Chapter Twelve

The UMOPG ship holding V’kyrri’s survivors still sat on the ground, engines warmed, but not throttled for lift off.

Edie straightened, the skin of her back and neck stinging. “They aren’t taking off.” Pressing a hand to the hollow at the base of her ribcage, she sidled around the column, trying for a glimpse of the inside of the hangar.

No Chekydran. Yet.

V’kyrri pasted himself to the rock outside of the hangar doorway and peered around the edge.

She joined him, leaving him a line of unreliable sight while she trusted data to paint the picture for her.

It made her catch her breath and yank her gun free. “Incoming.”

Miners bounded up the corridor at them.

Edie grimaced. Caught between the Chekydran and the UMOPG with nowhere to hide.

V’kyrri wavered between the two threats, a snarl on his face.

“Hunt!” One of the miners roared above the rest. “Protect the crystal.”

Edie risked a glance into the hangar.

The Chekydran ship opened. The bugs didn’t bother with a ramp. Six Chekydran jumped from the underbelly of their vessel to the hangar floor. The monsters landed, skittering on oddly segmented legs. A pair of tentacles protruding from their shoulders waved weaponry. Their brown-striped throat pouches vibrated as the bugs hummed, filling the cavern, and Edie’s data field, with sound waves. Chitin armor covered the creatures in shades of orangey-yellow.

She started firing, missing because her hands shook.

V’kyrri’s shots hit, spinning screeching, ravening bugs toward the doorway.

Damn, the things moved fast. En masse, they swarmed for the ship holding the survivors.

She gasped.

Roaring, miners sprinted past, ignoring Edie and V’kyrri, likely counting them allies since they’d turned on the Chekydran, too. The miners fixated on the Chekydran and engaged.

V’kyrri started around the massive stone door jamb to join them.

She snagged him by the collar and hauled him back. “Are you insane?”

Stupid question.

He snarled in her face. Claugh. The definition of madness. “They’re attacking the ship.”

“No,” she said. “They’re after the crates.”

For a moment, he froze.

A sonic signature lit her SEM. Adrenaline took hold. She threw V’kyrri, then herself to the ground out of the way of the hangar door.

“Edie. What…Oof.”

Someone aboard the UMOPG ship fired the amidships gun. Impact communicated through rock to her body. She clenched her eyes shut. Even though she didn’t see Chekydran and miner life signs wink out on her glasses, she had no doubt they had.

A split second later, the hangar roof came down. Rock smashed rock. Beside her. Around her. Atop her, crushing her against the unforgiving stone.

Edie screamed.

Still, stone cascaded down. Every shard squashing consciousness beneath the avalanche of SEM amplified sensory input.

Rock shifted, settling on her ribs, pressing the breath out of her. Immovable. No matter how she labored. The planetary crust gave not a millimeter. Panic set her clawing at rock, shrieking. Until another shift of the stone smashed her face to the ground.

Stillness took her.

****

V’kyrri roused, gasping. He groaned and tasted bitter, gritty dust. He struggled to roll to his back. Couldn’t. Rock weighed down his legs and one hip.

“Edie?” he rasped.

She’d been right beside him. He couldn’t touch her, physically, but she was still there, inside his awareness. Life trickling away like sand.

“Edie.” Twisting, he hefted stones off his legs and pulled free of the rock fall. He climbed to his hands and knees, sucking in great gulps of air, expanding his chest again and again, driving out the chill of old fear and inhaling the new-found terror of losing… What exactly? His only ally since his crew had escaped? Someone he’d kissed? Someone who’d destroyed countless Claugh?

From a tactical standpoint, he ought to leave her. End an old threat to the empire right here, right now. His soul twisted.

“No,” he growled, heaved to his feet, found her bloody, twitching, outstretched hand, and began tossing rock off her in time with the growing pulse of Chekydran hum.

The monsters were in the base.

He and Edie were running out of time in more ways than one.

****

She ached. Every breath drove pain through her body and her brain, but at least she could breathe.

A cloth, smelling of antiseptic, smoothed sweat from her forehead and temples. Arms enfolded her. The last hands to do this had been her father’s. When she’d caught Neffa flu and been miserable.

She shuddered. That’s what this was. Flu. And everything—every terrible thing about what she and her life had become had been nothing but a fever dream, a warning sent from the Gods. Relief melted tension from her muscles.

She’d get better, and then her father would teach her to make Churkem flower fireworks. They were the pinnacle of his artistry. He’d said she might be ready.

All your hard work has paid off, Altheas, he’d said.

She smiled.

A hand smoothed her hair from her forehead. A tingle followed. Momentary relief curled and crisped. The sensual motes dancing in her blood meant this was not her father. He’d curled and crisped, too, along with his top-secret technique for Churkem flower fireworks.

She’d pulled people who should have been dead from a wrecked, enemy starship. Another tingle traced her cheekbone.

V’kyrri. It was V’kyrri tending her.

Gasping, she forced her eyes open.

He was alive.

She was alive.

She was still twisted and tainted by what the Claugh had made of her.

Through watering eyes, she sought the familiar, calming flow of data, the telltale pressure at her temples to ease the shudders beginning in her body. To drown out the persistent pressure of self-loathing.

Nothing. She frowned.

“Rocks.” There’d been rocks, hadn’t there? Sharp, insistent stabs ran up her arms. Her head throbbed. Her chest ached. She’d been buried. Crushed.

Confusion gripped her.

V’kyrri shifted from supporting her to kneeling at her side where she could see him. Speaking. His lips moved. His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.

She couldn’t drag the pieces of herself together enough to wrest comprehension from it. She shook her head. Lost. Sick. Aching. Eyes watering. Cold. She brought her hands up to say so, to make him understand.

Her fingers were raw and bloody.

V’kyrri enclosed her hands in his.

Startled, she met his gaze.

He offered her a tight smile, shadowed by discomfort and uncertainty. “With your permission, I can help.”

She drew a sharp breath. His lips hadn’t moved, yet she’d understood him.

“Your SEM was crushed. How you weren’t, I will never know,” he whispered into her head, his remembered fear bleeding into her brain. “I may even be able to hear for you. You have my solemn vow to respect your privacy. Whatever it is that you’re afraid I’ll find out.”

Fear stormed her system, and in that instant, he was gone. He blanched and rocked, eyes narrowed.

Shaken, she grappled with emotion. Enough. She wanted to understand. She needed to. Because even without her SEM, vibration rattled the rocks, beating at her. That meant Chekydran. Neither she nor V’kyrri had time for her fears.

She grabbed hold of his wrists, clutched hard. “Yes. Hurry. We have to go.”

Leaning closer, he shook with a disbelieving laugh she could read without the SEM. He peeled her hands from his wrists and folded them together, his clasped around hers.

“The ship took off without us. Parqe fired at and destroyed the Chekydran. The roof came down. It crushed the Chekydran and the miners.”

“And very nearly us,” Edie said.

“Probably looked like it had. I’d like to think that’s the only reason we were abandoned. You okay?”

Motion behind him caught her eye and tripped her still-stumbling pulse. Bug. Edie snatched his weapon from its holster.

He twisted aside.

Edie fired.

The Chekydran went down, one eye stalk severed and twitching on the ground. The creature’s tentacles writhed before going slack.

Edie pressed the heel of her free hand against her sternum. V’kyrri had registered her alert without her having to speak. Convenient. Her breath caught. Terrifying.

V’kyrri picked himself up and, staring at the dead thing, reached a shaking hand for his weapon. “Thanks.”

Even from the side, she could read that word on his lips. She huffed a trembling laugh and gave him the gun.

“My pack,” she said, shifting her knees beneath her before climbing to her feet. She’d lost a light bar. They were down to the one he carried, and it was cracked. The light blinked at random intervals.

She tottered down the dim corridor, disoriented and dizzy, because her gaze kept searching for the missing flow of data.

She sidled past the Chekydran leaking yellow-green fluid into the rock flour. Tremors wracked her muscles. Pain stabbed from her temples inward with every step she took. Nausea sloshed her gut. SEM withdrawal. Great.

Edie bent to sling her gear to a shoulder. Headache blinded her. She fell to her knees and gagged.

Hands gathered her hair. Fire traced her veins. It soothed the dry heaves wringing her stomach. She straightened, mortified. What was it about the man that let him straight into the worst parts of her life?

At least she didn’t have to read the disgust and distrust in his face. SEM addict. Edie sighed. Parqe had been right. That rankled.

V’kyrri offered her a cloth streaked with mud.

A hint of antiseptic suggested it was a first aid wipe from her kit. The one he’d used when he’d hauled her from beneath the rock fall. She swiped her face, wishing for actual water to clean her mouth. Instead, she carefully wiped her quaking hands before discarding the dry cloth.

She threaded one arm through the strap of her pack.

V’kyrri assisted as she stumbled to her feet.

Edie raided her tiny store of hard candy. One for her. One for V’kyrri.

He stared at the orange-wrapped sweet laying in her palm. When she scraped hers out of the wrapper with her teeth, he set his hand on hers as if sealing a deal. The curl of his fingers against her skin sent heated tremors through her, while sweet, slightly astringent grebnol fruit-flavor lit up her taste buds.

“You’re stuck with me,” he said when she met his gaze. His smile took a secretive, sexy turn that shook her to the core. He unwrapped the candy and popped it in his mouth.

Despite the headache hammering her skull, her nerves tingled, trailing sensual promise along her gritty, perspiration-damp skin. Stuck with him. His idiotic smile, his weight tipped toward her, and his prying gaze struck flame to her awareness of him. Electricity sparked every nerve. The madman looked pleased with himself

“You did this on purpose,” she gasped.

“Getting left for dead? Sure. Because it’s such a holiday being stranded on this burning ash-heap crawling with Chekydran.” He drew and lobbed a shot into the darkness to his right. Her left. Flailing tentacles fluoresced a weird, vibrating indigo, then collapsed.

He said something.

“Slow down and look at me,” she said.

“I get another shot at these bastards. So what? You’d have died without your supplies,” he said.

“Had you gotten on that ship and taken off like you were supposed to, I’d have stolen what I needed.”

“While—”

“Slow down and look at me,” she snapped.

His features tightened. He sucked in a measured breath, damped down expression and very deliberately said, “While dodging miners and bugs?”

She snorted. “Do you really imagine I wouldn’t recognize a deep need for vengeance when it stares me in the face?”

“You would,” he muttered. “And you, resistance soldier. With your vast experience in revenge against my people. Are you suggesting I should get over it?”

“Good money in revenge,” she said. Then she pinned him with a stare she hoped got her message across. “But the way I see it, you don’t have a plan for getting out. At all.”

He met her eye, his expression bleak.

“Survivor’s guilt, much?”

He said nothing. His expression darkened.

“Yeah. I know a lot about that, too, Claugh. Get past it. You’re worth more to your queen alive.”

“Not anymore.”

She gaped at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“Edie, I burned out. I told you I’m a telepath. And you’ve had some experience with it.”

“Slow down or get in my head. I can’t understand when you go that fast.”

He grabbed her wrist. “This is touch telepathy. The lowest form of the talent. It’s what I’m reduced to since the wreck. Touch telepaths are common among my people. It wasn’t why Her Majesty brought me into the ranks.”

“You’ve suffered injury and trauma. You’ll heal.”

He shook his head. “As a natural consequence of working in close contact with a high-powered telepath, connections develop. Pathways into one another’s brains. No matter where I was, no matter where my friends were, I had a constant sense of them. I knew where they were and whether they were alive. If need be, I could get messages to them, or they to me via that link.”

Frowning, she eyed him when he paused. Furrows marred his forehead.

“Useful, but there’s a price. If I die, that link can kill. Even if doesn’t, it does serious injury.” His forehead crease hardened, and his gaze slid away from her. Shadows hollowed his cheeks. “The Rhapsody was in pieces and already going down. I’m not telekinetic, but I did my best to hold her together. Mentally. I couldn’t.”

“You expected to die, and you didn’t want to take your friends with you,” she whispered, the ache in him infecting her. “V’kyrri, what did you do?”

He shrugged. “Cut the connections.”

Such a bland trio of words. “You’re in my head, trying to block me out of that memory. You have no idea how it’s hemorrhaging all over me. You didn’t ‘cut’ anything.”

“Ripped,” he allowed. His eyes closed. “Ripped the connections out by the roots.”

Desperate measures…because no one survived the kind of wreck she pulled him from. He hadn’t taken the time to be neat or tidy.

“You did damage,” she said.

“Permanent.”

There was more. How she felt it trembling just out of her reach, she couldn’t know. They’d long since passed her limited understanding of how her own brain worked, much less any knowledge she might have about a telepathic brain.

“You believe that’s the only use your commanders had for you? That they’d put you in command of a brand-new class of starship simply because you’re a telepath?”

His eyes opened. He released her. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do—”

“You’re afraid. I get that.”

“Afraid?” He jerked back a step.

“Totally rational,” she said. “I’m afraid, too. Cause if I take you into Claugh space, there’s a good chance I’ll get shot on sight. You’re afraid your commanders won’t want you back. But they need what you know.”

“The others got away,” he snapped. “No one needs me.”

“They took off,” she countered. “There were Chekydran inbound on the planet and likely a carrier in orbit.”

He paled.

“We hope to all Twelve Gods they got away,” she said. “If the well-being of your empire rests on knowing what’s going on out here, they need you. And if I want your empire to stop the Chekydran—and I very much do—it’s in my best interest to get you to them. If you’re still bent on revenge here, just so happens I’m looking for work.”

“You’d work for the Claugh?”

“No. But I’d work with you on this job.”

“Edie. I’m touched.”

She balled up a fist. “Not yet.”

He grabbed her arm and yanked. “Run.”

Sick-making dizziness doubled her over, and he dragged her several steps.

“Run.”

Her skull creaked at the volume of his shout inside her head. Dizziness vanished, and Edie found her footing.

V’kyrri lobbed a trio of shots over her shoulder.

Laser fire scorched the stone beside her. Rock shards exploded outward. Edie flinched at the gravel peppering her cheek.

They pelted into the gloom. The light bar on V’kyrri’s belt flung illumination and crazed shadows across tunnel and misshapen stone alike.

Head buzzing, pins prickling her scalp, Edie dug into her belt with shaking fingers. She yanked free of V’kyrri’s grip, losing a layer of skin in the process, and spun to face an oncoming tidal wave of Chekydran.

“Catch, you baxt’kal freaks.” She threw a tiny, glowing marble at the lead bug. V’kyrri caught her by the scruff of the neck and jerked her off her feet.

She yelped, fell shoulder-first into a bed of scree, and half tumbled, half slid down a slope.

A green-cast flash from above lit the cavern for a split second. The blast wave shook her.

Gasping, counting cuts and bruises, Edie skidded to a stop, spread-eagled on her back. Sharp-edged rock dug into her skin. Her right arm and leg dangled in open air. Terror coated her insides. Another few centimeters and she’d go over that edge into who knew what. Edie tried to ease her too-fast gulps of air and realized she could see. A little bit, at least.

Sand trickled to her chest from the impenetrable dark above. Grains jumped on her coverall driven by the thud of her heart.

She turned her head to look up-slope, gasping when she slipped another millimeter. She couldn’t go on lying there, waiting for more Chekydran to rush toward the racket she’d undoubtedly made blowing up their friends. Did bugs have friends? Not to mention that if there was light, it meant V’kyrri had tumbled down slope with her. Maybe. He could be hurt. Or suspended over the void, clinging to the edge for dear life. He might even be calling for help in a voice she’d never hear.

That sent a pang through her. Some time when she wasn’t caught between Chekydran and falling to her death, it might be interesting to unpack her newfound wish to hear his voice.

She sucked in a long breath and gathered determination to save herself.