Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Get up,” Amy pleaded, her voice thin and desperate. “Please, Brannik. Please get up, you’re too big, I can’t—”
Because she couldn’t. She got both hands under his shoulder and tugged at him with everything she had and he didn’t move, not an inch.
Three hundred-odd pounds of alien warrior was poured across the cargo floor like a felled tree, and she was a small woman who’d spent four years learning to weigh nothing at all.
Her feet slipped on the deck plates. Her arms shook.
He was down and there was nothing on this ship or in her body strong enough to get him back up.
Then his eyes opened.
Just a slit, silver reflecting the dim cargo bay lighting, and the sight relieved something knotted in her chest and tied it up worse at the same time. Because he was awake, but he looked like a male watching himself sinking from the bottom of a well.
“Leave me,” he said.
“No.”
“Amy.” His jaw worked. The words cost him. “Fly first. Then me.”
“I don’t know how to fly a ship.” Her voice shook and she hated the sound of it. She’d spent four years never letting her voice shake. “I cook, I don’t… I’ve never even seen a—”
“You will.” His hand found her ankle and closed around it, warm and enormous even now, and the touch steadied her the way nothing else could have. “Cockpit. Forward. Go.”
She went.
She left him on the floor because he told her to, and it felt like leaving her own arm behind.
She scrambled up a narrow ladder and into a cramped forward space stuffed with panels and worn seats and a view screen that showed the field around them.
She dropped into the pilot’s chair. It had been shaped for something twice her size, and it threatened to swallow her.
Every surface swam with symbols she couldn’t read and lights she didn’t understand, and outside the ship she could hear the faint wail of the port alarm.
They were coming.
“Talk to me,” she called down, her hands hovering over the console, terrified of touching the wrong thing. “I’m in the pilot’s seat, talk to me.”
His voice came up to her, low and slow, each word like a stone he had to carry there first. “Left hand. Flat panel. Red line. Press it.”
She found the line. She pressed. The console woke under her palms in a wash of amber, and somewhere below her feet something huge and sleeping cleared its throat and began to vibrate.
“Is that the engine?” She almost laughed at the stupidity of the question, but it came out closer to a sob. “Okay. That’s the engine. What now?”
“Struts. Green. Two of them. Slide them up together.”
Two green sliders, side by side, low on the board. She slid them both up. The ship lurched as the landing gear folded up under it, and she yelped and grabbed the edges of the console.
“Good.” His voice came up from the darkness below, fading at the edges, but still there. “Now the wheel in front of you. Pull it towards you. Slowly.”
She tried to move slowly, but her whole body was one long scream to be gone, to be anywhere but the landing field where the alarm was louder now. She could see running shapes at the field’s edge coming closer, coming for this ship—
She pulled the wheel towards her and the ship leapt.
It jumped upwards, the cramped cockpit tilting sickeningly, and her stomach dropped out through the floor.
She wrenched the wheel back the other way and overcorrected, and the landing field spun past the ship in a dizzying circle.
Something in the cargo hold slid and crashed.
Brannik made a deep, involuntary sound of pain, and that was worse than the spinning.
She made herself go still for one half-second and breathe, the way she’d learned to breathe under Pelloq’s counter when the wrong sort of customer came in.
Then she eased the wheel back a hair, and the ship steadied. It wobbled, but then it climbed.
“That’s it,” he called from the floor beneath her, and she could have wept at how gently he spoke.
“I’m going to be sick.”
“Afterwards.”
The ship climbed. The landing field fell away beneath them, then the port, and then the whole grim grey sprawl of the town where she’d made herself into no one for four years.
All of it shrank behind them, disappearing from the view screen.
And then the screen was filled with black, deep and endless and pricked with more stars than she had let herself look at since the night they took her.
She was leaving. She was actually leaving.
A hard tone sounded through the cockpit, and a red glyph pulsed on the board.
“What’s that?” Panic turned her voice thin again. “There’s something red, and it’s flashing—”
“Someone’s looking at us.” A pause. She heard him drag himself towards the ladder, and she wanted to tell him to stop and lie still, and she knew he wouldn’t. “Weapons lock, or a hail. Doesn’t matter. We run.” His breath was ragged, but closer now. “Ahead of you. The ring. Do you see the ring?”
She looked. Far out against the dark, small with distance, floated a vast pale circle of light, as faint as a smoke ring blown across the sky.
“I see it.”
“Jump portal. Take us into it. As fast as she’ll go.”
“And then what?”
“Then we’re gone.” His hand appeared at the top of the ladder, hauling his body behind it. His face followed, grey under the bronze, his silver eyes fixed on her in a terrible effort of will. “Push the wheel forward. All the way. Don’t stop for anything you see.”
She pushed the wheel forward. All the way.
The engine went from a hum to a roar to a scream, and the little hauler leapt forward like something whipped.
The red glyph shrieked and far behind them, she saw two brighter sparks lift off the field and give chase.
She didn’t stop for them. She didn’t stop for the alarms. She aimed the ship at the pale ring growing wider and wider across the whole of the glass, her mouth dry, and her hands white on the wheel.
A woman who cooked and hid in oversized coats flung a stolen ship at a hole in space—
—and the ring swallowed them whole.
The universe folded. There was a sudden wrench, a moment where every part of her body seemed to be in a slightly different place than the rest of it, and then the black outside the view screen wasn’t black any more but streaks of light streaming past on all sides.
The alarms fell silent and the red glyph faded, and the only sound left in the small ship was the deep, even purr of the engine and her own rapid breathing.
She sat there for a long time not moving. Unable to move.
“Brannik,” she whispered finally.
“I’m here.”
She turned in the chair. He’d got himself halfway through the opening and no further. He sat slumped against the frame, one huge arm hooked over a pipe to hold himself up, and he was watching her. His eyes were open, barely, but they were open.
“Are we safe?”
“For now.” Each word sounded as if it took all of his effort. “Nobody follows through a portal blind. They don’t know where we jumped.” His head tipped back against the frame. “You did it.”
“You did it. I just pushed things.”
“You flew.” A corner of that sensual mouth curled up. “First flight. Not bad.”
A laugh tore out of her, high and cracked and edged with tears, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to stop it from turning into hysterics.
Because it was over. Whatever came next, this part was over.
No chains on the wall. No guards in the corridor.
No pot to carry, no makeup to hide behind, and no eyes to slide away from.
For the first time in four years there was no one in the world watching her except the one enormous, bloodied, half-dead male slumped against a ladder, and she didn’t mind him watching at all.
She got up out of the too-big chair on legs that felt like rubber.
The hauler’s forward space had a cramped sanitation unit with a spigot and a scarred metal basin bolted to the wall.
She investigated it because she needed something to do.
When she turned the spigot, cold water gurgled out over her fingers.
She looked down at those fingers and saw the dull grey stain she reapplied every morning and realized she didn’t have to do it anymore.
She didn’t consciously decide to do it, but she cupped the water and pressed it to her face.
The water ran off her chin the wrong color, muddy and false, swirling away down the basin, and she scrubbed again, and again, until the water ran clear.
Her own skin looked back at her from the scratched metal mirror bolted above the basin, pale and soft and hers.
She saw a face she’d deliberately stopped looking at, and it was like seeing a stranger.
She pulled off the outer tunic next, the big shapeless one that covered her head and hung to her knees and turned her into a bundle of cloth.
She dragged it over her head and dropped it on the deck and stood there in the thin shirt beneath it for a long moment.
Then she reached beneath the shirt and unwound the bindings she’d wrapped around herself every morning for four years.
She reached up and unwound the wrap that covered her hair, and worked her fingers into the tight braid, and shook it loose.
Her hair fell down around her shoulders, thick and crimped from the braid, and longer than she remembered because she never really let herself see it. She stood aboard a stolen ship in the middle of nowhere, a woman again for the first time in four years.
She stepped out of the small unit and saw Brannik staring at her.
He’d used whatever last measure of strength he had to lift his head.
His eyes moved over her uncovered face and her loose hair and the shape of a body that had been hidden for years.
She felt every inch of that gaze traveling across her skin, and she went hot and cold at once.
Her arms started to come up to cover herself before she caught them and made them stop.
“Don’t—” She didn’t know how to finish it. Don’t look. Don’t stop looking. “It’s just me. I’m sorry, I’ve been him for so long, I don’t even really—”
“Beautiful,” he said, his voice rough and quiet and absolutely certain, dragged up out of a body that had nothing left. Her heart did a somersault in her chest.
And then his eyes rolled back. His arm slid off the pipe, and that huge body sagged back against the wall and went still, and this time when she said his name he didn’t answer.
She stood alone in the humming cockpit, her hair loose around her bare face, a massive unconscious warrior wedged in the doorway beside her, and a stolen ship carrying them both at impossible speed through a river of light between the stars, headed for a destination she wouldn’t learn until they came out the other side.
The enormity of it pressed down on her, and for a moment the urge to shrink was so strong she started to wrap her arms around herself again.
But then she looked at the silent, battered form of the male who had let her think he couldn’t speak and had turned himself into a weapon for her sake, and the urge passed. Shrinking was for yesterday.
She still couldn’t really move him, but she managed to get him turned enough that he didn’t look like he’d been poured into the hatch.
Getting him anywhere else was impossible, so she made him as comfortable as she could, rolling her abandoned tunic into a pillow for his head.
She cleaned the raw wounds on his other wrist as best she could with another strip torn from the hem of her shirt.
The chains were gone, but the injuries remained.
She tended to him, her hands gentle, as the ship hummed its steady rhythm around them.
In the quiet, she could finally really look at him.
She could look at the long, powerful lines of his body and the thick muscle of his thighs.
She pushed all of his hair back to reveal a face that was all hard angles and a jaw that could have been cut from stone, softened only by the absurdly sensual curve of his lower lip.
He was all raw power, even in unconsciousness, a force of nature that had been contained and was now loose.
She didn’t know how to heal a wounded warrior twice her size and from a completely different species, but she knew the basics of how to care for someone.
She cleaned all of the injuries she could reach.
Then she wet another strip of cloth with water from the sanitation unit and bathed his face.
She sat with him on the floor of a ship she couldn’t fly and she listened to him breathe, and she waited.