Starflight (23 page)

“What can I do?” she shouted above the beeping alarms.

“Radio the
Banshee
,” he said, and clutched the trembling wheel. “Tell the captain we need a track-and-intercept. He’ll know what that means.” Darting a glance at the dashboard, he added, “Make sure he knows our emergency system’s fried. We’ve got, maybe, thirty minutes of oxygen left.”

And nowhere safe to land,
Solara thought. Then she realized that if they died, so would Doran, because the
Banshee
would never find them in time to deliver his medicine. The possibility made her shiver. She sent out a distress call, but there was no reply. “I don’t know if our com is out, or just the receiver,” she said.

“Keep trying.”

She did, over and over again, until her skin puckered into goose bumps and her teeth chattered. Without heated oxygen coursing through the cockpit, the temperature had plummeted so low that her breath condensed into clouds—not the best conditions to fly half naked.

Renny shrugged out of his jacket. “Put this on,” he said, then unbuttoned his shirt and handed her that, too. “And cover your legs.”

The coat was warm with body heat, so she wrapped herself tightly between the lapels before it cooled. When she thanked Renny, she noticed a scattering of pink lesions marring the bare skin on his shoulders. She frowned at the scars. Round and precise, they looked like laser wounds.

“What happened to your back?” she asked.

After engaging the autopilot, he reached blindly across the far end of the dash until he found his glasses, then grinned when he saw that they weren’t broken. “Remember what I said about stealing from the wrong people?”

“They shot you?”

“Thoroughly,” he said with a wry smile. “While I ran screaming for my life, a lot like how you did back there at the satellite.”

Solara wondered if those men had known Renny couldn’t control the impulse to steal, but she supposed it wouldn’t matter to the kind of people who’d shoot an unarmed man in the back. “What about the lady?” she asked. “The one who loved you. Where is she now?”

Renny’s mouth lifted in a sad smile. “I wish I knew…or maybe I don’t.” He shook his head. “Look at the mess we’re in now. This is no life, running in the shadows, never settling in one place. I wanted something better for her—a real home and a family she could be proud of. That’s why I left her behind.” A faraway look crossed his face, and he sighed with so much longing that it plucked at Solara’s heartstrings. “Some days, I hope she moved on,” he said. “And some days I don’t.”

Solara didn’t know what to say, so she took his hand, and they stared silently out the front window as the time and distance passed, along with their oxygen supply.

At some point, their grip loosened and it took a few tries to reconnect. They became clumsy in their movements, dizzy with confusion. Solara let her gaze wander around the cockpit but couldn’t make sense of the blinking lights or remember where they were going. She gulped breath after breath, never able to satisfy her body. The sensation reminded her of the city trams on Earth, how stifling they’d become in the summer until the tram operator had to lower a window.

“Hey, we sh-should open the h-hatch,” she stammered. “And let in some air.”

Renny peered at her through his glasses and tried to scratch his chest, but his hand fell into his lap. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She was about to ask why when a sudden movement caught her eye, and she turned to find an old, ugly ship keeping pace beside them. She knew that ship—couldn’t remember its name but desperately wanted to be on board.

Renny saw it, too, and released a whoop of joy. “We’re coming in hot,” he said, turning his gaze to the control panel. “Need to slow down.”

But all he did was rub his forehead.

A set of thick, metallic cables snaked out from their shuttle and latched onto the ship, then towed them closer. As if by remote control, their engines fell silent and they nestled into the ship’s port with a loud click. Solara tried standing from her seat, but straps held her in place until a boy with blond dreadlocks unfastened them.

He dragged her into the ship’s cargo hold and then went back for Renny.

The air inside the ship was clean and pure, so refreshing that she filled her lungs in great breaths that strained the linen straps binding her ribs. Her mind seemed to sharpen with each rise and fall of her chest, and by the time Renny recovered, she was already hugging him and laughing hysterically.

A while later, after they’d given Doran his medication and made sure he was stable, the crew reconvened in the galley. There she’d learned that the captain had never received her transmissions. He had tracked the shuttle the entire time they were gone. Sitting at the table, she thought about what Renny had said, what he’d wanted to give his lady on Earth:
a real home and a family she could be proud of
.

Solara still didn’t know this crew’s secrets or how their paths had crossed, and yet these strangers had done more to protect her today than her own parents had done in eighteen years. In her opinion, that was definitely something to be proud of. Renny was wrong when he’d said this was no life.

In that moment, there was no place she’d rather be.

I
n the days that followed, Doran learned to dread nighttime.

He’d spent so long in bed that his body had forgotten its sleep schedule, and now the eight hours when the ship was still and quiet had become a mental prison sentence. He wished he’d lied and told Cassia that he needed pain pills. Then he would be in a medicated coma right now instead of lying awake, worrying about what Solara had told him.

Your father’s in jail
.

The echo of those words still had the power to make his stomach clench, because they revealed a terrifying truth—Doran was alone.

He couldn’t remember a time when his father hadn’t been there to help him. Even when he hadn’t needed a hand, he’d moved through life with more confidence knowing that his dad would catch him if he stumbled. Now that the safety net was gone, Doran couldn’t shake the sick sensation of falling.

And what about his father? Was he lonely and afraid, too, or had he transformed his cell into a makeshift office and let his lawyers do the worrying? Doran had no way of knowing, and he hated that. He missed the sound of his father’s voice. He missed making his dad laugh. There was no way for them to talk now, and Doran had never learned what he was supposed to do once he reached the coordinates in the outer realm.

He would continue with his mission, but he no longer felt confident about clearing their names. Yesterday he’d borrowed a data tablet and learned a detail about the case that made him believe someone had framed them—someone within the government. The Enforcers claimed to have found Doran’s DNA on a crate of stolen Infinium from their transport. But Doran had never set foot on board a government ship, and he’d never heard of Infinium. That could only mean the Enforcers had planted the evidence, and if that was true, he wouldn’t get a fair trial.

Panic squeezed his rib cage, and it occurred to him that no matter how hard he fought, things might never be the same. His old life could be over, replaced by this new existence of running and hiding.

No
. He shook those thoughts out of his head. His father was depending on him to stay strong and do his job. Whatever awaited him at those coordinates in the fringe was the key to their freedom.

He had to believe that.

The next morning, he squinted against the starlight filtering through the porthole and glanced down at Solara’s balled-up form, hidden beneath a heap of blankets so that only her nose peeked through.

“Why are you still sleeping on the floor?” he asked, then cleared the gravel from his throat. She couldn’t possibly be comfortable down there. Just looking at her made his shoulders ache with the remembrance of those unforgiving steel panels.

To dispel the sensation, he reached both arms above his pillow and arched his bare back in a stretch, elongating muscles that had grown stiff with disuse. In response, a few wayward vertebrae popped into their rightful places along his spine. It felt so good that he repeated the movement, then pulled each knee to his chest to stretch his legs. Much like his shower privileges, he hadn’t appreciated his full range of motion until he’d lost it, and he vowed never to take his body for granted again.

Solara yawned and rolled onto her back, her naked fists poking through the blankets in a stretch of her own. He was glad she’d quit wearing her gloves, but he kept his mouth shut about it. She was sensitive about her markings, and he could never manage to discuss them without pissing her off.

When she didn’t answer his question, he indicated the empty space beside him. “It’s a double bed, remember? There’s more than enough room for two.” He sniffed himself and added, “I don’t smell. At least, I don’t think so.”

She sat up, grumbling and rubbing the side of her neck. She must’ve tossed and turned a lot in her sleep, because a riot of hair had escaped her braids and formed something resembling a bird’s nest at her forehead. It made him smile.

“You know why,” she said. “You need the—”

“Whatever.” He waved off her excuse because that’s exactly what it was. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” He pushed the blankets down to his waist and said, “Come and see for yourself.”

Wearing nothing but a T-shirt that barely reached her thighs, she stood from the floor and took a seat on the edge of the mattress. She seemed to have lost some of her modesty, and Doran didn’t mind that, either.

“You still have bruises,” she criticized, pointing at the yellowy splotches beneath his flesh.

“But they don’t hurt anymore.”

With a dubious twist of her lips, she placed her warm palms on his sides, then ran them up and down the length of his rib cage while Doran’s breath locked inside his chest.

Hot damn.

At her touch, every internal organ between his hipbones tightened—and a couple of external ones, too. His skin hummed alive beneath her fingers, like energy flowing through a completed circuit, and he was grateful as hell to have a thick layer of blankets concealing his lap.

“Am I hurting you?” she asked.

Doran shook his head. He felt an awful lot of sensations at the moment, but pain wasn’t one of them. Maybe sleeping beside her wasn’t such a good idea after all. He gathered her hands and held them at a safe distance from his body.

“See?” he said, and swallowed hard. “Soon I’ll be good as new.”

She studied the tips of her own fingers, not seeming to mind that they were trapped between his palms. “Then you’ll be gone,” she told him. “And I’ll have the whole bed to myself. I might as well wait.”

He didn’t say so, but she had a point.

The
Banshee
had reached Obsidian yesterday, and they’d been hiding on a large orbiting meteor while Solara repaired the damages to the two-man craft. Once Doran felt well enough to travel, he would shuttle planet-side to the private ship waiting there. After that, he’d never see the
Banshee
or her crew again.

But he didn’t want to think about that right now.