With a shoulder wedged into his armpit, she helped him get to his feet. Hand in hand, they made it through the ship, stopping to gather some food, blankets, and clothes. Once in the cockpit, they boarded up the cracked viewscreen and closed the reinforced cockpit door.
In the dim red of the emergency lighting, Justyn eyed the charred and dented command console. “We need to get a message through to Dare and Rynan.” He sank into his chair and tried the console controls.
“Anything?”
“Nope. I’m going to have to set off the e-beacon.” All starships carried emergency beacons that broadcast mayday transmissions on all frequencies. But Rynan had altered Justyn’s so that it only broadcast on a frequency used by theNomad. No self-respecting smuggler wanted to broadcast to rivals, pirates, or God help him, Patrol, in an emergency.
“Tell me where it is.” She stepped in front of him. “You rest.”
He didn’t argue. He was feeling like crud. “Take the panel off the emergency cabinet. Over there, beside the comms console.”
He took pleasure in watching her move. She had such a sinuous way of moving that drew the gaze, made a man wonder how she’d look dancing…or writhing on top of him, naked.
She ripped off the panel, fished around in the space, then pulled out the beacon. It was a small metallic dome just a little bigger than his hand. After setting it down in front of him, she perched on the armrest of his chair. He pressed the activation sequence.
The top of the beacon opened and four small arms opened out, making the beacon look like a star covered in blinking blue lights. He knew that inside the casing was a small shard of a Perman fusion crystal—a near-inexhaustible power supply.
“Done,” he said. “It’ll take a while to spool up and get the signal out.”
With a sigh, Nissa moved to the supplies they’d salvaged, grabbed a couple of nutribars, and sat in her chair. She held out a bar. “Care for some nutritious-but-dubious-tasting nourishment?”
“Sure.”
She tossed it and he snatched it out of the air. As he ate, he tried to ignore the red gloom of the lights. It reminded him of things he tried very hard to forget.
“What’s wrong?”
He glanced her way. “Why do you think something’s wrong?”
“You get this blank, slightly hard look on your face when something’s wrong.”
He stared at her. She hadn’t returned his words of love, or brought them up since, and damned if that didn’t leave a burn under his heart. But she noticed the looks on his face? A secret smile unfurled inside him.
“I hate the emergency lighting. Reminds me of being a kid.”
“You crashed a starship as a kid?”
“Well, I’ve crashed more times than I’d like to admit.” He took a bite of his nutribar, chewed slowly. “But no, it reminds me of when my stepfather locked me and my brothers in our basement.”
Nissa gasped. “He locked you up? Why?”
Justyn’s stomach roiled. “He hated us. Thought we were brats. Possessive bastard wanted our mother all to himself.”
“How often?”
He remembered the cloying darkness tinged with the red of the tiny light Ry had managed to smuggle in, the relentless hunger, hearing his brothers’ muffled tears. “A lot. Sometimes for days at a time.”
“Goddess, Justyn, how old were you?”
“Started when I was five.”
Nissa shot to her feet. “The monster!”
“Yeah, he was.” Justyn took another bite of the bar. It tasted like dust. “Mom was too scared to leave him or fight him. It didn’t stop until Dare got big enough to hit back.” Justyn shook his head against the memories.
“He beat you, too?”
Every day for seven years. There’d been so many broken bones and bruises. “Yeah. But we survived. We had each other, and Dare started fighting back, protected Ry and me. I know Dare and Ry havealwaysgot my back. The one good thing that came from that hellhole was that I learned the true meaning of loyalty.”
