Page 7 of Vicious
Chug. Chug. Step.Step.
When the doors slid back together, I dipped my head with relief. A streak of shiny gray at my wrist caught my attention. Motor oil. But no… Motor oil didn’t smear in a pattern. The elevator sank lower as I hesitantly touched it. Bumpy.Scaled. I ripped my fingers away as my next breath shuddered through mylungs.
What did this mean? Did it have something to do with the engineroom?
I blinked hard at the elevator doors, willing myself to drop into someone else’s nightmare instead of this one. But when I looked again at my wrist, the scales weregone.
3
“Randolph!”Ishouted.
“What?” he yelled from thekitchen.
I burst through the double doors, never as glad to hear the irritation in his voice as I was then, and gripped the shoulder of his orange vest tightly. “I need you to look at mywrist.”
“Your wrist… Why?” His gaze snagged on my face and what must’ve been unease behind my eyes. The last of his color drained away. “Are you okay? Did you see…something?”
I shoved my arm at him. “Just tell me what yousee.”
“Okay.” He gently took my arm, and that single action reached through my worried haze to remind me how much I missed Pop. “What am I looking for? Were youhurt?”
“In the elevator. I thought I saw…” I shook my head at the impossibility of it all. “Scales. Saelisscales.”
His dark, bushy eyebrows drew together over his brown eyes as he gazed down at my wrist. “But…there’s nothingthere.”
“I felt them, Randolph,” I said, my voice low. “They were there, and then theyweren’t.”
He grasped both my elbows, concern lining his brow. “This is what happens when you try to go cold turkey with your iron. You see things that aren’t there. Trust me, that’s all it was.” His voice sounded raspy, almost like a warning hiss to convince me. And maybe him, too. He hadn’t handled the haunted ship well atall.
It couldn’t be a sign of withdrawal, though, since I’d had a forced dose of iron just moments before I’d seen the scales. But I also didn’t want to needlessly worry Randolph with this. Rusted balls, it had been stupid to tell him in the firstplace.
“You’re probably right,” I said with what I hoped was a reassuring look. “Are we ready togo?”
He nodded, his entire face relaxing. “Mase gave me a key to lock up the outer door when weleave.”
I took a slow breath, willing myself to chill out. “Goodman.”
Randolph pocketed the list of items we needed, and we exited through the inner and outer doors and out onto the planet Orin. Sunlight threw bright white stripes across my vision and drilled a painful burn to the back of myskull.
It had been close to nine weeks since I’d left Mayvel and seen the sun occasionally peeking through between electrical snowstorms. It had been two months since I’d been on solid ground, running for my life through the underground mines on The Black. That seemed like a lifetimeago.
The few places where I’d left my skin uncovered with baggy clothes soaked the sunlight in like water, but my eyes teared up so bad, I thought about declaring myself a vampire and turning back to the spaceship. Of course we would land on a planet with multiple suns. I didn’t know if that was accurate or not because large yellow spots kept bursting across the sky everywhere Ilooked.
Orin was in a neighboring star system and the nearest habitable planet to The Black, the rogue planet that had drifted near Earth’s debris. If we’d travelled through the Ringers’ ring by Neptune, and if they’d let us through, we would have been to Orin instantly, but we hadn’t been able to try since that one had brokendown.
The door closed behind us, and Randolph twisted a key in the lock and dropped it into his pocket with thelist.
He sniffed. “No need to cry about it, James. Let’s go.” He stepped off the ramp and stumbled when his feet hitdirt.
I lunged to his side to catch his elbow. Apparently neither of us wanted to give up our space legs for this bright, hellish planet. “You’ve been in a dark ship as long as I have. Let’s just take a minute so we can see where we’re going and get used to walking on solid ground,okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.” Out here in the light, his usually ruddy cheeks seemed hollower, his color washed out. He blinked hard, and his hands shook at his sides. “You’re a good—” He looked down at me with his warm brown eyes, a watery smile curling his mouth. “You’re a good person, you knowthat?”
My chest swelled with his kind words at the same time my blood simmered. How could Ellison and Captain Glenn think he would function on a strange planet on his own, knowing his alcoholism was wearing himthin?
“We just have to stick together, you and me.” I tucked my arm through his, my girlish hands half covered by fingerless gloves. “No wandering to the river bean stand, gotit?”
He chuckled, loudly, and several heads turned on the dirt road a few yards ahead. Using his body as a shield, I kept my chin tucked low underneath the hood of mysweatshirt.
