Chapter 36
- Nora -
I lose track of the days because there's nothing to measure them against. There's no window, and no clock, only the slow cycling of a dim overhead light from grey to greyer and back again, which might mean a day has passed or might mean nothing at all.
They separated us within minutes of the capture.
I fought that too, uselessly, until the same restraint field that took my legs from under me in the corridor took my voice as well, and I watched them carry Sophia away down a corridor in the opposite direction, her head turned back toward me the whole time, until a wall closed between us and there was nothing left to see.
My cell is small. It has a metal floor, metal walls, and a single transparent door that fogs at the edges but never quite enough to give me privacy from whatever's on the other side of it.
There's no bed, only a shelf of the same cold material, and a drain in the floor I try very hard not to think about.
Lucius is in the corner where they dropped him, on his side, his casing scorched along one edge, his single working light dark unless I speak to him directly and quietly, which I've learned to do only when I'm sure no guard is close.
"Are you there?" I whisper, for what feels like the hundredth time.
"I am, Captain," he says, just at the edge of my hearing.
"They think you're scrap."
"I am encouraging that belief," he says, and even damaged, even reduced to a whisper of static and effort, there's something almost wry in it.
"It seemed the more useful impression to give.
A broken drone gets thrown in a corner and ignored.
A functional one might get studied, or destroyed. I would prefer this corner."
"Can you get us out?"
"Not like this. My mobility systems took the worst of the damage. I can still think. I can still translate, when they don't realize I'm listening. But I can't fly properly, and I can't fight."
"You got the cell door open," I tell him. "You got us this far. That's not nothing."
"From in here, that feels like very little."
I don't have an answer for that, so I don't try to find one. I just sit with my back against the cold wall, as close to his corner as the cell allows.
Time passes in a rhythm I learn without wanting to.
A guard comes twice in each cycle with something that might generously be called food.
Twice more, at intervals I can't predict, something scans the cell from outside.
There's a soft chime and a sweep of blue light that makes my skin crawl, but nothing ever seems to come of it.
I hear other captives sometimes, through the walls. It's just sound, muffled and various, some of it human enough to recognize as crying and some of it nothing I can place at all.
I can't help but wonder how many human women are here. Likely just Sophia and me. I don't know about anyone else who's missing in space. But of course, a lot of what Space Force does is secret, and it's not like they have to tell me.
I think about Krix'vorr more than I let myself admit even to Lucius.
I think about the flower on the mattress, and whether he found it right away or hours later, and whether he's furious or grieving or already, by now, standing in some vast chamber accepting a title that will make him someone I wouldn't recognize.
I don't let myself think about it for long. It doesn't help, and I need everything I have for what's in front of me.
I think about Sophia constantly, and about whether she's still in one piece thirty feet or three decks or half a station away from me, and that thought I can't put down at all.
Or, if her auction happened, she may be sold by now, and half a galaxy away.
Then, on what Lucius tells me is the fourth day, everything changes at once.
It starts with noise, boots and clattering and the higher mechanical whine of things being moved and prepared, filtering through the walls from every direction.
My cell's overhead light changes to a color I haven't seen before, a thin sickly white, and a moment later the transparent door hisses and slides back for the first time since I was put in here.
Two guards come in. Restraint field already active before I can so much as stand.
"Lucius," I breathe, the last thing I manage before my legs go rigid under me.
"I'm listening," he says, so quietly I almost miss it. "Hold on to me. Stay conscious. Stay watching. I don't think they can hear me when I speak like this. Catch me."
As we leave the cell, the drone buzzes towards me with a nasty screech and hits me right in the chest. I just manage to hold on to him with nearly powerless fingers.
They half-carry, half-drag me down a corridor I don't recognize, past cell after cell, some empty, some not, until we reach a wide, cold room I recognize immediately and with a lurch of pure animal terror.
It's the same room I saw from the observation gallery, with tables and restraints and instruments laid out with careful, unfeeling precision.
Sophia is already there.
They've put her on one of the tables, upright, restrained at the wrists and ankles, and for one terrible second I think I'm too late for whatever this is. Then her gaze finds mine across the room, wide and glassy with fear. But alert, unmistakably alive, unmistakably here.
Damn it.
"Nora," she says, and her voice cracks.
"I'm here," I say, though I don't know what good it does either of us. "I'm here, I'm not leaving."
A guard's hand closes on my shoulder and forces me down onto the second table, and the restraints close around my wrists before I can even think to fight them, cold and hard.
Lucius drops to the floor.
A new figure enters. He's taller than the guards and wearing a dark robe.
He moves with the unhurried confidence of someone who has done this many times before.
He carries a flat instrument, and behind it, mounted somewhere I can't see, a small mechanical voice begins to speak in a language I don't know at all.
A moment later Lucius's voice reaches me, thin and strained, translating in a broken whisper only I can hear.
"They're discussing... specifications," he says.
"Buyer preferences. The auction was postponed, it seems. Because now they have two of you.
'A matched pair', they say. Something about…
Captain, I'm sorry, something about proportions.
Modifications to increase something. I don't have a clean translation, but it concerns your alien listed preferences, and your friend's. "
"What kind of modifications?" I manage.
I can sense him not wanting to answer. "Physical. Permanent. I believe they intend to begin with your friend."
Across the room, the robed figure sets its instrument down on a tray beside Sophia with a small, precise click, and reaches for something else.
"No," I say, and I'm fighting the restraints now with everything I have left, uselessly, my wrists already raw. "No, don't fucking touch her—"
"Nora, don't," Sophia says, and somehow, impossibly, her voice is steadier than mine. "Don't waste yourself on it. Save it."
"For what?" The word comes out of me half a sob.
Two squat robots enter and lift Sophia's table with her on it.
"I don't know," she admits. "But not this. Remember who you are, Captain Ellis. Semper Supra!"
The robots roll her out.
“Always above,” I repeat the Space Force motto. And it does give me a new mental strength.
We can do this. Whatever it is.
The door closes behind the helpless Sophia and the robots.
“Changed their minds,” Lucius hisses. “They'll start with you.”
A spear of ice shoots through me. “Shit.”
The horrific Gzet butcher lifts the instrument, and behind it the mechanical voice recites something clinical and unhurried, and Lucius's whisper translates a string of measurements into my ear that I can't make myself understand.
The room seems to narrow down to nothing but the clinical click of instruments and the sound of my own breathing, too fast, too shallow, filling the silence where Sophia was.
Then the far wall of the room explodes inward.
It stuns me. The sound alone is enormous, a shriek of tearing alloy and a wave of pressure that rocks every table in the room.
Through the settling dust and the sudden shrieking of alarms, something vast and dark and impossibly familiar comes through the gap where the wall used to be, moving faster than anything that size has any right to move, already scattering guards and drones like a storm scatters leaves.
I spot beating, translucent wings, a huge chest carapace where the colors change like a kaleidoscope. There's a roar of fury, straight from the depths of an ancient, primal rage.
Something melts in me. "Krix'vorr," I rasp, and I don't believe it even as I say it.