Despite having been ordered to leave immediately, my gear strapped to my back, I turned to Arosha’s home. I wanted to give a last warning—to hug them one last time—before I slipped away. Were I any other person in the village, I would have worried about the younger hunter tracking me, spying on me for the Queen, no doubt to report whether I left as ordered or not. Nobody rivaled my ability to hide, though, and all I needed was to turn a corner and I’d lose him.
With more urgency than I’d ever felt while departing for a mission, I said my warnings and goodbyes, and then I left. To head for a distant, fallen skyship and the ghostly apparitions that had scared my brethren and the new Queen.
Chapter 2
Jolene
I woke slowly, blinking against deep blackness, my breathing even and heavy. My mind was filled with cobwebs and static. Where was I? What had happened to me? Why was it so dark? My mind was so hazy that I didn’t even feel the sharp pang of panic when I couldn’t move. Just a mild “oh shit” feeling that slowly dissolved back into nothing. I couldn’t move. Okay.
Blinking some more, it began to make sense, as slowly as it felt like I rose to wakefulness.Stasis pod, my brain supplied at last; I was in a stasis pod. I’d worked with those so often that my hand twitched, as if already touching the control panel. Except I’d never beeninsidea stasis pod myself, and this was different.
No, it wasn’t. I blinked again, and more of my brain joined the disjointed jumble inside my head. Now I remembered what had happened and where I was, but I wasn’t sure if that was much of an improvement. The crashedship, the lies of the UAR, and the nasty aliens who had put everyone in these stasis pods after locking up the ship. It took me a moment longer to remember that I was the one who had set my pod to wake after three months had passed.
Brushing my fingers along the inside of the lid, I found the latching mechanism exactly where it should be. My heart had begun pounding, flooding my body with adrenaline anyway, as if it fully expected to be trapped inside the metal and plexiglass coffin. Whoever had designed these pods hadn’t thought through what it did to a person when they had to free themselves. In my hospital, that had obviously never been the case, we were the ones rousing patients from stasis.
Damn it, even with the addition of the adrenaline, my brain still remained cloudy and messed up. Either that was a side effect of stasis so soon after a much longer stint, or something had gone wrong in the waking cycle. I wasn’t sure; I’d never dealt with either situation before. At least the latch worked, and the lid began to silently slide away. The cold slap of air against my thinly clad body did the trick at last to snap my brain to full wakefulness.
A crack of purple light raced across the ceiling above me, slanting light into the massive cargo hold. From wall to wall and floor to ceiling, stasis pods had been stacked in seemingly endless rows. Closer around me, though, the pods were much more haphazard and crooked. Those had been opened before—occupants woken and forced to work—until events three months ago had made the Krektar force everyone back to sleep. I hoped it had been three months, that my ploy had worked, and not that three years—or something worse—had passed.
I needed to get out of here, shut the stasis pod and make it seem occupied, then slip out of this ship and find help. Unless there was an easy way to escape this hold, there was no way I could rescue everyone. I was very tempted to locate some of my girls, though, just a small group could slip underthe radar, right? If I knew with certainty that Jasmine was here, I would have definitely woken her. She hadn’t made it onto the ship, though, when the natives had attacked to rescue that woman, Nala. I didn’t want to consider that it meant she’d died, and fervently hoped she’d spent the past winter with Nala and her friends, safe and warm… It was freezing in here.
The hold was silent and dark, not a soul moving. I wondered if the Krektar had gone into stasis somewhere deeper in the ship, too. Had they been hunkering down all winter to preserve supplies? Though it was to my advantage, the idea that everyone—down to the last creepy alien—was asleep felt wrong. Like I was on a ghost ship.
Winter was definitely not over. I shook from the cold as I stepped out of the pod and focused on the controls. The lid slid shut with a hiss, and lights blinked with familiar symbols as I told it to go into energy-saving mode. That looked closest to what a pod looked like while occupied, but I still engaged its hover mode and pushed the pod deeper into the hold, behind untouched stacks. I hoped that meant they wouldn’t check there, wouldn’t see it until long after I was gone.
My sling was still in my pocket, but I was all out of ammo, and my fingers were too stiff with cold to be able to use it anyway. I needed supplies, warm clothing, better shoes—and fast—or my only option reallywasstasis to survive. Jogging through the hold got my blood pumping, at least, and I kept my hands tucked into my armpits to stay warm. There was nothing in here that could help—not the pods—and they were the only cargo in the hold.
Then my eyes caught on a panel by one of the smaller exits, and I felt a surge of hope. That looked like it could be an emergency supply kit or first aid kit of some kind. Previously, the crowd of men had camped out closest to the door, so no wonder I’d never seen it. The box was metal andoblong, attached to the wall and emblazoned with alien symbols. Nothing so helpful as a bright red cross.
It was a struggle to get it to the ground, my arms weak and shaky, probably from stasis. Then the latches didn’t obey for several minutes, which felt like an eternity. When the box finally opened, I held my breath, certain I was going to be disappointed. My eyes struggled to make sense of what I was looking at, each wrapped object different from what I was used to. Then I started to make out more familiar shapes, and though I couldn’t read the alien script, I was pretty certain one of those small squares was a blanket. I picked it up gingerly, then unwrapped it to its impressive size. Yes, silver and a bit crinkly, but definitely very warm, it was an immense relief to pull it around my shoulders.
I hunkered down, categorizing my options and gathering what I definitely needed: ration bars, a small light, all kinds of medical supplies, and three cylinders that I thought might be flares. There were three more blankets, too, and I unfolded one to function as a makeshift bag for the things I wanted to take. The ration bar was hard and tasted unpleasant, but I chewed on one anyway to fill my queasy, empty stomach.
Good, I had supplies. I was much warmer inside the blanket. Now all I needed was a plan. I tied my blanket around my body, using the extra material from my improvised bag as a belt. Then, I appraised the door leading out of the hold. Was it going to be locked? I mean, if I were them, I would have locked it, just to be sure. Theydidthink they’d put all of us into stasis indefinitely, though, so perhaps they had been careless.
No response when I waved my hand over the doorplate, and nothing when I pressed either. I tried the handle, and it wouldn’t budge, the cold metal freezing painfully against my hand. Frostburn. Winter was definitely not over, but I hoped it was in its final stages, not part of a much longer cycle thanthe one I was used to on Earth. This was an alien planet, though, for all I knew, winter lasted ten months, not three.
Urgency tickled at the back of my neck, roiling through my gut where the ration bar had settled like a lead weight. The longer I was in here, the greater the chance of discovery. And if it was a long winter and everyone was still asleep, I needed to do the same. There was no way I could survive outside in this cold. Unlike Jasmine, I was no wilderness guide with extensive survival training—I was just a nurse, one with an impressive number of write-ups in her file and a serious problem with authority. None of that was going to help me go toe to toe with a Krektar. I needed ammo, but most of all, I needed help.
My eyes returned to the stasis pods as I considered my options. I could wake one of the girls, Rosy, Maeve, Eva? But most of us were just average ladies with average skills. Only Jasmine’s training was truly useful, but she wasn’t here. So, what if I woke one of the guys? Even just a man’s brute strength could be the deciding factor. I just didn’t know which one I could trust.
With the small light from the kit, I went past several of the nearby pods to glance inside, noticing big and brawny shapes, often covered in tattoos or scars. There was a definite bias toward bigger human men, as if the UAR had selected for that. It was probably not fair to see no deeper than their skin, but none of these guys looked trustworthy. I had no way of judging who was safe to wake and who wasn’t. I did not know them.
I definitely wasn’t waking the gray-skinned Talac guy I passed. I knew next to nothing about his species, and what I did know came from the hospital. Knowing how his digestive tract spiraled in a left-handed fashion wasn’t going to help me keep him in line, though. I lingered a bit longer at the pod that held the big Dragnell guy, though. He was terrifying to look at—so big he almost didn’t fit inside the pod—and it wasn’t just because he was covered in a thick,fluffy pelt. His wolf snout actually pressed against the plexiglass.
The Dragnell had collected some of the women with him who had been too scared to join our little collective. Women who didn’t think they could handle using a sling, or stand up to a horde of men and aliens to keep each other safe. I had not judged them for that choice, like some of the others had. Some people were fighters; others weren’t. The Dragnell had been the biggest, scariest thing in the hold, besides the Krektar. It was no wonder some of the women seeking protection had flocked to him.
While Iwassure that some of the stray women had bargained for protection with sex, I was not sure if that had been the case with the Dragnell guy. They didn’t mate outside their species, did they? They were genetic purists who did not even mate outside their caste. Maybe he was my safest bet; he was certainly the strongest.
My hand went to the panel to wake him, fingers trembling, this time not from the cold, but from nerves. This guy was big, and his fur was lush; he had to be from one of the higher Dragnell castes. He was going to be super bossy to deal with, no doubt about it. I hesitated over the panel, wondering once again whether it was a good idea. Then a sound reached my ears: metal shifting, a lock disengaging. I leaped over the stasis pod that housed the big Dragnell and crouched behind it. As far as hiding spots went, it was a terrible one, but all I could manage in the two seconds it took for the cargo hold door to swing open.
Fuck, that wasn’t good. I’d been taking too much time making up my mind, dawdling over choices when every minute mattered. I’d assumed too easily that the whole ship was asleep, and now I’d been proven wrong. Three men had walked into the cargo hold, judging by the sound of their footsteps: boots slapping against the metal flooring with heavy thuds. The noise made me squeeze my toes together inside the soft, gray slippers I wore, already damaged fromthe outdoors and hardly adequate to keep my toes from getting frostbite.
Then came the sound of voices, two of them, crude and rough. They spoke the language of the Krektar guards who had been keeping us in line and working to protect this crash site before. But the other voice sounded nothing like them, and it made me so curious that I peered around the edge of the pod to get a look. Who was that? He sounded alien and strange, but at the same time far more cultured than the smelly, warthog-resembling guards.
My breath misted in front of my face as I exhaled in surprise. I clasped my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound, but the way that long, sinuous tail twitched, I was certain he’d heard me. The stranger with the different voice—tall, bigger than the two Krektar with him, but also leaner. He wore black, but what I could see of his skin was also black and shot through with bright red lightning. Even his hair was streaked that way.
They kept talking, but the tail that dangled behind him—long, slender, and tipped with a razor-sharp knife—settled down. It hung calmly, and I thought maybe I’d gotten away with it after all. Then the guy turned, boot shifting along the floor, and I realized he was looking right at the box of emergency supplies I had raided. Fuck, that was bad; he had to know someone was up and about. He barked orders then, pointing with his hand and tail, whipping out to snap in the face of one of the two Krektar. They turned and jogged out of the hold, back the way they’d come—just like that.
