Sail
Chapter Twenty-One

In the hallway, my breath clouded in the dark with every quick gasp. A deep chill racked through my body and trembled a squawk from the hinges on the Vicious door as I shut it behind me.

My eyes swam with tears at the sudden exhaustion that diminished my energy to zero. I staggered down the hallway, my knees threatening to give out because I couldn’t think I could take much more.

The Saelis. On this ship. Why were they here? Had they somehow found out about the Vicious? Were they going to get their revenge?

Arms shot out of an open door and snatched at my coat. With a shout, I tried to wrench out of them. They hauled me inside, spun me about, and held me in place while the very pilot I hated most looked at me with wide, terrified eyes. Whatever he’d been planning to say seemed to change when it reached his mouth as his gaze drank me in.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did you see something? The Saelis are boarding—”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging out of his grip. “I saw something.” I didn’t have the energy to yell at him, but I was in no mood to be touched by him when his betrayal still hollowed out my heart.

“Daryl and Nesbit are dead,” he said in a rush. “Daryl swallowed his own tongue and Nesbit gouged out his eyes.”

“What?” They killed themselves? Sweet Feozva, what would make them do that?

“Are they ghosts?”

Worry pinched his forehead as he shot forward and took my arm again. “I don’t know.”

The cogs in my brain tumbled and creaked until the exhaustion-induced cobwebs cleared some. The female Saelis in the Vicious room had eaten iron. The female in the lab had something inside her blood to drive the male insane. Just like me.

“There’s something inside me, Mase. What if the Saelis are here because of me? Because of something inside me? What if it drives them crazy, too?” The memory of the lab woman being torn in half turned my stomach, and I shook my head to clear it.

Mase took my hand and marched me through the double doors into the kitchen then into the stasis pantry. “No. They won’t,” he growled once the door was closed behind us. “Help me with these shelves.”

Jars clanked together as he pulled and I pushed a shelf in front of the door. Eggs bounced around in their containers during the final heave, and a couple splatted on the floor. I couldn’t help but remember the scrambled map Mase had made for me to get to the cockpit. That seemed like a lifetime ago, a happier lifetime filled with trust, bodily exploration, and laughter. My foot came down on one of the broken shells with a satisfying crunch.

“Another,” Mase barked and wrapped his hands around the bars of a second shelf. A sheen of sweat had broken out on his face, tinged blue under the stasis light, giving him an otherworldly glow.

He caught me staring after we’d moved the second shelf behind the first. “What?” he whispered as he wiped his hands on his pants.

“Why did you tell him?” I asked, because if I was going to die, I needed to know.

He gazed at me with eyes bright with hurt. Seeing that pain, whatever its source, stabbed an unwanted breathlessness into my lungs.

“He needed to know, Absidy. Eventually we would’ve had to tell him the truth. He has to make this delivery so he can feed his family, and for him to do that on time, he has to land this ship without a swarm of police and questions slowing him down. He can help hide you on this ship when we do land, and he knows how to skip around questions that dig too deep. But he had to know about you first.”

“Why would he lie for me? He has no reason to.”

“Because...” His jaw twitched. “You’re a part of this crew.”

I stared at him, not sure what to make of that. “But you told him. You just gave it up like…like your virginity just so he wouldn’t think you were robbing James of his boyish innocence. How could you do that to me?”

“Jesus, Absidy, don’t you get it? He had to know. I was going to tell him anyway, and that was the time to do it since he saw me practically inside you. He needed an explanation. He deserved an explanation.”

“And you couldn’t stand to lie to your beloved captain, could you? Maybe I can trust him with the truth, but you…” I shook my head. “Especially with the price tag on my head and this drug baron you owe money to. What’s that even about?”

“I guess you’ll just have to take my word that I would never turn you in. And neither will the captain.”

I leaned toward him so he could see every fracture in the trust I once had for him in my eyes. “Your word means nothing to me now.”

“Fine.” He turned away while he raked a hand through his hair. “What’s done is done.”

Silence thickened the air between us, and I hated how that made my whole body ache worse than being possessed. I slumped against a wall and watched the door through the shelves.

“I did it, you know. I let the monsters on this ship pass through me to the other side. Your trick about eating iron afterward to chase them through worked.” When I looked at him, the wonder I saw in him feathered warmth over my skin.

“Well, that’s…that’s kind of amazing.”

I shrugged and toed the cracked eggshell. “Well, you’re kind of a genius, so...”

Somewhere on the ship, a teralingua shrieked. Glass shattered nearby, maybe in the hallway. Shivers flashed up my spine. Mase fisted his hands.

Maybe now was the time to confess everything before my life ticked to a stop. My mouth opened, and I said the first thing that popped into my heart, “I think I was starting to love you.”

He froze, and I could tell I’d knocked him off his guard by the astonished look in his mismatched eyes. Good.

“Don’t start saying your goodbyes yet.” With a glance at the barricaded door, he came toward me, his hands raised to shoulder height as if he expected some kind of violent assault from me. “I don’t plan on dying today, and I’m sure as hell not going to let you die either.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” He seemed to be looking at the distance between us stretching to several feet while a grimace rolled across his face. “Why would you even ask that?” The slight crack in his voice solidified the pain inside me to a sharpened point. The blue light above seemed to widen the gap linking us together until we stood worlds apart. But I so desperately wanted to fling myself across the stars at him, I could taste it. Sweet and tart at the same time, that want perched on my tongue like iron.

Pots and pans crashed to the floor in the kitchen, right outside the pantry’s barricaded door. I jumped. Mase whirled around and backed into me, his arm clotheslining across my body. My heartbeat matched the speed of what must’ve been a lid spinning to a stop.

Blood roared through my head in the sudden silence. I gripped Mase’s elbow tight for support.

A long drawn out screeching sound scraped down the pantry door from top to bottom that made me want to crawl out of my skin, and for some reason, I pictured the Vicious room with the marks all over it. Claw scratches. A Saelis had just marked the room we cowered in.

I shivered so hard, my hands loosened their hold on Mase’s arm.

Deep inhales pressed to the cracks in the door. Like they were sniffing us out. We’d been found within minutes of their arrival, which meant there was no way we could outrun them. Where would we go anyway?

Mase moved from in front of me and crept toward the corner of the pantry to a shelf piled with spare rope used to tie meat to the ceiling to hang. He coiled the ends between both fists and snapped it taut, then handed one to me. I shook my head and plucked the ice pick from my pocket. Nodding, he stashed the spare rope in his pocket and nudged me behind him again.

Something slammed into the door, and we both jerked back. No way would a rope and an ice pick fend off anything that could make that much noise, but it banged again. And again.

This would not end well. We were trapped with no place to go but toward them.

Mase turned to me, a wild flare in his eyes, and palmed both my cheeks. “When I tell you to run, you run. Do you hear me? And you stab everything that’s not me or the captain with your ice pick.”

I started to shake my head no, no I didn’t hear him, no I wouldn’t just leave him, when his mouth landed on mine with a desperation that stuttered my pulse to life. I drank him in as deeply as I could because I might not ever get the chance.

Another crash outside the door pulled him away. A firm resolve settled onto his face as he glanced at the door.

“If you ever believe anything I say again, then believe this. I’m in love with—”

A loud blow to the door bounced the rest of his words across the walls instead of to my ears, and then the barricade tipped. Mase rushed forward to catch it, but I stood frozen in place because the door was now inching open.

Through the slats in the falling shelves and the food items sliding from them, vague shapes loomed.

Huge, hulking frames. Black, scaled skin. Bright, needle-sharp teeth under an extended snout. Curved claws protruding from human-like fingers on arms long enough to scrape the floor. White tufts of hair. And a pair of eyes rimmed in luminous green around dark pupils. Three pairs. Three Saelis. All males.

Terror welled up inside me so complete, it charged every synapse to the frying point. A tremble went through Mase as both shelves crashed to the floor.

A low growl sounded from the three of them as they picked their way over the tumbled shelves.

Mase backed into me, turning his head. “As soon as they’re clear of the door,” he said, his voice low.

My back hit the far wall. The only escape was toward the advancing Saelis. How fast could they move? Where would I go? How many were there prowling around the rest of the ship? I fisted my hands and swallowed. If lady luck had ever had the notion to smile down on me, now was the time to stretch that mouth past her Feozva damned ears.

“Take the left side of the room. Run,” Mase yelled, and he charged at the three Saelis who weren’t even clear of the door yet.

My feet sprang into action right behind him. I hugged the left side of the remaining pantry shelves while he charged down the middle and barreled into the first one. I didn’t think. I just put one foot in front of the other until I became nothing but movement, leaping over spilled food and broken shelves.

The second Saelis rushed at Mase, but the third stood in the doorway. Its bulk took up too much space to get around. I couldn’t look at it. I just needed to sail through it, around it, maybe even underneath it, and leave it behind like it was nothing but stars.

Ducking my head to a low squat, I ran as fast as I could across the overturned shelves with the intent of hurling myself under the Saelis’s long legs.

A silver blade flashed across the Saelis’s throat. A spray of warmth swept across my cheeks and mouth. The Saelis slumped forward. Behind where it had been seconds before, stood the captain, the knife in his hand dripping red.

Between the punctuated crashes and Mase’s bellowed grunts, the two remaining Saelis gave an eerie howl that slid shivers up my back.

Captain Glenn plowed over the fallen alien into the room and hissed, “Go” without even a glance at me.

I hugged the doorframe to get past into the kitchen, then burst through the double doors into the dining room, the bright glow from the stasis pantry shining a sliver of blue light to guide my way around the gurney. But once out in the hallway, darkness skidded me to a stop for half a heartbeat.

Then I sprinted right toward…what? The Saelis had no trouble finding me once; they could do it again.

I didn’t bother gliding my fingers over the doors because I knew I’d be able to feel the Vicious room’s gloom when I neared it. The pump of my arms and legs fed panic into my lungs faster with every pant. I wheeled around the room to the right, toward the elevator, but a faint ding stopped me in my tracks. The elevator door had just opened one floor above. More Saelis?

Winter air rushed from behind me and flickered the broken light. A door slammed open in the hallway to the left, and the smell of tobacco led right to it.

Another ding signaled the elevator had closed. It was headed to this floor or the one below, but I couldn’t take any chances.

I turned and ran toward the tobacco smell and the open door, hoping, praying, that the Saelis skipped this floor. The blast of cold gnawed at my feet with icy teeth to go faster. I strained to hear anything from inside the dark room before I entered, but it was deathly quiet.

Ding. The elevator rumbled open as I swung around the corner into the room.

The light on the ceiling sputtered. Another door on the opposite side of the room crashed open. A high keening shivered up my shoulders from the hallway. Much too close. If that was how fast Saelis could move, I’d never make it. Even if they didn’t see me, they would hear the doors crashing open and my pounding feet across the titanium floor.

Exhaustion weighted my limbs, but I couldn’t dare let it slow me down. I flew through the doorway into a larger room, and the door slammed shut behind me. Heavy-looking metal containers, almost as high as the ceiling, lined the walls under a blinking light. I remembered this room from iron and Randolph hunting.

But I didn’t remember the high-pitched giggle or the old cheese smell. Both the sound and smell curdled my insides to jelly.

A force gripped my neck with an iron shackle. It smashed me against the side of one of the metal containers. I kicked and punched and clawed at the ghost with empty eye sockets who crushed the air from my lungs. Nesbit.

Metal containers slid in front of both doors. Was that Red keeping the Saelis out? The whole ship lurched while the smell of tobacco drowned the room.

Blood leaked from the deep tears orbiting where Nesbit’s eyes had been. It streamed down his face and reddened the creases around his crooked tooth. He brought his head closer to mine, a crazed grin plastered to his face that grew wider under the sputtering light. If he’d had eyes, his gaze would likely be pointed at my mouth. If Red hadn’t knifed off his arm after he’d attacked me, it would likely be prying my mouth open to let him in.

His hand around my throat tightened. My lungs burned with the need for more than shallow breaths. Darkness pressed into the edges of my vision, and the sounds of the quaking ship began to fade.

Gasping, I hooked two fingers into each eye socket. A dark-skinned arm snaked around Nesbit’s bandaged stump where his used to be. His grin morphed into a deranged glower as Red hauled and I pushed. Instead of releasing my neck, he tossed me up the side of the metal container.

My fingertips skimmed the top rail but the backs of my legs were already flipping me over inside. The harsh blow at the bottom knocked the air from my lungs. Dark shapes darted past my eyes, and I had no idea if they were real or the result of my head cracking against metal.

I tried to breathe, tried to get up, but my body wasn’t cooperating. Ice cold seeped into my back and stormed a brutal, painful shudder through my body.

Crashing and metal sliding against metal battered my ears. The container rocked violently, slamming my shoulders and head against the sides.

I had to end this now. How did I do it last time? How did I make the Saelis dissolve into smoke so I could breathe them in? Before I could take my next breath, the container tipped and threw me out.

I lay in a crumpled pile at Nesbit’s feet. His wicked smile crawled over my skin, and his tongue darted out to catch some blood on his crooked tooth. He stalked toward me with his fist clenched.

Wait. I’d told the largest one to do it, to come inside me. I’d invited the Saelis ghosts in.

“Nesbit…” I heaved through the pain lancing my body. “Come in.”

His face warped into black smoke, and I breathed all of him in. Pain shocked down my throat, through my bones, crushing my body in all directions.

Memories that weren’t mine flashed through my head. Someone leaning over me with a nametag that read Saelis Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Nursery. Sex. Esmerelda the Space Vixen. A terrible hunger that gnawed at my insides when he smelled my blood.

Somehow my hand made it from my pocket to my mouth, and the iron on my tongue vanished.

The pain Nesbit caused faded, but not the kind from my beaten body. I lay there in a puddle of sweat and blood, shivering uncontrollably, while I listened hard for sounds of Saelis. I needed to get up, but everything hurt.

Red appeared at the door, crouching as if listening too, and a screw dropped from the flickering light attached to the ceiling. It bounced toward my head. I tried to grab it, but my arms wouldn’t move. They were sealed to the floor, but the puddles of blood surrounding me streamed toward it as if the room was tipping. But it wasn’t.

The light blinked out and the door flew open, and I knew that was my only chance. I left the iron where it was since I had no time to search for it in the dark, then hauled myself up and limped toward the door as fast as I could.

My body felt shattered, but I refused to let that slow me down. I raced to the left as fast as my aching body would go, heart beating wildly. The glow of green elevator buttons pulled me forward. When it rumbled open, I knew that’s where Red wanted me to go. I could make it to another floor to find someplace to hide. I could…

In the hallway to the right of the slanted, flickering light, a teralingua widened its orange eyes and shrieked. A high-noted wail came from behind it. The teralingua’s scream ended with a wet splatter and too many thuds on the floor.

A shimmer of luminous green rings stared me down over the fallen creature. It wailed again just as I sailed past toward the elevator. A matching yowl down the hallway behind me speared icicles up my spine.

Almost. There. I could practically hear the ding that would announce my potential safety. Please Feozva, don’t let there be more Saelis lurking on the other floors.

Claws ticked against metal behind me, faster and faster. I plowed into the elevator.

“James? Are they gone?” someone whispered above me.

I jerked my head up, my thumb only just skimming the Floor 3 button. A terrified, but familiar, face peeked down at me from behind a loose sheet of metal on top of the elevator.

“Randolph?”

A screech in front of me, then a blow to the head darkened my whole world.

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