Atrophy (5 page)

Chapter Four

T
annin stepped out of the stairwell into the docking bay and paused behind a tall locker. Under dim lights, the
Imojenna
perched in silence, the crew no doubt still sleeping.

Sunrise wouldn’t be for two hours, and he wasn’t due to start work at the administration center until three hours after that. Hopefully it’d take at least another hour or two for anyone to notice he hadn’t come into work and, with any luck, they might not come looking for him until later in the day. By then, the
Imojenna
would be well away from Erebus.

In the marketplace last night, he’d overheard that the tech-mechs would be working through the night to get the ship ready for launch early the next morning.

He hadn’t slept, he’d been too worked up. Instead he’d sat on his bed, counting down to the hour he thought would be the optimal time to sneak aboard and wait for departure.

And in the few moments he hadn’t been thinking about his imminent escape, his mind had been otherwise occupied by
her
. The way she’d looked when she’d glanced up at him in that holding cell, her dark blue eyes hard, grip on the knife like she was ready to fight her way out of there. Her hair, which he’d first thought was simply honey blonde, had deep gold highlights in it, falling thick and soft past her shoulders. Around her neck she’d worn a thin, twined piece of leather and resting against her skin just below the line of her collarbone was a six pointed star like the one painted on the side of the
Imojenna
.

He’d gone into that room with the full intention of fighting for her, even if it meant the end of his plans, but he’d been stunned, and more than a little impressed, to find she’d readily handled herself. He’d met a lot of tough women on Erebus, most of whom were willing to kill to protect themselves, but the woman from Sherron’s crew didn’t seem to have that same kind of ruthless, jaded grit. Hers had been more subtle, and somehow still…not vulnerable, but maybe unguarded. Whatever the case, she’d intrigued him on a deeper level than he wanted to consider, since he was about to use her and that ship as a means of escape.

Taking a deep breath, he scrubbed a hand over his face, fatigue making his limbs heavy as the lack of sleep and stress started to catch up with him. Until he got on that ship and secured himself somewhere, he had to stop letting thoughts of the woman distract him, no matter how captivating she might be.

His fingers closed tightly around the commpad in his pocket, that small, ordinary unit which held the key to his freedom. He moved farther around the locker, reaching in to tug out a pair of grey overalls and pull them over his clothes. With one more long breath, which didn’t alleviate the hard pound of adrenaline through his veins, he took the commpad out of his pocket and crossed the open floor.

There were two guards sitting on a raised platform, right where he’d expected them be. One of them glanced at him, away from the program they were watching on the viewer—some sort of sports from the sound of it. But, Tannin didn’t react or hesitate at the guard’s gaze. He reached the
Imojenna’s
cargo hatch, waiting for one of the guards to ask him what he was doing, but one quick glimpse revealed they’d turned their attention back to the game. Not quite able to believe he’d gotten away with the brazen bluff so far, he spliced his commpad into the hatch’s control panel and ran the security code sequence. Three short beeps told him the cipher had been accepted.

He instructed the smaller, person-sized door to open, and disengaged his commpad as the panel slid away, revealing the dark interior of the cargo bay. Two steps took him inside and one swipe of his hand over the inner access board shut out the docking bay. Standing for a moment in the darkness, he listened to his breathing, coming harsh and ragged in the silence. Leaning forward, he rested his forehead against the cool, hard surface of the bulkhead and waited for a shot of disorienting dizziness to pass.

Made it
.

Opening his eyes, his vision gradually adjusted to the shadows and he turned to survey the cargo hold. In the middle of the large space, a stack of creates were strapped down to the floor. Beyond that, dim light shone down from stairs disappearing up into the next level. With measured steps, he crossed the metal-grate floor, the hard soles of his boots ringing softly against the steel mesh.

At the bottom of the steps he paused and looked upwards, the pungent scent of coffee reaching him.
Real coffee
, not the repli-coffee the officers on Erebus drank. A long forgotten swell of sensory memory flooded him and the burning, loathing recollections of a different time suffused his very cells. His lungs stalled and for a long moment, he couldn’t find any air. But the fresh blaze of old pain rallied his determination. He wrapped a hand around the stair rail, anchoring himself in reality, to now and what he needed to do.

The scent indicated someone was awake and moving around up there. He needed somewhere to hide, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere in the open space of the cargo hold. He carefully climbed up the stairs, opening into a long passageway with doors running the length of it. Crew’s lodgings, if he had to guess. Just as he started moving deeper into the ship, the lights along the ceiling flickered to life with eye-aching intensity.

Tannin edged closer to the nearest bulkhead with a sharp movement. To his left, a door slid open with the slight tinkle of bells. His pulse thrummed harder through his body.
Damn it
. He had nowhere to go, leaving him exposed in the passageway. If he didn’t deal with this, his escape attempt would be over before it’d even begun.

A few short steps took him into the hatchway. He recognized
her
as he dropped a hand over her mouth and wrapped an arm around her middle, forcing her backward and then spinning them to shove her up against the wall next to the door. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist and tugged against his hold. Indigo eyes went wide, her terrified cry muffled by his hand.

Her fear lanced his chest, guilt over doing this to her after what she’d endured last evening scraping his insides like rusted nails. He couldn’t stand her looking at him like that, gaze filled with horror as if he were the devil incarnate. Keeping his eyes locked on hers and the hand tight over her mouth, he reached over and palmed the door shut, blocking out the bright light shining in from the passage.

In the diffused glow of her cabin, her eyes looked almost black and her tousled hair a rich deep gold. She smelled like summer-storm-rain on a hot day back home on Barasa, bringing another sting of innocent days past. He could feel her lush curves yielding against him, though tension ran through every line of her body.

She knew he was onboard now. The only way he’d be getting off this hellhole of a planet was with her cooperation. If she would agree to hide him. His heart tripped over itself. It’d been a long time since he’d trusted anyone besides himself, and she almost literally held his life in her hands.

“I need your help.” His voice came out uneven and he swallowed against the tightness in the back of his throat.

She shook her head, pressing herself harder against the wall, her nails digging into the skin on his forearm.

“Please, just listen. I need to get off Erebus. I know you have no reason to trust me, especially now. It’s asking a lot, I know that, too.” Helpless emotion he’d long thought dead and buried tightened his chest. For once, he needed something in the universe to go his way, for this stranger to give him the chance the IPC justice system hadn’t. “I just need a little faith here. So I’m going to take my hand off your mouth, because I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”

With a short breath, knowing with almost total certainty that his one chance of freedom was about to be blown, he dropped his hands away from her and stepped back.

She didn’t shift, didn’t run, and didn’t scream for help, just stood there with fingers locked on her necklace, her chest rising and falling rapidly.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Tannin Everette.”

Fatigue started catching up with him as his body finally hit the adrenaline wall and splattered into a jelly-like mess. His limbs heavy, he walked to her unmade bed and dropped onto the edge. He scrubbed both hands over his face, swallowing again around the tautness in his throat and stared unseeing at the floor. Would he really allow himself to be killed rather than return to a life on Erebus? Panic blended with grief in a sickening whirlpool of misery. He wasn’t brave enough to die, rather than stay on Erebus. Survival instincts reared within him, despite the depravity he’d be facing out in the general population upon his return.

“You’re the guy who came in after that officer attacked me.”

Her bare feet appeared in his line of vision, toenails painted gold and a petite, graphite-colored ring on the little toe of her left foot. She crouched down and touched his chin, bringing his head up.

“What happened to you?”

No one had ever asked him what happened. As far as everyone had been concerned, the case had been cut and dry, no need to ask any questions when the apparent evidence was so overwhelming.

Every bad, hateful, vile, smoldering feeling he’d experienced since arriving on Erebus erupted into a devastating torrent. He struggled to breathe through it as she stared at him, curiosity and maybe just a touch of concern in her gaze. With a tenacity borne from years of keeping himself locked down and guarded—because on Erebus there was no other way to survive—he cut off the searing sensations, as effectively as snapping a rope holding an anchor, and the emotions sunk into his mind’s deepest, black abyss.

“My name is Zahli. Figure you should know that much, since apparently we’re now partners-in-crime for two separate felonies.” Her words took some of the tension from him, mostly because he was amazed she could make even a light, half-hearted joke about what had happened to her yesterday afternoon. “If I did agree to help you in return for you helping me yesterday, what would you want me to do?”

She hadn’t exactly agreed, but neither had she run screaming from the room.

He inhaled over the last echo of the harsh emotions tightening his chest. “Hide me until we get to wherever this ship is headed.”

“We’re bound for the Rim. We’ve got a delivery to make.”

The news made this already bad situation worse. The Rim was a giant space station. Like some planets had rings of debris and ice, the Rim entirely encompassed and rotated around Yarina. It was the IPC’s central planet, where government sittings were held, the highest justices upheld, and where almost all IPC government leaders resided.

“Well that’s about the last place in the entire universe I want to go. How about after that?”

She shrugged. “It depends on where my brother decides.”

“Your brother?” A foreboding sensation crept into his brain, subtle as a nail pounded into his skull.

“Rian.”

Great
. The war hero, whose mere name could make a seasoned soldier piss his pants, was her brother. If he’d thought before he couldn’t bring himself to choose death, he might as well have not worried. Sherron would make sure he got good and dead, probably in the most painful way imaginable.

“That’s what I get for sneaking onto the ship of a trained assassin,” he muttered.

“What did you say?” Zahli’s gaze was sharp as she stared at him.

“Your brother and his training? Another inmate said he’d gotten to know Rian about two or three years before the Assimilation Wars finished, that Rian had been working as some sort of super, government-sanctioned assassin.”

A flash of surprise crossed her features, so fast he couldn’t be a hundred percent sure he’d really seen it. Surely she’d known what her brother had done during the war?

One of her hands skimmed over his shoulder and he forgot all about her brother. Except that was ridiculous. What was he, a puppy starved for affection? Had twelve years on Erebus turned him into some kind of head-case who got all mushy the first time someone showed him any decency? He shifted, putting some distance between them.

Zahli stared at him and he could all but see her mind working behind her expressive gaze, saw the moment she’d come to some resolve.

“I’ll help you. You put yourself on the line to save me yesterday. If you ended up taking the blame— This is the least I can do. You can stay in my room.”

He glanced around the small cabin, basic quarters of a padded bench along one wall, small desk with crystal display set into it, and double bed pushed up against the outer bulkhead beneath a high, elongated viewport. On the opposite side was a locker and privy facilities. Yeah, being locked in here for days and weeks on end was so not going to be fun. Especially with Zahli flitting in and out. Sleeping only a few feet apart. Showering while he sat out here and pretended there wasn’t a naked woman in the next room… He flashed hot and cursed at himself for being just as bad as that bastard officer who’d attacked her yesterday.

The door slid open, catching them in a blinding flood of light.

“Zahli, how frecking long does it take you to—”

Tannin shoved to his feet as Rian stopped mid-stride and looked over them both, his expression blank. Deadly vacant.

Zahli edged in front of him and took a step backward, as if protecting him when Rian’s fists clenched. “Rian—”

Tannin only caught a flash of movement from Rian before pain lacerated his left shoulder. The impact sent him backward, glancing off the edge of the bed and crashing to the floor. He rolled onto his back, jaw locked against the blazing pain as he grabbed the knife buried all the way to the hilt, high in his chest.

Zahli dropped down next to him and covered his hand. “Don’t pull it out. If he hit something vital, you’ll bleed out before I can get our doctor.”

“Zahli, get away from him.” Rian’s warning came out at not much louder than a growl.

“Rian, you’re such a frecking ass sometimes.” Zahli reached up to the small table by her bed and came back with a comm.