AllFreeNovel
Share Us
* * *
LUCCA
Lucca achieved consciousness in one painful spasm. She was on her back in another dark maintenance shaft, a small device lighting up the area as someone leaned over her. She yelped when a hand brushed her leg. “Please-no,” she cried.
“Shush,human. You’re safe. It’s me.”
The pirate.
She shut her eyes, groaning in pain. Safe was such a relative term. No one should be allowed to use it anymore.
“Keep it down,” He bit out. He continued tending to her in the darkness and eventually said, “I’m surprised they stung you…”
Stung.
Zoramia had stung her. She suddenly remembered the wicked dark spike under Caligher’s tail, and a fresh wave of nausea crawled up her throat. The pain was blinding.
“Am I dying?” she rasped. Even talking gave her the spins.
“No. I countered it with my own venom.” He rapped the back of one knuckle against her knee, testing it. The erupting pain made her hiss.
Disapproval clouded his expression. “Did you have to antagonize your commander?”
“Had to find Cal…”
“Yeah, and you’re just as fucking stupid as he is, too. Thanks to your stunt, we’re on our own with the entire ship after us. Leave it to you to make enemies of both sides.”
Embarrassment joined the sensation of bile. She swallowed it down as he tended to the gash on her hip with surprising gentleness, mending it with an energetic glue gun and bandaging it. The agony faded to a dull thrum. The pirate said nothing more on the subject, but his eyes cut through her. He thought she was idiotic.
Staring at the pirate, Lucca had the aching sense all at once that she would have given anything to be there with Caligher. She would never tell him that, of course. He was helping her infiltrate the ship. He had dragged her out of hell and saved her. Her was the only reason she’d made it this far—and she was grateful—but it ached, in her chest, where Caligher should be.
Because it made her imagine moving on in a life without him.
They briefly discussed their situation before slipping out into the corridors.
* * *
That final floor was eerily silent. Visual alarms flashed along the wall, lest anyone forget about the fight. Her thoughts were pinned on other things.
The top floor should have been flooded with soldiers. It should havelookedthreatening, but instead, it was as quiet as a sleepy dental office. The hairs on her neck stood when they rounded to the final hallway. Both of them sensed it.
It was too quiet.
Astyanax spoke in a low whisper. “This is trapped.”
She stiffened, listening for clues. Down that very hallway was a circuit board with a button that she prayed would end all conflict for good… but she sensed death waiting beyond it.
“I have to do it,” she whispered back. “It’s the reason I’m here. Otherwise, this is all for nothing. We let people die for nothing.”
He peeled his lips back in distaste for the situation as he turned his gun in his hand, inadequate toy that it was. “I don’t like this…” His eyes slipped to the far end of the hallway. “What’s beyond that door?”
“Commander Collins’s office.”
He turned rock-still, disrupting her senses with his mannequin-like presence.
“No,” he abruptly said.
“What do you mean, no?”
