Chapter 12
Delilah woke up cold, with metal under her cheek and a hum in her teeth.
She blinked. She knew that hum, knew the way it got right into your bones until you barely felt it anymore, but at the same time it was somehow always on the edge of hearing. She was on a ship.
She sat up too fast, and the room tilted. Wincing, she held a hand to her head as she looked around. Grey metal walls, grey bunk, a light strip turned all the way down until she could barely see. There was no window or door.
She frowned. No door? That couldn’t be right, surely? How the hell had she gotten in here if there was no door?
Her gaze traced the walls, trying to work out where the best place would be for the door, if it existed.
Perhaps this was more alien technology she had no idea existed, and they’d teleported her in here or something?
She frowned as her gaze snapped on something opposite and she squinted, trying to bring it more into focus.
A seam, almost flush with the wall, like the door was pretending it didn’t exist.
She leaned back against the wall behind her and rubbed at her face. The last thing she remembered was the dark… and hands coming out of it. Hard hands over her mouth. Then nothing.
“Okay.” Her voice sounded small in the little room, so she tried again, louder. “This is fine. Absolutely fine. Just another little road trip.”
It was very much not fine, but she wasn’t about to put those words out there into the galaxy.
She looked down. She was still in the gown and still had her sneakers on, which was something… say what you liked about being kidnapped by aliens, at least she’d been kidnapped in sensible shoes so she could run for it if she had to.
There was a band of grey metal around her wrist that hadn’t been there before, snug as a hospital bracelet. She poked at it. It wouldn’t turn and wouldn’t slide off… and when she picked at the seam a little green light blinked at her.
She got up and walked the perimeter of the walls, counting her steps.
That was what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it?
The trouble was, she had no idea what to do with the number of her steps once she had them.
So she investigated the wall seam. It was just a shadow on the wall, not even enough for her to get her fingernails into.
Pushing on it didn’t do anything either.
She banged on it in frustration. “Hello? Hi. Any chance of any room service?”
There was no reply. She put her ear to the metal and got more nothing. “Hey! Look, there’s been a mix-up. I was at the medical conference?” She banged again, harder, then winced. “This is a really weird way to run a conference, by the way! One star! Would not be abducted again!”
Silence met her ears. There wasn’t even a footstep. She’d spent her whole life being able to talk her way past bouncers and landlords and Harper’s disappointed face, and now here she was, doing her best material for a damn wall.
She sat back down before her knees could give way under her.
She didn’t hear Rivaan arrive. One wall just changed, grey fading to clear like someone wiping fog off a mirror, and there he was on the other side with a data device, looking exactly like he had at the conference: neat robes, tidy hair, and a smarmy, self-important expression.
He looked at the screen rather than at her.
“Elevated cortisol,” he said. “Understandable. It will settle.”
“Where am I?” She was up and at the clear wall before she’d finished the question. “What is this? You can’t just take people like this! There are laws. Kellat is Lead Healer of an entire station, and when he finds out—“
“Your neural readings are stable.” He tapped on his screen, his lips pursing. “Even sedated, the pathways held. Remarkable.”
She slapped her palm against the wall between them. He didn’t even flinch as he carried on making notes.
“Hey. Look at me. What do you want with me?”
He lifted his head, and she wished he hadn’t. There was nothing in his eyes to argue with. No anger, no gloating, nothing. He looked at her the way she’d once looked at a secondhand fridge.
He lowered the screen. “You will be fed shortly. The environment is within human tolerance.”
“Kellat will come,” she hissed. “He’ll come, and when he does—“
“No one is coming, Miss Sawyer.” His voice didn’t change at all. “The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be.”
The wall went grey again, leaving her standing there with her palm still on it, and the hum of the ship came back to fill up the quiet.
She leaned against the wall. No one was coming.
Harper hadn’t answered her message. Kellat had called her petty and turned back to the warlady, and the last thing Delilah had done as a free woman was flounce off through the wrong door like the child they all thought she was. Nobody even knew which door.
Her eyes burned, and she let them, because there was nobody here to smile for. It didn’t last long. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and sniffed hard. Crying had never gotten her out of anything. All it did was leave her cheeks cold where the tears had been.
Think. There had to be something she could use… some way out of this.
But there wasn’t. Four walls, a bunk, and a seam that wasn’t a door. She checked it all again anyway, slower, and ended up right back where she’d started, knees pulled up under her skirts.
That was when she felt it.
Warmth. Faint, small, tucked in behind her breastbone like a hand pressed to the other side of a wall. It didn’t hurt. It just sat there, steady, like something a long way away was reaching for her and couldn’t quite make it.
She went very still and waited for it to turn into a heart attack, or a panic attack… or whatever that tag on her wrist was really for.
Wishful thinking, she decided. It was just her brain throwing her a bone. She’d read about that somewhere, hostages inventing rescuers, lost hikers hearing voices. The mind was kind like that when there was no hope left.
Lying down on the bunk, pulled her knees up and watched the light strip dim to whatever counted as night out here.
The warmth stayed, but she didn’t let herself believe in it.
The darkness under the bunk was cool and steady. It pressed its chassis flat against the deck plating and let the cabin’s silence settle over its sensors.
There was a hollow place in its systems, a link that had torn loose when the pilot fell.
It registered as a low-level, constant error it had stopped trying to resolve.
But now there was a new link, a brighter, lighter connection that didn’t match any of the designations in its protocols.
It ran through them again, teasing at the edge of the problem.
It was a warm signature… one that matched the female who talked to it and rolled the ball for it to chase. It ran alongside the absence of the first link. That one was gone, so it settled its attention on the warm link with a contented chirp.
But hours later, something changed. It came back online as the new link stretched thin. A hard spike came down it, heat and pressure and a jagged pulse. It knew that pulse, matching it to the feelings of its pilot, the one who was gone now.
That pulse was emotion. It was terror. Not its own. Hers. The female was far away, and the signal felt frayed and wrong. It skittered upright, its processes alert and on edge.
It surged out from under the bunk. Six legs clattered on the polished floor as it struck the bunk frame, recoiled, and circled. The need to move overrode three safety protocols in sequence. Find the source. It needed to find the female. Find the source.
It threw itself at the cabin door. The door was sealed metal with no handle its manipulators could grip and no gap it could pass through.
It pressed its sensor array to the seam and pinged, rapid-fire, request after request, but the door didn’t respond.
Then it tried slamming itself against the door again and again, but all it managed to do was rattle its plating.
The door was still closed.
Words were how the female opened things.
It had watched her. She stood in front of doors and terminals and asked, and kept asking, circling a system’s logic until it gave way.
But it had no words. It had only pings and protocols, and the terror in the link pulled at it like a directive it could not execute.
The panic cycled, high-frequency, and it whined as the overload nearly caused a system crash.
A heavy vibration came through the deck, warning it and not a moment too soon. It retreated into the dark under the bunk, pressing its belly to the deck.
It had watched the female move when she did not want to be found. She held her breath and timed her steps to the moments when the crew looked away. She made herself small and quiet. Patient.
So it copied her. Shutting down every non-essential system, it dimmed its optics and dropped its hum below the engine noise. Became nothing more than a piece of discarded hardware in the shadows. And it waited.
The door slid open. It moved backward further into the shadows as two beings entered.
The first was tall and male, a being that it knew…
the healer. The second was warmer and heavier.
Its threat assessment protocols spiked. Vorrtan.
It had files on them in its memory. Warnings flashed.
It could not engage a vorrtan in its current format.
The male and the vorrtan spoke to each other in low voices. It didn’t pay attention to what they said, listening as boots crossed the floor and fabric shifted. They didn’t look under the bunk, didn’t see it.
They took something from the linked-female’s bag, and then they turned back toward the door.
It moved as soon as their backs were turned. Coming out of the shadows low and fast, it slipped through the narrowing gap of the door a fraction of a second before the seal engaged.
The corridor beyond was long and bright. It stood there for a second, sensors sweeping as it triangulated. Then it locked onto the flickering link.
The linked-female was out there.
So it ran.