Page 38 of Consume
Chapter Ten
“Mase.” Alarm spiked the white hairs up the back of my neck while I shook the holy shit out of him. “Mase, wake up. Youhaveto get us in the air.”
He bolted upright, always asleep with one mismatched eye open. “What’s it?”
“In the air.Now. We’re being tracked.”
“How do you know?”
But I was already flinging myself out the cockpit door. What if someone was already here in the upper decks of the ship? What if they’d hurt someone? We were sitting ducks waiting to be plucked while parked on the edge of a farm. Raw panic sawed at my nerves, edged into my nightmares at what could be happening rightnow.
But what I should have been wondering was how the tracker key had wound up here after I’d dropped it. Every time I did wonder, though, all the holes in my memory fogged over with doubt. Had I not dropped it? Or if I had, had someone else brought it back onto this ship? I scrambled to remember while I braced myself against the frigid walls of the ship.
We weren’t moving yet, not even the slightest shudder. What was taking Mase so long? While darting a look over my shoulder, I raced across the empty storage space toward the elevator, keeping one hand on the wall for when we zipped toward the stars.
And then it hit me. Oh yeah. Mase had to fly Parker’s ship to get itandtheViciousin the air. How could I have forgotten that too?
But Mase wasn’t trailing me. I hadn’t triggered the same panic in him that was searing a hole through my chest.
“Mase?” I shouted, jabbing my finger at the elevator button.
My Swiss-cheese brain melted into thick soup. My muscles fell limp. What... What was happening? When the elevator door slid open, I stumbled inside, thinking, remembering, and then slid to the floor. I needed something. My lips smacked together while they tried to form a word, tried to form a thought. The door closed with a final hiss and a shudder. I couldn’t remember what I needed, or where I was going, or why. My eyes drooped as the elevator lifted toward the unknown.
“Mase?” I tried to say, but only a nasally laugh hissed out.
Someone was here with me, pushing out from underneath my skin and making me forget. Where was Mase? He would know what to do. He would know how to arrange my limbs so I could stand again.
The elevator dinged and jolted a sliver of awareness back into my body. I wasn’t in control, but I could be. I was simply a puppet without...
I forced every ounce of focus into my arm. Move.Move. It might as well have been a severed limb, but slowly, so slowly, it dragged toward my face, the tracker key gripped in my palm. With juddering movements, I stuck the key in my mouth. The metallic taste rolled over my tongue, not the usual sweet, but bitter and awful like it had been touched by too many tainted Byrian fingertips. But it did give me clarity. It sparked its energy down my throat and lit every ghost-infected corner inside me. It swept away the clouds swarming my mind and revealed Poh, just outside the elevator.
“You.” The accusation whipped off my lips as I fought to get my legs underneath me with the help of the elevator wall. “Where have you been?” The words came out garbled around the key, but they were all me, and fierce.
“Here and there.” Her yellow eyes narrowed with a mix of curiosity and pity, and I hated both on her.
As the iron fed my consumectalons, I felt less fuzzy, stronger. All my doubts roared forward and surrounded Poh. I didn’t have my ice pick, but I hid one hand behind my back anyway.
Poh didn’t miss a second, seeming to treat each of my movements as a threat while her fingers crept closer to one of her many knives and guns strapped down her legs.
