That thought briefly shifted her focus from wondering if she could help them to wondering if they might help her.
She dismissed that hope fairly quickly.
Even if they hadn’t been captured themselves, or killed, or hurt too badly even to help themselves, they couldn’t help her. Zhor had captured her and flown for hours with her—at least she thought he had. They wouldn’t have a clue of where to look for her, although, if they had survived, they might alert rescuers to the possibility that she’d been taken captive.
So that wasn’t something she could really count on to any great degree, she decided. It was fertile ground for hope, but she couldn’t just sit around and hope.
She had to do something.
That conclusion brought her to focus on escape scenarios—which brought her, in the nick of time, to the realization that her only chance of escape was to lull Zhor’s suspicions so that she might try.
As soon as she was lucid enough to begin plotting—and she was alone—she explored Zhor’s habitat.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out it was a glorified cave. It was surprisingly comfortable, had clearly been fashioned for comfort and wasn’t entirely natural, but it was rock—floors, walls, ceiling and the only evidence of tooling was chipping marks where rock had been removed. There were no windows—only a couple of air shafts barely big enough for her to get one thigh through—and there was only one door.
The door was a massive slab of wood—possibly not fashioned at all but rather sliced from an enormous tree as one piece—although it boggled the mind to attempt to figure out how he could have gotten the thing in place by himself. It was rounded like the trunk of a tree. Zhor rolled it into place and back via a crude track system when he entered or left.
An hour later, sweating profusely from effort, Annika high-stepped it back to the bed and dove in when she heard Zhor on the other side of the door, pulling the cover over her head and struggling to regulate her heart and her breath.
Fortunately, he went straight to the room he used for a kitchen and set to work on something. She had plenty of time to recover and to think.
It had been instinct that had sent her racing to the bed to dive in, but she realized it had been good instincts. As far as Zhor knew, she hadn’t really recovered from the crash. She’d slept more since he’d rescued/captured her than she’d been awake—until he’d left earlier.
This had given her the opportunity to discover that the door was not only the only way out, it was beyond her ability to move it.
She thought there might be some way to leverage it. It seemed to her that Zhor would have to have some help in moving it himself, regardless of the fact that he seemed mostly made of muscle.
It also seemed like her chances of opening the damned thing herself were pretty slim.
So where did that leave her?
