by Jessie Kwak
When she realizes no one’s really watching her, she risks raising her head to look around.
No one’s watching her, but there’s also nowhere to go.
The alley dead-ends behind her. There’s a ladder at the end, but Starla’s not strong enough to climb it as fast as she’d need to, to get out of range of Mahr’s stun weapon.
Or the other, much more deadly looking weapons carried by the other guards.
Beyond the guards, the alley opens up into a vast paved lot with nowhere to hide; she can just see a fence beyond. Starla fights to keep herself calm. Now isn’t the time to panic. Now she needs to figure out what to do.
A change in the vibrations in the ground — it’s a vehicle approaching, a van backing into the mouth of the alley. She acts groggy when they come back for her. It’s not hard; she’s exhausted from the stunner Mahr zapped her with. Mahr barely looks at her, she’s still talking with the scruff-faced man. He’s sleeveless in the heat, ink scrawled up his scrawny forearms in a pattern that reminds her of Deyva and his snakes.
She can smell his cologne, mingling with baked asphalt and engine oil.
Her heart’s racing. She wills herself to stay calm.
Now that they’re at the mouth of the alley, she can see that the pavement stretches out beyond the van, see the buildings on either side, lined with loading docks, parked trucks, cargo containers. The inside of the van is smooth molded plastic with no doors.
Once she’s inside, she’ll have no more options. If she runs now, she might be able to find cover long enough to evade them.
Maybe.
Just as the two guards hoist her to the back of the van, Starla twists in their grip, kicks with all her might towards the left, aiming for the man’s groin. Her bare heel connects and the guard drops her, toppling the other guard off balance.
Starla’s expecting this; the other guard is not. She lands and drives her elbow up into the soft spot below his sternum as he falls.
She’s panting, but she scrambles free, risking only a split-second glance over her shoulder to see Mahr and the scruff-faced man shaking off their surprise.
She runs as fast as she can.
Chapter 12
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Nayar is raging at the guard, Patch. Jaantzen’s glad to be on this side of the desk.
“You don’t know where she is? Who’s been in charge of her questioning?” she asks, as though she doesn’t already know. She’s reading over his shoulder as he pulls up that information. “Alert Lieutenant Mahr that she’s missing,” she says.
Patch nods, grateful for something to do. He’s braced against the brunt of her anger, shoulders tense and jaw clenched.
“She’s not answering,” he says.
“It’s late,” Nayar says. “Try again.”
“She always answers,” the guard says, but he tries again.
“Trace her comm. Is she in her quarters?”
Patch shakes his head. “Her comm’s off.”
Jaantzen can see the brief moment of thought, flashing through Nayar’s eyes. “Keep trying to trace her, and tell me what you find,” she tells Patch. “Come with me,” she says to Jaantzen, which gets him a slightly longer look from the guard than before. Jaantzen gives the man his most innocuous Rosco Kudra smile.
“Yes, Major,” Patch says after a moment’s hesitation. “Should I put the base on alert to find the girl?”
“Not yet,” Nayar says. “I’ll call you if we need backup.”
Patch glances back and forth between Nayar and Jaantzen. Jaantzen can see it in his eyes when he decides it’s above his pay grade and security clearance to wonder why a refrigeration and coolants executive is joining Major Nayar in the hunt for a teenage OIC terrorist.
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” Patch says, settling back into his chair.
“If I was going to try to offload human cargo in the middle of the night, and didn’t already know about the faulty security camera on Dock 16, I’d use the area by the generator building,” says Nayar. She’s jogging comfortably; Jaantzen is struggling not to pant. “There’s an alley there that’s secluded and fairly unsecured, and close to the max facility.” She slows as they reach a corner, checks the safety on her sidearm.
“So you think that’s how Mahr’s been smuggling out these kids?”
“It seems the most likely. If we get in a sticky spot, feel free to shoot to kill,” says Nayar. “Particularly if we’re talking about Sendera Dathúil.”
“You don’t need witnesses to prosecute Mahr for kidnapping?”
Nayar shrugs. “Mahr’s not my problem. I don’t care if she walks free.” She glances at him. “But quieter is better,” she says.
They round a corner and there’s a van parked by the loading dock, no windows but the driver’s compartment. Nayar swears. “That’s one of my supply vans,” she whispers. Jaantzen can see her scowl in the wan light. “That bitch is using my van.”
“You’re sure it’s not your people?”
“If it is, they’re still where they shouldn’t be with a van that isn’t checked out.”
Jaantzen can hear humming coming from the far side of the van, catches the faintest hint of kosh smoke wafting their way. It smells cheap, acrid. He wrinkles his nose, and Nayar nods and pulls out a knife. “Now,” she whispers.
She’s around the corner of the van before he can react; he hears a strangled gargle and follows to see a man sprawled on his back. His chest is rising shallowly, but he’s not conscious. Apparently being head of requisitions isn’t all sitting at a desk.
“I’m faster with a gun,” Jaantzen says.
“Smarter if nobody sees you anyway,” Nayar says. She passes her ID badge over the reader at the rear of the van and there’s a faint hiss of pneumatics as the doors open. It’s empty, as Jaantzen suspected. He wouldn’t be caught standing around waiting if the cargo had already been loaded.
“Help me with this,” she says, and together they load the man into the back of the van. He’s wearing a guard uniform; Nayar taps her comm over the ID badge and frowns at the name.
“Anyone you know?”
She shakes her head. “He’s in maintenance,” she says. “Nobody who should have access to a requisitions van.”
She shuts the door, makes sure it’s locked to her ID badge only. “Now I guess we wait until they bring her out,” she says.
Chapter 13
Starla’s crouched on a ledge about ten meters up, panting. She’s figured that hiding and thinking will be smarter than running aimlessly. Whatever Mahr is doing, she seems to be trying to fly dark. Starla suspects she’ll have at least a few minutes before Mahr decides it’s worth alerting the entire prison.
Beyond the buildings there’s a huge swath of asphalt and packed gravel, and beyond that she can see what looks like a launchpad and airstrip. A fence stretches out between the two, but it can’t go on forever.
To be honest, Starla barely sees the fence. Despite the pressing need to focus and plan, she’s having trouble not gawking.
Overhead, the sky is gaping wide, space stations and super-massive cargo haulers tracing lumbering paths between glittering stars. A blue-tinged star hovering just above the horizon can only be Indira — Silk Station isn’t close enough to make Indira out so clearly, so she’s never seen it in real life before. Beyond everything, the first of New Sarjun’s two moons is starting to rise; right now it’s just a sliver, shading the black desert landscape blood red.
The whole scene’s alive in a way she’s never experienced, the gradients of the atmosphere and wisps of clouds and the burst of some distant electrical storm embroidering it with depth and texture.
It’s breathtakingly beautiful.
Starla forces her attention back to the task at hand. She’s heard stories of this desert prison. She knows that making a run for it isn’t an option — there’s nowhere out here to run to. But she thinks she doesn’t have to escape the entire prison in o
rder to survive this night; she just has to escape from Mahr.
And then?
Then she’s back to square one. Say she turns herself in. She’s still trapped here answering Hali’s questions, no way home, no way of knowing what happened to the rest of her family.
Starla crouches, looking past the fence, out over the airfield.
That would be her way out, if she knew how to fly one of those things. She wonders if she could stow away. They’ll need to send in supplies, from time to time, and surely not every plane that lands here is Alliance. Surely there’s some that aren’t so well guarded.
Starla thinks through her options.
Right now they’ll probably be searching any plane that leaves — it only makes sense, with a newly escaped prisoner. But a week from now? They’ll assume she ran out into the desert and died. That would be her time to try to get past the fence and stow away.
Through the wall against her back she can feel that same rhythmic vibration, two long, one short, and she realizes it reminds her of the generator back on Silk Station. A generator building will be relatively unvisited, she guesses, and full of places to hide. So now all she has to do is figure out how to get inside this building, and then live there for a week.
Starla ignores how absurd this plan sounds.
She might be able to get in through the roof, she thinks, but first she’ll have to get onto the roof. The ladder she climbed stops at this ledge.
The ledge, though, wraps around the building to Starla’s left. It’s narrow and exposed, but she hasn’t seen anyone come by yet. She might be able to risk it, if she inches along.
Starla stands, shuffles away from the safety of the ladder. She tries not to look down.
She’s never needed to be afraid of heights before.
She’s trying to move as seamlessly as she can, hoping that translates into silently, and she’s just turned the corner when she sees movement. It’s one of the guards. Starla freezes; he doesn’t look up.
He’s walking softly, as though trying to be secretive — and limping, Starla notes with satisfaction. Starla hopes this means she’s right about Mahr not calling in reinforcements just yet. He passes right underneath her, and she stays as still as possible, trying not even to breathe until he’s out of sight around the corner.
Starla counts to twenty, let that be enough time for him to pass by, then begins her slow shuffle. Now that she’s around the corner, she can see another ladder ahead, leading off a small balcony. If she can —
She feels her bare foot hit a loose brick, watches in horror as it skitters along the ledge and plummets to the ground below. Is the guard far enough away? How loud a sound did it make?
Starla shuffles faster along the ledge now, as fast as she can stand, keeping her gaze on the balcony ahead. She’s ten meters away. Nine. Eight.
Movement below: the guard has returned to investigate. She’s loud now — she must be with how fast she’s moving — and he looks up. His face registers shock and he says something, with lips tight and close. Whispering, not yelling. Still trying not to attract attention, she hopes, and she ignores him, keeps moving. She’s two meters away from the balcony when he raises his gun.
Starla feels the energy sizzle past her as she makes a final leap, desperately judging the amount of force she needs to bridge the gap.
Her open palms slam against the lowest rail of the balcony — not the top, as she’d been hoping — the grotesque weight of her New Sarjunian body threatening to tear her grip loose. She swings wildly for a terrifying moment, then manages to hook her heel up onto the balcony and pull herself in.
Another bolt of energy sizzles past with a blaze of blue light, leaving a slice of pain along her upper arm in its wake. The small hairs on the back of her neck are standing on end, and she can smell burning. The sleeve of her jumpsuit is scorched, the bricks behind her are cracked and smoking.
Starla has miscalculated. She’d thought they wouldn’t kill her. Apparently she’d been wrong.
Chapter 14
Jaantzen doesn’t like waiting, and something feels wrong in this night. The man in the back of the van, Jaantzen wonders what he’d say if he could be asked — whether he knew who he was waiting for, or if he’d merely been given a routine task with no explanation.
And what if Nayar hadn’t wanted him, Jaantzen, to be able to ask anything? The thought whips through his brain like a flash at the corner of his vision: fleeting, yet leaving an uncomfortable smudge of uncertainty in the spot where it had been. He glances over. She’s looking out into the darkness, forehead creased in thought.
“How do we know they’ll bring the girl here,” he says. He doesn’t like all this uncertainty. Doesn’t like being surrounded by Alliance soldiers. Doesn’t like being at the mercy of Coeur’s sister.
“We don’t,” Nayar says. “It’s the most logical place, but we have no way of knowing for sure what Mahr’s up to.” She shrugs. “This is all conjecture.”
“I don’t like conjecture.”
“I imagine not.” Her attention has slid off him, though, into the shadows around the buildings. The flat darkness is reverberating with tiny noises: the hiss of ventilation systems kicking on, the slow WUB-wub-wub of a generator deep inside one of the buildings.
Nayar moves suddenly, and Jaantzen’s hand is on his pistol, aiming it at her head as Nayar’s own weapon leaps up to match, a split second too slow for it to have mattered. Her lips break into the ghost of a smile; she pulls up.
Jaantzen slowly lowers his pistol.
“Touchy,” she says, sidearm dropping back to ready as she turns away from him. “I’m just here to help. And if you — ”
Somewhere, not too far away, the night sizzles with the charge of a plasma carbine set to its maximum. It echoes in the alleyway; to Jaantzen, it sounds like it’s coming from every direction at once.
“C’mon,” Nayar hisses, and she’s sprinting forward, away from the direction they’d come from.
She’s nearly out of sight when a figure flashes out from behind a pile of crates, launches itself at her. They roll, grappling. She’s strong, but the man’s scrappy and tough, all wiry ropes of muscle and street-fighting technique — dodgy and dirty. He’s not in uniform, he’s just wearing a close-fitting biosilk shirt cut short to show off tattoos, and baggy pants that give his kicks better range. Nayar’s military-trained blows aren’t landing. Jaantzen catches the glint of a knife the second before it plunges downwards.
Jaantzen fires.
The skinny thug drops to the ground, the knife clattering to the asphalt beside him. Nayar stands, wincing, and kicks the knife away from the man’s reach.
But he won’t be reaching for anything.
Jaantzen nudges one ropy arm open, sees the familiar Money-Beauty-Death symbols intertwined with nudes on his forearm. “Well, there’s your evidence,” he says.
“What is?”
Jaantzen stabs a finger at the tattoo. “Sendera Dathúil,” he says. “Anyone else caught with this tattoo is killed.”
Nayar nods slowly. “Thanks,” she says.
Jaantzen’s looking around, doesn’t see anywhere the familiar clunky shape of the carbine they’d heard. Besides, if this thug’d had one, he’d’ve probably used it instead of going hand to hand with Nayar.
For a brief moment he wonders if it was a decoy, a lure to get them away from the van so the delivery can finish, but then the sound comes again, twice, and a flash of electric blue reflects off a stack of oil barrels a hundred meters away.
“Let’s go,” Jaantzen says, breaking into a run.
Chapter 15
Starla searches for a weapon. Sees the cracked bricks where the guard’s blast hit, grabs one. Takes careful aim and hurls it — again she miscalculates the force needed, and the brick shatters at his feet. She’s rewarded by another blast from his gun — it hits the ladder behind her and energy crackles up the metal tubing. Starla stares at it, wide-eyed, hairs rising on her arm where it’s inc
hes away from the metal. Apparently climbing to the top of the building while hoping he doesn’t hit her won’t be an option.
She throws another brick, deliberately aiming this one at his feet to test the force she’ll need, and as it shatters there, he looks up with a cocky grin. He says something to her, his torso jerking in a laugh, and in the second he looks down to check the charge on his gun, she throws a third brick.
True aim, this time. It hits him square in the ear and he nearly drops his weapon, throwing his hand up to the wound. His fingers come away black with blood. He dodges her fourth brick, and Starla flings herself back against the wall as he raises the gun. Part of the balcony crumbles away as he shoots. Starla pulls her feet back from the edge, panic rising as she readies herself for the next shot.
It doesn’t come.
She risks a glance, brick in hand.
Mahr is here, now, yelling and waving arms, and obviously furious with the guard. Starla relaxes a fraction. Maybe she’d been right, and the plan wasn’t to kill her after all. She watches Mahr yell for a few seconds, then makes her decision.
Starla starts to climb.
Her hands are claws on the rungs, her heart racing with both the effort of the climb and the terror she feels waiting for the blast that will electrify her molecules into the metal.
When it comes, it’s not the electric shock she’s expecting. Instead, the ladder shudders and shards of brick rain down on her from above; Starla ducks her head and closes her eyes against the ferocious hail. She can feel the metal of the ladder shrieking as it twists under her weight, looks up in horror as the struts attaching it to the brick above pop loose one by one and the ladder slowly peels away from the wall.
Starla tries to climb down, but her feet slip off the rungs as the ladder tips backwards by degrees, faster and faster until it’s gone horizontal with a crash against the balcony. The impact breaks the last of her grip.