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She might not look it, but she was a prisoner.
* * *
“Hey. Wake up and listen to me. Wake the fuck up. Don’t say anything though.Don’t—React. You’re being spied on.”
The voice seemed to nag her sleep for hours on end. The pirate. She was pretty sure it was the pirate. Something about his words was strange and distorted, but she couldn’t put her finger on what.
“Don’t look at the speaker,” he said. “Don’t let them know I’m talking to you.”
“What about—”
“Shut. Up,” he hissed.
Scowling, she shoved her face into her pillow. He was such a fucking dick sometimes.
“You can’t sayanything,not until I verify we’re not being listened to. Also—I’ve switched to my native tongue. Your translator should have the update—but none of the humans will have ever heard of it.” He paused. “Tap your finger on something if youcanunderstand. We need some form of communication.”
She thumped her fingers on the headboard, wishing it was his eye sockets she was digging them into.
“Thank the fucking stars,” he huffed. “I’ve been rooting around. I don’t have access to a lot… Comms, though. I can interfere with that. Have you made any progress on the weapons? Tap twice if you have.”
She was silent.
“Fuck.” He paused. “Fuck.”
Under her breath, she grumbled to herself, “Can’t believe they took away my computer access. They won’t even let me use the menstrual app. Assholes.” Complaining to herself shouldn’t raise any suspicions, so she took the chance.
“Is that what they did?” he asked. “It’s what I would have done.”
They wouldn’t let her near the control room. They disabled her account and locked down all computers within her vicinity—even the minor ones. Even the fucking coffee maker. She couldn’t explain the humiliation of having to nicely ask a soldier to operate a goddamn coffee machine for her.
And they wouldn’t tell her to her face that she’d been cut off. Collins kept sending soldiers to redirect her with a smile, but they wouldn’t acknowledge what they knew. They wouldn’t acknowledge that she was in trouble.
Lucca was certain she was up to her neck in trouble, but she still had time to play it cool. It was just hard not to freak out when she had no clue what had become of Caligher.
“I’ll get you access to something,” Astyanax said. “Get ready to move. I want out of this cell. Then we go straight for the center.”
Very quietly, she said, “Where is he?”
Astyanax paused for a heartbeat, then answered, “I haven’t seen him. He’s not in any of the cells around here.”
Then where the fuck was he?
That worried feeling in her gut twisted into a desperate, clawing thing. She had the urge to get up and empty the contents into a toilet. Ever since things went down, she’d been feeling… something. Like a magnetic pull. A tether between her center and where he… ought to be. Used to be.
It didn’t feel like he was dead.
But it didn’t feel like he was close, either.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Be ready. It’s gonna get ugly.”
* * *
Astyanax’s prompting came when she was in the middle of a nuclear meltdown. Her brain had come to the ‘what if’ stage and it had been going for hours with no end in sight. What if Caligher was moved? What if Caligher was hurt? What if Caligher was in immense pain—it felt like a real possibility.
What if he was dead?
Her fears reeled out of control. She was on the floor next to her bed, curled in a ball with eyes wide open. Totally losing it.
