Chapter 8 #3
My suit creaks when I shift. He doesn’t hear it; the Bloodseeker has a thousand creaks louder than a man trying to be shadow.
I tap the grill with a fingertip. Twice.
Not enough for a man to say what to, enough for an animal sense to twitch.
His head turns. He shows me his profile, his throat, the place where the bone ridge gives way to soft because every predator has a place he forgets to guard.
“Who’s there,” he barks, the word skidding up a half-step like he’s heard his own stories and half believes them.
I push the grill and let it fall. It hits lightly. Not enough to clatter. Enough to make him take three steps and put his weight where I want it: under me.
I drop.
No war cry. No flourish. I land on his shoulders and ride him down, my forearm across his windpipe, my other hand finding his jaw.
He bucks, bone spurs raking my thigh, and heat jumps into my blood that says this is what I was built for and I tell it later.
He’s strong. They always are. He goes for his knife.
I use his wrist against him, heel of my hand to his elbow, pop the joint wrong with a wet, sharp noise.
His first howl is loud. My palm finds his mouth.
The second howl is a breath eating itself.
“Sleep,” I hiss into his ear, not because I believe in mercy but because the word feels right.
I tighten, not around his neck—too much noise—but across the carotids, the old way that drops a big thing fast if you have the nerve to wait two long seconds.
He thrashes like a dying fish on a line.
He claws a line of heat across my forearm and finds scale, not meat.
His heels drum the deck. I count one, two, three.
He fades. I hold two more heartbeats because he would not have given me one.
When he’s gone, I let him lay heavy and whisper to the part of my head that wants to bellow victory. “No.” I don’t want a ship hearing me whoop like a boy.
I roll him, check the eyes, pry the blade from his loosened hand.
The knife is a mean little thing, bone-handled, serrations like bad teeth.
I take it. I slide his body behind a stack of empty pallets and wedge a drop cloth over the dark shape of him.
Blood beads in a slow, reluctant line under his ear where a spur caught him on the fall.
I rub it with my thumb and wipe my thumb on the inside of my suit at the seam where no one will sniff.
The cargo cam sits in the corner like a bored god. I look where it’s not looking.
His comm bead is stuck to the cartilage of his ear with adhesive and arrogance.
I peel it, roll it between finger and scale until I feel the tiny catch release and the little click that says I own one more of their voices.
I stick it under my own jaw where the scale thins and the heat of me will hide it from lazy scans.
“Cargo three,” a voice grumbles in the bead, static-gnawed. “Report.”
I make his breath with my breath and add a growl I learned from a man I killed on a different ship. “All clear.”
“Say my name,” the voice demands, because fear is a uniform here.
I look down at the dead thing at my feet and riffling the pockets gets me a strip of tags. “Kren.”
A beat. Then, satisfied: “Right. Keep your eyes. Captain’s bringing something special up from the hard hold.”
My teeth find themselves together hard enough to creak.
My hands stop wanting to shake and start wanting to be careful.
I picture a hard hold: lower than cargo, below comfort, deep in the ship’s belly where the sound of engines is a god that never sleeps.
I picture red hair in the wrong light. I picture yellow skin bruising in ugly colors.
I pick the knife up and teach my hand how it feels.
I breathe the Bloodseeker in. Ozone, oil, bone.
I listen to her railings tick like cooling weapons.
I count the steps of a patrol two bays over and the lazy swing in a drunk man’s voice down the corridor.
I put the Bishop in my pocket against the ache in my thigh so it presses when I move and reminds me where I’m going and why.
“Keep your eyes,” the voice said.
“I am,” I answer, but not to him and not out loud. I ghost back into the ribs and start toward the sound of the engine the ship thinks is a heartbeat and I know is a trail.
The Bloodseeker is a bad church; everything in her hums a creed I don’t accept.
I move with it anyway—between ribs of pipe and cable, past grates sunburned by engine heat, under catwalks that smell like old oil and cheap victory.
My comm bead—Kren’s bead—ticks softly against my jaw, feeding me nonsense and orders not meant for me. I give the ship a different sermon.
“Vent B-nine, open,” I whisper to a maintenance port, fingers already in the wires. “Spill steam on corridor four.”
A valve exhales. Far below, a guard curses. “Hot! Who ran the purge?”
“Engineering, you clowns,” another voice snaps. “Stop standing under it.”
“Copy,” I murmur, letting the panel fall back. “Walk south, not north.”
I hook a talon under a junction cap and pull. Sparks kiss my knuckles. The deck lights along an intersecting passage flicker, then die. Boots slow. Arguments start. I smile without my mouth.
“Cargo three,” someone barks over the bead. “Report.”
“All clear,” I growl in Kren’s last voice and pitch, the old lie sliding back into my throat like I never stopped using it.
“Captain wants the hard hold prepped,” another voice says, ragged from too many cigarettes and too much obedience. “Key the chain. No eyes on the prize unless you like losing them.”
“Copy,” three men answer at once.
“Get sloppy,” I tell the ship, and she tries because someone is leaning on her with intent.
I reach a door dressed up as a wall—maintenance only, no questions asked if you look like a question they don’t want to answer.
The lock is a simple brain with a fancy badge; I teach it a new badge out of two wires and a promise.
The panel shivers. The door breathes. I slip into a conduit crawl where heat licks and the smell of ozone sharpens into medicine and wet metal.
The noise of the engine swells through my ribs until my bones buzz.
“Status?” a patrol lead asks the bead, bored.
“Grid twenty-three is hiccuping,” I say in Kren, flicking a breaker. “Lights are drunk. Someone hold its hair.”
“Get it fixed,” the lead says. “Captain’s moving.”
“Copy,” I say again, already farther than his order.
At a junction a maintenance drone sleeps in a charger cradle, a beetle thing with a clever tongue for patching.
I wake it with two fingers under its chin.
Its optics blink; its tiny logic considers me a friend because I told it to.
I scrape a Reaper crest into its casing with Kren’s knife and set it loose on a route that makes no sense, its flashing repair strobe weaving like a lure.
Voices follow it down a wrong hall. Boots thud.
I shimmy the other way and let the ship sing my cover.
“—saw a spark down two—”
“—don’t care; hard hold’s hot—”
“—you smell bone? I smell bone—”
“You always smell bone,” someone says. “We live in it.”
I keep my breath quiet. In tight places, a man’s exhale tells on him. I learned that in a war that ate young voices until only the old ones spoke. My hands move like they remember a body that was just an instrument for orders; the difference now is whose orders.
“Rayek to Rayek,” I tell myself in my head, a cadence I use like prayer. “Corridor ahead. Left. Right. Ladder down. Two guards. One asleep standing up. One wishing he were. Wait for the shift in weight. Now.”
I drop behind them. My claws whisper a warning across steel.
One turns his head. My hand is already at his mouth.
The other says, “What—” and then meets a panel that decided to be his pillow.
I lay them down gently because I’m not a boy anymore.
I strip a code loop from the second’s wrist and slide it over my own; the reader light accepts the lie.
I slide a bottle from the first’s belt and leave it three meters down the wrong corridor where a drunk friend will turn his head and buy me ten seconds later.
“Hold three,” the bead hisses. “Report your chest counts.”
“Forty-eight, breathing,” someone says with a laugh that sounds like a toothache.
“Thirty-nine and I’m stealing one’s boots,” someone else says. “They fit.”
“Twenty-one and a yellow biter,” a third grumbles. “Captain says light stays on; they do tricks in the dark.”
My heart does something I hate. The map in my head shifts, pushes me like a hand between the shoulder blades.
I breathe once the way the old medic taught me: in to four, hold to two, out to seven.
The numbers empty me enough to move without noise.
I cut across a catwalk and drop into the damp heat of a lower deck where the air tastes like old blood and coolant.
The hard hold is close; its voice is a throbbing cable through the bulkhead.
“Door control,” I whisper to a panel with a staring face. “Forget how to close.”
The hydraulics sigh; pressure dips. In the guttering light, a door down the hall grinds, squeals, and lurches back up like it got stage fright.
Shouts move toward it. The door next to me stays closed.
I pull a fuse and put it back in crooked.
Somewhere a siren debates whether or not to sing.
The debate eats thirty seconds of someone else’s time.
A metal plate above me bears a workman’s scrawl in paint pen: DOG RUN—CELLS. I climb, forearms and thighs; the ladder bites in. Voices bleed from above, a sour chorus of boredom and petty cruelty. I flatten on the last rung and let my eyes climb without me.