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After hours and hours trying to find a way out of my own cell, my brain had finally kicked in and pointed out that no, I couldn’t get out of my cell from the inside. The access panels were on the outside.
But my father hadn’t boasted to his friends about having a smart son for nothing. Even when I’d been too awkward and gangly, my glasses and teenage clumsiness a source of mockery from my peers, I’d always been able to fall back on that.
I was a damn smart guy.
As a teenager, I’d imagined myself a future Steve Jobs, becoming a millionaire and leaving my former bullies wishing they’d been nicer to me. The reality hadn’t been that great, but now was my chance. I could use my brain to change things.
So I picked the first other human I saw in Crux’s lab to help me, and by the best of luck, it was Ree. “Which cell is yours?” I asked, pretending to be conversational and praying it wasn’t one of the last. I might be able to slip my guards for a little while, but probably not that long.
She glanced over at me, one brow lifted. “The first one. The door you can see from here. Why?”
It took everything in me not to jump or shout or do a fist pump. Instead, I casually leaned back while Crux snapped at one of his little lab goons, and turned to whisper to her. “I’m gonna disable the lock on your door. When things quiet down, you can sneak out and find help.”
“And just who am I gonna go to for that?” She glanced over at Crux, who had just backhanded his assistant, like some caricature of a drunken angry chef, pissed at his sous chef. Without looking away from the eight-foot alien holding his cheek and looking cowed, she nodded. “I’ll find help. Whatever it takes.”
“That one guy seemed really pissed about Genevieve having been taken, and everyone agreed she had to go home. If nothing else, maybe the fact that she’s still here will—”
“Quiet!” Crux thundered from across the room, glaring at us.
The last thing I wanted to do right before I was going to break someone out was get more attention, so I nodded meekly and ducked my head. Ree clenched her jaw and glared at him, but she didn’t say anything either.
He seemed to like it when she was pissed at him, which was somehow even creepier than the anger. Even if she just escaped and didn’t send help, I’d feel good about getting her away from him. Dude gave off evil vibes like the villain in a superhero movie, and anyone I could get away from him was a win.
So half an hour later, when I pretended a dizzy spell as we came out of the lab, clutching my head and leaning against the wall, the bored lab assistant next to me hardly paid any attention. Just muttered about how weak humans were, and waited for me to gather myself.
The system was even simpler than I’d anticipated, rather than as complicated as I’d feared, and it took me under a minute to overload the lock. It beeped and made a tiny hissing noise, and I spun to see if my escort had noticed, but instead, he was glaring at a clear screen like it had wronged him. Well, he’d been glaring at everything like that since Crux had slapped him. Part of me wanted to point out that his boss was an asshole, loyalty be damned, but no. He didn’t want to bond with me over his boss being a douche. He wanted to be more like the douche in question, because pitiful little humans were weak.
I wasn’t going to escape by making friends of Crux’s allies. That wasn’t what I did. I was the tech guy. I did the tech. I got Ree out, and Ree, well... Ree needed a miracle, frankly. She was my hail mary pass, and I had to count on her making that catch.
I wasn’t a praying guy, but that night, I did it anyway.
When the door to my cell opened to the smirking face of the very alien I’d mentioned to Ree that afternoon, who seemed to have Captain America’s sense of justice (and every single one of Cap’s bulging muscles), I could have slid right off my bed into a puddle on the floor in relief. Jax, one of the aliens back on the ship had called him.
I hopped up, grinning. “You’re definitely not a little short for a storm trooper.”
He cocked his head confusedly, but seemed charmed by the comment which... well, good, since I didn’t imagine it had made any sense to an alien.
“Come on, flyboy. Let’s avoid the garbage chute if we can.”
“A sensible endeavor,” he agreed, following after me with a bemused smile on his own face. It reminded me of why I’d thought of him first when I’d thought of Ree getting help, and it wasn’t actually about Genevieve.
He was the first Thorzi I’d ever seen smile.
* * *
“No,” Ree insisted. “No way. You stay here. He can go fly the ship on his own. They got us into this, and they should get us out of it.”
Prince Kaelum—and holy crap, what luck that the guy who’d taken Lucas as a freaking payment was not just a decent guy, but the prince of the whole planet—was frowning at Ree’s angry outburst. He was probably offended at the implication that his people were at fault, because from what I’d gathered, the whole mess wasn’t really about his people.
I mean sure, they’d let it happen, but it wasn’t like Crux was advertising the fact that he was keeping us in boxes, unbathed, and eating a steady diet of packing peanuts. Some of the worst atrocities in human history had also happened because of one monster, and an apathetic public who didn’t want to know the truth.
As a sometimes member of that apathetic public, it would have been hypocritical of me to blame them for not being more proactive. Crux was still the monster here, and we were escaping him.
Then, hopefully, we were going to get to see an alien planet. Learn their technology, and not just be poked and prodded with it.
“They are getting us out of it,” I told Ree, laying my hand over hers on my shoulder. “This isn’t about Jax, or you, or what’s happened. I’m going because I need to do something. And no, I’m not saying you need to come. This isn’t about anything but me.”
“He has the heart of a warrior,” Prince Kaelum said, which was... surreal, because I was definitely not a warrior. “He must act. They shall return quickly.”
