Leviathan (Leviathans #2)

Chapter 1

ONE

MARIA

One tear, that’s all it would take for them to realize I’d gotten out.

If they realized I’d gotten out, then they would realize I’d been getting out for weeks now.

If they realized I’d been getting out for weeks, they might realize I was the one who started the fire in the supply room.

My fingers strained to stretch the rubbery membrane that covered the exit to the ventilation shaft, prying it open enough to get a good view, but not enough that it couldn’t bounce back, hiding evidence of my spying.

During the night cycles, this place was a ghost town, but now, in the dead center of the day shift, the frantic rush of guards and scientists had suddenly stopped, leaving the security room empty and unguarded, I hoped.

All I needed was to see the security screens and know where the aliens had clustered, so I could get to the airlock in time.

Except, it wasn’t enough.

I couldn’t see what I needed to see to escape.

I had to risk it.

I gritted my teeth and pulled harder.

The material tore, the soft sound of the rip exhaling and rippling like fleshy lips blowing out air. It didn’t matter if I left evidence, because this was my one chance to get off this hellhole floating somewhere in outer space.

I froze, listening for any reaction.

A heavy silence pressed against my eardrums, punctuated only by the frantic hammering of my heart.

I peered out. On the monitor across the room, I could see my cell.

The pathetic tent I’d rigged from a thin blanket and table corner still held my shape, a poor disguise for my crawl through the ventilation shaft hidden behind the table.

At least, I thought it was poor, but it was enough to fool these aliens.

That or they just didn’t care enough to pay attention to what I was doing when they weren’t prodding me.

After a few more moments it became clear. No one was in the security room.

Every last one of them had gone to deal with the docking ship, a situation that had sent the whole station into a flurry, or at least the portion of it I could access through the ventilation shafts. If there were more space stations beyond the research labs, they were on a different airflow system.

This small research space station hadn't had any other ships arrive in the months I'd been here.

I wasn't sure if it was two or three. I had no way to translate time into months except when the lights were out, and these aliens had a shorter sleep cycle and a longer wake cycle than mine.

I marked the night cycles on the wall with one of the things I had stolen that I kept under my bed table like a packrat.

No one searched my room. I didn't give them a reason to, and had put on the appearance of a compliant little test subject while I spent my nights searching for an escape.

The room itself suggested that imprisoning people wasn’t something they did often. The bed was little more than a glorified coffee table, and the ventilation shaft was large enough that I could probably squeeze through it if I was willing to collect a few bruises along the way.

After a few months here, bruises were the lease of my worries.

I could see the escort moving on the monitors, following along with the small robotic drone that carried the large cargo container of supplies that dwarfed them all, a strange juxtaposition of size and strength. They were so nervous about it being on board they were all there.

I’d overheard them talking.

They wouldn’t have let this particular supplyship anywhere near the station if they didn’t have any other choice. A choice I took away from them the moment I set fire to the supply room.

My neck itched as my eyes fixed on the small box sitting on top of the empty security desk.

I’d heard them talking about that too.

They were all escorting the drone because they were certain that it was going to try to hack the station. That type of ship was known for electronic espionage, so they had taken all of the research data off their network and stored it in a device locked in this security room.

That data belonged to me.

Any information formed off of the contributions of people who didn’t consent to it, belonged to those people. It was my body they were studying, that meant their findings, their research, it was mine.

I glanced at the monitors, the group was almost to the supply room.

I didn't have much time to get this done.

I shoved a finger under the tight collar that circled around my neck and scratched the rash that had become my constant companion, taking one long, deep breath to settle my nerves.

I lifted the most useful tool I'd stolen so far to the edge of the vent and pressed the button.

The edge of the vent made a clicking sound, and with a push, the whole thing swung out into the room, allowing me access without further damaging the membrane.

I shimmied out, using my elbows to drag myself forward while my toes inched along to help.

I'd gotten pretty good at crawling on my elbows and toes.

I rushed over to the desk, eyeing the array of controls I didn't know how to use. For a moment, I considered just mashing all the buttons to see what kind of mayhem it would cause. It was the same urge that had caused me to set fire to the store room. That and I’d seen Evangelia playing with an alien lighter, leaving it out where it was easy for me to steal.

I'd managed to keep myself off camera when I set the fire, but the destruction cut my food rations to a quarter of what I had before, as the entire station starved while they called for help.

It meant the arrival of a supply ship that scared them.

I looked at the screen’s magnified image of the ship. It was massive. Even at this distance, its spherical bulk swallowed a patch of stars, carving a dark absence into the glittering backdrop of space.

Its surface was black, not the flat black of painted metal, but something deeper.

Light slid across it and vanished, leaving only faint ripples of reflected starlight to reveal the curve of its hull.

Without the glowing targeting outline projected by the display, I doubted I would have been able to track its shape at all.

It blended almost perfectly with the surrounding void, as if it were a black hole that pulled in the darkness between the stars.

They were so scared of that giant chocolate bonbon of a ship that they had taken the entirety of research data for this station and packed it into the cube on the table. They wiped all of it from the system. It was now impossible to hack in and download it.

But it could be stolen.

If that ship was planning to steal it anyway, then it was a bartering chip.

Plus it belonged to me.

I picked up the cube and wrinkled my nose as my skin stuck to it for a moment. Something green coated one side, a thin smear that looked almost organic. It felt slightly tacky against my fingertips, tugging at my skin like half dried glue as I shifted my grip.

I waited for pain.

Nothing happened.

No burning or itching, no discoloration on my skin. As far as I could tell, the mysterious green goo was merely unpleasant rather than dangerous.

The door behind me slid open.

I turned, lifting the cube up over my head.

"I'll smash it!" I snarled.

Evangelia held out a small jar, a light green glow to it that matched the tacky substance already coating the cube.

"This is the only way you survive," she said, her voice hard, the bright light from the corridor accenting her frame like the halo of a sun peaking out from behind the dark circle of an eclipse.

“You think you can get out of here if I feel like stopping you? I can snap your bones without even thinking about it.”

My leg twinged, the memory of a pain healed over. The medical technology was better than anything on Earth, but it couldn’t take away those moments of fear and suffering.

It couldn’t take away the memory of her face turning into a blank mask of utter boredom as I screamed on the ground, the sharp stab of my femur cutting through my skin.

When I first met her, I was so relieved to not be alone, to have another human being with me. Being abducted was bad enough, but having to face the reality of cruel alien life seemed somehow easier with another human heart to lean on.

But it didn't take long to find out that Evangelia didn't have a heart.

She might look like a human, but that was by design, not birth.

I stretched my arms up higher.

"Lo hago!" I snarled with all the fear of the wild beast I had been delegated to be. "I promise you I will break it into a million pieces! "

"That thing would survive atmospheric re-entry on any known habitable planet," Evangelia said, her lips twitching slightly with an aborted smile before settling into the blank, deadpan expression that was natural to her when she wasn't performing emotions to attempt to manipulate me.

I'd seen her do the same performance for the scientists, but it never seemed to reduce their fear and apprehension when speaking to her.

The scientists who tormented me were afraid of her, and it only got worse when she smiled and pretended to joke around with them.

"If you need to lob it at the floor to satiate your primitive needs, then do it; it won't damage it.

Neither will your pathetic little tantrum save your life," she continued.

"What is going to happen is I’m going to pour this on the cube, and you can take it with you and continue on your merry little way to escape this station. "

I lowered the cube, clutching it to my chest.

"Why?" I demanded as I inched back toward the ventilation shaft, even though I knew I couldn't crawl into it faster than she could close the distance.

That facsimile of a woman would rather lift me up off the floor by my ankle then crouch down to inspect a broken bone; she wasn't going to have any trouble dragging me out of the shaft if I tried to flee.

"Why would you let me escape? Aren’t you the one who sold me to this lab? "