Page 10 of Consume
The Vicious room light was turned off again. No explanation on that one since supposedly there was no one else with a heartbeat on the ship.
After we entered the dining room, without wasting a second, I rounded on Josh and pointed. “You first,” I said, and surprise, surprise, the words came out right.
Josh nodded, seeming to understand as he crossed toward Mase’s stool. “You don’t trust me. It’s because I pointed a gun at you, isn’t it?”
“I don’t trust anyone...with secrets.” Including myself. I had so many that they were consuming me from the inside out.
He held up his hands like an innocent. “I don’t have a Mind-I, Absidy, but I’ll show you if you like. I’m not a hybrid, and you can test that yourself by bleeding, but only if you want to. I’m just a former doctor who’s crazy about your sister and desperate to win the war against the Saelises so I can raise our child with her.”
A burst of emotion scorched my eyes. That was one of the last things Ellison had told me before I left her. If anything happened to her or her baby...
A grin stretched Josh’s mouth from earlobe to earlobe. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited and terrified of anything in my entire life. The Saelises have nothing on fatherhood.”
“You can say that again.” Chuckling, the captain strode through the double doors into the kitchen.
Before the door flapped shut, Randolph smiled at Captain Glenn from over by the stasis pantry, but the captain breezed past, seeming not to notice. He’d seen his fair share of ghosts on this ship, but it was the most violent ones who demanded to be seen and heard. Except if your name happened to be Absidy Jones. I saw them all.
“Ellison,” I said to Josh, though it was broken up in a series of clicks from inside me.
Josh sank down onto Mase’s stool, his excitement from before melting away to heartache and loss. “The Byrians have her. Mase, too.”
I sagged against the closed dining room door, a well of emotions fighting to break free. Byrian was the name of the family who invented the space-bending rings used to travel from one solar system to another faster than light. One of them, Felix, had started an entire conflict on the planet Wix because he thought his family name earned him the right to hand pick those who lived there. Mase had been half blinded in his struggle to get away from the violence and was forced to leave his already dead family behind. So now the Byrians, who’d thought it would be a good idea to slaughter all the females of an alien race to power their rings and who’d killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people on Wix, had two people I loved.
For now. That would soon change.
The captain emerged with three glasses and a bottle of wine. “I don’t drink much, but today’s the exception. You’ll want some while you hear all we have to tell you.” He sat at his usual seat at the head of the table, began to pour, and offered a glass to me.
I shook my head and ticked my gaze to Josh again.
Josh took a glass and drank deep. “About a week after all of you left the Black, I received a message from a man named Parker Donatrough.”
The captain made a growling noise at the back of his throat and tipped his full glass over his mouth.
“I’d never heard of him in my life,” Josh continued. “He gave me your ship’s coordinates and said I needed to come right away. And to bring explosives, enough to blow up an entire ship. No explanation. That was it. I was already on my way to come after Ellison, so I pushed my ship harder, thinking something was really wrong. When I finally got here, your ship had already been boarded by Parker himself.”
I remembered that vividly. While Parker and his gang had boarded, Poh had escorted me onto his ship so we could blackmail or kidnap or buy our way through the rings back to Mayvel. The Saelises had beat us to Ring Guild Station 144, and we’d barely escaped with our lives.
Josh set his glass down and fiddled with the stem. “When I boarded your ship, Parker and his men laid down their weapons. Mase was... He was passed out, not in good shape.”
My heart spasmed. Parker had done that. He produced an addictive drug inside his own body called He and She that looked like different-colored lightning, and when they merged, it was supposed to be an insane high. He’d forced it into Mase, a recovering addict, because Parker was a rusted-out piece of shit in love with a man who wasmine.
Josh glanced at Captain Glenn. “Your captain here made a deal with Parker in order to save Mase.”
“He would pay my family’s medical bills if I handed over Mase.” The captain set his glass down carefully on the gurney, his shoulders stooped. “I took his deal.”
Talk about being backed into a corner. But wouldn’t I have done the same in his shoes? Absolutely.
“Listen, Absidy,” Captain Glenn said, “I know what it sounds like. Like I betrayed Mase, like I betrayed all of you. But I was in an impossible situation. We had a doppelganger assassin on board, poisoned food, a drug baron coming after one of our own, and I had stacks and stacks of bills. It was time to abandon ship, in more ways than one, to protect me and my crew. Something had to give.”
I nodded my understanding and tried for a sympathetic smile. Despite its flaws, this ship meant everything to the captain. It was his livelihood. And Mase, his son.
Josh drank the rest of his wine in one swallow, the beads and charms in his hair clinking together. “Since he was short on fuel, Parker agreed to land first before we handed over Mase. The captain, Ellison, and Mase boarded my cruiser. With them out of the way, I rigged explosives to the consumectalons so the Saelises couldn’t use them against humanity. Your captain here said he thought they’d been put here by the doppelganger to set you up as a bioterrorist, which judging by that video of you...mission accomplished.”
I sighed. It’d been a rough couple of weeks.
Consumectalons was the name of the parasites running through my veins and what powered the Space Guild’s rings. The video Josh referred to was of me in front of a crate of consumectalons while holding a cylinder of them with scales marring my forearm, a green tint to my eyes, and a snarl peeling back my lips. That was the video that targeted me as a suspected bioterrorist. In reality, I’d been caught on camera in a moment of terror.
Josh shifted on the stool. “My ship was just about out of fuel, too, and we had a bit of a hard landing”—he rubbed the back of his neck and winced—“right into Wix’s largest bank. The Byrians must’ve been scanning the news channels with facial recognition software because they were there on the scene within almost seconds. They took Ellison and Mase because they made public that they knew the truth.”
