Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There you are.
The words reached Brannik through the low stone corridor, and every muscle in his body turned to stone.
He couldn’t see the mouth that said them.
He could only see the small slice of corridor the doorway allowed, the far wall streaked with damp and Amy’s small huddled shape a few paces down it, gone still the way prey goes still.
But he saw the shadow fall across her, and knew the shape of that shadow. Krebb.
Then the shadow moved and a hand the size of a shovel came down on the back of Amy’s neck and hauled her up, and the empty pot she’d carried clattered off the stone and rolled, ringing, out of sight.
He didn’t move. Not yet.
He’d spent days not moving. He’d spent days letting them believe the drug still fogged his thoughts, and the chains were the reason he sat quietly against the wall and not the choice he’d made.
He had counted the pins in the wrist-locks with the flat of his thumb while she talked to him.
He had felt where the ring-bolt sat loose in its socket, and worked it free using his own weight, night after night, slowly enough that no guard would ever mark it.
He had a plan. The plan involved the priest, and darkness, and no witnesses, and Amy already gone and safe before the first male died.
The plan died the instant he saw her feet leave the floor.
“Let me go,” she demanded, and it wasn’t the whisper she wore like armor. The voice was loud and clear and hers. “Let go of me—”
“Careful now. You’re worth more without bruises.” Krebb sounded amused as two more sets of boots crowded into the corridor behind him. “The priest wants you clean and calm. So be a good—”
She wasn’t calm. She wasn’t good. She twisted like a caught feline, drove her heel against a shin, raked her nails down a face, and threw her whole small weight against the grip that held her.
It went against the quiet careful disguise he’d watched her wield, the shrinking, the making-herself-invisible.
This time she wasn’t disappearing. She was fighting.
For the first time since he’d known her she refused to vanish, and it was the most beautiful and the most terrible thing he had ever seen.
“Hold her—”
“She scratches—”
“Then hit her, you—”
A hand cracked across her face.
The flat, wet sound of it sliced through him and everything in his head went white and simple.
He came off the wall. There was no thought left in him, only the cold clean geometry of leverage.
He set his heels, dropped his weight, and pulled, and the ring-bolt he’d worked loose over the long, patient nights tore out of the socket with a spray of stone dust and a shriek of metal that filled the corridor.
The chain came with it, live and heavy in his fist. The wrist-locks he snapped the way a male snaps kindling, the pins he’d counted giving way all at once, and then he was upright and free, and the chain hung from his ruined restraints like a war-flail.
The nearest guard turned. He barely had time to open his mouth before Brannik hit him with the loose chain and the male’s jaw came off its hinges and he folded sideways into the wall and did not get up.
“Get him!” Krebb bellowed. “Weapons—”
There was no room in the narrow corridor for multiple attackers, and that was the last mistake Krebb’s males would make on Brannik’s account.
They came at him in ones and twos because the stone forced them to, and in ones and twos they went down.
He took the second one by the throat and drove his horns into the bridge of his nose and let him drop.
The third had a stun-baton half-raised. Brannik broke his arm at the elbow, took the baton, and drove it under the male’s chin so hard he lifted off his feet.
It was fast. It was not fair. His father’s people did not train warriors to fight fair. They trained them to end things, and he ended things. The corridor filled with the copper stink of blood and the high whine of a stunner discharging into the ceiling and a male sobbing over his own arm.
Krebb still had Amy. He’d put her in front of him, one thick hand fisted in her tunic as he backed towards the yard, his small dark eyes wide with fright.
“Stop,” Krebb said. “Stop or I—”
He didn’t stop. He crossed the space between them in two strides.
Krebb tried to swing Amy up as a shield and Brannik simply grabbed the wrist holding her and bent it the wrong way until Krebb screamed and his fingers sprang open and released her.
As soon as she was free, Brannik put his other hand flat against the other male’s chest and shoved.
Krebb flew off his feet, off the ground entirely, and hit the wall hard enough to loosen dust from the ceiling, then slid down it, and stayed down.
Amy stood in the middle of the chaos, one cheek scarlet, breathing hard, staring up at him with her eyes wide and dark.
He held out his hand. For a heartbeat she didn’t move, and he understood.
She was seeing what he truly was, seeing the blood on him and the males on the floor and the side he’d kept leashed for her sake, now off the leash entirely.
He braced himself, because if she flinched from him now he would deserve it and he would still not let them have her.
She took his hand. Her small fingers closed around two of his and gripped hard, and something in him that had been roaring and breaking since he’d seen Krebb grab her slowly settled.
“We go,” he said, and started moving, pulling her with him towards the yard.
He expected her to stumble and lag behind, caught by the sheer speed of what was happening. He should have known better. She kept up, her head up, her face set, her small body packed with a stubborn resilience that he was only just beginning to understand.
The courtyard erupted as they cleared the corridor.
Alarms wailed, a high, thin shriek that cut through every other noise.
Males boiled out of the adjacent buildings, and the guard at the main gate went for the alarm panel and the weapon on his belt at the same moment.
Brannik saw it all in a single, clear glance.
“Run,” he said to her, pointing at an unattended back gate in the rear wall of the compound. “I’ll meet you there.”
He let go of her hand. Then he turned, and he met the charge.
He put himself between Amy and every weapon in the yard, and he became the wall.
The chain on his arm became a living thing, a whistling arc of brutal efficiency that cleared a space around him.
A stun-baton discharged against his shoulder and the current buzzed through him, hot and sour, and he grunted and kept moving.
A dart grazed his neck, not penetrating enough to bring him down, but enough to slow him. He had to get her out of there. Now.
He had just reached her side when he saw Thressk.
Across the yard, unhurried even now, the dark Grorn uniform cut a neat line through the chaos, moving towards the far arch and the ground-car that waited beyond it.
Leaving. Stepping neatly clear of the disorder the way a male lifts the hem of his robe over spilled wine.
The priest who knew where the Aurelians were.
The priest who might hold, in that flat cold head, every answer Brannik had bled and searched and starved for years to find.
His mother. The reason for all of it. Twenty paces off, alone, his back half-turned, walking slowly away.
Twenty paces. He could cross it. Even now, even torn open, even with the drug dragging at his system, he could cross twenty paces and take that grey throat in his hand and have his answers or a corpse.
Amy’s fingers closed around his. She wasn’t watching Thressk. She was watching the narrow gate and the maze of streets beyond it, and she was shaking against his side.
He looked at the priest. He looked down at Amy.
There was no choice. He’d told himself for weeks there would be a choice and now the moment came and there was nothing to choose, because a choice needed a male to want two things, and there was only ever going to be one.
He turned his back on the priest and every answer he owned, and he ran towards the gate, pulling Amy with him.
“We need to get to the spaceport,” he told her as soon as they were through, blocking the gate behind them by the simple expedient of heaving a discarded loading skid against it.
“You have a ship?” She was panting, her short legs racing to keep up with his stride, but her eyes were bright and clear and full of something that wasn’t fear.
“No,” he said. “But we will.”
He ran, not with the mindless speed of a hunted beast, but with the calculated rhythm of a warrior clearing ground.
He pulled her along with him, her small hand tucked into his, and he listened.
The shouts behind them were already organizing.
The port was a city of a million hiding places, but it was also a city of a million eyes, and Krebb’s males would not stay confused for long.
They plunged into the winding alleys that ran behind the merchant stalls, the air thick with the stink of refuse and frying meat.
The narrow passages, clogged with carts and crates, forced a brutal obstacle course, but he didn’t slow down.
He scanned every shadow, every rooftop, every flickering sign.
She stayed with him, her breath ragged but her footing sure, her gaze sweeping their surroundings as well.
“This way—” She tugged his hand left where he’d have gone right, and he followed her directions.
She knew the city the way he knew a ship’s guts, from behind the scenes, and she pulled him off a wide street into a gap between two storehouses barely wide enough for his shoulders, and then down a stinking drain-alley.
She went over a low wall like water and he went over it like a landslide, and the shouting fell away behind them.
“We have to get off world.” His voice came out ragged.
The white simplicity of the fight was draining out of him now and what it left behind was worse—the paralytic drug slithering through his system, his torn wrists screaming, a deep grey heaviness pouring into his legs like wet sand.
He shoved it down. Later. He could fall down as much as he liked later. “Show me the field.”
She showed him. Down a set of service stairs slick with runoff, along a gantry behind the fuel racks where no honest male walked, and out at last onto the raised lip of the landing field.
It opened out before them—flat and open, with a scatter of hulls squatting on their struts and the smell of scorched earth and heavy fuel thick in the throat.
“There.” He gripped her shoulder and pointed her towards his choice. A small blunt cargo hauler sat off at the field’s edge, ramp up, and he would have laughed if he had breath because it carried the crude fanged mark that was Krebb’s brand. “That one. It’s Krebb’s. He’ll have kept it fueled.”
“Won’t it be locked?”
“Yes.”
He crossed the last stretch of open field with her tucked against his side, the fading sunlight making their shadows huge on the ground.
Every stride was harder than the one before it, his heartbeat growing loud and irregular in his ears.
At the ramp he dropped to one knee in front of the lock-panel and pried the casing off with his claws and studied it.
For a terrible swimming moment the wires doubled and slid and would not hold still.
“Brannik.” She grabbed his arm. “I think they’re here. I hear—”
“Quiet.” He blinked hard, and the world snapped back into focus.
He laid two fingers over the exposed wires and traced the connections, looking for the override.
He’d done this on a dozen ships over the years, coaxing failing locks and stubborn systems into giving him what he needed.
Machines made more sense beneath his hands than they ever did when someone tried to explain them.
His fingertips settled over two contact points. He couldn’t have said exactly why those two rather than the others. They simply felt right. He bridged them with one claw, and something inside the panel clicked. The ramp cracked, hissed, and began to lower.
“You did it—” She was already climbing onto it before it finished dropping, hauling at his arm. “Come on, get up.”
He got up. He got them both up the ramp and into the dim cargo hold of the hauler. He slapped the control that raised the ramp and sealed it behind them. The lock reset with a solid heavy thunk that shut the port and Krebb and the priest and any possible answers outside.
And then his legs, which had carried him through the fight and the town and the field on nothing but will, suddenly stopped belonging to him.
The floor came up. He got a hand out before he hit metal, and the grey wet sand that had been rising in him all this while closed over his head at last. The last thing he knew was her voice cracking above him and her small hands fisting on his shoulder, far too small to hold his weight and trying anyway.
“No! Not now, Brannik… Brannik!”