And the pocket of air that tossed the ship around vanished on that inhale, the jerk upward almost as violent as the freefall. Georges panting, sucking down sterile air, sip after sip, until he realized he wasn’t flying the ship.
She was.
And the Alpha female reeked of fear, her own mouth covered with a breathing apparatus as she dared glance away from the windscreen to ask, “Comme ça? I hold it like this?”
The yoke?
Gods, his penis hurt. Testicles swelling, a cry of agony caught in the breathing apparatus.
“I don’t know how to fly an aircraft!” she yelled. Yet the Alpha female was trying, though sending the ship in too sharp an ascent. “Georges! Snap out.Maintenant! Wake up!”
He could not feel his hands. Glasses long since having fallen from his face. Cockpit a blur, he swallowed air, heard the damning screams from the cargo hold, and ever so slowly began to realize where he was.
He couldn’t fly. Not yet. Still, he reached out with numb fingers and adjusted Maryanne’s grip on the yoke. Guided her to steady the ship, rocking in his seat.
The whole thing came and went in a blink of time… yet it had felt like an eternity. The hell he had earned.
Maryanne had brown eyes. Doe eyes. Eyes that knew his every secret. Yet now, his Overseer, the Alpha who spoke terrible French, looked at him like she… felt concern.
Even her broken French was soft, even in its judgment. “Boîte, Georges. You make a box,oui? Everything in your head, put it inside. Shove it down, lock it tight, so far you cannot touch it anymore. You forget it exists.Comprends? There is notempsfor anything else. No room for… feelings. Not now.Seulement maintenant. Do you hear me?” Stumbling over her words, as if she too had her own shame, she added with an uncomfortable, harried, “Unit 512XT, do you understand me?”
And that did it. That simple recognition, that reminder, of who he had always been. The job he had to do. “I’m not yourtech. I’m Unit 17C’s tech. Brenya’s tech. And I am going back home to save her.”
“Oui, that’s right,” the woman agreed, a stiff nod of her chin. The narrowing of her eyes as she watched the horizon. “She needs you. She needs you to keep it together. To help her.Comprends?”
It wasn’t instant, how his brain slowly turned back on. But the shakes stopped, his breath deepened, and he was able to reach for the fluttering yoke before him and relieve the frightened woman of a job she had no training in. “I apologize. I did not account for potential vertical wind shear.”
He leveled out the ship, assuring a safe and steady ascent to make up for lost altitude, and did exactly what Maryanne had ordered—he shoved his feelings deep, deep down. “We should reach our destination in two hours.”
“No. You make it one hour.” There was determination in this woman, a desperation Georges could not account for. “Push ship harder. Must go faster. We need Bernard Domemaintenant.You can do.” She swallowed, eyes flashing guilt before she forced it down. “There are drugs… if you need. In the black bag. Just enough to get you through. I need you… operational.”
“Pharmaceuticals?” Georges would never touch them, not that he wasn’t salivating at the thought. He didn’t deserve oblivion. He deserved to feel every last trace of guilt. “Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind, ma’am.”
Again, he pushed the ship too hard, the next thirty minutes leaving the cockpit rattling through turbulence while Maryanne outlined the next stages of the plan, her fluency improving marginally with practice. Confidence, she pulled it around her like a blanket, apparently shoving her own feelings into a box, until she was cocky, flippant… desperate.
The second downdraft they hit sent them plummeting again, and together they corrected the ship, the female even making ajoke as if she were now used to the violence of the wind. “Fun, eh?”
She adapted. She lied.
She pretended her box of feelings didn’t have any cracks.
It did. The breathing apparatus might have filtered out the scent of her fear, but he saw the sweat at her temples. The whites of her eyes.
And then her loud sigh of relief as the glittering shine of Bernard Dome came into view.
The final minutes of approach, her exhilaration failed, and her hands began to shake, until it was she who reached for a drug, digging through one of the black bags until her hand found a premeasured syringe of something blue that she jammed right into the meat of her leg.
Her spine straightened, her pupils dilating, as she reached for another, and then she stuck a needle into the meat ofhisthigh, shooting chemicals into him before he might refuse.
The effect was instant.
These were not Beta rations, but a stimulant that drove away fear, pain, and heightened his concentration.
And he wondered why she had not given it to him sooner.
“Do not remove your breathing apparatus, even after we land.” All this was spoken as she signaled the landing pad, ordering them to open the Dome so a gift of one hundred Omegas might be delivered to Central as promised. That time, her French was flawless, as if she had practiced the words in her mind, over and over, until polished and commanding.
And the glittering fortress of his home opened to him.
