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He pulled me tighter. “Shh. I know. I know. Your first kill is a bit of a shock. I know.” His hand ran down my hair in a comforting pet while his heart pulsed steady and strong beneath my ear.
Being comforted by Zane was a foreign and bizarre feeling, but at the moment, I didn’t have the mental capacity to question it. Despite the weirdness of it, it also felt right. It was what I needed, what my brain and body needed to sort things out. And he seemed to understand that.
I didn’t know I’d closed my eyes until the sound of the rowboat being dragged across rocks, then pushed into the water had me blinking through the harsh glare of the sun. Two pairs of confused and terrified eyes stared back at us as Rix and Jorik rowed as fast as they could back to the boat.
Rix hopped off first, terror on his face as he took in the bloody scene on the deck and Zane’s ripped pants covered in blood and his leg taped with gauze.
“What the fuck happened? We heard gunshots and a helicopter and ran back to the boat as fast as we could.” He dropped the bottles of water on the deck, along with a satchel of foraged food.
Jorik tied up the rowboat and climbed aboard, too. “Holy shit.”
I swallowed and sat up, lifting my head from the safety of Zane’s chest. He removed his arm from around me, and a cold, hollow feeling eclipsed me when we were no longer touching. I pushed that feeling down and focused on Rix and Jorik. “We were attacked. I shot down the chopper, and five armed soldiers came up from the water.”
“Fuck,” Rix blew out, raking his hands through his brown, floppy hair. “And I’m guessing you killed them all and tossed the bodies overboard.”
Jorik was leaning over the side. “There’re five floating bodies. So, yep.” He glanced at Zane’s leg. “What the fuck happened there?”
“Flesh wound,” Zane said with a grunt. “I’ll be fine.”
I shot him a look, but he only smirked at me and lifted a brow, which pulled a smile to his own mouth. I glanced back at Rix and Jorik. “Yep, just a flesh wound.”
They didn’t believe either of us for a second. Flesh wounds didn’t result in that much blood loss.
“She gave me a full vial,” Zane said. The way he was looking at his friends was as if I suddenly didn’t even exist. “I was out when she did it.”
They both stiffened, and their expressions turned stony. First, they looked at me, then the canvas bag, then Zane’s leg, then back at me.
“I … he was going todie,”I said. “What else was I supposed to do?”
Rix scrubbed his hand down his face, Jorik scratched his chest, and Zane just seemed to call upon that dark cloud that perpetually loomed over his head like a depressed best friend.
“That leaves two vials left?” Rix asked.
Jorik nodded. “A vial split three ways can get us three days, so that’s six days—roughly. We dosed today, so we won’t need to dose for another three days. So that buys us nine days.”
They were back to pretending that I wasn’t there.
“We need to lay low for a while,” Rix said. “Let Zane heal and figure out our next step.”
“We need to keep moving,” I replied, shaking my head and letting them know that I still existed and deserved to be part of this conversation. “I have to meet whoever Neffers was supposed to meet. And they”—I pointed to the sky—“know we’rehere. It’s only a matter of time until they send more soldiers, and with Zane injured…”
“I’m fine,” the man in question replied.
“You were just stabbed. I had to burn your wound with my Yakku blade and then sew you up and give you a full dose. You’re notfine.”I plopped my blood-soaked hands on my hips and glared at him. He met my glare with full force. “Sure, you’ll heal faster than an Amlin or an undoped Verian, but you still need time and rest.”
“They must have had a heat sensor to get past the cloaking device,” Jorik murmured.
“But how’d they find us in the first place?” I asked.
“I’ll sweep the boat and weapons for tracking devices again,” Rix said, climbing down the ladder. “But I think we need to consider the possibility that the trackers areonorinus. I mean, if they put kill switches on us when we go for missions and have team deactivation chips in the three of us—”
“Then what’s another piece of hardware on a genetically modified fighting machine to a bunch of power-hungry sociopaths?” Jorik finished with a glower.
Rix tapped his nose. “Exactly.”
I exhaled and shook my head. I’d been thinking the same thing.
“We need to get away from these dead bodies, though. They’ll have trackers on them for sure. Same with the chopper. So we need to motor, get away from this site and hide in an inlet. Maybe even go up the inlet and lay low for a few days.” Jorik caught my eye, then his gaze flicked down to my chest.
