Page 37 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“All clear,” I growl in Kren’s last voice and pitch, the old lie sliding back into my throat like I never stopped using it.
“Captain wants the hard hold prepped,” another voice says, ragged from too many cigarettes and too much obedience. “Key the chain. No eyes on the prize unless you like losing them.”
“Copy,” three men answer at once.
“Get sloppy,” I tell the ship, and she tries because someone is leaning on her with intent.
I reach a door dressed up as a wall—maintenance only, no questions asked if you look like a question they don’t want to answer. The lock is a simple brain with a fancy badge; I teach it a new badge out of two wires and a promise. The panel shivers. The door breathes. I slip into a conduit crawl where heat licks and the smell of ozone sharpens into medicine and wet metal. The noise of the engine swells through my ribs until my bones buzz.
“Status?” a patrol lead asks the bead, bored.
“Grid twenty-three is hiccuping,” I say in Kren, flicking a breaker. “Lights are drunk. Someone hold its hair.”
“Get it fixed,” the lead says. “Captain’s moving.”
“Copy,” I say again, already farther than his order.
At a junction a maintenance drone sleeps in a charger cradle, a beetle thing with a clever tongue for patching. I wake it with two fingers under its chin. Its optics blink; its tiny logic considers me a friend because I told it to. I scrape a Reaper crest into its casing with Kren’s knife and set it loose on a route thatmakes no sense, its flashing repair strobe weaving like a lure. Voices follow it down a wrong hall. Boots thud. I shimmy the other way and let the ship sing my cover.
“—saw a spark down two?—”
“—don’t care; hard hold’s hot?—”
“—you smell bone? I smell bone?—”
“You always smell bone,” someone says. “We live in it.”
I keep my breath quiet. In tight places, a man’s exhale tells on him. I learned that in a war that ate young voices until only the old ones spoke. My hands move like they remember a body that was just an instrument for orders; the difference now is whose orders.
“Rayek to Rayek,” I tell myself in my head, a cadence I use like prayer. “Corridor ahead. Left. Right. Ladder down. Two guards. One asleep standing up. One wishing he were. Wait for the shift in weight. Now.”
I drop behind them. My claws whisper a warning across steel. One turns his head. My hand is already at his mouth. The other says, “What—” and then meets a panel that decided to be his pillow. I lay them down gently because I’m not a boy anymore. I strip a code loop from the second’s wrist and slide it over my own; the reader light accepts the lie. I slide a bottle from the first’s belt and leave it three meters down the wrong corridor where a drunk friend will turn his head and buy me ten seconds later.
“Hold three,” the bead hisses. “Report your chest counts.”
“Forty-eight, breathing,” someone says with a laugh that sounds like a toothache.
“Thirty-nine and I’m stealing one’s boots,” someone else says. “They fit.”
“Twenty-one and a yellow biter,” a third grumbles. “Captain says light stays on; they do tricks in the dark.”
My heart does something I hate. The map in my head shifts, pushes me like a hand between the shoulder blades. I breathe once the way the old medic taught me: in to four, hold to two, out to seven. The numbers empty me enough to move without noise. I cut across a catwalk and drop into the damp heat of a lower deck where the air tastes like old blood and coolant. The hard hold is close; its voice is a throbbing cable through the bulkhead.
“Door control,” I whisper to a panel with a staring face. “Forget how to close.”
The hydraulics sigh; pressure dips. In the guttering light, a door down the hall grinds, squeals, and lurches back up like it got stage fright. Shouts move toward it. The door next to me stays closed. I pull a fuse and put it back in crooked. Somewhere a siren debates whether or not to sing. The debate eats thirty seconds of someone else’s time.
A metal plate above me bears a workman’s scrawl in paint pen: DOG RUN—CELLS. I climb, forearms and thighs; the ladder bites in. Voices bleed from above, a sour chorus of boredom and petty cruelty. I flatten on the last rung and let my eyes climb without me.
The cell block is a ring with a bone-spoked center. The bars aren’t energy; they’re alloy wrapped with bleached rib to make the Reapers feel like poets. Five cells hold nothing. Four hold men. One holds a woman who keeps her hands in her hair and laughs at a joke a guard tells his own shadow. At the far end, the last cell holds two shapes I know even when they’re wrong.
CynJyn is yellow and defiant and too quiet, cradled against the far wall like she’s working on an idea she won’t share without teeth. Star has her arms around her and her chin up. Bruises bloom along her shoulder and cheek in cruel colors; her mouth is split at the corner where a man with no imagination tried to punish her for having a voice. She looks small only until she looks up. Then she is a weapon again.
“Eyes up,” a guard barks, banging his baton against the bars like a kid dragging a stick along a fence. “Look at me when I look at you.”
“No,” Star says, and it lands like a stone in a pond. “I look where I choose.”
My hand finds the rib of the ladder and crushes until the metal complains. I let the complaint be the sound I’d rather be making.
