Page 29 of Risking Her Heart

She slides my arm free of the box and I lift it up. It’s as good as new. A little tender, some bruising, but nothing like it was.

“Wow,” I say.

“They have a few toys,” she says with a smile. “Now, I want to show you what we’ve been working on. Come with me.”

I trail along in her wake. Zas grunts and I give him a wave to let him know that I’m okay and then follow her out a door.

19

KATARINA

She leads me down what feels like a natural corridor. The walls are rough and unfinished, except for lights mounted into the ceiling that turn on as we approach and go dark once we’ve passed. We pass closed doors without pausing until she stops at one.

Jackie puts her hand on the door then pauses to give me a wry grin before pushing and it opens. We step into a massive barracks. Double stacked beds line the walls on both sides. It looks like hundreds of them.

The beds frames are rough made. Mixing stone and steel together but they look sturdy and serviceable. Most do not have any form of mattress or blankets. I walk over to the closest one and give it a closer inspection.

The construction looks hurried. Rough hew marks on stone, scrapes on the steel parts, but for all that it seems solid. I shake it or try to, but it doesn’t move at all. Going back to the center of the hall I imagine the room filled with my fellow survivors. A warmth suffuses my skin, and I smile.

“It’s not perfect,” Jackie says. “And of course there’s no privacy for the moment, but we haven’t had long to work and there are only a few of us. Honestly, I’m not much help. The material is too heavy for me to work with, but I do what I can.”

“It’s amazing,” I say, shaking my head.

The couples won’t like the lack of privacy but we’re talking about survival. If this Order is coming like they all think, the ship will be a death trap. No defenses and no way to set up any. I don’t need to see more of this base they’re living in to know it’s a thousand times more defensible than the wreck of our ship.

“There is still a lot to do,” Jackie says. “But we can take everyone in. We’ll need to move as much of the supplies from the ship and other stuff as we can too.”

“That’s going to be a massive pain,” I say.

“The boys have one working ground transport. It’s not in the best of shape but they think they can keep it running to help get the heavier stuff moved.”

“Oh, wow, really?”

Jackie smiles wide and laughs.

“They have a lot here,” she says. “This was one of the major Order outposts.”

“With only seven Zmaj?” I ask.

Her face darkens and she drops her eyes for a moment.

“Only seven now,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. “I guess that, uhm, not everyone abandoned the cult so easy?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It got ugly.”

Looking at my friend, an overwhelming sense of joy surges. I pull her into a hug and hold her tight. Inhaling her scent, feeling her body fitting against mine the way it always did. There is still a slight sense that all of this is unreal. As if I might wake from a dream at any moment.

“I’m sorry,” I say, voice muffled by her hair.

“Me too,” she says.

I let her go, if reluctantly. We hold each other at arm’s length, staring into one another’s eyes.

“I’m… so…”

“Happy?”

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