Page 35 of Elanie & the Empath
“Not sure,” I replied. “I can’t connect with other bionics or to the wider Vnet all the way out here, but maybe I can connect to—” A thought struck me. “Give me a second.”
Closing my eyes, I attempted to access the pod’s onboard AI again. Still locked out. Not surprising. But I’d been right. She was also connected to the SBN, and that was something I could work with.
Piggybacking on the shared network, I searched for a back door in the pod’s programming. “I think I found something.” I sniffed out a string of vulnerable legacy code that used to allow for manual override of the pod’s ejection sequence and exploited it. “I’m in.”
“You’re in?” His voice was closer now. “In what?”
“The pod,” I said. “I’m in the onboard AI.” I still couldn’t hack into the autopilot, which was locked up tighter than an Imperion detention sphere. But with a few tweaks here, an additional line of code there… “Got it.”
When I opened my eyes, the pod’s navigation display flickered into existence. A detailed map of golden dots and arching white lines hovered in the air in front of us. I rose to my feet, standing on one side of the display while Sem stood on the other.
“Where the hells are we?” His silver-blue eyes, bloodshot from G-force trauma, darted around the 3-D image of whatever corner of the Known Universe we’d jumped into.
I compared the display to every charted map in existence. “We are somewhere between Ulaperia and Delphi.Outer rim. Deep space. Why have they jumped us here? There’s nothing out here but dust.”
His finger followed the dotted line of our pod’s planned trajectory, then he expanded the screen to zoom in on what appeared to be our final destination. “Dust like this?”
I zoomed in again, tapping on a dwarf planet so tiny it was barely spherical. A dwarf planet in the middle of nowhere at the very edges of charted space. It hit me then, hard and fast. They’d never find us all the way out here. We were lost.
“Sem, I’m…I’m sorry.”
His eyes met mine through the navigation display. “What for?”
“You should be sleeping in your bed, warm and safe. Instead, because of me, you’re probably going to die on some barely-even-a-planet rock and nobody will ever know except for me because I’ll be the one burying you.”
“Elanie,” he said calmly, his webbed hands raised. “I came with you of my own free will.” Then his lips quirked. “But it’s sweet that you’d take the time to bury me. I’m touched.”
I hung my head, my chin dropping to my chest. Then he reached for me through the navigation display. Stars danced around his arm as his fingers closed over my shoulder. “This isn’t your fault. We’ll get through this. Both of us.”
There was something soothing about his hand, the way his blue skin glowed against my pink pajamas, the solid weight of his touch. But I must have stared too long because he pulled it back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his arms to his sides. “I didn’t mean to touch you. It’s still… It’s hard for me.”
I collapsed into the jump seat. “I’m sure it is. I’m sureyou’re wondering, ‘Why in the stars did I follow this malfunctioning bionic into an escape pod?’”
With a swipe of his hand, he minimized the navigation display. Stepping close, he stood above me and looked down with a stern set to his jaw. “That’s not what I was wondering at all. Not even a little bit. I just meant that sometimes it’s hard for me to be around you.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better?” I asked as something cold and heavy took up residence in my stomach. “Because it didn’t work.”
He sank to his knees, putting us closer to eye-level. “I’m an empath,” he explained. “I’m usually pretty good at knowing when and how to comfort another being. So it’s difficult for me. It’s a challenge. Not knowing how you’re feeling.” His throat bobbed. “Or what you might need from me to feel…better.”
For some reason, my heart started beating too fast, too hard, thumping inside my chest. The heel of my palm went instinctively to my sternum.
“Are you having chest pains?” His silver brows creased in a doctorly concern as he placed two fingers against my neck, just to the side of my throat. “Excessive acceleration forces can cause cardiac abnormalities.”
“I’m fine,” I said even though my heart rate continued to surge, one extra beat for each second his fingers lingered over my pulse. “My cardiovascular system is designed to withstand much greater forces than a jumping pod.”
Satisfied with either my heart rate or my answer, he sighed and pulled his fingers away. Instead of dropping his hand, however, he reached up to tuck a stray strand of my hair behind my ear.
Our eyes locked, his fingertips brushing ghostlike over my skin. Just when an internal alarm reminded me to take abreath, he stood and cleared his throat gruffly. I stored the way his pupils had dilated in my memory, where a file markedSemnow existed.
Maximizing the navigation display again, he studied it closely, our destination glowing over his forehead while he rubbed his stubble again, this time on his chin. An image I also added to his file.
“If that rock is where we’re headed,” he said, “at this velocity, we should arrive in a few hours. Maybe… I wonder…” He pivoted toward the control panel, then slapped his forehead. “Saints! Why didn’t I think of that before?” Ducking underneath the panel, he started yanking out wires.
I shot to my feet. “What are you doing? Isn’t ripping out random wires in a space-faring vessel, I don’t know, ill advised?”
Popping his head out from under the panel, holding a red and white striped wire between his teeth, he slurred, “Don’t worry.” Then he spit it out. “I won’t blow up the pod. I know what I’m doing. Before I became a physician, I studied to be a ship’s mechanic. I was pretty good at it too.” Crawling back under the panel, he said, “It should be right around here. Shoot. Well, that’s not good.”
