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He groaned and righted himself. He looked disoriented.
So, extra loud noise was Therak's weakness. Miya hated seeing him vulnerable like this. “Do you need to rest? Wait to regenerate?”
“Why… the alarm?” he asked, his eyes refocusing on her. His expression told her he was still in some pain, not that he would admit it. He wasn’t back to his full strength to hide it, though.
“It’s an automated warning system used in new colonies. I’ve heard this particular sequence of signals once but can’t remember its meaning. Sorry.”
His hand was trembling when he took hers. “We should go to the shuttle.”
“Therak, I think you need a breather. Give yourself a minute or two.”
“No, I–”
“You need to be at your 100% when we get back out there. Just in case. Use this time to heal. We’re still safe-ish.”
“Not quite,” a male voice came from around the corner.
Then the sound of a blaster shot echoed in the corridor.
Next thing Miya knew, Therak was crumbling to the ground with a burning wound in his back.
She screamed and reached for him, but the mouth of a blaster was suddenly pressed against her side.
“Don’t, sugar. Step away from thechinon. Slowly.”
Miya barely spared Solais a glance. Therak was lying in a pool of yellow blood that was growing by the second. She had to do something!
Another one of the presumed-dead soldiers, the Aldebian named Garfis, came from behind the corner, blaster pointed at Therak’s unmoving form.
“He’s going to bleed to death, you idiots!” Not the best thing to say to those who held Miya’s life in their hands and tail, but to hells with it. “Let me patch him up, or you’ll have no prisoner–”
“He’s not so easy to kill, sugar. Just like me.” Solais used the gun’s mouth to turn her face toward him and flashed her a reddish-toothed grin. “Aren’t you happy to see me? I sure am. We thought our cargo was destroyed, but here he is. Delivered straight to us on a platter. Along with the traitor who stupidly believed she could help him get away without consequence.”
Miya glared at the Cordalian. Funny how the deserter was callinghera traitor. “What are you going to do with Therak?”
He used the blaster to push her in the direction of the station. She began walking that way but looked over her shoulder. Garfis, a bit unstable due to his third leg being out of commission, was putting magnetic cuffs on what looked like a lifeless Therak.
But she had to believe his regenerating ability would save him from the terrible wound, the way the soldiers seemed to. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. And not because she was worried about her survival without him on deadly Xera.
It was official: she had feelings for Therak. Somewhere along this insane roller coaster ride that her working day had turned into, Miya had begun to care about the enigmatic assassin with a well-hidden tender and passionate side.
“Sugar, you should be more worried about what we’re going to do withyou,” Solais hissed behind her, his tail wrapping around her bicep painfully. “You’re no longer needed as a pilot and no one knows you survived the attack on our ship, so I may do with you as I please.”
Miya had never missed her wrench so much. She’d have to rely on wit instead. “No longer the pilot, huh? And who’s going to get the two of you out of here? I’m assuming you landed in the escape pods?”
The Cordalian roughly pushed her forward when she tried to look back at her man again. She caught a glimpse of Garfis struggling to drag Therak along by the cuffs.
“We may have barely made it to this planet, but we’re leaving it in style,” Solais informed her with a smirk as he made her enter the station’s infirmary.
The spacious room was in total disarray, just like when she and Therak had taken a look inside in search of an access point to an underground hangar. But now Miya knew why.
With their escape pods programmed to land near the colony, Solais and Garfis must have arrived here way earlier in the day. They must have passed through the infirmary, probably searching for painkillers for the Aldebian’s smashed leg. Had they been resting in a residential building ever since, only the automated warning system making them head back to the station and run into her and Therak? Miya could only speculate, but that would explain why he hadn’t heard the soldiers before the deafening alarm.
Not that any explanations would make the current situation any less shitty.
“Me and Garfis are getting a lift off thisfruckingplanet, sugar,” Solais told her while tying her wrists together with a cable he had cut from some medical machine. “You, on the other hand, might die here. I still haven’t decided what to do with your traitorous ass. Better start thinking how to best plead for your life.”
“And you better start thinking about the missing colonists.Curhole,” Miya snapped. She was trying to play it cool, but it was hard.
