by Naomi Lucas
Should I go for it? The two men in the cell still hadn’t moved to fight each other.
I could be with my dad. I could bide my time and hope. Her secret was already on the fast track of being exposed and would be once they reached the slave market. Here, she at least had the chance to continue hiding.
She parted her lips.
“I’ll take it!”
But it wasn’t her voice that said it.
Kallan stumbled to his feet and the guard approached. The questions were asked. She watched it all play out mutely, and not without a little fear.
Kallan already suspects that I’m a woman.
She caught Kallan’s pervy gaze looking her way, glancing at both her and Gunner huddled a little too close together as he was given over to the android. The twisted smile on his wrinkled, dry lips was the final nail in her coffin. Gunner was silent but she could feel his overwhelming pressure trying to suffocate whatever options she had into dust.
The guard grunted and walked back to the two men still at a hushed standoff and silently watched them, as did everyone else. The guard, still silent, turned away and left the brig with Kallan and the man. The cattle prod remained.
Elodie closed her eyes. “Gunner...” she breathed, hopeless.
“What?”
“You won’t tell anyone about me will you?”
“I’ll take it to my grave.”
Something warm and strong squeezed her finger, comforting human contact, and she looked down to see it entwined with Gunner’s. She stared at it, perplexed, but didn’t pull away.
SEVERAL OPPRESSIVE hours dragged by and her finger remained hooked with his. Neither of them spoke and she was okay with that, glad for the time she needed to come to terms with her temporary alliance with him.
His finger was warm, searing, the connection fragile. It wasn’t real, she kept telling herself. Their connection was borne of the events around them. If she had encountered Gunner in any other circumstance, it would never have progressed more than an encounter, one she would be lucky enough to live through. He was that frightening, that intimidating, and in the back of her mind, a man who, even now, she should be staying clear of.
But he held her finger and she held his. The contact grounded her and she wanted more. Elodie twitched her other fingers, searching, but didn’t make a further move in interlocking them. When she glanced his way, his head was resting back on the wall, his eyes shut, his body loose and unmoving, giving off the appearance of sleep.
The brig had grown quieter since Kallan left, and it was almost to the point of relaxing, if it weren’t for the two men down the row still conversing under their breath.
She saw them as herself and her dad, fighting, in a stalemate, neither one knowing how to proceed. I could never beat my dad. Never. He would never have beaten her either. It wasn’t his way. Elodie would swear on both their lives that he would never lift a hand to hurt her.
She sighed, praying that he was okay. That he was alive, and somewhere safe in his element elsewhere on this ship.
One of the two men stood abruptly and grunted. He began to pace angrily across the space.
“Gunner?” she whispered.
“Hmm...”
“Could they use the electric prod to their advantage?”
They had a weapon between them after all.
“They could try.”
“Do you think they might?”
He lifted his head off the wall and opened his eyes, lasering them straight at the men. Several minutes went by in silence before he answered. “It’s a possibility but a stupid one. Those prods only have so much charge and only work with direct contact. They’d be sitting ducks against gunfire. Let’s say only the one guard returns and they take him out, take his gun, and gets his key. Let’s say they figure it out and release everyone in the brig. We would be two dozen half-starved men against at least triple our number with weapons. You see that.” He pointed to a pipe that ran down the length of the brig. “There’s a hole every two yards and a camera that feeds to security—”
“How do you know?”
“I can feed myself into it and see through them. If,” he continued before she could ask more, “they managed to do all that, whoever is watching and maintaining security, AI or human, would know immediately and a siren would go off, locking us in. Now, let’s say we manage to get outside this hold before that triggers, we now have a large unknown ship to deal with that not only has armed men but also androids protecting it. There’s no happy ending to that plan, none whatsoever, and the guard who left his weapon knew that.”
“What if we do manage to get out of here and into the ship? Some of us are skilled gunmen and fighters even if we’re weak, the adrenaline would take over. We could manage to kill a few more guards, get a few more weapons and work our way through. We could set traps?”
“Are you thinking about escaping, Ely?” Gunner taunted her with a smirk.
“I’m thinking about all our options,” she mumbled and brought her knees to her chest. “It’s better than being miserable.”
He chuckled. “Okay. So, let’s say we make it that far. How will we get past the security blockades? Because there will be blockades.”
Elodie groaned and ran her fingers through her limp hair. “I don’t know? How did you do it?” She still believed Gunner knew more about what happened to Royce then he was letting on.
“I went at night and I was alone. Regardless, I would have to be willing to help you out first. And, Ely, if all this hypothetical suicidal bullshit went down, I’d be inclined to hang back and take a power nap in my cell. I’d have to have a damn good reason to foster a bunch of desperate prisoners on a last-ditch effort escape attempt. A damn good reason.”
She tore her gaze from the two men and looked at Gunner. His eyes bore into hers, flickering red and white, making her flush. A damn good reason. Fuck you. But the guns on his cheek wrinkled with the devilish twitch of his lips and her gaze was drawn from his eyes to his mouth.
Elodie sucked in her lower lip as her heart thumped under the insinuation. His finger caught hers more heavily in the hook. The small amount of flesh to flesh they shared threatened to be so much more.
She knew how to be a man, but to be with a man, her experience was limited and sporadic. She was no virgin, having educated herself during the brief stints where she wasn’t on a job, but her knowledge was vastly lacking. Her eyes trailed from his face to skim over his body. Powerful. Muscled. Intense. Gunner would chew her up and spit her out. Elodie wasn’t sure she’d survive the experience.
But the idea had taken root and her belly clenched.
I’m way out of my depth. He’s way out of my depth.
The men she accepted in the past all had one thing in common: they could all be easily handled. They were either cowed by her insistence that she would spread terrible rumors if they started crowing about their conquest or never knew her name in the first place. Gunner couldn’t be handled, let alone easily.
“I’m dirty,” she argued, unsure why. “Disgusting.”
Gunner tugged on her hand, the heat of his skin burning. “I’m dirtier. Ely...my skin is stained with so much shit, it’ll never be clean again.”
She shook her head. “This is all hypothetical.” Please, please still be hypothetical.
“Is it? Because I’m a hell of a lot more interested now.”
She tore her finger away from his clasp and fisted her hands together, bringing them to her face. “We’d have to survive first. No, no, you’re right. The whole idea is suicide.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“You can’t guarantee that!”
“Sure I fucking can.”
The breath wooshed out of her. Possibilities rose like waves in her head. Hope. Fear. Even damned arousal was playing a terrible dance in her mind. Hunger. Fear. Hope. Arousal. Gunner. Elodie wanted to trust him but knew she couldn’t, she would be stupid to try. But here she was, one of the desperate prisoners
playing a part of a conversation that had started with two men and a weapon at the other end of the brig.
“I can’t trust you,” she squeaked out. “I should’ve never spoken to you. I don’t even know you.”
He turned to fully face her and she peered at him from behind her hands and through her hair. “I’ve never lied to you.”
“Yes you have!” she hissed, dropping her fists. “Several times. What really happened with Royce? Everything screams that you killed him but that doesn’t make sense. The blood on the panel. I remember. It’s impossible. But I know it’s true. How? I want to know. How do you know there are security feeds in the pipe above us? How can you see through them? How is it you’re not afraid, that you never look hungry? I’ve never seen you eat, and you don’t respond to the cold, to anything. You don’t react normally, at all!” Her voice rose as she spoke and so did his roiling intensity.
She’d gained the curious stares of the other prisoners, and it lessened her rising temper, but she continued anyway in a raging whisper. “Your eyes, I’ve never seen anything like them, and it’s obvious you’ve had enhancements done but you don’t seem fully human. Gunner, who the hell pisses all over the place where they sleep?”
She was cowed and Gunner was laughing—laughing at her.
“I mark my territory otherwise I can’t rest,” he said. “It’s instinctual.”
Elodie narrowed her eyes. “Humans don’t have instincts like that.”
“No, but animals do.”
“You’re not an animal.”
His eyes flashed. “I’m not? I could prove it but it’s not fucking pretty.”
She shook her head. Stop lying to me. “Did you kill Royce?”
“Yes.”
Her heart dropped into her hungry belly. “Truth?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I already told you,” he answered.
“No. I mean...” She rubbed her hands, curling them against her chest. “How is that possible?”
Gunner gripped the bars and rested his head on them, closing the remaining distance between them. His heat seeped into her space to enclose around her. Every joint in her body went stiff, her body on edge. They locked eyes and that harrowing connection that had begun to build strengthened. She could still feel his touch and his breath on her brow from nights past. And she waited for all the pieces to fall into place.
“Look at me.” His whisper came out hoarse, low, and dark, and only for her to hear.
“I am,” she breathed.
“No. Really look at me.”
And she did.
Elodie drew back slightly and looked at his eyes, the curvature of his face, and the lack of facial hair. His ears came to an odd point on the top, and his mid-length tousled brown hair fell to his neck where his pulse would be. She wanted to touch it but was too afraid to. Her eyes went to his hands, tense and straining on the metal bars on either side of his cheeks, and how they were large enough to round the entire rod of metal.
She had looked at him closely before but not in a way to find out his secrets. Gunner had never positioned himself in a way for him to be read. Maybe there’s more to him like there is to me... The idea had never occurred to her before.
Her eyes trailed over his shoulders and the undershirt that outlined his biceps and chest, to his bent knees, kneeling behind the barricade between them, and down to the scuffed boots on his feet.
When she got her fill, she lifted her gaze back to his face, back to arched brows that framed hard eyes, until his smirk died and his mouth parted slightly.
Something fell out from between his lips and dropped to the steel floor at his knees. She found it immediately, squinting at the small white shape, confused.
A tooth.
Elodie stared at it for what seemed like an eternity. She slowly raised her gaze back to his mouth where a single, sharpened canine stuck out. Gleaming and grey like new steel. Metal.
A shiver wracked her body and she realized what she had been missing. What she had been looking for. Why she felt differently about him as opposed to everyone else. Why he was different from everyone else.
Gunner wasn’t just a man with a couple cybernetic enhancements.
He’s a Cyborg.
“No...”
“Yes,” he retorted back, closing his lips. When he opened them again, the canine was no longer there.
“No. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It does.” She heard him but it went through one ear and out the other. “Now we both know each other’s secrets.”
Elodie shook her head. “No.” She fixed her eyes on the lone tooth. Gunner’s a Cyborg. He’s a Cyborg. He’s a Cyborg and I’m a woman and we’re not supposed to be where we are.
“Yes.”
But her mind kept saying no. No. No way. Cyborgs were a creation of the past, for a war that had ended before she was born. She knew about them, not as a reality, but as a legend. They went down in history like gladiators, cowboys, medieval knights. Existed once but no longer.
“Look at me, Ely.”
She couldn’t, she couldn’t tear her eyes from the tooth.
But he continued his harsh whisper, filling her ears. “I’m a Cyborg. Two nights ago, I turned off the lights and left my cell. I found the warden and killed him. I also killed the fucker who wouldn’t stop laughing. I killed another and I killed Royce. And I plan to kill again tonight.”
Elodie licked her chapped lips and reached for his tooth, skidding it across the ground until she held it between her fingers. It was utterly normal, even down to the elongated stem that would hold it into his gums. It was cold to the touch and the more she studied it, the more everything made sense. There’s no blood.
She felt his eyes on her, knew he was waiting. “Open your mouth,” she demanded.
Gunner did and there, where the tooth would have been, where a canine had been a minute before, was now a brand new pearly white piece. The one she held was heavy and real and not imagined.
“No one knows?” she asked.
He dropped his hands and settled his back against the wall. The tension from before dissipating. “No. Not yet at least, and I would like it to stay that way.”
“Then why reveal yourself to me?” She still couldn’t believe it.
He shrugged. “Hypotheticals.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the men in turmoil. “Hypotheticals,” she repeated and as she said it, one of them, the one thrust into the cell, picked up the rod and brought it down on the other’s head.
Elodie startled and yelped, sitting up, wide-eyed as the brig filled with strangled groans and grunts. She heard Gunner move at her back as the men fought, although clearly one-sided. The injured man without the rod curled up on the ground and cried out like a wounded animal.
The thumps from beating—the electrical pulses—went on until the noises died, until there was a clear winner. Her hands came up to cover her mouth, suddenly happy there had been no rations given to them that morning.
Nausea kicked her in the gut and the wet dew of her own tears slid down her cheeks. They caught on her knuckles and tickled down the backs of her hands.
When it was over, the man dropped the rod at his feet and sank to his knees, crumpling up and crying next to his friend. No one in the brig spoke, no one dared, and she knew it was just another horror to catalog in a file already filled with nightmares.
Elodie grieved for the strangers, heartbroken for the two men and the choices they made, for the outcome that could’ve been so vastly different if no less brutal.
Her body shook, and she was immensely tired. Instantly hateful.
With the man’s cries in her ears, she turned back around to face Gunner, her own eyes wet.
“Prove it to me,” she said. “Kill that guard tonight.”
Chapter Ten
THE REST OF THE CYCLE went by in silence.
Gunner waited and prepared, knowing he needed to be extra careful this time.
He no longer had the element of surprise on his hands—the crew was watching for a killer—and what had been a simple mission of finding out where his ship had been taken had turned into something more.
He seeded into the ship’s systems and clocked the remaining men on board, testing and jackknifing his way through the new stopgaps and fail-safes that Ballsy had implemented. They were stronger, harder to break down than the ones he penetrated before and they all came from a new source.
The handheld hologram Ballsy used on the cell door’s panel.
Gunner skirted around it like he did before, acknowledging the pricking sensation it gave off whenever he came too close.
He slipped through the currents, weightless and observant, checking each feed that gave him an extra pair of eyes into the world, keeping half his consciousness grounded in his body and in reality while the other half...creeped. Lurked. Stalked. It was an unsettling experience, splitting his consciousness to roam the digital realm, the electric currents and waves connected like a finely thinned, interlocking web all around him. It was at once chaotic and intuitive. It took a hell of a lot of time to get used to, and he was more comfortable than most.
Gunner prowled the edges of Ballsy’s cybernetics, itching to blast through them and break down the man’s digital walls. He barely restrained himself from doing so because if he did, he’d leave a direct trail right back.
He wasn’t ready to give himself away yet. Not quite yet. He still had no idea where the pirates had taken his ship and he still didn’t have override access to the bridge.
Or captain Juke’s correspondence to those outside the metal walls of this mobile prison.
His feelers chipped away at a rate that wouldn’t give him or them away until it was too late.
He was a corruptor, albeit a slow one, but a corruptor nonetheless.
Gunner stretched out his fingers before clenching them, doing so again in an effort to find patience. He yearned to bare his teeth and sink them into flesh—meat. He wanted this whole ordeal to be behind him and his enemies dead.
But he wanted his fucking ship. And killing everyone aboard the vessel that was his only lead would be idiotic, even for him.