Page 38 of Taken By the Alien Killer
I slip onto the catwalk and shadow around the ring, matching the patrol’s lazy tempo. Two guards at the far door argue about cards. One scratches under his bone collar and drops a flake of calcium on the floor. It looks like snow. It is not. I pass behind a camera and teach it a moment of blindness with a magnet no one inventoried. It forgives me because I’m gentle with it.
“Cargo three,” the bead crackles. “Kren, status.”
“Running hot,” I rumble. “Eye on the chain.”
“Keep your mouth shut unless someone asks you to open it,” the voice replies, bored. “Captain doesn’t like chatter.”
“I don’t like many things,” I say, and the voice laughs because it thinks I’ve made a joke for it.
I come to the cell. I don’t breathe between heartbeats because breath shakes and I will not shake now. I keep the patrol guard’s cadence in my hips and turn my face just enough the camera sees profile, not gold. The key loop buzzes on my wrist like a trapped insect. The bars hum with the low animal of metal wanting to be anything else. Star’s hands lock tighter around CynJyn when my shadow arrives, then loosen because she’s smarter than fear.
She looks at me full, the way she did in the gardens, no lace, no court sugar. Her breath catches like she’s stepped into cold water. My name shapes her mouth without sound. CynJyn sees my eyes and starts to grin because she was born for trouble; Starsqueezes her and the grin becomes a knife she hides under her tongue.
“Guard,” the card-playing one snaps without glancing up. “Eyes on the prize. Captain wants them pretty.”
“Pretty’s working,” I say, and it’s Kren’s gravel again, and the guard snorts and returns to his cards.
I step into the space where the bars make a ribbed wall between my hands and her face. My fingers slide through bone and iron. Star doesn’t flinch. She leans as if heat is a law I wrote. I cup her cheek. The bruises are a map of someone else’s arrogance. The skin under my palm is too hot; her pulse skitters like a bird that learned the wrong song. I let my thumb drag along the cut at the corner of her mouth and she inhales like it’s the first clean breath the ship has allowed. My claws stay sheathed. Touch is a discipline when it wants to be hunger.
“Rayek,” she whispers, and the ship hears it, and the part of me that promised not to be a boy again tries to break my ribs from the inside. I press my forehead to the bar, bone to bone, and that is all the body I allow myself.
CynJyn leans forward, voice paper-thin. “You took your time,” she says, because she is stitches and sunlight even here.
“I got lost,” I murmur, and it is not for the guards, and it is not smart, and it is true.
Star’s eyes fill and do not fall. She reaches up with shaking fingers and covers my hand with hers, tiny compared to mine, strong compared to the men with guns outside. “You can’t be here,” she breathes, which is a lie and a vow and a prayer.
“I am,” I say, and it is all the language I have.
Down the ring, a door booms open. The air changes when a certain kind of man enters it; the pressure shifts and the room remembers fear like a word it hasn’t used since the last time it was hurt. The card players go still. The bored camera wakes up. The bead in my jaw clicks as if it just bit down on a bone.
“All hands,” a voice howls across the shipwide—joyful, savage, cult-leader calm flayed thin. “Captain on deck.”
Klaxons roll, red light floods the block, bone bars turn blood-dark in the wash. The ship’s old heart lurches to match a new rhythm—a boot on a stair, a blade tapped against a thigh. Somewhere close, footsteps heavy with the kind of certainty you only get from a thousand deaths approach like a storm that thinks it invented rain.
“Brozen,” CynJyn says, not a question, and Star’s hand tightens on mine.
I let go because I have to. I turn toward the sound and build my patience into a weapon one more time.
CHAPTER 9
STAR
Idon’t know if I’m dreaming or dying.
“Rayek,” I breathe, and his name tastes like metal and heat and mercy. His palm is huge and careful, claws tucked, thumb grazing the cut at my mouth so gently my eyes sting. CynJyn grips my waist and whispers, “Oh, thank the saints,” like laughing would break her ribs.
“I’m here,” he says, voice low and wrong for this ship, and I let myself fall into that sound for half a heartbeat.
Then the floor starts to shake.
Boots. Not many. Heavy like law. The air pressure changes, a weight in the sinuses. CynJyn’s fingers dig crescents through my sleeve. I turn toward the sound and catch the bar’s bone ridges against my temple.
“Go,” I whisper, not sure if I’m ordering him or begging him. “He’s coming.”
Rayek’s hand leaves my face. Cold slaps me. He’s gone—no, he’s above, muscle and shadow folding into the duct with a sound like a held breath. The panel barely kisses its frame. If I didn’t know where to look, I wouldn’t know he was there. My knees go watery anyway.
“Play dead,” CynJyn hisses, shaking out her shoulders, igniting her smirk like a fuse. “Or play mean. Dealer’s choice.”
