When I finally strode onto our platform on the three-hundred-and-fourteenth level of the Squirrel Tree, Shade Ganavan was just packing up for the day. A welding mask and various other pieces of equipment now occupied the hover crate where the two metal tiles had previously been.
“Hello, SRP,” I called out as I looked over the progress Shade had made, presumably with Jax’s help to fit the heavy tiles into place. It was impressive, and I was beginning to think he might deserve his nickname. He’d patched up my bedroom entirely in one day and gotten a good start on another hole.
“Sugar.” Shade acknowledged me back with a slight smirk.
I let that go. He’d done good work.
“Thanks for the bookstore recommendation. Flipping Pages was perfect.”
Shade nodded and then took a long drink of water, draining half a bottle in one go. More stubble had grown on his jaw since this morning, giving his already attractive features a rougher look I liked even more.
The rest of him looked grubbier, too. There was a black streak of oil down one corded forearm, and he was covered in the sticky evidence of a hard day’s work. His short, dark hair looked damp and crushed, probably from being under his welding helmet. Sweat slicked his neck. I watched a bead roll down the thick tendon that began just behind his ear and angled toward the base of his throat. The drip caught on his collarbone and stopped.
My mouth went suddenly dry. I wanted to lick the drop off.
“What’s the matter, starshine? Never seen hot and dirty before?” he asked.
My eyes jumped to his. He hadn’t put even a hint of innuendo into his voice. I couldn’t tell if he was flirting or not, but desire still surged inside me like an electrical pulse. Warmth simmered between my legs, and hot and dirty played on repeat through my every thought.
“Seen all kinds of things,” I eventually said.
His expression seemed to harden somehow. “I’ll bet you have,” he muttered under his breath.
I felt that little crease form between my eyebrows, the one that was quickly etching itself into my first permanent wrinkle. The heat swirling through my abdomen dissipated, leaving only confusion instead. The weirdest things seemed to tick Shade off.
Bonk broke the tension by poking his delicate head out of my bag and letting out a croaky little meow. The still-sleepy, wake-up sound was immeasurably cute.
Shade frowned at my bag. “What the hell is that?”
“A cat,” I said. “They’re all over the place.”
“Yeah, but you don’t just pick up any old one. It could have vermin. Or be totally wild.”
“He’s not any old one,” I said, leaping to Bonk’s defense. “He’s Bonk, and Susan gave him to me.”
“She gave you a fucking cat?” He looked so stunned it was almost comical.
“Jealous?” I asked. “She’s never given you a cat?”
His hands landed on his hips. Machine oil and scarred knuckles flashed at me.
Damn. I liked those hands.
“I don’t want a cat,” he said.
“Sure you don’t.” My tone conveyed just how much I believed that.
Unzipping my bag all the way, I took Bonk out and lifted him up onto the Endeavor. He started sniffing around immediately. I hoped he wasn’t about to pee. I still needed to set up that box.
I turned back to Shade. “You can pat mine if you’d like.”
His eyes took on a sudden glint, and a blush exploded across my face, burning up my pale cheeks.
I waited for Shade to follow up with something, anything, hoping he would, even if it was a lewd joke. He just turned back to my cat instead. He’d apparently lost all interest in flirting with me.
Internally dealing with my disappointment, I produced the metal tray and sand from my bag. “Any idea what to do with these?” I asked.
Shade took both, setting the tray in the ship’s open door near Bonk—who immediately looked interested. He tore open the top corner of the bag and dumped a thick layer of sand into the bottom of the tray before nudging the whole thing toward Bonk.
Bonk climbed in, squatted, and peed.
“Well, that was easy,” I said, impressed.
Shade folded the top of the bag over to close it and then put it down next to Bonk’s tray. “Susan gave you the good stuff. You don’t even have to clean it. It cleans itself.”
A nearly maintenance-free pet sounded good to me. I had my hands full enough as it was.
“How do you know Susan?” I asked.
“She want your books?” he asked in lieu of answering.
I nodded. “I’m bringing her the rest in two days.” I immediately wondered why I’d said that. Anything beyond the fact that there was going to be a transaction wasn’t information Shade Ganavan needed to know.
He stared. I stared back.
Great Sky Mother, we have to stop doing that.
Shade finally reached a hand out to Bonk. After a few careful sniffs, Bonk leaned in, looking ready for a scratch. Shade obliged, muscles he’d probably overused today standing out firmly under the thin layer of his cotton shirt. The dark material stuck to his upper body in places, revealing contours and revving up my apparently uncontrollable imagination. I couldn’t recall ever having had such a strong urge to reach out and touch.
“I’ll see about getting you that new door, then,” he said, letting his big, grease-stained hand drop.
I nodded again, but that didn’t seem like enough. “Thank you, Shade. Really. I’m glad I found you. I mean…your shop.”
I nearly bit my tongue. I’m glad I found you? Who said something like that?
Clearly, two years in a maximum-security prison and then reclusive living with the same four people in a confined space severely eroded a person’s social skills. I appeared to have none left.
I stood there, my chin up despite my embarrassment, which seemed to be a permanent state around Shade Ganavan. Who the hell could still fluster a woman who’d been used as a science experiment, abandoned, imprisoned, hunted, and chased through a freaking black hole, for fuck’s sake? It must have been Shade’s superpower. Great.
He didn’t respond to my thanks, and the awkward silence grew so heavy that I could have sworn gravity doubled right then and there on Albion 5.
“Here’s your hat.” I took it off and handed it to him, trying not to wonder how crushed my hair was and in which directions my bangs were sticking out.
He took it from me only to flop it back down on my head. “See you soon, Tess Bailey. When I’ve got the rest of your stuff.”
Shade turned, and I watched him walk toward the elevator tubes, Bonk already bumping my shoulder and jaw with his little head, hitting whatever he could reach from his new perch on board the Endeavor.
The transparent tube Shade had entered whooshed down, taking him out of sight, and I felt on edge and unsatisfied, as though he’d just left in the middle of something I hadn’t finished yet.
Maybe there was nothing left to say. I’d get his money. He’d get my door and the other panels. Transaction complete.
Shade had definitely flirted with me in his shop. It had been exciting and nice, but maybe I wasn’t the type of woman a man stayed interested in. Except for Bently. He’d had staying power. The slimy jerk had offered every morning for two years to keep me out of the mines for the day in exchange for hard and fast and rough against the prison cell wall.
I scoffed. As if I’d ever have chosen that over a day with Jaxon, even if the mines had meant breathing in toxic fumes, risking the explosions, and breaking my back under the heavy loads.
At least Dagger Bently never tried to force me. He was a beefy, power-abusing turd, but he wasn’t a rapist, which had made me glad he was my cellblock guard.
I leaned into Bonk, and he rubbed against my chin, making that running motor sound again.
&n
bsp; “We’re home,” I told him. I rubbed back with my nose, and he purred louder. I hoped that meant he liked his new digs.
As Bonk and I got better acquainted, I couldn’t help wondering why Shade hadn’t answered my question about how he knew Susan. Had he just been more interested in confirming that he’d get his money for the armored door? Or was he hiding something I might want to know?
Speculating was useless, but the turn of my thoughts brought home how little I knew about the man who was going to be all over my ship for the next week.
Chapter 11
“What do you say we fire up the tablet and see what’s going on out there?” I asked about forty-eight hours after our perilous descent onto Albion 5.
Jax looked iffy. Miko wrinkled her nose.
“We encrypt everything,” I reminded them. “What could go wrong?”
“Famous last words,” Jax muttered, sliding out from under my console and wiping his hands on the rag he’d tucked into his belt. Between the two of us, we’d managed to fix the ship’s electrical systems, and the Endeavor was running smoothly again—or at least without sparking and spontaneously shutting down sections of the bridge.
Better still, with Albion 5’s steady sunlight on our solar panels, we were up to almost a quarter of our power capacity again after only two days. Life was good, all things considered.
It would be even better as soon as Shade Ganavan came back with a big pile of parts.
I scratched between Bonk’s ears, listening to him purr. Bonk had conquered the entire crew in less than a day and was now king of the Endeavor and grand master of the bridge, despite the fact that his main activity was to curl up on one of Jax’s old sweaters and sleep.
“What a tough life you’ve got, Bonk,” I said, smoothing down the white fluff under his chin. He tilted his head for better patting, and his little motor sped up. “Do nothing and still rule the roost.”
We’d already seen significantly more of Fiona and Shiori on the bridge, when Fiona usually stuck to her lab, and Shiori preferred the kitchen or her bedroom to the busier section of the ship. Such was the appeal of Bonk, his Feline Majesty, Lord Tabby. I was seriously contemplating hanging a sign over his sleeping sweater that read Pat here to feel good.
I smiled, enjoying my cat’s steady rumble. He was so slight that the sound made his whole body vibrate.
So far, I’d fed him the same food we’d eaten. Some beef stew. Cooked vegetables. Rice. He seemed to like it. And it was convenient, just scraping leftovers onto his plate. None of us ever wanted to reheat the canned stuff anyway. It wasn’t good enough for that.
Earlier, we’d all followed him outside when he’d leaped down from the ship and started exploring the docking platform. He’d had a grand old time chasing a twirling feather around, and we’d all laughed our asses off at his springing, stalking, and pouncing until his antics had taken him too close to the edge, and then we’d all freaked out and started shouting at him to come back.
Hey, you! had worked like a charm, thank the Powers for that.
I’d heard that cats always landed on their feet, but I seriously doubted that applied when falling from three hundred and fourteen platforms up the Squirrel Tree.
Now Bonk was safely back inside along with the rest of us, and I was ready for some news, especially from Starway 8.
I logged on to the right channel and then sent a message to Mareeka, asking how things were and sending my love to her and Surral. While waiting for a response, I scrolled through various articles. There wasn’t anything about a stolen lab, missing vaccines, or a confrontation in Sector 14. Of course not. Those things would never have made it into the public feeds.
There was something about a natural gas explosion half-destroying a weapons plant on Switchtide, and then there was a long article about troop deployment on one of the large inhabitable moons just outside of Sector 17.
Reading between the lines, I saw a rebel attack on a galactic armament facility and then a clear message to the insurgents hiding in the Outer Zones. We’re here. We’re watching. We control you.
But in fact, they didn’t. Despite forty years of hard-core looking, the military still had no idea where the rebel stronghold was. That was the cool thing about thinking outside of the Overseer’s tight little box: you could find a hole.
A message back from Mareeka pinged and popped up on my screen.
Viral epidemic. Possible quarantine in sight. STAY OUT OF SECTOR.
I sucked in a sharp breath, tapping her message and making it full-screen. It still said the same thing, only bigger now.
“What?” Jaxon asked, frowning over at me.
“Disease on Starway 8.”
His mouth thinned. “It’s either something new, or…”
“Yeah.” I nodded, my stomach knotting up.
With our efforts, our thefts of cure-alls over the last five years, the director and other personnel on Starway 8 were fairly well-protected against disease. So were many of the children. But we hadn’t managed to get any inoculations to them in almost a year. That meant this was either a mutated strain of some already-known sickness, which would make it even more dangerous; something entirely new that could hit anyone; or something that had been around for a while, and it was the newcomers and the little ones who were dropping like bees covered in pesticides.
My heart turned over like lead. There had to be something we could do.
I sprang up, disturbing Bonk enough for him to crack open one greenish-yellow eye. “You want this?” I asked Jaxon, holding out the tablet.
He shook his head, so I powered down and then slid the tablet back into the cubbyhole under my console.
“Where are you going?” Jax’s question, or rather the wariness in his voice, made me hesitate midstep.
“Nowhere.” I glanced at him over my shoulder, my hand already reaching for the touch panel adjacent to the automatic door. “Staying on the ship. I’ll be back soon.”
He nodded, and I let myself off the bridge, heading for the lab attachment I’d closed up tightly two days earlier. My heart pounded a little harder with each step I took along the Endeavor’s corridors, across the central cargo bay, and then through the rear air lock and accordion-like vacuum seal. What am I doing?
Then again, I’d acted on some pretty bad ideas in the last several days. Why stop now?
The second I entered the stolen lab, the stale air hit me like a dirty sock in the face. My breaths tasted like crap on my tongue and didn’t quite satisfy my lungs.
I shut the door again and cautiously sniffed, adjusting to the stuffiness. We’d kept the lab sufficiently ventilated for Big Guy’s sake, but I’d stopped doing that when he’d left, and I hadn’t thought anyone would be back in here, least of all me.
The oxygen levels seemed okay—although definitely not ideal—and if I hadn’t been about to do the unthinkable, I’d have gone back and opened all the doors to let in some fresh air again. Being locked inside a silent metal can with rank O2 and no systems running was totally unnerving, but there was no way I was risking an accidental audience for this.
In finding the concealed test tubes with my initials and ID number on them, Big Guy had helped me link the enhancer to my blood. I never got sick, and Fiona had said the false vaccines boosted healing. What if I could boost healing at the orphanage without giving the children something invasive, altering, and possibly dangerous like that military-engineered cocktail? The Overseer’s serum did who-knew-what to a person, but what if Fiona could use her knowledge or her medicinal plants to make something less risky out of one of the serum’s main ingredients?
At least, I hoped it would be less risky. I didn’t know what made my blood different, but I’d been carrying it around inside me for twenty-six years and it hadn’t killed me or made me sick or insane. Chances were, it wouldn’t harm the kids, either.
All t
hose days in a frightened haze, all those vials of blood stolen from me, and no one had ever told me what they’d found; they’d just taken. And my knowledge was as incomplete as ever, because I hadn’t let anyone near me with a needle since the day my father decided I was no longer worth keeping around. Not even Surral had ever gotten a blood sample out of me, and she was my doctor.
Maybe it was time to finally find out what the hell was inside me. It would be worth it if I could help Starway 8.
Shoving aside remembered whispers of “foreign,” “inexplicable,” and “unknown” that still made my hair stand up with a shiver, I went directly to what I needed and opened one of the drawers I’d taken stock of during a previous exploration of the lab attachment.
Bingo. Needles. Vials. Blood bags. Everything in sterile cases.
It was too bad I’d dumped the test tubes Big Guy had found, or I wouldn’t have to do this.
Trying not to overthink my actions, I pushed up my sleeve before I could change my mind. I grabbed a rubber strip and tied it just above my elbow with the help of one hand and my teeth. Then I sprayed the inner part of my elbow with a disinfectant, feeling more and more detached the further I got into the process.
I knew exactly what to expect. The cool dampness on my skin that would almost instantly evaporate. The eye-stinging, nose-wrinkling odor of antiseptic. The sharp prick and then the steady flow of blood. Sometimes, they’d drained me straight into oblivion.
I paused, the syringe in my almost-steady hand. I’d never drawn my own blood before, and I had definitely never given it voluntarily. But doing this on my own terms, for my own reasons, was different and somehow empowering. I didn’t know if I was making a good decision, or the right one, but at least it was mine. My choice.
I looked down at my pale skin and at the needle poised over my inner elbow. My heart raced, and the tourniquet felt tight and uncomfortable.
Who could this hurt? I’d kissed people, had sex with Gabe, bled on just about all of my crew members, and whatever was different about my blood or fluids had never harmed them. There was no reason to think my body contained anything damaging to other people, at least not in its natural state.
Nightchaser Page 10