Chapter 33
33
“Welcome to Kravax,” Axel said, waving a hand toward the cockpit windows.
I tried to focus on the dark-green planet rotating off the shuttle’s starboard side, but my vision swam, and my temples throbbed. I loathed jumping. Hated it. Would you enjoy being flattened to the width of a single strand of hair, then rebounded so violently to normal size that every single one of your cells heaved? I didn’t think so.
Despite the nausea, the cold sweat beading on my brow, I found the strength to say, “Huh,” while measuring the unimpressive size of the planet between my thumb and first finger. “It’s smaller than I expected.”
“Oh, I assure you, Sunny,” Axel replied with an arrogant smirk. “It’s quite large.”
I rolled my eyes.
Sai shook his head.
And when Tano growled back at Axel, looking— dare I say —jealous? Marisia slammed an overhead storage bin closed so hard something cracked, then strapped herself furiously into her seat to prepare for entry into Kravax’s atmosphere.
After a rough landing that made my teeth clatter, Reya led Sai while Marisia more or less dragged me out of the shuttle. The gravity on Kravax was heavy, at least twice what we simulated on the Ignisar , and Sai and I stumbled through a grueling hike through a dense forest to a small clearing bordered by a towering cliff. And in that small clearing, carved into that towering cliff, they led us into…a cave. An actual cave. I sighed. Some planets just couldn’t help but live up to their stereotypes.
“Sit,” Marisia ordered after shoving me inside the dank, dark, inhospitable space that wasn’t much bigger than the shuttle that had brought us here. The ground was hard and cold where Sai and I huddled together, shivering until Tano lit a fire.
“You’ll be here for a while,” he said, scowling at me in the firelight. “So get comfortable.”
“If I may,” I interjected, lowering my voice. “I’m assuming this is a hostage for ransom arrangement and not some we’re hungry and you look appetizing situation?”
It was almost funny, watching someone as intimidating as he was grumble with such long-suffering annoyance. “Despite what you offworlders believe, we are not cannibals. Behave, and you will make it back to your ship unharmed.” He stood, wiped his hands on his camouflage pants, and left us to warm ourselves by the fire—Sai in his pajamas, me in my silk jumpsuit, both of us bound in mag-cuffs.
Once we were alone, I looked Sai over. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. Or, no, obviously,” he clarified, holding up his cuffed wrists. “But you know what I mean. Are you all right? ”
“I’m better than if I’d decided to wear a dress to the party, so there’s that at least.” I scanned the cave, looking for anything I could use as a weapon. Then abandoned the search when I remembered I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with a weapon, even if I found one. I wasn’t a fighter. I was only good at one thing. And if we stood any chance of getting off this planet in one piece, I needed to play to my strengths.
“What do you think they want with us?” Sai asked.
Pressing my shoulder against his, trying to give him some warmth, I said, “I’m not sure. My best guess is it has something to do with your mother. I think they’re using us to get something from her. And once they get whatever that is, they’ll let us go.”
“Will whatever they want hurt my moms?” Sai asked, his chin wobbling even though he was clearly trying to fight it.
“No, Sai,” I told him, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. “Nobody is going to get hurt.”
Pushing his bare little toes through the dirt, he said, “You’re lying to me. I can tell. But thanks for trying to make me feel better.”
I would have said more, tried harder to soothe him, but boots crunching across the cave floor pulled our heads up.
“Well, how does it feel to be our special guests now?” Axel asked, striding over to the fire, squatting to warm his hands over the flames.
“Your hospitality is unparalleled,” I said flatly. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel scared. It was only that I knew I’d be orders of magnitude more terrified if I hadn’t come, if I was still stuck on the ship wondering where they’d taken Sai, wondering if he was all right. Things, I was certain, his moms were wondering at that precise moment, all thanks to the asshole grinning smugly at me .
Axel scoffed, brushing his thick black bangs off his pale forehead. “Did you know that one of the most difficult things we had to learn in order to convince the worlds that we were a kinder, gentler breed of Kravaxians was sarcasm? Sarcasm is not a valid form of communication on Kravax. We find it pathetic, weak, dishonest. But above all other types of expression, sarcasm sets offworlders most at ease. Why do you think that is?”
“We bore easily?” I suggested.
Keeping his head down, Sai stared at the fire like it was the tether that would keep him from floating off into space. Which may have been accurate. Even with the small fire, it was still too cold in the cave for our climate-controlled sensitivities. Aside from being safe in his arms, at that moment, while my toes throbbed from the cold, I’d never wanted anything so badly as I wanted Freddie’s wool socks.
When Tano shouted some guttural Kravaxian something or other outside, Axel grumbled, “What now?” He stood, pointed a finger at us. “Stay put, you two.”
“Darling”—I raised my cuffed hands as far as I could—“where would we possibly go?”
Once Axel was out of earshot, Sai asked, “Do you think they jumped with us?”
“Who?”
“Morgath and Rax? Maybe Captain Jones? I’m sure they were out there in cloaked shuttles or something.”
I blinked at him. “How did you know that?”
“It makes sense,” he said with a shrug. “They wouldn’t have just let us go. So they probably followed us, right?”
Squinting at the FFKs through the cavemouth, trying to make out their shapes in the darkness, I said, “Isn’t it impossible to follow a ship through a jump if you don’t know where it’s going? ”
“It used to be,” he said. And when I turned to face him, his eyes shone. “But there’s a new thing that makes it possible. Morgath told me.”
“Morgath told you that? When?”
“When we hung out last week.”
“You’ve ‘hung out’ with Morgath?” I asked, looking at him like he’d just told me he used to have a Kuiper worm as a pet.
“Oh yeah, lots of times. Rax too,” he continued while my jaw hinged open. “Anyway, it’s this new tracker thing. Like a giant laser gun. Morgath said if you tag a ship with it, you can follow it through an FTL jump, even if you didn’t know where it was going.”
“How in the stars did you end up talking about faster-than-light travel with one of the heads of security on my ship?”
“He was reading my book with me,” Sai explained like it was the most normal thing in the worlds. “Captain Zorba was trying to catch a jewel thief, but he jumped and got away. And Morgath said that if he’d used that new tracker gun, he could’ve followed the thief through the jump. It was the coolest.”
“Morgath… read to you?”
“Yeah, when he boosted the security around our suite. He took a break to have some lunch. I was reading. He joined me. Is that weird?”
Words failed me, because the image of giant, grumpy Morgath of all beings reading a child’s book to an actual child was indeed extremely weird. The only thing weirder would have been if Rax had done it. But if I’d learned anything in my tenure as the hospitality specialist on an infamous pleasure cruise, it was that every single being possessed untold hidden depths. “Sai,” I said. “Did Morgath, by chance, tell you if he had one of those trackers?”
“No,” he whispered, his shining eyes twinkling with excitement in the firelight. “He showed it to me.”
Later that evening, Sai and I watched the Kravaxians eat some small rabbit-type animal Marisia had shot with a crossbow and sip from steaming cups of tea made from berries and spruce needles. Reya offered us some of the meat, but Sai—a vegetarian—shook his head. I declined as well, in solidarity. But the tea wasn’t too bad.
After dinner, Sai fell asleep with his head on my shoulder, and I pretended to do the same, closing my eyes and leaning against the wall. But I wasn’t sleeping. I was listening.
They spoke in Kravaxian, and after a lifetime spent having my VC translate every known language into Common, words I didn’t understand fascinated me. But I didn’t need to understand what they were saying to see that Tano, Marisia, and—to a lesser extent—Axel presented a united front, while Reya continually tried to push against them. They weren’t arguing, necessarily, but tension mounted in the cave. Eventually, after an hour or two, their conversation faded behind the crackling of the fire, and I’d nearly drifted off to sleep for real, the adrenaline that had propped me up all day giving way to a dense, droning fatigue, when a single word stopped my heart.
Brock .
At first I thought I’d imagined it, some half dream invading reality. But then, there it was again. “Brock,” in Axel’s clipped voice, followed by a hissed warning from Tano that sounded a lot like quiet, fool .
And like one of Freddie’s puzzle pieces locking firmly into place, one of Sai’s toys shifting from an orb into a star, I realized why Tano had looked so familiar. Stars above , it was so obvious now I wanted to scream.
I’d never met him in person, but his broad forehead, wide cheekbones, and chiseled jawline—those I’d seen plenty. Everyone had, considering the vain bastard had them carved into the CAK’s Central Park hedge maze. Tano’s features weren’t identical, but close enough that they had to have been brothers. Cousins at the very least. And even though he’d definitely been wearing makeup in that BLIX brochure to hide his pale face, there was no lingering doubt in my mind that the audacious, outspoken, and duplicitous CEO of LunaCorp, Brock Karlovich, was a Fifth Fucking Kravaxian!
Suddenly, it all made sense. LunaCorp funding initiatives to benefit Kravax. The FFKs learning our systems while “vacationing” with us at the same time as a senator who was about to propose legislation that would penalize corporate monopolies. Sai being abducted to shut Sonia up so that her proposition would never see the light of day. Since nobody would ever think to question who was behind this act—kidnapping for ransom a common enough practice for Kravaxian pirates—LunaCorp and Brock Karlovich would get exactly what they wanted without garnering a single smudge of guilt. Cunning, merciless, and resilient, indeed.
This information also gave me an idea of how long Sai and I would have to spend in this cave before the FFKs either released us or killed us. The senate meeting on Portis was in four days. Best-case scenario, if Sonia and her fellow senators withdrew the proposition, the FFKs would release us, and we’d all go about our lives with a fun story to tell our friends. Worst case—and what I now thought was much more likely, since Karlovich was involved—Sai and I would never leave this cave alive.
Even on the off chance that the FFKs did let us go, who would ever believe us when we tried to convince them that a Kravaxian was at LunaCorp’s helm? It was absurd. I needed that proposition to pass; the entire KU did. There was no way around it. If we wanted to live, if we wanted to keep LunaCorp from destroying what little free commerce remained amongst the stars, if I ever wanted to see Freddie again, hold him again, look into his eyes and tell him how sorry I was that I left him, how I hoped he understood why I did, how much I loved him, because I hadn’t told him enough, not by half, then we needed to escape. And we needed to do it soon.
While my brain’s chaotic whirring eventually slowed, I noticed that an ominous silence had descended over the cave. Shit . Had the FFKs realized I was awake and listening. Were my muscles too tense? Did an eyelid twitch? Had my breath caught?
Do they know?
It wasn’t until the first rattling snore echoed through the cave that I let myself exhale. They weren’t on to me. They weren’t busy planning my untimely demise, at least not right then. They’d simply fallen asleep.
I cracked my lids, finding Axel snoring on his back, his arms crossed over his chest. Reya huddled in a corner, curled in on herself like a snail, her knees pulled up to her chest. And nestled along the cave wall, Tano slept on his side. Also snoring.
Only Marisia was still up, standing guard at the mouth of the cave. With a stiff set to her shoulders and a jaw clenched so tightly it made my teeth hurt, she tapped out an irritated rhythm on her crossbow. All night, she’d seemed annoyed—well, more annoyed than usual. But was her annoyance with us, with the situation, with life in a cave? Or was it with Tano, who, in my professional opinion, appeared to be driving her up the wall? While I wondered if there might be an exploitable crack forming between them, Sai, awake and looking down the top of my jumpsuit, whispered, “What is that?”
Surprised by the turn of events, and not entirely certain how to proceed because was this some kind of teachable moment ? I explained, “Well, Sai, those are called breasts?—”
“Stop. No. Not what I meant. And I know what they’re called,” he said, only mildly ruffled. “I mean what is that ? Your necklace?”
Marisia’s head swiveled our way, and we waited silently, our eyes half-closed, Sai’s head on my shoulder again as we hid behind the crackling flames.
Once she went back to staring resentfully through the cavemouth, I whispered, “Orion’s Tooth,” nodding toward my pendant. “It was a gift from these jerks.”
“I need that.” Sai made a pointed gesture toward his mag-cuffs. “I can use that,”
“You can?” I asked.
“Yeah. These are just another puzzle.”
“Well, that’s good to know. But then what?”
“We run,” he mouthed, pointing at the cavemouth. “Obviously.”
“We can’t just run. We have no idea where to go. We have no food or water. We’ll die out there.”
Giving me a level stare, he said, “They’re going to kill us if we stay here. You know that, right? ”
He was too smart. Too damn smart. “Yes.” I squeezed his finally warm fingers. “I know.”
“But you’re right. We need a plan.”
Slowly, we both looked out at the sleeping FFKs, our gazes lingering on Reya.
“She’s the weak link,” Sai said. “You can get her to break. Tomorrow. We’ll have to make our move tomorrow.”
I frowned down at him. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Sai. But you’re a teeny bit terrifying.”
“I’m a KU senator’s son,” he explained, nestling against my side again, closing his eyes. “Of course I’m terrifying.”
“Is Tig okay?” Reya asked me, her voice a dry rasp. “She didn’t get hurt, did she?”
I peered up at her from where I squatted in the dirt, surrounded by a stand of tall conifers with narrow trunks. I’d asked for one of the FFKs to take me to relieve myself, and when Axel offered his services, I requested Reya because of “female stuff.” Axel had no issues letting Reya take me after that. Sometimes, it was just too easy.
The hollow, dark circles carved under her eyes made me wonder if she’d slept at all last night. And if not, had she heard my conversation with Sai? It didn’t matter. I had her alone. It was now or never.
“I don’t know, Reya. The last I heard before you fragged my VC was that Morgath had found her crying on the floor of the control room.”
Turning away from me, her shoulders rising toward her ears, she said, “I didn’t want this. I never wanted any of this.”
After pulling my jumpsuit back up, I took advantage of the moment to look around, trying to figure out where Sai and I might go if we were somehow able to escape from the well-guarded cave in the middle of the frigid night on this foreign and hostile planet.
It was actually beautiful, wherever we were—a small clearing in the middle of a dense pine forest with snow-covered cliffs spreading out into the distance. Since my shoes and Sai’s bare feet were hardly appropriate for cliff climbing, our only way out would be through the forest. But we needed a direction. We needed intel.
“Reya,” I said, positioning the first chess piece. “What is ‘this’ anyway? I thought you were different. I thought you wanted change for your people.”
Wheeling around, she crossed her arms, digging her fingertips into her skin. “You don’t understand. You couldn’t possibly. Kravax is not like the rest of the KU. Beliefs here are not modern. We are not evolved. We do what our elders say. Always. We don’t have a choice. But”—she paused, her eyes closing—“I really did hope that would change.” She opened her eyes again, clearly fighting to hide the emotion welling behind them.
“Did you know all along?” I asked. “Did you know the plan was always to take the boy?”
Her chin dropped to her chest, her black hair flowing forward to curtain her face. “I thought BLIX was real. I was excited about something for the first time in my life. And then, when I met all of you, when I met Tig, I thought maybe, with her, I could finally be”—she shrugged—“myself. Away from this planet, from these beliefs. But no, I didn’t know. I swear it. Tano told Axel and me an hour before he made his move.”
“And you felt compelled to go along with them because that’s just how things are here.” I wasn’t questioning or judging. I was only validating .
She nodded. “I shouldn’t have. I should have pushed back, told Rax or Morgath or you. Maybe if I had”—she paused, and a single tear rolled down her cheek—“I would have stopped it. I should have been stronger, braver. I failed.”
I should have been stronger . How many times had I said this same thing to myself?
A bird twittered above our heads, and pine needles crunched under my feet as I stepped toward Reya. Placing a hand over her crossed arms, I said, “Tig will understand.”
Her head jerked up, a second tear chasing the first down her cheek. “No, she won’t. She will never forgive me.”
This was my window. I had to open it. I had to try. “She will,” I insisted. “Because she’ll know that you are not your people. She’ll know that you are strong and brave. You are special to her, Reya. And she is special to you. That sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time.” My heart squeezed out its next few beats, Raphe’s words to me, my words to Elanie, Freddie’s worried eyes all flashing through my mind. “It’s precious.”
Glancing around nervously, as if making sure we weren’t being overheard, Reya said, “That sort of thing never happens on Kravax. That kind of love… It’s forbidden.”
I risked giving her arm a squeeze. She let me. Time to attempt a gambit. “Listen to me, Reya. The universe is vast and open, and your place in it is not defined by where you were born, what lies you’ve been told about what is right or wrong, or who you choose to love.”
“But how? How can I find my place? I’m here. I’m stuck here.”
“I’ll tell you how,” I said with a fierce determination. “You are going to fight for what you want. You are going to fight for the type of life you want to live, and for who you want to live it with. And you are going to start by helping me get that boy back to his mothers.”
Tano waited for us at the cave entrance, his stance wide, his arms stiff at his sides. “Where have you been?”
Reya’s head ducked under his intimidating glare.
Mine did not. “You know what they say.” I gave him a wink. “Never rush a woman in the bathroom.”
Those pale Brock Karlovich cheeks of his flushed bright pink. “Get back inside.”
“Yes, sir,” I said obediently, then, glancing at him under my lashes, I gave him a very obvious, very intentional, very suggestive thumbs-up before letting my knuckles brush against his as I stepped past him into the cave.
Looking over my shoulder, catching his gaze dropping to my ass while a crooked, self-satisfied grin spread across his face, I knew that Freddie’s warning about the hand gesture being a Kravaxian come-on had been right on the money.
As if on cue, Marisia grunted, scowled at me, then glowered at Tano.
“What are you doing?” Sai asked when I returned to sit by his side, his brows knitted. “Doesn’t thumbs-up mean sex stuff on Kravax?”
“Sex stuff?” I repeated, shaking my head at him. “How do you know these things?”
“Seriously. What are you doing?”
“My job, darling.” My lips quirked at his puzzled expression. “It’s simple distraction,” I explained. “If Tano is busy thinking about me, and Marisia is busy thinking about him…”
“Then they’ll both be less busy thinking about us. ”
While I nodded down at him, he smiled up at me and said, “Sunny, I think you might be a teeny bit terrifying too.”
We passed the day by telling stories, picking at the tart yellow berries Axel had harvested for us, and—in the brief moments when we were alone in the cave—discussing our escape plan. Sai was worried that Reya wouldn’t go through with the admittedly thin plan we’d made out in the woods. But while Sai knew puzzles, I knew people. Reya would come through for us. I only hoped she wouldn’t get punished because of it.
After sunset, Tano returned to the cave from wherever he’d been all day. Sitting across from Sai and me, he stoked the fire while Marisia, Axel, and Reya left, presumably to hunt for dinner. Poor Sai would be skin and bones if I didn’t get him out of there soon. He couldn’t live on berries alone.
“So, what’s the plan here, Tano?” I asked boldly. In my experience, his type always responded best to directness. “How long are you planning to keep us in this cave?”
His eyes narrowed into slits. “And what makes you think I will tell you anything?”
“No harm in asking. It’s not like we can go anywhere or talk to anyone.” Leaning toward him, maybe far enough for him to just see down the top of my jumpsuit, I said, “Your secrets are safe with us.”
He only grunted. Charming .
Overt flirting not doing the trick, I changed tactics. “Is Marisia your wife?”
He grunted again. “I have taken no wife.”
“Really?” I asked. “Why not? She seems like she’d make a fine enough wife. ”
What I could see—and Tano could not—was that Marisia had returned, and now she stood outside the cave with a sizable dead rodent dangling from one hand, her crossbow from the other, and the wrath of a thousand suns blazing in her eyes.
“She would not make me a fine wife,” he said as the flames picked up, golden light flickering in his eyes. “She has no fire.”
His head turned when Marisia made a strangled, disgusted noise, hurled the rodent at him, and stalked back out into the graying twilight.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “She seems pretty fiery to me.”
Grunting for a third time in as many minutes, Tano moved the rodent to the side of the fire, pushed himself to his feet, and grumbled, “Mind your own business. I will go find the boy more berries.”
Sai and I sat in silence, watching Tano, Axel, and Reya chew on roasted rodents, and Marisia—refusing to eat—chewing on her resentment instead. While she sent Tano scathing glares, I passed him fleeting, furtive glances under my lashes, popping berries into my mouth, taking my sweet time licking my fingertips clean. Kravax might have cornered the market on violence and intimidation, but they had much to learn about interpersonal relationships. And how easily those relationships could be manipulated to sow dissent among the ranks by someone like me.
After dinner, Sai—who must have been both exhausted and starving, yet hadn’t complained once—fell asleep with his head in my lap. Leaning back against the unforgivingly hard rock wall, I pretended to do the same, keeping my eyes mostly closed. I waited for Tano and Marisia to drift off, sleeping on opposite sides of the cave tonight, while I listened for Axel’s inevitable snoring after he passed out by the fire. Eventually, only Reya remained conscious, sitting at the entrance of the cave, taking her turn to keep watch. Just like we’d planned.
Not daring to wait much longer, I ran my fingers over Sai’s soft hair. When he opened his eyes and turned his head to look up at me, I nodded, took a deep breath, and carefully unclasped my Orion’s Tooth necklace. Slipping the tooth into Sai’s hand, I mouthed, “Be careful. Don’t break it.”
Rolling his eyes, he mouthed back, “Yes, Mom.”
The pain attempting to pierce my heart at the term, teasing as it was, would have to wait. The only thing that mattered now was making sure we didn’t die in the next few minutes.
I didn’t know how he did it, but with a press of the tooth’s tip, a tiny jiggle, and a firm twist, the cuffs on my wrists, then my ankles, unlinked. After slipping off my heels, I tried to unlink his, but all I managed to do was break the tooth in half, which—while earning me another eyeroll—at least didn’t wake the other Kravaxians.
They’d never bothered to cuff Sai’s ankles, so even though his hands were still bound, we tiptoed through the cave. Past Axel, still snoring. Between Tano and Marisia, both sleeping with their backs turned to each other, conveniently facing opposite sides of the cave wall.
When we reached Reya’s spot as lookout, she placed a finger to her lips, then drew several landmarks and three arrows in the dirt, reminders of the directions she’d told me to run earlier in the day. Directions that would hopefully lead us to a village where we’d be able to find comms. Not viewChips, but hopefully the low-tech, surface-to-orbit radios Reya said were prevalent in the villages in this region of Kravax.
It was a risk, trusting Reya, running through an unfamiliar forest in the dark, hoping the twins or the captain had been able to follow us through the jump and now orbited above us close enough that we’d be able to contact them. But neither of us thought we’d get a better chance than this one. Ushering Sai through the cavemouth, watching him run to the tree line where he’d wait for me, I turned back.
“Come with us,” I whispered, extending my hand toward Reya.
She shook her head, whispering back, “I can’t.” Sorrow lanced through her expression. “Tell Tig I’m sorry. Please.”
I nodded, squeezed her shoulder, and watched as she shoved a paresis dart into her thigh. Helping to lower her carefully to the ground, I brushed her hair off her cheek, wishing there had been another way. But it had to look like we’d snuck past her. Like we’d stolen a dart and tricked her. It was the only way we could think of to keep her safe.
I ducked out of the cave, and after a single glance up to the clear night sky, making a silent wish on the stars that they were up there—or maybe that they were down here with us already—I put my head down, and I ran for the trees like my life depended on it.