7. Althea
ALTHEA
The pirates come out of a debris shadow with their drives dark, which is how I learn the Badlands have predators worse than the people running them.
The first I know of it is the deck slamming up into my knees and the lights going to emergency red.
Then the boarding charge — a sound like the ship taking a punch to the lung — and the corridor I'm in fills with a wind that wants to drag me toward a breach two compartments down, the ship bleeding its air into the void through a hole that's getting wider.
A bulkhead starts to drop to seal the section. I'm on the wrong side of it. I get three running steps before my boots leave the deck and the breach starts to win.
He comes through the dropping bulkhead in the last hand's width of space, and he doesn't grab the railing, he grabs me, and turns his own body into the wall between me and the void.
We hit the deck hard with the bulkhead slamming shut over us and the wind cut off all at once, and for a second there's only his weight and his heartbeat going like a drum against my ear and his voice in my hair saying a word in his own tongue, over and over, that I don't need translated.
Then he's up, and I see the other thing he is.
I've seen violence. I grew up in it. I have never seen anything like Saren in a corridor full of men who came to take his ship.
He doesn't rage. That's the part that stops my breath.
He's economical, almost gentle, and three boarders are down before the fourth understands the math has changed, and he moves through them like weather moves through a market, and when it's over he's standing in the wreck of them not even breathing hard, and his crimson eyes find me where I'm pressed to the wall, and for one bad second I can see exactly what the galaxy was afraid of.
Then it's gone, folded back behind the careful captain, and he's bleeding from a gash along his ribs and pretending he isn't.
"Sit down," I tell him, in the medical alcove, with a suture kit I've stolen from Elsyn's stores. "You're dripping on your own deck. It's undignified."
"I have had worse."
"That's not the flex you think it is." I get my hands on the wound, and he goes still under them, every muscle locked, and I work fast because the alternative is thinking about how warm his skin is and how the heat answers mine. "Hold still or I'll make it crooked on purpose."
He holds still. After a while, in a voice with all the captain stripped out of it, he says, "When the bulkhead dropped. I thought you were on the other side of it." A pause. "I thought you were gone."
I don't look up from the suture. If I look up I'll have to deal with my own face. "You came back for cargo," I say. "Sentimental, for a monster."
"You are not cargo." He says it quietly, like a fact he's only just allowed himself. "I have not decided what you are. But you are not that."
I tie off the last suture and make myself let go of him, and I sit back, and I understand with a sinking certainty that I have started to care about the captain of a dying ship far past anything that's going to end well for me.