The man on the top step reaches for my waistband and I kick him as hard as I can. He stumbles backward, and for a second. I think he’s going to tumble down to the next landing. But then he steadies himself with the handrail. Brows drawn low, he backhands me so hard that for a moment my vision starts to go dark. Their voices sound swampy.
Distantly, I feel something tug at my waist, and by the time my sight and hearing swell back into focus, I’m naked from the waist down.
“I’m next,” the man holding my pants says, while the first man pushes me to the floor on the landing. My ears are still ringing from the blow when he grabs my wrists and pins them to the tile over my head.
“Callum will kill you for this,” I spit as he shoves my knees apart. My voice sounds strange. Hollow.
“We all gotta die sometime.” He positions himself between my legs, and I feel the hard length of him pressed against my thigh.
My mouth drops open and I scream, my tongue be damned, but then his weight drops onto my chest, forcing the air from my lungs and strangling my cry.
“Nonononono…” My mouth moves, but no sound comes out.
“Hurry up—” The man holding the door shut suddenly flies forward and trips over the man on top of me.
“Maci!” The weight disappears from my chest, and I can breathe again. I crawl into a corner of the landing, and through tears, I see Graham throw one of the men down the stairs, head first. He lands with a brutal crunch of bone, and he doesn’t get up.
Callum tosses the man who’d held the door shut to Graham, who punches him in the face, then the stomach in even, rapid-fire blows, and as he throws that man down the stairs after the other one, I hear him mumble something about treating me like a fucking lady.
But then, all I can see and hear is Callum. He has the first man pinned to the ground with one knee on his chest, pummeling him over and over in the face. In what used to be his face, but is now just a mass of swollen flesh, broken teeth, and ruined features.
“Callum.” My voice is hoarse as I crawl across the landing and reclaim my clothes. “Callum, stop.” My hands shake as I pull my underwear on, then my pants, and I’m too flustered to remember how to make the belt work.
“Fischer!” Graham shouts, and finally Callum looks up. “He’s dead, man. See to your girl.”
“Maci.” Callum spins toward me, then lifts me to my feet. His gaze roams over me, looking for injuries, and he runs one finger over the tender spot on my cheek, which is already starting to darken on the lower edge of my vision. “Are you okay? Does anything else hurt?”
I shake my head. “I’m fine.” Though my shirt hangs in tatters and I still can’t remember how I made the belt work before, with pants that don’t actually fit me. “We need to go.” I try to push past him, mentally shoving yet another trauma into the box in the back of my mind, to be dealt with later, but his arms are like a prison, holding me still.
No, holding me against him. He’s breathing too hard, and after a second, I realize that Callum is trembling. “I’m so sorry,” he murmurs into my hair. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Hey. I’m fine.” When I can’t push my way free, I give in to the embrace and hug him back. “Really. But we need to go before Station Alpha sends down reinforcements.”
Finally, Callum releases me. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” But when he tries to tug me downstairs, I pull out of his grip again. “Maci…”
“No. I didn’t come all this way—I didn’t go through that—” I wave one hand at the three dead men. “—just to quit when we’re so close. I’m setting the women free. And you’re going to help me.”
“She’s right, man,” Graham says. “We can’t just leave them here.”
Callum nods again, and he seems to be getting himself back together. Then he pulls open the door and steps into a lobby now littered with the corpses of a dozen guards and eight metal hounds. When he’s sure it’s safe, he waves me out of the stairwell, and Graham flanks me, clearly trying to protect me from behind.
I touch one of the dead hounds as we pass them, frustrated by the loss of so many faithful companions. And so much useful tech. I think I could fix them, if I had enough time, equipment, and spare parts. But while I’m wishing, I may as well ask for a shuttle to get us off this nightmare of a planet.
“Is this it?” Callum peers through the window in the only door in this hallway.
Graham snorts. “Is it a room full of women?” He elbows his friend aside and glances into the room. Then he slides the door open.
A chorus of gasps goes up from inside, and I push past Callum and Graham to find the women I met a week ago each sitting on their bunks, staring in wide-eyed terror at the men who just saved me from the worst this planet has to offer.
“It’s okay. These are the good guys,” I assure them. “We’re getting you all out of here. Come on.”
“Maci?” Danna stands from her bunk and ventures into the center aisle. Her gaze takes in my torn clothing and bruised face. Then she looks past me at the two large men.
“Yeah. It’s me.” I follow her gaze. “They didn’t do this to me. I need everyone to—”
“What did you do?” Danna demands. “They’re going to kill us, for whatever you’ve done. They’re going to kill all of us!”
“There aren’t any guards left to kill you, and we’re going to be gone before they can send more. So, get up,” I say, but no one moves. “Come on, everybody up. Grab what you can carry and let’s go. Grab the mattress pads from the beds and roll them up. Tie them with anything you can find.” So that we won’t be sleeping on the ground, in zone three. “Throw on an extra layer of clothes.”
The women glance around at one another. Then they all begin to talk at once, asking questions I don’t have time to answer.
“No questions! Get moving!” I turn to Callum and Graham. “Guard the door,” I murmur. Then I jog down the aisle into the bathroom, where I strip and pull on a fresh set of clothes. Then I grab the linen bags hanging inside the laundry hampers and dump them out one by one. “Danna! Lilli! Come help!”
Danna appears at my side, still looking mystified, and I shove two of the bags at her. “Fill these with extra clothes. Toiletries. Anything we can use or trade in the open population.”
“The open… Maci, what’s going on?”
“I let all the death row inmates out of their cells, so they’d attack the guards and we can all get away in the chaos. But Station Alpha will send more guards down, so we have to get out of here. Come on!”
My shout startles her into motion, and she begins shoving clean uniforms from the shelves into one of the bags. Lilli appears and takes the other bag from her, then begins filling it with towels and toiletries. “Where are we going?”
“Zone three. I can open the gate.” I show them the wrist com. “But we’re going to need supplies.”
When we’ve collected everything we can carry, I throw one of the bags over my shoulder and shove a second at one of the other women. Danna and Lilli each take one, and together, we begin herding the women into the hallway, each of us carrying a thin, rolled up mattress pad tucked beneath one arm or a laundry bag over one shoulder.
“To the left.” I direct them toward the door at the end of the hall, and Graham jogs ahead to check the stairwell. He pronounces it empty, then leads the women down.
Callum and I take up the rear. He relieves me of the laundry bag and takes my hand in his free one. His gaze is everywhere, scanning for threats. His grip on my hand is almost tight enough to hurt.
The closer we get to escape, the warier he becomes. As if he’s just now starting to believe this is truly possible. Just now realizing he has something to lose…
In the stairwell, we press past the women and join Graham as he peeks out to make sure the coast is clear. “Looks good,” he whispers. “Which way?”
I consult my on-screen map. “Left. Then left again, and right out the front door.”
Callum frowns. “Won�
��t that get us caught, if Station Alpha has shuttles on the way?”
“The landing pad is on the other side of the building. But if a shuttle sees us, we’re screwed no matter which exit we take, and this one’s closest to the gate into zone three.” I tap the symbol on my map. “Out the front door, and straight across the buffer zone, toward the seam in the metal wall.”
Graham nods. “You two go ahead. I’ll take up the rear.”
Callum and I lead the women out of the stairwell and down the hall to the left. They’re used to being quiet, and their bare feet are virtually silent on the tile. Though the lack of shoes will be a disadvantage outside.
At the corner, we turn left again, and the door is in sight.
“Oh my god,” Danna breaths, and I turn to find her staring at three dead guards, lying face up in the lobby.
“I told you. Chaos. Let’s go.” We head out the front door, and the buffer zone—an empty, lawn-like expanse of land—is clear, except for a few male inmates who’ve obviously had the same idea. But they’re way ahead of us, running for the gate just barely visible in the moonlight, in the tall metal wall ahead.
I can’t help but wonder how they’re planning to get it open.
Halfway across the broad stretch of grass, I hear it. Not with my ears, but with that other sense, deep inside my head. “Shuttle,” I mummer to Callum. Then I turn to the women trailing out behind us. “Run!”
We take off for the gate as fast as we can go, just as a shuttle appears over the roof of the Resort. It’s a patrol shuttle—probably the quickest thing they could scramble, while they’re rounding up off-duty guards on Station Alpha.
“Go!” Graham shouts.
I stop and begin waving the women past me, yelling for them to run, but then Callum picks me up and throws me over his shoulder. He takes off, and I bounce helplessly in his grip, one hand braced against his back as I wave to the straggling women, still trying to get them to hurry.
To my horror, a woman named Mallory stops running. Graham stops with her, and though I can’t hear what they’re saying, she’s clearly terrified to go any farther. Maybe she’s scared of the open population, or of the guards who will punish her for trying to escape, if they catch her.
Finally, Graham picks her up, ready to rescue her by force—until the shuttle overtakes him and unleashes a fine mist that seems to hover above the ground, each microdroplet shimmering in the moonlight.
“No!” I’ve seen this before, in zone four. It’s a sedative the patrol shuttles use to shut down riots.
Graham falls to the ground, unmoving, with Mallory next to him. They’re unconscious.
“Callum!” I shout. “We have to help them!”
He twists to look back, then forges ahead with renewed speed. “There’s nothing we can do for them now, hellkitten.”
With the shuttle bearing down on us, we race toward the gate, and as we approach, I tap on my wrist com to open it. Callum sprints through the opening at the end of our procession of escapees, still carrying me, and the gate slides closed on its own once we’ve passed several yards from its sensor.
“Head for the trees!” Callum shouts, and finally he puts me down. Together, we run toward a thick patch of forest—all we can see of zone three so far—armed with nothing but a bag full of women’s toiletries and a small army of former sex slaves.
In the woods, we huddle with the women beneath the thick canopy, waiting for the shuttle to appear overhead. For the sedative fog to descend. For guards to be lowered into the woods by cables.
Instead…
“It’s leaving,” I tell Callum, as the sound of the shuttle begins to recede, deep in my head. “It’s leaving!” I shout for the others to hear. “They’re not going to chase us!” We’re not worth it, when they have dozens of death row inmates to round up, guards’ corpses to recover, and a building to secure.
I wrap my arms around Callum’s neck and he lifts me, his hands cradling my ass as my legs wrap around his hips. “We’re free,” I whisper, leaning in for a kiss. “I mean, we’re back in the woods, and we have, like thirty women to look out for. And we’re still on a prison planet. And if we do run into any of the guards, they’ll probably kill us.” I frown as what I’m saying finally sinks in. “Okay, that doesn’t sound as much like freedom when I say it out loud as it did in my head.”
Callum laughs. “I’ve spent the past year in a cage, waiting to die. This is more freedom than I ever thought I’d see again. We have the whole planet. And the rest of our lives.” He leans in for a kiss that scalds me from the inside, holding me tight against him as his cock grows hard between us. “You gave me the whole fucking world, Maci,” he mumbles his face buried in my hair, while my wrist com translates. “I don’t know how I can even begin to repay you for that. Or to deserve it.”
“I have everything I need right here.” I squeeze him with my thighs, and he groans against my skin. “Just promise you’re not going to trade me in for one of the other women, now that you have options.”
“What other women?” His breath raises goose bumps all along my neck. “I can’t see anyone but you…”
23
MACI
“Is that it?” Lilli pushes through the brush to emerge from the forest at my back. Callum stands on my left, but behind us, most of the women are still tromping through the woods in our direction. We’ve been hiking for hours, and their pace seems to slow with every step. Not that I can blame them.
They’re exhausted, scared, disoriented, and singularly ill-equipped for hiking.
“That’s it.” Up ahead, two buildings stand on a slight rise in the landscape, each three stories high. They look largely intact, at least from a distance, and what windows remain are reflecting the last rays from the moon as it sinks below the horizon, signaling the last and darkest hours of the night.
“Thank god,” Lilli breathes. “Let’s unroll our mattresses and get some damn sleep.”
“Um…you guys should probably wait here while Callum and I check it out,” I whisper as I pull her aside. “Just in case.”
“Check for what?”
“For men,” Danna murmurs as she comes to a stop on Lilli’s other side. Behind us, the rest of the women are finally emerging from the woods, and they’re anything but quiet.
“I’m covered in bug bites,” one whines.
“Me too. And I’m starving. At least at the Resort, they fed us.”
“I’m so thirsty. Does anyone have any water left?”
Callum tenses, his shoulders hunching a little tighter with every second. I can practically see him losing his temper. So, I turn before he has a chance to snap at them. Again.
“Okay, I know this is hard.” I try to keep my voice low, and the women gather around me in a semicircle, pressing in close so they can hear. Waiting for me to explain how this is all going to be worth it in the end. But I’m not used to people looking to me for answers. And the truth is that I don’t have many of them. “I wish I could promise you that it’s going to get easier, but that might not happen, at least for a while.” I hold my arm out so they can see the satellite image on the com screen, for the dozenth time. “The infrared scan doesn’t show any heat signatures near those buildings, but I can’t promise there aren’t people inside.” After all, it’s the middle of the night. “What I can promise you is that there are enough of us that—if we work together—we can claim a room for ourselves, even if the buildings are occupied. Which will at least give us somewhere to sleep. We can protect each other and our assets. We can—”
“Assets?” a woman named Kallie spits, holding up the bulging laundry bag she’s been carrying all night. “We have a bunch of shampoo. In case you haven’t noticed, that won’t feed us.”
“Actually, it will,” I tell her. “I don’t know how many of you were in the open population before you got the Resort, but out here, everything is for sale. And there isn’t much in the way of personal hygiene products. Our soap, shampoo, and extra clothing w
ill buy food. Lots of it.” The tricky part will be finding a women’s settlement willing to trade. Because if we wind up in a men’s settlement, they’ll likely just take. And not just our toiletries.
They’ll try, at least.
“She’s right,” Danna says. “Don’t think of it as shampoo. Think of it as…tangible credits. Really fucking heavy credits.”
“Will our shampoo buy shoes?” Lilli lifts her right foot to rub it through one of the strips of towel she’s tied over her feet, to protect them from the ground. The rest of the women have made similar makeshift footwear.
“Yes.” If we can find shoes. “And there’s one more thing. I didn’t want to mention it yet, but…when I connected to the system to get the satellite image, I also found the drop schedule. Tomorrow’s drop day.”
“What does that mean?” a tall brunette from near the back of the crowd asks.
“Every week, a cargo shuttle drops two huge crates of supplies into every zone,” Danna explains. “In two different locations. That’s our best shot at getting our hands on what we need, without having to trade for it. Though we might have to fight for it.”
“We might not.” Callum’s deep voice rolls over our small crowd, and they all look up at him, as my wrist com translates. “Maci didn’t just find the schedule. She found the locations. They’re going to drop one of the crates just to the east of those two buildings, and if we’re ready when it lands, we can get what we need and get you all out of the way before anyone else finds the drop. Which means you’ve all lucked the fuck out. So, stop whining before we just leave you here.”
“Callum!” I snap, but he only scowls at me. “No one’s leaving anyone. But we are going to ask you to wait here while we check the buildings.” Please, God, let them be unoccupied. Or occupied by women willing to make a fair trade.
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