“Watch your oxygen,” Nysus says.
I nod, but I can’t seem to slow my breathing down. My heart is thundering, blood roaring in my ears.
“Here, let me,” Kane says.
He works his way around me to the bed and then gently tugs at those stiffened fingers.
It’s hard not to squeeze my eyes shut. But I need to see, to understand.
In a moment, she comes free, sliding smoothly out from under the bed.
This woman, whoever she was, is naked and beaten to hell. Her cheeks are purple, puffy and swollen with bruises and cuts… beneath the ragged blindfold she wears.
I exhale. “A blindfold.”
A narrow band of white cloth is wrapped so tightly around her head that the skin rolls over it at the edges. That’s what gave me the impression that her eyes were gone.
“Whoa,” Nysus breathes.
“She was hiding,” Kane says.
“Probably from whoever hurt her.” My breathing is slowly returning to normal. “But why didn’t she take the blindfold off?”
“Claire.” Kane points. “Look at her ears.” He sounds grim.
Beneath the blunt cut of her dark hair, white threads and raggedstrands are poking out. Scraps of that same white fabric, stuffed into her ears. Makeshift earplugs of some kind.
If someone else had covered her eyes and ears, why hadn’t she removed that stuff before getting under the bed, to give herself a better chance of seeing or hearing her attackers coming?
Unless she did it to herself. I shudder.
“Let’s get her downstairs with the others,” Kane says.
We carry her, just like the others, carefully to the sunny atrium. I drag the comforter along with us.
“Someone has a lot of explaining to do,” Kane mutters after gently letting go of her near the others we’ve found. “This is going to be big news.”
“Yeah,” I say. But as I’m attempting to drape the comforter over her—exceedingly difficult without gravity—my gaze is caught by First Officer Wallace, who is lying… floating nearby. We’d moved him, along with Captain Gerard, a while ago. But down here, in the light, at this angle…
Voller is right; the left side of his head is mostly gone, a gruesome mess of an exit wound. But his ear is still intact and just inside of it, an unexpected burst of color. Bright orange. Not blood, clearly, or bone or brain matter.
I squint at his remains, trying to figure out what I’m seeing. “Kane, do you—”
But his hand grasps tight on my arm, too tight, and his breath catches audibly over the mic in his helmet.
“What’s wrong?” I look toward him. His gaze is fixed on a darkened hallway across the atrium. Not the one we came in; another leading to more lower-level guest rooms. But I don’t see anything alarming. Or, at least, more alarming than what’s been here the whole time.
“I thought I saw…” He shakes his head, releasing my arm. “Never mind.”
But the adrenaline once awakened in me again is not likely to go back to sleep so easily. “No,” I say firmly. “Tell me.”
“It’s nothing.”
But I wait, and eventually he continues. “I thought I saw someone at the edge of the corridor, watching us.”
Alertness topples into a clear, pure spike of panic. “Voller, do you have a read on another ship out there?” With the LINA in the cargo bay, we’re blind and trapped. If a salvage team has boarded another way—by cutting a hole through the hull somewhere—we’re in big trouble.
No response.
