“When we hung out last week.”
“You’ve ‘hung out’ with Morgath?” I asked, looking at him like he’d just told me he used to have a Kuiper worm as a pet.
“Oh yeah, lots of times. Rax too,” he continued while my jaw hinged open. “Anyway, it’s this new tracker thing. Like a giant laser gun. Morgath said if you tag a ship with it, you can follow it through an FTL jump, even if you didn’t know where it was going.”
“How in the stars did you end up talking about faster-than-light travel with one of the heads of security on my ship?”
“He was reading my book with me,” Sai explained like it was the most normal thing in the worlds. “Captain Zorba was trying to catch a jewel thief, but he jumped and got away. And Morgath said that if he’d used that new tracker gun, he could’ve followed the thief through the jump. It was the coolest.”
“Morgath…readto you?”
“Yeah, when he boosted the security around our suite. He took a break to have some lunch. I was reading. He joined me. Is that weird?”
Words failed me, because the image of giant, grumpy Morgath of all beings reading a child’s book to an actual child was indeed extremely weird. The only thing weirder would have been if Rax had done it. But if I’d learned anything in my tenure as the hospitality specialist on an infamous pleasure cruise, it was that every single being possessed untold hidden depths. “Sai,” I said. “DidMorgath, by chance, tell you if he had one of those trackers?”
“No,” he whispered, his shining eyes twinkling with excitement in the firelight. “He showed it to me.”
Later that evening,Sai and I watched the Kravaxians eat some small rabbit-type animal Marisia had shot with a crossbow and sip from steaming cups of tea made from berries and spruce needles. Reya offered us some of the meat, but Sai—a vegetarian—shook his head. I declined as well, in solidarity. But the tea wasn’t too bad.
After dinner, Sai fell asleep with his head on my shoulder, and I pretended to do the same, closing my eyes and leaning against the wall. But I wasn’t sleeping. I was listening.
They spoke in Kravaxian, and after a lifetime spent having my VC translate every known language into Common, words I didn’t understand fascinated me. But I didn’t need to understand what they were saying to see that Tano, Marisia, and—to a lesser extent—Axel presented a united front, while Reya continually tried to push against them. They weren’t arguing, necessarily, but tension mounted in the cave. Eventually, after an hour or two, their conversation faded behind the crackling of the fire, and I’d nearly drifted off to sleep for real, the adrenaline that had propped me up all day giving way to a dense, droning fatigue, when a single word stopped my heart.
Brock.
At first I thought I’d imagined it, some half dream invading reality. But then, there it was again. “Brock,” inAxel’s clipped voice, followed by a hissed warning from Tano that sounded a lot likequiet, fool.
And like one of Freddie’s puzzle pieces locking firmly into place, one of Sai’s toys shifting from an orb into a star, I realized why Tano had looked so familiar.Stars above, it was so obvious now I wanted to scream.
I’d never met him in person, but his broad forehead, wide cheekbones, and chiseled jawline—those I’d seen plenty. Everyone had, considering the vain bastard had them carved into the CAK’s Central Park hedge maze. Tano’s features weren’t identical, but close enough that they had to have been brothers. Cousins at the very least. And even though he’d definitely been wearing makeup in that BLIX brochure to hide his pale face, there was no lingering doubt in my mind that the audacious, outspoken, and duplicitous CEO of LunaCorp, Brock Karlovich, was a Fifth Fucking Kravaxian!
Suddenly, it all made sense. LunaCorp funding initiatives to benefit Kravax. The FFKs learning our systems while “vacationing” with us at the same time as a senator who was about to propose legislation that would penalize corporate monopolies. Sai being abducted to shut Sonia up so that her proposition would never see the light of day. Since nobody would ever think to question who was behind this act—kidnapping for ransom a common enough practice for Kravaxian pirates—LunaCorp and Brock Karlovich would get exactly what they wanted without garnering a single smudge of guilt.Cunning, merciless, and resilient, indeed.
This information also gave me an idea of how long Sai and I would have to spend in this cave before the FFKs either released us or killed us. The senate meeting on Portis was in four days. Best-case scenario, if Sonia and her fellow senators withdrew the proposition, the FFKs would releaseus, and we’d all go about our lives with a fun story to tell our friends. Worst case—and what I now thought was much more likely, since Karlovich was involved—Sai and I would never leave this cave alive.
Even on the off chance that the FFKs did let us go, who would ever believe us when we tried to convince them that a Kravaxian was at LunaCorp’s helm? It was absurd. I needed that proposition to pass; the entire KU did. There was no way around it. If we wanted to live, if we wanted to keep LunaCorp from destroying what little free commerce remained amongst the stars, if I ever wanted to see Freddie again, hold him again, look into his eyes and tell him how sorry I was that I left him, how I hoped he understood why I did, how much I loved him, because I hadn’t told him enough, not by half, then we needed to escape. And we needed to do it soon.
While my brain’s chaotic whirring eventually slowed, I noticed that an ominous silence had descended over the cave.Shit. Had the FFKs realized I was awake and listening. Were my muscles too tense? Did an eyelid twitch? Had my breath caught?
Do they know?
It wasn’t until the first rattling snore echoed through the cave that I let myself exhale. They weren’t on to me. They weren’t busy planning my untimely demise, at least not right then. They’d simply fallen asleep.
I cracked my lids, finding Axel snoring on his back, his arms crossed over his chest. Reya huddled in a corner, curled in on herself like a snail, her knees pulled up to her chest. And nestled along the cave wall, Tano slept on his side. Also snoring.
Only Marisia was still up, standing guard at the mouth of the cave. With a stiff set to her shoulders and a jawclenched so tightly it mademyteeth hurt, she tapped out an irritated rhythm on her crossbow. All night, she’d seemed annoyed—well, more annoyed than usual. But was her annoyance with us, with the situation, with life in a cave? Or was it with Tano, who, in my professional opinion, appeared to be driving her up the wall? While I wondered if there might be an exploitable crack forming between them, Sai, awake and looking down the top of my jumpsuit, whispered, “What is that?”
Surprised by the turn of events, and not entirely certain how to proceed becausewas this some kind of teachable moment? I explained, “Well, Sai, those are called breasts?—”
“Stop. No. Not what I meant. And I know what they’re called,” he said, only mildly ruffled. “I mean what isthat? Your necklace?”
Marisia’s head swiveled our way, and we waited silently, our eyes half-closed, Sai’s head on my shoulder again as we hid behind the crackling flames.
Once she went back to staring resentfully through the cavemouth, I whispered, “Orion’s Tooth,” nodding toward my pendant. “It was a gift from these jerks.”
“I need that.” Sai made a pointed gesture toward his mag-cuffs. “I canusethat,”
“You can?” I asked.
