by Sean Kennedy
Jazz braced herself for impact, and it came far quicker than she expected.
Part Two
Chapter 13
JAZZ groaned within the wreckage of the Lilliput.
Smoke and the stench of leaking gas seemed to strip the lining of her lungs. She was finding it difficult to breathe.
It didn’t help that her chair had overturned and was crushing itself against her chest. She pulled it off herself, and breathing became slightly easier. She coughed and vomited a thin stream of liquid.
“Disgusting,” she croaked. But it couldn’t be helped. She staggered to her feet, checking herself for broken bones in the process. All seemed fine.
How long had she been unconscious? She limped to the console, but it remained dark under her touch. It had obviously been a rough landing, and she would probably have a lot of work ahead of her just to restore communications—
Ezra!
Funny how when she was worried about him, he was always Ezra to her. Any other time he was Kneebone.
Jazz thought back hazily to that last moment she had seen him—going down with a bullet wound. Tears pricked her eyes, and she pushed them back angrily. She would not cry; she had too much work to do.
Damn, she wanted to speak to Lady Bart. Her whole body hurt, she didn’t know where her friend was, and she needed her lover to tell her everything would be fine. But she couldn’t even contact her at the moment.
Jazz determined to stop feeling sorry for herself and set about opening all the doors and trapdoors to the cockpit to allow the smoke to clear and escape. She pulled herself onto the roof and grimaced at the damage that was immediately discernible even with a cursory glance. It could be days before the Lilliput was in the air again, and that was even if she got quick access to materials to fix it.
She could see Settler’s Pass in the distance; she had actually managed to clear it by a few clicks. She couldn’t help but be surprised the crash hadn’t brought out anyone to investigate, even if only to do so with the hopes of scavenging from the expected corpse of the downed dirigible.
Her wrist comm looked undamaged. She hit the button that acted as a two-way between her and Kneebone. “Ezra?” she asked hopefully.
She wanted his voice to come through, mocking her for calling him by his first name. But there was nothing, not even static.
Her first priority was getting communications back up. Then she could scan for Kneebone, and if the comms on his end weren’t damaged, maybe, just maybe, things would start to look up.
OUCH.
That was Ezra’s first conscious thought.
And that was followed by: I’m still alive.
It stood to reason, really. If he could feel pain, he must be alive. Unless he was in Hell, which preachers liked to tell you was full of unnecessary and eternal pain. But Hell wasn’t an idea Ezra chose to subscribe to; Hell, as a concept, didn’t sound that different to life as they knew it on Earth.
But he was hurting too much to debate religious discourse with himself at the moment.
He slowly opened his eyes—even that was an effort—and was momentarily panicked by the fact that he couldn’t see anything. But a little light faded in, and he noticed different shades of darkness. He was probably in a hull, or an underground prison cell; neither of these options were particularly pleasing.
“You’re awake,” said a voice, one that was slowly becoming recognizable, and even pleasing to him. It automatically put him a little more at ease with its natural soothing tone.
“You’re alive,” Ezra croaked.
There was humor in the reply. “I was starting to worry you weren’t.”
“How long was I out?”
“Days? Hours?” Icarus replied quizzically. “I can’t tell. I was out for a while myself.”
Ezra moved to sit up, cried out, and was gently pushed back down again.
“It’s probably best if you don’t move.”
As his memory returned, Ezra became belligerent. “I got shot!”
“Yes. While you were unconscious, I dug the pellet out. So at least it’s still not in you.”
“I suppose I should thank you.” It came out less grateful than Ezra really intended it to.
“I can live without it,” Icarus shrugged.
Ezra sighed. “No. Thank you. Really.” His eyes were beginning to adjust more in the darkness. He could see Icarus sitting only a little way over from him, and as he looked around him, he realized they were in the hull of an airship—what seemed to be a cargo area.
And the cool wind on his legs made him aware he wasn’t wearing his pants. He sat up and tried to cover himself. It would have been comical, if he wasn’t so embarrassed and hadn’t felt so exposed. And if there hadn’t been that lancing pain which accompanied his sudden movement.
“I had to take them off to get to your wound.” Icarus’s eyes glinted in the dark, and Ezra would have sworn they danced with merriment.
“Where are they?”
“I have them.”
“Then help me on with them.”
“I don’t know, I kind of like you out of them.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s not meant to be,” said Icarus.
The muffled droning of the engines was only adding to Ezra’s headache. “Are you flirting with me?”
“We’ve done more than flirt before, so why not?”
There it was, finally out between them again. That all-too-brief, passionate kiss on top of the mesa.
“Why did you kiss me that day?” Ezra asked, the dark making him more brazen and able to confront all that he so desperately tried to avoid on any other normal day.
Icarus got to his feet and walked over to him. “Because I could tell we both wanted to.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“I know,” Icarus agreed. “Nothing ever is. Like now. I was your prisoner, and now we’re in the same predicament.”
“What happened out there?” Ezra asked. “After I got shot, I mean?”
“I thought you wanted me to help you get back in your pants?”
“I want both.” Ezra was sure he was flushing at how his statement could be taken, and he was pretty sure he wanted it to be taken in the way of innuendo as well.
“Okay,” Icarus said. “Pants first.”
He braced himself against the crate Ezra had been lying on, and gently positioned Ezra’s thighs around his hips. To Ezra it seemed overtly sexual, but he didn’t object. He could feel himself getting aroused, and he tried to will his wayward pecker to behave itself. In the end, he hoped the dark would hide his shame. But as Icarus began pulling the denim over one of his boots, his elbow brushed against Ezra’s groin. In fact, Ezra couldn’t even tell if Icarus had done it deliberately or not. The brief touch, however, burned directly from the tip of his cock, raced through his bloodstream, forced his heart to pump further and caused sweat to break out on his brow.
Icarus, however, moved on to the other foot. He began to pull the pants up Ezra’s calves, and hesitated. “Stand up, it’ll be easier.”
Ezra obeyed him, and the weight on his leg made him stagger. Icarus steadied him.
“This may hurt a little bit, but remember that you wanted these back on.”
“Just do it,” Ezra told him.
As the material passed over his wound, Ezra grunted but it eventually turned into a groan. Icarus didn’t hesitate; he knew the quicker they did this, the quicker the pain would subside. Ezra could hear the clink of metal as the tip of his belt passed through the buckle and feel the denim around his waist draw together. And then Icarus’s hands ghosted over his groin, doing the buttons of his fly, encasing him. He couldn’t be unaware of the state of Ezra’s arousal now, but he remained silent.
Ezra was thankful.
“There,” Icarus said. “You can sit down again.”
“Thank—” Ezra began to say, but Icarus’s mouth was pressed against his.
Ezra’s reaction was instant
aneous. His hands pressed against Icarus’s cheeks, bringing him in closer to deepen the kiss. Icarus’s lips were rough, probably from being out in the sun so much and the constant exposure to wind chapping them, but his breath was sweet and hot. Ezra felt the pain in his thigh building to a crescendo again, but Icarus’s tongue in his mouth was like a shot of morphine for the good it did to him.
It was Icarus who pulled away first, and he looked at Ezra with something like regret. “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
“Doing what?” Ezra asked foolishly, thinking it was pretty much clear what they had been doing.
“Ever since I met you, you’ve caused me nothing but trouble,” Icarus said. “The first time, you impeded my escape by falling out of your damn ship. And then you kidnap me the second time so you can get bounty on me. Plus, I got shot.”
“To be fair, it wasn’t me who shot you,” Ezra reminded him.
“No, but pretty much everything that came after is your fault.”
“Well, if it makes you happy, I got shot too!”
“What goes around comes around,” Icarus shrugged.
“You’re saying an eye for an eye, then?”
“Maybe,” Icarus said with a tone of steel.
Ezra grinned, but it was a hard grin. Little mirth lay behind it. “Then why can’t you keep your damn hands off me?”
“You seem to have the same problem,” Icarus countered.
“I can’t help admitting you get my juices flowing,” Ezra said. “But there must be something else behind it as well.”
“Insanity,” Icarus mumbled.
Ezra laughed. “Maybe. All I know is when they were trying to take you away from me, money wasn’t exactly the first thing on my mind.”
Icarus let go of his grip on him and walked away to sit in his corner again. “That doesn’t reassure me none.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, actually, I don’t,” Icarus said with surety. “I have no idea who you are, or whether I can trust a damn thing that comes out of your mouth.”
“Maybe you can’t,” Ezra fired back. “But I can tell you one thing: what I just told you was absolutely true. I have no idea what’s going on anymore, or what to think about it. All I know is that we’re in a right pickle and we have to find a way to get out of it.”
“Besides the kissing thing,” Icarus said, still in his corner, “that is the one thing we can still agree on. And my luck must be improving, because at least the second time I got shot, it was with a tranq.”
Looking down at his leg, Ezra wished he had been so lucky.
JAZZ felt as if she were bathing in her own sweat. She had been steadily working in the bowels of the dirigible for over three hours now and had moved outside to work on the external sensors while she still had daylight left. The sun, however, was starting to disappear behind the mesas that surrounded Settler’s Pass, and with that would come the colder temperatures of night. She had to get the main power to the ship at full level, even if she couldn’t fly just yet, so she wouldn’t freeze.
Bullet holes dented the hull in a sweeping arc, and some of them had taken out vital wiring. Jazz began to strip them back so she could remove the affected areas and replace them. If she had had Ezra with her, they would have sped through this part, but Ezra wasn’t here.
She had to stop thinking about that for the moment. But her affection for the man who had become her most constant companion—imagine that, a man!—made it difficult. He had taken her on when most other ship owners had scoffed at the idea of a female pilot. Ezra had simply asked her if she believed she was the best. And she had known that she was, and he had seen the truth in her. She hadn’t let him down, and, although they had had their barneys over the years, neither had he with her.
But he had certainly never gone missing on her before.
Scratch that—he had been taken from her. Guilt threatened to consume her; she hadn’t managed to get to him in time, and had been forced to fly away as he lay wounded in the dirt. What kind of friend, what kind of partner, did that make her? He surely would have fought more had their positions been reversed. He probably would have crashed the Lilliput upon their attackers.
It did her no good to be imagining what ifs. That would get her nowhere.
She yelped when she lost her grip on the pliers and they hit her on the head on their way down. She scrabbled in the dirt to grab them again, and savagely twisted the wires together. The hull of the dirigible suddenly began making a humming sound, and Jazz could have almost cried with relief.
“Thank you, baby,” she crooned to her ship. “I know you’ve been through the wars, but I really needed you to do this for me.”
She wondered if the Lilliput missed Ezra as much as she did. She believed it felt his absence, otherwise why had it taken so long just to get base power back to the ship?
The last rays of the sun sank below the horizon, and Jazz shivered. Almost immediately a wolf howled in the distance, and she knew she’d better be getting herself inside and locked up safe. From both animal and any human that might come along and try to take advantage of a downed ship.
She ran up the steps, and knew Ezra would have laughed had he seen her. She pulled the door down and bolted it into place. Nothing would be coming in, but she would have the gun by her side just in case.
The console was now giving off a comforting glow as its lights awaited her input. She sat down with a heavy sigh and activated the heating. She was rewarded with the sound of the generator kicking in, and she allowed herself a brief smile.
But now came the big test.
She activated the comm and searched for Kneebone on the frequency she had his cuff tuned to.
“Kneebone?” she asked quietly. Who knew what his situation was? Maybe he was in hiding, and her trying to contact him would give him away. But she would have to risk it. “Answer me, Kneebone.”
The replying static only made her feel exposed and vulnerable. She was alone. She didn’t like the shadowy landscape outside the window, with the imposing mesas a darker mass outlined against a blackened sky. Jazz much preferred the emptiness of the skies—she felt in her element there, as if nothing could intimidate her. Its vastness was inspiring; the mesas only served to hem her in.
“Kneebone,” she said again.
Nothing.
She might as well go all out. “Just on the off chance you can hear me, and I’m just not hearing you… here’s an update. I crashed into the outskirts of Settler’s Pass, and I’m trying to get the Lilliput back in the air. And then I’ll come and find you, Kneebone. I promise you.”
She knew in all likelihood she was speaking to static, and static alone. But with the long night ahead of her, it gave her comfort anyway.
THE two men had sat in silence for quite some time, and it was driving Ezra crazy. Icarus, however, was sitting calmly in his corner with his knees drawn up to his chest and his eyes closed. In fact, Ezra could have sworn he was sleeping.
He gingerly swung himself down from the crates and bit his lip to stop crying out when landing on his feet caused a jolt of pain that made the throbbing of his bullet wound become an explosion of agony.
Look on the bright side, he thought. Maybe I’ll die of gangrene before we get to where we’re going.
Which undoubtedly would be Shrevesport. He had no idea why he had been taken along when their captors had stolen Icarus from him. Maybe they thought he was in cahoots with the wanted man, and there might be more money in it for them if they turned both of them in? Ezra had no idea, and he hadn’t exactly gotten the full story from Icarus, either.
His lips tingled with the ghost memory of Icarus’s mouth working against them in some kind of passionate lock. He looked back at Icarus, who rested against the cool metal of the hull, and wondered if he was cold. He was still shirtless and barefoot, after all. Should he drape his coat over him, or would Icarus resent him for it?
Who knew what was going through that man’s head? Kissin
g Ezra one minute, then abusing him the next… although when Ezra looked at from his vantage point, he could see why Icarus was running hot and cold.
He hobbled over to the door of their cargo hold. He didn’t expect it to open under his touch, and it didn’t disappoint him. He ran his hands over the edges, hoping to find some structural weakness he could exploit.
Icarus piped up from his corner. “I’ve already gone over that thing. There’s no way out.”
Ezra turned around. Icarus was still sitting in the same position, with his eyes yet closed. “There’s a self-defeating attitude.”
“There’s the truth.”
“To which? The attitude, or the door?”
“Both,” Icarus said maddeningly.
“You’re not being that helpful.”
“I thought I was when I told you I’ve already been over the door?”
“Just go back to sleep!” Ezra said dismissively, and returned his attention back to the door.
“Sure.”
Ezra reached inside the lining of his coat and felt in the dark for the hidden pocket that he kept his wallet and other necessary goods in. He breathed a sigh of relief, giving silent thanks for the fact that it hadn’t been discovered. He unbuttoned the flap and brought out a small leather pouch that was tied up with a small thin strap, releasing the knot as he laid it upon the top of a crate. It rolled out, and revealed a small array of tools.
He heard Icarus coming up behind him.
“Thought you were sleeping.”
“You sounded like you were doing something interesting.”
“I am.”
“Okay, so tell me.”
“I’m going to get us out of here,” Ezra said, a tad confidently.
Icarus peered around him. “What, with your little tool… kit?”
Ezra hid his grin at the deliberate entendre. “Well, your wings are pretty small, but they’re still powerful.”
“You’ve got that right,” Icarus conceded.
For a brief moment, the spirit of bonhomie and camaraderie sparked between them again. Their smiles bounced off each other and reflected back.