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I looked down at what she held. “Yeah, it’s that code again. Can’t read it.”

  “I know this, I know this pattern.” She put the vial down, picked up another one. Tapped a nail against the label. “Venarian categorization numbering. Why in all the Void would the ship’s stores use that? No one uses it, too much of a hassle.”

  “Will you tell me when you start saying things I need to know about?”

  But she didn't hear me, just put down the second vial, picked up a third to study. “But we learned it in that horrible history of ‘Nomenclatures throughout the Empire’ lecture in second year.” She closed her eyes and leaned back, almost into my chest. “How did it go? The first string is the class, the second string is the…”

  I stopped listening, just watched her sort through them, pick up another vial, examine it.

  “Got it.” Bewilderment stole the look of victory from her eyes. “But it doesn't make any sense. Nobody's used this classification system for decades.”

  “Sense or not, will they still be effective?”

  She picked up a few vials, rolled them in her hand. “Should be, they’ve been kept cold enough. A few things may need an increased dosage. A couple things I might not use just because I'm not sure how they would degrade. But this,” she tapped one of the vials, “this should go a long way towards bringing Loree's fever down.”

  “Any painkillers in that lot?” I hated to ask, but it would be time to go back out soon.

  She looked up at me, jumping a little at our closeness. “Yes, but what you need more than meds is rest.”

  Stepping back, I choked off the bitter laugh that fought through my throat. “Let's assume that's not on the table. At least, not as long as I need.”

  I hated asking for help. But it wasn't just for me. “Whatever you can find to help patch me up, I'd appreciate it.”

  Nadira made a bag out of a pillowcase and started putting supplies in, vials, injectors, a sheet. “Is there running water back at the room?”

  “No. Couldn't pull that off without making it clear the area was inhabited.” I thumped one of the liquid storage cubes. “I promise it’s kept better than the rations did.”

  Lifting one of the large cubes, I counted the water containers left on the rack. With three of us now I'd need to come back and restock more frequently. And I’d have to find another storage compartment soon.

  Or else... I shook my head. Not going there. Not now.

  “Ready to go?” Nadira tied the pillow case top together to make handles, and slung it over her shoulder. “I know you said there's no one else here, but I'm a little nervous leaving Loree for so long.”

  Back in the room, she immediately checked Loree’s condition. Nothing had changed to my eyes, but she seemed worried as she prepped a vial for the injector. With a hiss it, released the medicine into the woman’s upper arm.

  “Will that take care of her?” I slid the water cube onto the desk.

  “It’ll bring the fever down, make her more comfortable. That’s all for now.”

  I watched her sort through the vials she’d brought, load another into the injector. “Let’s get started on you. Any reactions to medication?”

  Her voice sounded sad, resigned, but her hands were sure as she moved so she could see my back and then injected me with the painkiller.

  The knife edge of pain I’d been riding dulled, just a bit. Just enough.

  “Some of these older wounds look infected.” My own system should have caught it, should have kept me in shape. But without sustained down time, it was doing a crappy job.

  The click and hiss of another vial. Her touch was a world away from any kind of caress, but I couldn’t help but lean into it, crave hearing another voice. She’d fallen silent while she worked, but there was an easy way to fix that.

  “What else does she need?”

  “A geneticist.”

  “What?” That wasn’t what I expected.

  “Loree has Karda’s Syndrome. Even on Orem, the black market couldn’t always get the drug she needed to stay stable. Since we were caught, put in the cage...” Her sure fingers stopped, shook on my back.

  I turned, enfolded her hands between mine. She’d lost color, her glassy eyes didn’t see me anymore.

  “But you’re not there now, right? Nadira?”

  She took a deep breath, then another. “Right.”

  I stretched, rotated my shoulder. Still a mess, but better. It would do.

  “Get some rest, I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Hunting.”

  Nadira

  What the hell did he mean by that?

  I checked on Loree again. Her skin had a touch more color and her pulse had evened out. A knot loosened in my chest. She was already responding to the medicine.

  I checked the vials I'd taken from cold storage again. They'd be stable here in the stateroom for a while. I gritted my teeth. If I'd known that our rescuer was going to be leaving us, I might've grabbed a few extras, made sure we had enough.

  Whatever.

  We were better off here. I just hated not knowing what was going on. Always had. And it was clear Ronan knew a lot more than he was telling me.

  All right, Nadira. Makes no sense to worry about what you can't solve. Focus. What can you do?

  See what else is in here that might be useful. With a whispered apology to the past occupant, I ransacked the shelves, looking for anything useful, anything that could give me a hint as to where we were.

  A bowl filled with pretty rocks, small crystal figures commemorating something I didn’t recognize, a stack of thin plexi sheets, the printing too faded to read, and a small cup. Not much left of a life.

  Trailing my fingers along the edge of the shelf, the reluctant memory tickled at the back of my brain.

  No matter, it would surface later. Hopefully, when it was still useful.

  Going through a dead person’s things made my skin crawl just a bit. But the last few weeks had done a good job of teaching me not to be too picky.

  If there really had been a breach in this section... I shuddered. Whoever it was wouldn't be coming back for their stuff, not anytime soon.

  I unlatched the dresser to find neatly folded shirts, each still in their compartment. When I tugged at the shoulder of one, the sleeve separated immediately.

  I stared at the fabric.

  Decades-old classification system on the meds. Fabric weakened by age.

  I would have thought we were trapped in a floating wreck, abandoned to all but ghosts, except for the horrors in the lab.

  Emptying the rocks onto the shelf, I carefully poured some water from the giant cube Ronan had casually placed on the desk into the bowl and moistened the sleeve.

  While wiping down Loree's face, I calculated the weight of the water container. I thought about how easily Ronan had lifted it, destroyed the lock on the cage, and opened the jammed panel.

  Interesting.

  Sitting back, I finger-combed my hair and gazed longingly at the water. How long did ‘hunting’ take, exactly? The hell with it. I might not be able to have a shower, but for Void's sake, I could at least be clean.

  I stripped quickly, laying the clothes across the back of the chair while I hurriedly wiped myself down.

  I really, really didn't want to put the filthy rags back on, now that I was even just a little cleaner. Sorting through the dresser, I found a few things that hadn't degraded as badly.

  Hmmm.

  I tapped the holoplate again, looking at the woman more closely this time.

  “Sorry, hope you don't mind me raiding your closet.”

  The pants were degraded to useless and too narrow in the hips for me anyway. Finally, I layered a couple of long skirts, the outermost black, with deep patch pockets. Over it all I added a tank top and two overshirts. Not the most becoming look, I was sure, but more secure in the face of possible seam failure.

  “What were you doing out here?” I asked the nameless woma
n while I pulled out another set of clothes for Loree. She might not be strong enough to be moved yet, but we’d have to go somewhere eventually, right?

  Folding the clothes, I placed them next to the portrait, looking at the boy and girl framed by their parents. “Were the kids with you, or did they stay home, grow up without you around? Did they know what happened?” I couldn’t decide which would be worse.

  “Who are you talking to?” Loree's faint voice interrupted my little dialogue with my imaginary companion.

  “Hey!” I forced a smile. Loree still looked terrible, but there was nothing I could do, not out here. And there wasn't any reason to make her any more worried than she already was.

  She wasn't dumb. She knew where things were headed.

  “Where are we?” She coughed, and I hurried to rinse the cup and bring her a drink.

  “Well,” I pushed the filthy clothes onto the floor and kicked them into a corner, then dragged the chair next to her bed. “The good news is we’re not in the lab anymore.”

  Her dark eyes, smudged with exhaustion, widened. “We got away,” she breathed. “How?”

  “There was a guy.” And then I stopped. Other than his name, I had no idea of anything about Ronan. I thought about the cuts and bruises all over his chest, his strength. But I wasn't sure what exactly that told me.

  “I think he escaped from the lab, too. He came back, got us out, and brought us here.”

  Loree looked around the room, obviously not much comforted. “But where are we now?”

  “I don't know. And that’s the bad news. We’re still on a ship, the same one the lab is on. But beyond that, I can't tell you.”

  “Wish I had a tablet,” she muttered. “Anything with a connection to the ship’s systems. Can't do much, but I can still do that.”

  I squeezed her fingers lightly. “I know you can.”

  It was true. Her treatment was rare, exorbitantly expensive. Loree’s skills at hacking and cracking data had kept her alive this long.

  “I'll keep my eyes open for anything you can use, okay? How are you feeling?”

  Loree cracked half a smile. “Like crap, but slightly less terrified crap. I'm not arguing.”

  “Let me get some more meds into you. They're old, so not as effective as I'd like.”

  I reached for another vial to slide into the injector, but her arm twitched, knocking it to the floor.

  She grimaced.

  “Not the worst thing we've dealt with today,” I reminded her as I got down to my hands and knees and started hunting for the vial.

  She couldn’t help it; the spasms were a symptom of the disease. Bit by bit, it stole her motor control. Loree took it as a particular insult, since her nimble fingers were how she’d made her living, how she defined herself.

  A glint caught my eye underneath the desk and I crawled into the kneehole.

  “Got it.”

  When I shuffled around, I froze, the memory finally clear. “That's why I know this…”

  A wave of deja vu washed over me. A trip with my parents when I was no more than three, maybe four, some grand luxury-class starliner, restored to the standards of the gilded age when it had been launched.

  My parents had squabbled the entire time and I'd spent the cruise hiding, making my own little world in the nooks and crannies of the ship.

  I traced the pattern of the fabric on the walls. Not the same ship, surely, but the same age, the same class.

  I crawled out from under the desk, clutching the vial like a trophy. “It's one of the Zaurion starliners,” I told Loree while fitting the vial into the injector and pressing it to her arm.

  She stared at me in shock. “That's insane. There were only three of those things made, right?”

  “I know, it’s nonsense.” And it was, but I couldn’t argue against the sense of certainty that had taken hold of me. “I was on the one they keep by the Capitol as a floating museum. This is exactly like it.”

  “In the museum version, did they have the scary lab?” Loree leaned back against the pillow as the drug took effect.

  “No, somehow we missed that part of the tour. But my parents and I, we stayed in a room just like this one, I'd swear.”

  “Nadira, those things were made over 100 years ago. Why would something so old, so rare, be all the way out here on the Fringe? Who would have the money to even run it?”

  “I don't know. If I can find you a connected tablet, you can figure it out. If they’ve got the money to run a lab like that, maybe keeping an old cruiser online isn’t that big of a deal.”

  “When,” she said, voice fading again into sleep. “Not if. Need to be connected. If it's true, can't wait to see how it’s still running after all these years.”

  She dozed off, no doubt dreaming of code, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

  My hunch made no sense, but I was certain I was right. The luxury liners had been built as a decadent extravagance during the last Emperor’s reign. They'd been lovely, but the entire project had terrible timing, a flaunting of the elite’s wealth and disdain for the needs of the lower classes.

  Not surprisingly, a small civil war had broken out not long after. The Empire would've been better served building battleships, not pleasure cruisers.

  My eyelids drooped, and I slumped in the chair. We were safe, or at least safer. I was clean. Loree had medicine. And now all I wanted to do was sleep.

  Which apparently happened, because suddenly the door slid open.

  Ronan leaned against the frame, staring at me blankly. “The women. Right.” Then he slipped down, half sitting, half sprawled on the floor.

  New injuries had joined the cuts and bruises across his chest, and he kept his arm pulled tight against his side. Blood covered half of his face, turning it into a ghastly mask.

  I rushed to him, grabbing the basin of water and a cloth as I passed. “What happened?”

  “I told you. Hunting.” The soft growl of his words faded away.

  Like that made any sense. “Let me see what's wrong.”

  I tried to ease his arm up, but he pushed me away. “I'll be fine. I just need to rest, not be poked and prodded. Had enough of that.”

  “You're being an idiot. Are you trying to die?”

  His eyes flashed and he glanced into a corner of the room; I turned, but nothing was there.

  When I looked back at him, his shoulders were slumped in defeat. “Fine. I don't suppose you can make it any worse.”

  I clenched my teeth, fighting the urge to clean one of his wounds extra briskly for that little comment.

  As I wiped away the blood so that I could see where the actual injuries were, I couldn't help but notice the determined set of his jaw.

  “If I patch you up, are you just going to go out again, get a new collection of injuries?”

  He snorted, closing his eyes and letting his head tilt back against the wall. “It depends, am I out of Hunters yet?”

  “The black droids?” My hands stilled. “You're trying to kill them?” I reprocessed his words. “All of them?”

  “Got it in one.”

  My thoughts raced as I closed his wounds, hoping there wasn't any internal bleeding. I wouldn't be able to do anything about that with no equipment. Once again I wondered about the scar at his throat. The angle seemed wrong somehow, but it didn’t actively need attention, and so many of his injuries did.

  While I liked the idea of our tormentors being killed off, it seemed like a pretty large project for just one guy. Even a guy as big as this one.

  “So, after you’re done with that, what’s the plan?” I paused, looking at the vial of painkiller. He’d had one earlier, but two likely wouldn't hurt. Hell, three or four might not make a difference at the rate he was going.

  He didn’t answer, just stared into the corner while I worked. “There is a plan, right? Steal one of their ships, get out of here, something?”

  No response. I rocked back on my heels, arms crossed. “I’m not going to sit here,
waiting to bandage you up day after day. You can’t just keep going out to fight them. Do you even know how many are left?”

  I threw the bloody rag down in frustration. “If that’s your plan, it’s time for a new one.”

  With a snarl, he jumped up, grabbing my wrist and dragging me from the room.

  “Wait!” I glanced back at Loree, but the drugs kept her under, unaware of the commotion.

  “You wanted to know my plan? Come on.”

  He wrenched open the hatch, and we reentered the main part of the ship. I hung back until he pulled me behind him. “They’re not here now. They’re somewhere where I can’t get to them.”

  Twisting through the corridors, I could only stare at his back, the cuts I’d just tended already healing. Was that the only reason he’d returned to the stateroom? All of his targets were out of reach?

  Down a lift to another deck, deep in the hold of the ship. Cold, practical permisteel replaced the decaying finery of the upper levels.

  He didn’t say anything, just marched relentlessly on, while I worried and struggled to keep up.

  Whatever his plan was, Loree and I were in trouble. No one could fight forever. It would just take one unlucky blow, and we’d be trapped in the stateroom. The water would last longer than the food, but not forever.

  Throat dry, I started mentally running through the drugs in the storage closet. I wouldn’t be captured again, wouldn’t let that happen to Loree. We’d need to escape another way.

  “Here.” He hit a door lock, and we stepped into another storage compartment, but what it held confused me.

  Six gray, softly curved ovoid shapes, like giant misshapen eggs, filled the room. Ronan dropped my wrist, walked to one and leaned over it, his anger drained away, leaving him looking lost and tired.

  Curiosity won, and I approached him warily. The clear top of the egg came into view, and as got closer I could see it was filled with a soft blue gel.

  I froze.

  Floating in the gel was the body of a man, naked except for the barest of shorts.

  “They’re all gone.” Ronan’s rough voice bit the words out. “These are my brothers, dead, but they still won’t let us go. They’re here, waiting for another round of experiments, for the Hunters to try and pry secrets from our bones.”