Page 17 of Warped

His question is referring to the woman on the bed.

The one squeezing my finger.

I still don’t like the fact that she used a fake profile, and I still think she’s hiding something from us—something illegal, and potentially dangerous. And on top of all that, I’m still not fully convinced she’s ready to be our Warp companion.

It’s not my own pleasure that I’m worried about. It’s Binx’s safety. I need to make sure she understands exactly what she’sgetting herself into, ’cause once we’re in the Warp, there will be no turning back.

With my finger still inside her, I climb onto the bed and lean down close to whisper in her ear.

“Listen,” I tell her. “Here’s the deal: if you want to travel through the Warp with me and Rek, we’ll let you ride along, but there’s something you gotta understand. You’re gonna be our shared sex toy for the duration of the journey. You’re gonna get fucked by both of us, hard and often. We won’t hold anything back. We won’t be able to. If you don’t think you can handle that, I’m giving you one last chance to get off my ship. You have ten seconds to decide…”

It only takes her two.

“I can handle it,” she says, her voice soft but defiant. “I can handle anything you dish out.”

I turn to Rek and give him a nod.

“So be it.”

CHAPTER 8: BINX

Iam alone now.

Rek and Traven have gone upstairs to the cockpit to prepare for takeoff, and they’ve left me lying here naked and quivering on the bed. The wall imagers are turned off now, and the room is dark except for a few blue-green nightlights glowing dimly around the walls. The only sounds are my own ragged breathing and the soft, steady hum of the ship’s power systems.

That big thing the warpers used to test me is gone now too. Before he left, Rek carefully pulled it out of me and put it back in the room with the other “toys.” I can still feel it inside me though, like a phantom limb.

Or a phantom cock.

That’s a funny idea, but it doesn’t make me laugh. If anything, I feel like I should be crying after what just happened to me, but I don’t do that either. I’m pretty sure I already used up all my tears yesterday, when I found out what Stanley and those other creeps at the Gaia Group are planning.

That thought brings me upright on the bed.

The Gaia Group. Caldera. The datastick.

After the intensity of everything that just happened, I almost forgot why I’m doing all this in the first place. Why I set up a fake profile on WarpSeekers. Why I’m traveling with Rek and Traven. Why I let them strip me naked and shamefully probe my body.

On my hands and knees, I crawl across the rumpled sheets to the edge of the bed where I put my trench coat earlier. There’s a moment of panic when I discover that the coat isn’t there anymore, but it only fell on the floor during my testing. I climb down from the bed and plunge my hand into the trench coat’s pocket. There’s another flash of panic as my fingers touch nothing but fabric.

Then I feel the hard metal tab of the datastick, and relief washes over me like a cool spring rain.

I take the datastick out and hold it up in the dim light. It’s not much bigger than the tip of my pinky finger, but it contains a wealth of information.

Information that will save the lives of every single human on Caldera.

And put the jerks at the Gaia Group away for good.

Whatever I do, I can’t lose this datastick. I can’t let the warpers find it either, especially not Traven. Rek is more easygoing. Perhaps he would be sympathetic to my cause. But Traven is too much of a hardass. If he found out what kind of trouble I’m mixed up in, there’s no telling what he might do.

I have to hide the datastick.

I gather up my trench coat and underwear, along with my little wheeled suitcase that I left sitting next to the bed earlier, and I take everything into the closet that Rek pointed out to me during my tour of the ship. Not the sex-toy closet. The regular closet for clothes.

Only, it’s not regular at all. At least not by my standards. To me, a closet is supposed to be a tiny little nook with a rail for coathangers, a shelf for holding boxes, and never quite enough space for everything you need to store.

This closet, on the other hand, is an entire freaking room.

Actually, the closet is shaped almost exactly like the giant bathroom where I first met Traven. In other words, it has a sort of flattened half-moon shape to it. The wall opposite the door follows the curvature of the ship’s hull, while the inner wall curves more gently to match the rounded triangle of the central bedroom.

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