The human female stared up at him with wide brown eyes, and Doren felt something dangerous stir in his chest.
Focus, you idiot.
A Key. An actual, living Key—not an artifact, not a relic, but a silver-skinned infant currently crying against the human’s chest. Twenty years of chasing legends and half-truths, of sifting through rumors and following cold trails, and he’d stumbled across one of the Seven in the cargo hold of a third-rate Ithyian smuggling vessel.
The universe had a twisted sense of humor.
“Move,” he growled, pressing his hand more firmly against the small of her back. Her skin was cool through the thin fabric of her gown, far too cool despite the sweat on her brow but there was nothing he could do about it now. “Unless you want to explain to the Grorn why you’re holding their prize.”
She moved.
He had to give her credit—she didn’t argue, didn’t freeze, didn’t do any of the dozen useless things most civilians did in crisis situations. She simply ran, bare feet slapping against the deck plates, the infant clutched against her chest with a competence that spoke of experience. Did she have children of her own back on that pre-spaceflight world?
She shouldn’t be here. None of this should be happening.
But she was, and it was, and the Grorn were rounding the corner behind them with weapons drawn.
“Left!” He yanked her sideways into a service corridor, his body shielding hers as energy bolts sizzled past. The smell of scorched metal filled the air. The infant screamed.
“I want them alive!” The Grorn commander’s voice echoed off the walls.
Alive means leverage. Leverage means torture. Or in the case of the Grorn, sacrifice.
He bared his teeth in something that wasn’t quite a smile. His claws extended reflexively, scraping against the wall as he pushed the female ahead of him.
“Keep moving. Don’t stop for anything.”
“Where are we going?”
Her voice was steady. Too steady for someone who’d just escaped a slave cell and stumbled into an armed confrontation. Shock, probably. It would hit her later, when the adrenaline faded and the reality of her situation sank in.
That was a problem for later.
“Hangar bay. There’s a flyer we can steal.”
“You have a plan?”
“Something like that.”
The something like that involved getting off this ship before it was reduced to slag, keeping the infant Key out of Grorn hands, and not dying in the process. Beyond that, he was improvising.
He was very good at improvising.
The service corridor dumped them into a larger passageway—one of the main arteries running through the ship’s midsection. Warning lights strobed red and amber, and the deck shuddered beneath another distant impact. The Grorn, or someone else?
It didn’t matter. Right now, every party on this ship was an enemy. The Ithyians would recapture the female and sell her. The Grorn would take the infant and probably kill everyone else as witnesses. And whoever was blowing holes in the hull clearly didn’t care about collateral damage.
His only advantage was knowledge. He’d spent the past two weeks memorizing this ship’s layout, searching for the artifact he’d believed the Grorn wanted. The forgotten maintenance corridors, the blind spots in the security systems—he knew them all.
Time to put that knowledge to use.
“This way.” He grabbed her elbow and steered her toward a cargo lift. “We need to go down three levels.”
“The baby?—”
“I know.” He jabbed the lift controls, watching the indicator lights flicker. “Can you keep her quiet?”
The female shot him a look that would have stripped paint off a hull. “She’s terrified. Her whole world just changed. She was in some kind of suspended animation, and now there are explosions and strangers and?—”
