Chapter 9 #2
He ghosts the grate loose and we pour into the machine shop like a spilled pocket.
The room smells like solvent and pride. Tools hang in neat rows that make me ache with gratitude for the orderly mind that put them there.
A cutting torch sulks in its cradle. A line of grease smears the floor like a signature.
No one is here; the sirens lured talent elsewhere.
“Bag,” Rayek says, and I’m already yanking an empty kit off a hook, stuffing it with anything that looks like it might make a lock regret its life choices—wedges, fiber cutters, a jack that expands like a hard idea. CynJyn plucks goggles off a nail and shoves them at me.
“Cute,” she says. “Grease chic.”
“Later,” I gasp, because the word later is the best lie I’ve told all week.
Footsteps hammer past the door. Voices curse.
Someone yells, “Find the leak!” Someone else yells, “Find my lunch!” The ship bucks slightly, like something big just took a bite out of its schedule.
A heat haze ripples across the doorway. A smell like burning insulation sneaks in and slaps my sinuses.
“Fire,” CynJyn whispers, delighted and terrified.
“Electrical,” Rayek says, all soldier. “Panel eighteen is down.”
“Good,” I say, because chaos is our saint. “Bad,” I say, because chaos eats saints for dessert.
We dart back into the duct. Rayek shoves the grille up with his shoulder and hoists me like I’m made of air.
My thigh brushes his shoulder and that touch is a bell ringing in a church I didn’t know I built.
CynJyn climbs, boots clattering on the frame, and curses in Kilgari so pretty it sounds like a toast.
We crawl toward sound. Toward heat. Toward a hurricane we didn’t start but might survive if we grab the right anchor.
A hatch below us bangs open. A Reaper stomps through my field of view, bone collar glittering with red-wash sweat.
He stops, sniffs the air, and says, “You smell that?” to nobody.
Another voice answers from the hall: “Yeah. Pride.”
Rayek’s hand lands on the small of my back, steadying, a press that says We are a pack, move, go.
So we go. The duct opens into a cross-junction; the left branch glows, a red pulse that means heat and panic.
The right branch hums cool. He tips his chin right.
I start to turn that way and then the left side coughs smoke through a seam and I hear someone below scream—short, ugly, cut off.
“People,” I whisper, chest tight.
“Dying or killing you,” CynJyn answers, unsentimental. “Pick a route, captain.”
Rayek chooses for me. “Right,” he says. “We don’t get noble. We get out.”
“Copy,” I say, throat rough. “Copy.”
The alarms go feral. The red wash is everywhere now, painting our hands raw.
A tremor runs through the duct; a weld somewhere groans; the whole ship sounds like an animal dragged by a bad dream.
CynJyn coughs in my ear. I want to wrap her in my body and make her invincible.
I want to pry every bolt out of this beast and watch it fall into the bright dark.
We reach another panel. Rayek braces one arm across the frame, pries with the other, and the grate lifts like it knows better than to argue. The space beyond is narrow, stacked with crates stenciled with staccato words: CONNECTORS. FUSES. PRAYER. Someone has a sense of humor.
“Out,” he says, and I tumble through, knees knocking wood, palms skidding, bag thumping my hip. CynJyn flows after and collapses against a crate labeled SPARE TEETH—DECORATIVE. “Gross,” she declares. “Love it.”
“Ship’s turning,” Rayek says, head cocked. “They’re closing bulkheads. We’re going up and forward. Hangar’s wrong; too hot. We go to the secondary bay or we go to hell.”
“Guide me,” I say. “I’m very persuadable.”
He looks at me then—properly looks—and the way his eyes soften for a microsecond is worse and better than any siren. “Stay with me.”
“Try and lose me,” I shoot back, because if I say the real thing I will cry.
A door somewhere opens and a gust of heat slaps my face, smelling of cooked plastic and angry metal. Voices bellow. A volley of shots snaps the air and dies. The lights stutter, hiccup, die to a bruised glow. The ship groans like something got stuck in its throat.
“Move,” Rayek says, and his hand finds mine. His skin is hot, rough, real. Behind us, CynJyn grins like a devil and shoulders the bag.
We run past fire and fury and men who would call me a pet to make themselves feel like kings. We run, and I don’t care about anything but the pull of his fingers and the future in the shape of his back as he clears the way.
“Hey,” CynJyn pants, close to my ear. “Remind me to write a very stern review of this cruise.”
“Add ‘excellent rescue staff,’” I choke-laugh, and then swallow smoke, and then laugh again because I’m alive.
Rayek glances back once, just once, and in that look is a hundred chess matches and every almost and all the yes we never said.
The hallway ahead flares bright, a gout of sparks shredding from a popped conduit, and the heat kisses my face like a dangerous mouth.
Someone yells our direction, then yells at someone else because their attention got stolen by a different disaster.
“Left,” Rayek says, voice cutting through everything. “Up. Now.”
He drags me toward a ladder throat; we climb; the world shrieks; the ducts roar; the ship tries to throw us. He is a wall and a map and a weapon and a man. I am bruises and breath and a heart that refuses to shut up.
Chaos. Alarms. Blood. Fire.
I don’t care.
I’m with him.
The corridor is a throat choking on smoke and alarms. Heat licks my face; the air tastes burned, metallic, wrong.
Every light is an open wound. Rayek runs point, a moving wall, and I stay tucked to his spine while CynJyn hammers at a keypad behind us and swears in that gorgeous Kilgari way that could melt steel.
“Left—cover!” he snaps, voice low and lethal.
“I’ve got you,” I shoot back, even as he’s already shifting his body to make my words true.
A spray of bolts hisses past like angry bees; the smell of scorched paint and hot ion fills my mouth.
He takes the corner wide, grabs a crate with one hand, and rips it free of the mag-lock like it weighed as much as regret.
It slams down between us and the incoming fire, sparks skittering across the deck.
“Two on the catwalk,” CynJyn calls, eyes up as she reloads a borrowed pistol with hands that barely shake. “And three dumb ones at the door arguing about card rules.”
“Dumb ones first,” Rayek says, and he moves.
He doesn’t fight like a man. He fights like gravity forgot how to refuse him.
He’s taller than every nightmare, all scar and scale and that scarred gold gaze, but there’s nothing clumsy about him; he flows.
He lifts into the spray like the noise belongs to him, catches a wrist, turns it, and the bone gives with a wet pop that I feel in my teeth.
He plants his heel and pivots and a Reaper meets the wall and loses the conversation he was having with his lungs.
Another jumps from the catwalk; claws flash; Rayek drops his shoulder and the body sails, crunches, quiets.
“You good?” he throws over his shoulder.
“Define good,” I rasp, smoke stinging my eyes, the bruise under my jaw singing. “But yes. Go.”
We run with the ship trying to buck us. Doors slam and unlatch and slam again as his sabotage ripples through systems like mischief in a devout town.
I grip the bag of tools we stole from the shop so hard the straps burn my palms. Alarms change pitch, a chorus going feral.
Somewhere behind us someone howls, and the sound crawls down my spine and hides.
“The hangar’s ahead,” CynJyn says, breath ragged, horns tipping red in the wash. “We take Bay Two. Bay One is lava.”
“Copy,” Rayek barks. He shoulders a door and it thinks about arguing and then decides to live.
Heat pours through; smoke claws at our eyes.
The hangar is a cathedral to violence—gantries like ribs, scaffolds draped in scorched canvas, skiffs crouched like predatory insects, and our peacock—our stolen ceremonial cruiser—trussed and sulking on a mag cradle in the far bay, her chrome smudged with someone else’s fingerprints.
“There,” I say, and the word is a fist.
“Move,” Rayek orders, and we do, legs burning, lungs on fire.
A Reaper crew swings into view on the upper catwalk, mouths wide, guns up.
Rayek steps right, interposing, and the first volley tattoos his torso shield in angry light.
The air smells like frying circuitry and charred resin.
He grunts once—just once—and keeps going, broad back between us and a universe that wants my blood.
“Rayek,” I say, because his name jumps out of me when I’m scared like a prayer does. “You’re—”
“Alive,” he answers, and he is, and he is terrifyingly beautiful in the way a storm front is beautiful when it is coming for your roof.
We hit the base of the cruiser’s ladder at a dead sprint. “Go,” he commands. “Up.”
CynJyn and I climb, boots shrieking on rungs, hands slipping, hearts trying to learn bird.
The hull hums under my fingers, half-awake, like it recognizes me and is trying to rise to meet me.
I throw my arm over the edge of the hatch and haul; CynJyn dives headfirst, rolls, hits the cockpit in one feral slide.
The panel screams for codes—it screams in our house voice—and she slaps a bypass on the port with a laugh that sounds unholy and alive.
“Hello, beautiful,” she croons. “Wake up and sin.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I tell Rayek as he takes the last rungs three at a time.
He glances up, gold locking on green. “I am coming.”
“Don’t you—”