood in silence, not knowing how to take Marc’s words. He wasn’t wrong. But he hadn’t asked for any of this either. With unease, I watched Juniper shear Marc’s thick mane of hair into a short stubble on his head. When she’d finished, Lyric took over dyeing Marc’s hair since Juniper lost interest as soon as she couldn’t use her blade anymore. The stubble accepted the camel dung ash well, turning the noticeable red to a deep burnt brown. Now, he looked like anyone else on the fringe who hadn’t had a bath that month.
Luckily for him, the dung ash was one of the few things from a camel that didn’t smell.
Lyric rubbed the remaining ash from his hands. “Not a bad job if me do say so.”
Bodie left when it became clear there’d be no bloodshed, I guess, and took Darwin to help him pack a few provisions for Marc and me in case it took us longer than expected to contact Marc’s friend at the lab. If things went bad, we might have to hole up somewhere in the settlement for a few days before we could either sneak into the hospital or out of the settlement.
With Lyric finished, Marc stood and turned a slow circle. “What do you think?”
With our size difference, my borrowed clothes fit loosely on his body, making him appear less muscular than I knew him to be. My trousers hung low on his hips, and I tried not to let my eyes drift to the trail of fiery hair below his belly button.
Was it my imagination, or did my heart whir louder as if compensating for the rush of blood leaving my brain and coursing to my dick? It made me a little lightheaded. Bloody second-hand, second-rate mechanical heart.
“He looks like a regular bloke,” Lyric said.
A regular bloke that I wouldn’t mind stripping my clothes off of and seeing what pleasure we could bring each other.
Lyric might have been a little heavy-handed with the ash in Marc’s hair, but it only made him look more like he belonged out here with the rest of us.
“He’ll do.” I turned before anyone saw how my body had reacted to Marc, but not before I saw the flash of a smile on Marc’s lips and the spark of lust in his eyes.
But we weren’t here for any of that.
I was on borrowed time and had this inexplicably unsettled feeling under my skin. Like an itch I couldn’t scratch that propelled me forward. We had nothing more than a skeletal plan, but I was driven to go with what we had.
What if your heart gives out when it’s just the two of you? What if no one else is around to get it going again? Would Marc step in, or would he run?
Most of me thought he’d help. I knew Bodie had doubts about Marc’s intentions, but Marc had risked his life leaving the settlement to search for me. I no longer looked at him as a prisoner but as an accomplice.
I glanced up at the sky. The sun hadn’t yet reached its zenith. We had a lot of daylight left, but I had no clue how long it would take us to make our way to the hospital. The sooner we left, the better.
Bodie and Darwin returned with our packs full of provisions.
I took one and handed Marc the other. “We should be going.”
Marc accepted the pack, both of us knowing what dangers awaited us.
The sour twist to Bodie’s expression remained, but his unmitigated ire had dissipated. He didn’t like what we were doing, but he knew we had little choice.
We all loaded into the dinghy and lowered ourselves down. As soon as we cleared the protection of the Lark, a large wake rolled toward us from a passing vessel three times the size of the Lark heading for the wharf way too fast.
“Hold on!” My hand instinctively gripped Marc’s shirt, keeping the wave from tossing him out of the dinghy.
Darwin and Bodie sat at the oars and steered the bow into the wave to keep it from hitting broadside and capsizing us. I didn’t need a repeat of the day before. I wasn’t sure either of our hearts could take it.
In the bow, Lyric and Juniper caught air as we hit the wake. They turned with equally wide grins. “That was bloody brilliant,” Juniper said.
Lyric bumped Juniper’s fist. “A lass after me own heart.”
Where we sat in the stern, Marc turned to look at me, his nose wrinkled. “What’s that smell?”
“Camel shipment,” Darwin said. “They’re shipped in from the Western province. It can take them weeks to get here. The camels are half-mad when they unload.”
The bawling of the camels grew so loud that we had to raise our voices to be heard. The camel shipments were always a spectacle. People lined the streets to watch while mounted camel drovers used their whips to herd them toward the pens a few miles away on the outer reaches of the fringe.
Bodie and Darwin got us to shore and tied the dinghy off. Darwin helped Lyric to shore so he wouldn’t get his feet wet, but he left the rest of us to leap to the rocky beach. But by now, I was more than used to falling short at times and ending up with wet feet for the rest of the day.
We worked our way through the back alleys as much as we could. At one point, we had to divert to the main street that led down to the wharf to avoid a brawl between four men with broad blades. Those never ended well.
Marc stepped between a couple of the spectators to watch the commotion at the end of the road by the wharf. The drovers got the camels headed in the right direction, only to have them turn back toward the water.
“What’s going on?” Marc asked the man next to him. He had a scraggly beard that hit him mid-chest and eyes that looked like he’d seen too much.
After a glance at Marc as if he couldn’t believe he had to explain this to someone, the man said, “The camels are thirsty, but the drovers aren’t allowed to let them drink until they get them to the pens because it would tie up the wharf. It’s always a battle to get them away from the water.”
I caught the strap of Marc’s pack and pulled him away from the street. “Sorry,” he said as he fell into step behind me.
We continued through the alleys, Marc recognizing the one we’d dragged him down the night before. Had it only been the night before? It didn’t seem possible, but it was.
By the time we made it to the road leading into the settlement, the drovers were slowly herding the camels up the main street to our right. Across from us stood a building like few others on the fringe—it had a solid working door.
It was the office of the wharf master. All legal — and illegal—shipments went through him. Trying to bypass paying the wharf master’s tariff didn’t end well for the smugglers. The wharf master paid his men too well for them to be bought off and turn their heads the other way.
The door opened, and Tobs stepped out. Yep, Tobs. The same Tobs that had Bodie’s kidney.
Marc must have sensed the collective tension because he asked, “Who is that?”
“Tobs,” I said. “He runs the black market and has one of Bodie’s kidneys.
I looked at Bodie. He looked at me. We only had one thought. Get him.
Before we could move, shouts rang out from the main road. Tobs started crossing the road with a cane. He must have taken longer to recover than the rest of us.
Another shout rang out. Beneath our feet, the ground shook, and the enormous herd of camels stampeded toward the settlement and, more alarmingly, Tobs.