We catch all kinds of looks from crewmembers. This isn’t normal protocol. Officers don’t usually handle cleaning crew as if they’re badly behaved pups who crawled out of their mother’s whelping box.
“Let me go! The captain isn’t even going to care! What’s one more pair of hands on a busy ship like this! I’m an asset!”
“Don’t fight me,” he growls. “This is hard enough as it is. I’d rather have walked you to the captain’s office, but you wanted to do everything the hard way.”
“I did you the hard way,” I remind him.
“Don’t try to make this a joke. You’ve committed crimes we don’t have words for.”
“Stowing away definitely has a word for it.”
The captain is in his ready room. It’s guarded, which I think is weird. Isn’t everyone on this ship supposed to be friends? What are these bulky bearded men in crimson uniforms even doing? Is it for show?
“I need to speak to the captain,” Thor says. “I have discovered a stowaway.”
“One moment,” the guard on the left says, before disappearing into the captain’s room.
“So,” I say. “How’s the weather? Oh, right, we don’t have any.”
The captain’s door opens again.
“You can take her in,” the guard says. “Do you need help handling her?”
“Yeah? Do you need help handling me? Does the whole ship need protection from me?”
Thor carries me into the captain’s ready room while I mock the very concept of everything that is happening. I’m just a girl on a ship. It really shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
“What’s going on here?” A voice that sounds exactly like it should belong to a captain, belongs to a captain. I can’t see him because my face is angled down toward Thor’s incredible ass. I give it one last smack, because what the hell. I am now entering a level of fucked I have never been before. I used to think I had discovered all the levels of fucked I would ever reach, but I’ve outdone myself.
“This is why the computer is reading an extra soul on board. It’s because there is one. This is Selene Weltheim. She is not on the ship’s manifest, and I believe she stowed away.”
“Can she speak for herself, or stand on her own two feet?”
“Not without being feral in the extreme, sir.”
I hear what might be a chuckle.
Thor puts me down when the door closes behind us, and I face the captain.
“Hello,” I say, smiling at the man, who has a fantastic silver dappled beard and head of hair. It’s hard to tell what else he looks like because when you have a lot of hair and a lot of beard, most of the face is swallowed up by it.
I am really hoping that someone will find me charming and take pity on me. That tactic has worked before, and I hope like hell that it will work again, or I am seven different kinds of fucked.
“This officer says you’re a stowaway. Is that right?”
“Yes,” I say.
He looks at Thor. “Take her to the brig.”
Well, that was not the audience I had hoped for. There were no questions, no fascination with how I did it, not even a ‘well done,’ or a ‘how dare you.’ Just a swift, decisive, er, decision.
“No!”
As Thor picks me up again, I kick out and knock a cup of coffee over into the captain’s keyboard. Good. I hope some of the letters stick forever now. I hope he spends half his life hitting backspace because the typos will make him look inept if he doesn’t.
“Wait,” the captain says.
Thor pauses. I pause in my flailing, too.
