“It means I beat you out in natural selection. I heal better and don’t get sick.”
Shade pursed his lips, absorbing what I’d said. “Should Bridgebane get that blood?”
Worry about the blood exchange we’d agreed to passed between us with a look.
“We had no choice,” I said. “They’ll alter it with chemicals and drugs and make super soldiers from it. There’s no doubt. But they’ll make dozens. I still have the lab, and there arethousandsof injections in it. It was a necessary risk,” I said, remembering Mareeka’s words from earlier.
Shade nodded, seeming to agree.
I wrapped a compress around my arm, not wanting to drip on everything when I went inside to somehow get my blood into Fiona, questions be damned. Maybe I’d answer them. Maybe I wouldn’t. That was up in the air, like everything else.
I started up the stairs. “The super soldier serum? I think Big Guy might be a test.”
Shade grunted as though that didn’t surprise him at all. “At least I finally know what you stole,” he said.
I nodded. I’d even stolen Big Guy, in fact.
“Good for you.” Shade powered up the laser healer without saying anything else, and I went inside to face the horror I knew I’d find on the bridge.
Chapter 30
It turned out that Shadecould navigate. That was good, since neither Jax nor I really could. We both saw numbers and our minds went blank. It was kind of a curse. I could steer, but I couldn’t calculate.
The Fold was no longer where we’d last found it. We got Shade to jump us to eight different systems where we thought we might locate it, all without a result. No one was willing to tell Shade what we were looking for or why we appeared to be leaping willy-nilly around Sector 17, which frustrated the hell out of the guy who was setting the coordinates. We kept searching, anxiety and fatigue growing. Shade did what we asked and didn’t press too hard for information, although I could tell he was damn curious. It was obvious we weren’t ready to trust him with a big secret yet, and he respected that.
Big Guy stuck around this time when I asked him to, bringing his personal cruiser on board the same way Shade had. He finally gave us a name—Merrick Maddox. He’d been captured and experimented on, imprisoned for six months while scientists and machines monitored the serum’s effect on his body and blood. The result of making someone with a rebel’s heart faster, bigger, and stronger than everyone else was apparently an escaped prisoner who could find a secret lab and nearly blow it up.
The charges he’d been setting when I came along and stole the lab were still hidden under the refrigerated shelves. That unexpected news made me understandably nervous, but Merrick assured me that the bombs were controlled by a remote that he’d deactivated—after he’d decided he could trust us with the serum.
He’d initially wanted to bring the enhancer to the Fold but hadn’t had any means of getting the lab to the rebel leaders or contacting them with only a stolen military cruiser and a bunch of goons hot on his tail. No wonder the Dark Watch had popped up all over the place around the lab just after we’d stumbled upon it. They’d been after Merrick, not us. But then we’d nabbed the lab—and their intense focus.
We’d been willing to die to keep the serum away from the Overseer, and that had made us okay in Merrick’s book. He’d figured the Black Widow would do as well as his bombs to destroy the lab when the Dark Watch had cornered us once and for all in Sector 14, so he hadn’t set off the explosives. When we’d gotten away, he’d left to try to contact his friends but had kept an eye on us, spying to see what we’d do with the serum. If it was bring it to the Fold, then all the better—we had a cargo cruiser to haul it there. If it was something else, he still had that remote.
I remembered the prickle to my senses, that feeling of being watched, as I’d walked the streets of Albion City. Apparently, Merrick had been that itch on the back of my neck.
I wished he’d been more straightforward with us, although I couldn’t be too angry, since he’d saved my life by keeping us in his sights.
I gave him a requisite stink-eye and strongly urged him to remove his tracking devices from inside my ship and find all his charges. I also did a thorough sweep, inside and out, to make sure I hadn’t missed any trackers during my frantic spacewalk—and that none had been added while the ship had been docked on Starway 8.
I didn’t find anything, and Merrick put his bugs and bombs in our secure weapons chest while I wondered about his confrontation with the Overseer. Everyone knew the Overseer, but why did the Overseer know Merrick? Had he monitored the tests on him? Or was there something else? Something more?
Fiona didn’t wake up for three days. It was part blood loss, part heavy sedation, and part probably not wanting to wake up and face a reality without Miko and Shiori in it. I understood. I longed for the temporary escape of deep sleep myself. And I would have it—after I found the Fold.
Shade’s cruiser was inside the main cargo hold next to Merrick’s, but unlike Merrick, who’d taken up residence in the bunkroom, Shade was living out of his little ship. When I laid my head on my pillow for brief periods of rest and stared numbly at the wall, I wanted his arms around me. When I got up and saw him again, my heart jerked with uncertainty and doubt. But I also warmed all over with anticipation, and attraction, and the memory of his touch. The confusing mix kept crashing together and just hurt.
Shade looked at me as though he wanted to comfort me, and that just made everything both better and worse.
Bonk stuck mostly to the bridge and to my room, seeming completely fine after shaking off Shade’s sedative. He gave out affection like he had an endless supply, bumping his head into any leg he could find and snaking his little body under any hand that reached out to touch. Without him purring against me most of the time, the panic and desolation growing inside me might have eaten me alive.
Jax stayed almost constantly with Fiona until she opened her eyes. I could hardly get him to eat, and he looked like a ghost. Or maybe he was seeing ghosts. Alone in the heartbreak that had never left him, he sat there and watched.
When she finally woke up, he kissed her on the forehead and then went to bed. I wasn’t sure he slept. His face looked too battered for that when he eventually emerged again, his eyes still bloodshot and stark.
In the meantime, I looked for the Fold. And looked, and looked, and looked.
Merrick knew more than any of us about finding the pocket between the stars. Unfortunately, not even he could locate it. But the time we spent searching together gave me a chance to ask how he’d survived so well in the lab for three full days. It turned out he’d had food and water in a small pack and used empty biohazard bags for those bodily functions I’d wondered about.
On dayfourof wandering the Dark, I gripped my console, growling and wanting to give the damn thing a good shake.
