Unchosen

by Katharyn Blair

  My breath catches in my throat as her eyes fall on me, her taut expression unreadable.

  Did she figure out I’ve been lying? Or is it finally time?

  “But that’s the thing,” Lucia breathes out quietly, lowering her wrist from her ear as she steps back, eyeing the ceiling of the cell. “We weren’t captured.”

  That’s the exact moment Maddox stops walking suddenly, and her eyes aren’t on me.

  They’re on Lucia and Rielle.

  Maddox’s eyes widen.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she shouts, and then everything goes dark.

  Chapter 12

  THE BRIG ERUPTS AS I SHOVE MYSELF BACK INTO the corner of my cell. Metal creaks open, and the sound of boots scuffing on the ground mixes with Maddox’s shouting orders and the other prisoners yelling.

  The dark makes everything feel louder, the terror and confusion of the murky shadows amplifying every sound. We’re in a metal tube atop an endless ocean. We’re locked in a metal tube atop an endless ocean.

  Panic brushes up against the back of my throat like a flame, and I shut my eyes tight against it.

  Not now.

  But the panic is there, making everything move slowly and too fast at the same time. I push myself up, feeling around the cell for the door. If there’s any chance of me getting free of this place, it’s happening right now—and I won’t let it slip away because I can’t control my own mind.

  I walk around the cell, my hands brushing against cold steel in the dark.

  The lights snap back on, and I spin around, squinting against the light as I take in the scene through Rielle’s mirror. I’m facing Lucia and Rielle’s cell. A crack sounds, and Rielle pulls Lucia against the bars as the ceiling above them caves in. A man lands in front of them, hood pulled low over his eyes, plaster and debris landing in a rolling cloud at his feet.

  Maddox raises her gun and points it at him.

  “Get the girl. No matter what happens, don’t let her out of your sight,” Maddox orders her guards, not taking her eye off the man through the sight of her gun. He raises his head slowly.

  One of the guards behind Maddox pulls a set of keys from his pocket, but the other objects.

  “Captain,” the one with the green bandanna starts. “It could be dangerous.”

  Maddox goes still and then turns toward the guard.

  “You’re questioning me?” she asks, her face incredulous. Being doubted throws her off-balance, and it’s the moment the guard was waiting for. He throws out a foot, catching the other guard behind the knee before snatching the gun out of his hand and knocking him out with the butt of the gun. Maddox turns, pointing the gun at the man who is most decidedly not a member of her crew, but Green Bandanna is too fast. He grabs the muzzle and twists, and Maddox loses her grip.

  The prisoners in the other cells let out a raucous cheer, but Maddox isn’t going down that easily.

  She lets out a roar of frustration and lunges, dodging the man’s swipes as she spins and lands a solid kick to his gut. He groans and she pulls the gun, still in his grip, over his head, clocking him with the barrel as he refuses to let go.

  I chance a glance at Rielle and Lucia, and the stranger now standing in their cell.

  He’s pulled something from his pocket and is fastening it to the cell door. As the fight between Green Bandanna and Maddox rages, he looks to me. I catch his eyes in the mirror. He’s Xanthous.

  “I’d step back if I were you,” he says, his voice muffled by the black fabric draped over the lower half of his face.

  I lurch backward as Maddox lands another punch, this time to Green Bandanna’s jaw. He falls, and she wipes the back of her hand over her nose, which is now bleeding. He’s got at least a hundred pounds of muscle on her, but they are evenly matched.

  A low whining tone revs up from the contraption secured to the door, and then a loud bang sounds through the brig, followed by a plume of smoke. Lucia coughs, waving her hand in front of her face. Seconds later, as the smoke wafts away, I see their cell door, hanging like a broken jaw off the hinges.

  Maddox looks, her mouth opening in rage as she sees what they’ve done. It’s a half-second mistake she can’t afford, and Green Bandanna knocks her backward, catching her off guard just long enough to fasten her wrists with zip ties to my cell bars. He pulls the keys out of his pocket and opens my cell.

  “Come on,” the fighter says through the dark fabric. He tosses the keys to Rielle, who runs down the block, opening cell doors. Prisoners barrel down the hallway, making for the stairs that will lead to the deck. The fighter turns, pulling the door on the far end shut and sticking a mop in the handle. They bang on the metal, and the sound echoes through the ship.

  I don’t move. It’s not fear that makes me stop, but the realization that just because these people hate Maddox doesn’t mean that they are my friends. It doesn’t mean they are any better than her.

  They could be worse. They could be rival Runners, plundering Maddox’s cargo.

  “You’re dead.” Maddox laughs lowly. There’s only a hint of rage in her words, like this is a poker hand she’s lost and not an all-out invasion of her ship. “If you take her, they will find you. She will cost you your life, Marsali.”

  Marsali. The name pulls on my memory, but I don’t have time to place it.

  She lets out a hateful snicker as Rielle strides over to the other man, reaches up, and snatches the green bandanna off his face before kneeling down and stuffing it in Maddox’s mouth.

  “I think you’ve talked enough,” she says, bopping a finger on the end of Maddox’s nose. Maddox growls, the sound terrifying even through the ball of fabric. Straightening, Rielle looks at me.

  “You coming?”

  I don’t move. I know I’m dead on this ship. But I might be dead with them, too.

  “Thomas, help get them to the stern,” the man Maddox called Marsali orders, and Rielle follows Lucia to the stairs, leaving just the two of us. He lifts one hand, tugging the black fabric down over his chin.

  I look at him. Without the black bandanna over his face, I can tell he’s probably about Dean’s age. His broad shoulders are covered in a dark blue hoodie still peppered with debris from the ceiling, and his boots are wet as he steps closer.

  I take another instinctive step back, and he cocks an eyebrow at my blatant distrust.

  As if I wasn’t just locked in a cargo hull like an animal, which would give anyone trust issues.

  He glances down at Maddox, who has the green bandanna still stuffed in her mouth.

  “This one? This is the special one that will bring me death and destruction?” he asks, his eyes trained on her as he steps into the cell with exaggerated care. He tilts his head, the light catching the shadows under his high cheekbones, sloping down to a strong jaw covered in dark stubble.

  He looks back to me, narrowing his yellow eyes. “Color me intrigued.”

  I needed to be Vanessa earlier, but now I need to be someone else. Right now, I need to be strength. I need to be a razor’s edge covered in viper poison and angled toward anyone looking to mess with me.

  I need to be Harlow.

  What would she say now?

  Harlow.

  “I’m not here for your intrigue,” I shoot back, straightening my shoulders like it will somehow infuse my voice with authority or something. As though any sort of good posture can undo the fact that I have mascara dripping down my face and “U WISH” stamped across my ass. I hate how he runs his eyes over my body, like he’s thinking something similar.

  “Who are you?” he asks quietly, a smile twisting up the side of his mouth.

  The door bangs and shudders once more, and I know Maddox’s crew will find a way in. I don’t have much time.

  “Seth!” someone calls from the stairs. “Let’s move!”

  Seth. Seth Marsali. Son of Admiral Marsali—from the Torch. Evelyn’s twin brother.

  Seth steps closer, and I fight to hold his eyes, lacing def
iance in my gaze as he steps closer. I’m backed against the wall of the cell—I can’t go anywhere.

  “You do you, princess. Come or don’t, but whatever you’re going to do, do it quickly.” He turns away.

  My eyes flick to where Maddox is tied—

  Where she was tied.

  Seth sees it the same time I do, and whips his head to look back at me, a question in his eyes.

  The plastic restraints lie forgotten on the floor, and Seth follows my horrified stare for half a second before the gun cocks behind him. He turns to find a muzzle in his face, Maddox grinning with blood in her teeth.

  “What do you think your daddy will do when I chop up his favorite disappointment and use him as chum?” she purrs. Her voice is lethal, even when it’s absent of rage. Because there’s no rage in her now. She isn’t mad about this. She sees it as sport. This—from all the lives in the cages to her freshly broken nose—is all a game to her.

  And blowing Seth’s brains all over me will be her version of “checkmate.”

  I can’t have anyone else die because of me. I look around, desperately searching for anything that could help, but the cell is bare.

  “I think you’ll be doing him a favor,” Seth replies evenly, grinning humorlessly. If he’s scared, he’s not showing it. “He might even throw you a parade, and I know how much you hate being cast in a positive light. Probably best to let me go.”

  Seth steps to the side, and Maddox mirrors him. I stay at the bars, watching them circle until she’s standing in front of me.

  “I don’t think that’s gonna be the way this goes,” she muses. “Though I do so regret the thought of losing that face. It’d be like shattering the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Even if you aren’t really my type.” Another crash thunders against the door. The crew has found some sort of battering ram, it seems. We don’t have much time. “But there’s more where that came from, right? And I think your sister and I would get along better.”

  Seth’s grin freezes, and a deadly, killing calm sweeps through the cell.

  “There are a thousand reasons to kill you, Maddox. But mention Evelyn again and I’ll only need one.”

  Maddox raises the gun. “And our repartee was going so well.”

  With a final shattering noise, the door finally gives way, and the sounds of shouts rip down the corridor. Seth seizes the moment of distraction and lunges, knocking Maddox’s arm upward and shoving her back.

  “Go!” he screams as we scramble through the door. We barrel down the hallway just as the door bursts open, and Maddox’s crew spills inside. I hear the metallic click and brace myself for the gunshot, but it doesn’t come. Maddox swears loudly, and it sounds like a strangled growl.

  “Get them!” Maddox screams.

  “Time to go,” Seth says, and I don’t argue. I follow him up the stairs, and he stops just long enough to slam it shut behind us. We race up the curving wooden steps, Seth right behind me, and spill through a narrow doorway and into the rainy night. A fight is raging on the deck, most all with blades of some kind. Up on deck, Thomas and Lucia hold off Maddox’s crew while Rielle stands by a rope tied off the edge of the stern. The rope stretches off the back of the Devil’s Bid, secured to something I cannot see through the fog. Prisoners slide across, their lives suspended over the black water.

  “Hey, Lucia, Thomas! Wrap it up!” Seth cries, sprinting toward the rope. I freeze as the sound of the door opening at the bottom of the stairs rings through the night—screeching metal and a raging Maddox.

  Fear roots me to the spot. I can’t step off the deck and over the water. I can’t. The terror clouds my mind, pulling my rational self deeper and deeper into a tailspin with no end.

  I feel hands on my shoulders, and then Lucia is dragging me behind her.

  “How the hell did you even survive this apocalypse?” she seethes, yanking me behind her, up the steps to the stern of the ship.

  Maddox and her men erupt onto the deck, a wave of simmering rage emanating off her like a living thing.

  “I don’t think so, sweetheart,” she says, eyes locked on me.

  Thomas steps in front of her, blocking her path as Lucia pulls me toward the stern.

  “Come on!” she says, grabbing the rope and swinging off the edge. Rielle follows, like they’ve done this a thousand times.

  “Thomas!” Seth shouts to Thomas, and Thomas turns, jumping onto the railing of the ship and giving Maddox a mock salute before leaping into the darkness. She seethes, turning to me.

  “Go!” Seth orders, but I freeze.

  Maddox gets closer.

  “You need to go now!” he orders, but I can’t move. Maddox’s hateful eyes practically spark with bloodlust as she starts up the steps.

  She’ll kill me. It doesn’t matter what the Vessels hired her for. She’ll finish the job now.

  I turn to look at Seth, his hair soaked and windblown, his jaw tight as he regards me with something between incredulity and naked irritation. I have no other choice. The fear snakes up my spine, but I launch myself out and grab the rope. My skin screams as pain rips down my fingers. I look down.

  The water glitters black, like the gaping mouth of a devouring monster. I let out a scream as my fingers slip and I let go to redouble my grip.

  Seth grabs the rope and swings down beside me.

  “Hold on!” he yells.

  “What the hell do you think I’m doing?” I shriek.

  He lets go, dangling by one hand as he pulls a knife from his boot.

  “Hold on harder,” he shouts back.

  I don’t even have time to scream before he reaches up and slashes the rope, sending us plummeting to the unforgiving darkness below.

  Chapter 13

  I SLICE THROUGH THE INKY BLACK WATER LIKE A razor, so smoothly I don’t even feel the impact.

  I open my eyes as the frigid water squeezes air from my lungs in a string of bubbles. Looking up, I can see the glowing light off the stern of the Devil’s Bid mixed with the slight glow of the moonlight refracted through the dense fog.

  The surface slips farther from me, my hair dancing around my head like it’s caught in the wind.

  And I can’t move.

  I can’t thrash—I can’t kick back the shadows that seem to reach up for my feet, thirsty for the panic that leeches deeper into my veins with every passing second. My chest burns, and I can’t tell if it’s my lungs begging for air or the complete and utter terror unfurling in my bones like propane finally catching a spark.

  There was a hope, somewhere tucked in the back of my mind, that maybe I’d built this up. Maybe, if I could just make myself go under, that my body would respond well. That the fear I’d awakened the night of the blood moon wouldn’t actually be as strong as I’d feared.

  I was wrong.

  I’m so scared I can barely move, except to tilt my head to watch the light from above slowly fade.

  Fight. Fight. Don’t go down like this.

  The voice is a screech in the back of my mind. She’s buried under the rubble that used to be my life, and I can barely hear her.

  Fight. You aren’t ending this way.

  I kick once.

  Twice.

  The fear roars in the back of my mind, leering back and rebounding. A fresh wave of hot panic lashes at my spine, and I cry out from the pain.

  Then, a vise grip clamps down on my wrist and yanks me upward.

  Up, up, up.

  We break the surface, and the fight overtakes the panic. I gulp down lungfuls of damp air, my mind clearing.

  I’m alive.

  “Hold on to me!” Seth orders, and I wrap my arms around his shoulders. He tugs twice on the rope, and then we’re being pulled through the water so fast there’s a wake behind us. Someone on the other boat is pulling us up.

  Seth lets out a groan as they pull us out of the water and up along the back end of the other ship.

  I cling to him, and his fingers dig around my waist. We twist as the rope hauls us up, an
d I see faded lettering on the side of the ship.

  The Ichorbow.

  My chest seizes. The Ichorbow—almost as notorious as the Devil’s Bid, but not quite.

  It’s another Runner ship.

  For a second, I almost let go, because the thought of being skin to skin with a Runner makes me want to throw up.

  But the thought of the yawning deep beneath keeps me clinging to Seth, even as I curse myself for being such a coward. Behind us, the Devil’s Bid is fading as the Ichorbow pulls ahead.

  Rielle and Thomas meet us at the railing and pull us over. Seth lands on his feet, but I spill onto the deck, hacking up a lung as the adrenaline from the panic attack slowly ebbs from my limbs, leaving me shaking.

  Rielle drapes a blanket over my shoulders as I peer up through drenched hair. I can’t stay on my knees. I look weak enough. My legs shake as I make myself stand. The Ichorbow is a sailboat, which explains why we’re going faster than the Devil’s Bid. In this wind, it’s easy to clock more knots than an engine.

  God’s engine is all we need, baby, my dad used to say.

  Seth whips around, eyeing me with wide, piercing eyes.

  “What was that?” he asks.

  I look around the deck. Lucia stands next to the railing, wringing out her black hair. Rielle hands blankets to the other prisoners. Thomas, who somehow managed to swim from one boat to the other, mans the wheel.

  Harlow. I need to act like Harlow.

  “You cut the rope!” I shoot at him. Maybe he thinks I’m a weak swimmer. Maybe he thinks the stormy waters were too much for me. Maybe he didn’t pick up on the fact that I was a deer in the headlights. That I literally sunk like a stone.

  “Yes I did. If you’d moved your ass a little faster, I wouldn’t have had to,” he shoots back.

  I clamp my jaw down tight against my chattering teeth. If this is the Ichorbow, then it doesn’t matter what I say. We’ve gone from one Runner ship to another.

  Rielle lights two torches on the railing, illuminating the deck and sending a huff of steam up past the sails.

  “You are going to stand there and act like you’re some sort of hero? It would be more merciful for you to let me drown.”