Flame (20 page)

Assistant.
To hear Jared talk, he took care of an old man and grew herbs, but in reality he was a church elder, and the doctor had called him his son. The way he’d beaten up those guards: He’d taken on three men at once and had incapacitated them inside of a minute. Who was he really? He poured her some wine and handed it to her in a dainty crystal chalice. She took a sip automatically. It was fruity and sweet, but it settled bitterly at the back of her throat.

“Good?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she whispered but didn’t take another sip.

“Waverly, what’s wrong?” Jared said, seeming finally to acknowledge her reluctance. “You can tell me. I’m your friend.”

“I’m your prisoner,” she muttered, looking at the vast pink cloud.

After a brief, surprised silence, he said, “That’s not my doing.”

“Mather’s guard lets you take me places.”

“That makes me your jailor?” he asked angrily.

She gripped her bread so hard part of it broke off and fell on the floor at her feet.

“Waverly, I hate how they’re treating you. If there was anything I could do to change it…”

She watched him as he spoke, looking for signs that his heart didn’t match his words, finding none. But did that make him truthful or just a good liar? He leaned toward her, hands cupped together, dark blue eyes searching her own.

“Why do you spend so much time with me?” she asked him.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

She shook her head.

“I like you.”

“But the doctor wants you to keep an eye on me, right?”

He groaned. “Okay, yes. But I don’t
have
to spend so much time with you. And I don’t have to enjoy it.”

For want of something to do, she took a small bite of her mangled bread.

“Waverly. Look at me.” He moved closer. It was a matter of inches, but she could feel the heat from his body moving through the cold air to find her. “There aren’t a lot of single women my age on this ship, and none of them are particularly … attractive. You might have noticed.”

She looked at her hands. Her fingers were white and trembling.

“But you.” He held up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “You’re very mature for your age. And you’re so beautiful.”

She looked into his eyes, those mysterious beautiful eyes, and found she didn’t want to look away. She could smell him intensely—a mix of fresh male sweat and musky perfume. “I think I’d better go,” she whispered.

“Why won’t you let me in?” Jared pleaded.

“Can we go?” She stood up and waited for him to do the same.

Jared stood, arms at his sides. She moved toward the door but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. If she moved even a millimeter farther, he’d let her go, she knew, but she hesitated.

He pulled her in before she knew what he was doing, his fingers winding in her hair, his strong arms wrapped around her. He pressed his lips against hers, his tongue working its way into her mouth.

He was adept at breaking through her defenses, and at first she let him. She wanted to forget her fight with Seth, forget Kieran, forget all the childish things that kept her holding on to the past. She melted a little.

He was powerful.

He’s more powerful than me,
she thought.

She liked it. She liked being held in his hands like a precious, fragile object.

But.

But …

This isn’t right.
A small part of her realized it as he was drawing her down to the floor, his hands already under her tunic, fingertips skidding along the smooth skin of her back.

Seth’s kiss hadn’t been anything like this. It had been so tentative, honest, halting, so … inexpert, and beautiful. He had shown her only naked wanting and passion. There had been none of this … skill.

Manipulation.

“Jared,” she whispered.
Don’t make him mad.
“Please. I’m not ready.”

She tried to stand, but he pulled her back down.

“Really, I can’t,” she said and pushed him away. “I’m confused.”

He still came toward her, pulling at her clothes, wetting her lips with his tongue. She pushed him away once, and again, and a third time as hard as she could until he lost his balance and fell away from her.

“I need to go,” she told him.
Find Seth. Get to Seth. Make things right.
She got up, brushing her hair out of her face with spastic, trembling hands, pulling her tunic down to cover herself. Jared ran his hands up her calves, but she kicked him away. “I need to be alone,” she said through her teeth. “Don’t follow me.”

He didn’t look at her face. He turned away.

She ran down the spiral stairs to the cargo hold and across the storage bay to the port-side stairwell. She vaulted through the door and headed up the stairs, a single thought in her mind—Seth!—when she was hit from behind by a wall of muscle.

An iron fist clamped around her shoulder. She looked up to see the twisted mask of Jacob Pauley. A scream exploded inside her throat, but a meaty hand was wedged over her mouth and nose, confining the scream to the inside of her head, piercing her brain and rattling her ears. She tried to shake loose of his hold, but his grip was machinelike. He locked another hand around the back of her head and held on while she wriggled.
I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe!!!
were the final words to bloom in her mind as her eyes fluttered closed.

SURVIVING

Arthur Dietrich slid along the corridor of the Empyrean, his eyes on the door to the infirmary where he knew Tobin, Austen, and all their patients were waiting. If everything was working correctly, Sarek was watching him on the com screen from the apartment they’d commandeered. When Arthur reached the infirmary doors, he knocked, two quick raps, then another set of three slower knocks. Almost immediately the doors opened, and Tobin greeted him with a pat on the shoulder. “You made it.”

“How is everyone?” Arthur said.

“Stable,” Tobin said. “Hopefully,” he added, worrying the inside of his cheek with his teeth.

Arthur and Sarek had tried many times to convince Tobin to turn himself in and transport the patients to the New Horizon, until Arthur heard a conversation between the crew chief, Chris, and one of his repair crew. “I’ve been thinking the infirmary might have life support after all,” said a woman over the com signal. “It might just be a malfunction in the sensors.”

“As soon as we seal all the bulkheads,” Chris had answered, “the infirmary is next. We’re breaking it down and bringing all the equipment and meds to the New Horizon.”

“What if there are survivors hiding in there? I heard rumors there were comatose patients,” she persisted. Arthur liked this woman; she was always looking out for the animals on board, too. “Maybe we should have a medical team on standby.”

“The Pastor told me no doctors will be allowed to come on board,” Chris said, sounding angry about it. “She’s short on medical staff as it is, and she’s not willing to risk them when there’s probably no one to help anyway. If we find any, we’ll just have to hope they survive the journey to the New Horizon without help.”

Rattled by this new development, Arthur and the rest of the boys decided to hole up on the Empyrean for as long as possible to give the coma patients, including Tobin’s mother, a chance to heal. That meant they had to move everyone out of the infirmary to avoid discovery, and today was the day for it.

“Ready?” Arthur asked Tobin now. They had a lot of work ahead of them.

Tobin nodded distractedly as he tucked bags between his mother’s legs and the safety rail on her gurney. She’d been in a coma for months now, the result of severe decompression trauma and radiation sickness. Her hands had curled up against her sides, her legs bent, her spine twisted. Tobin had insisted on keeping her on life support until a real doctor could see her, and Arthur knew he’d do the same thing if it were his own mother. But now, would there ever be a doctor?

Austen walked into the room carrying a large bag filled with bed linens and plopped it on the floor.

“Hey,” Arthur said to him.

“Hi,” Austen muttered distractedly as he shoved the linens into a cloth bag and hung it at the foot of one of the gurneys.

Each patient’s gurney was loaded with bags of medications, but Tobin and Austen had also stuffed every available wheeled cart with medical equipment and supplies. This was going to take hours.

“The patients first,” Tobin said as he gripped the railing of his own mother’s gurney. “Austen, you stay here for this trip. Arthur, you take Philip.”

Arthur moved to the head of the little boy’s gurney. Philip Grieg looked pale as he slept, totally insensible of the activity around him. In the weeks since his injury, the bruising around his eyes had faded, and he looked peaceful, though his left hand twitched as he dreamed. “How is he?” Arthur asked quietly.

“The same,” Tobin said wistfully. “As far as I can tell, anyway.”

“There are other planets,” Philip whispered. His head turned on his pillow and he was quiet again.

Arthur looked sharply at Tobin. “I thought you said he couldn’t talk!”

“He can’t when he’s awake,” Tobin said as he rubbed at the back of his neck. He looked sore and tired. “Philip says all kinds of stuff when he’s sleeping.”

“Well, that sounds like a good sign,” Arthur said.

“It might be.” Tobin looked doubtful. “Victoria doesn’t know what it means.”

Arthur looked at Victoria Hand, the sole remaining medical practitioner aboard the vessel. She was sleeping now, but she looked almost like her old self except for the downy fuzz of grayish hair growing over her skull. She used to have thick brown locks that coiled around her face, but they’d fallen out months ago from radiation sickness.

“Let’s get going,” Arthur said. Sarek was probably already wondering what was taking them so long.

Tobin and Arthur pushed the loaded gurneys down the dark corridor. Arthur hoped that Sarek was able to mask their progress on the surveillance system by sending prerecorded video of their route to the system in Central Command. Arthur wasn’t convinced that the person manning the surveillance system would ignore the blinking of the screens as they switched from one image to the other, but that couldn’t be helped. He was impressed that Sarek had figured out how to do this at all.

When they reached the apartment that would serve as the infirmary, Sarek opened the door for them, smiling. “It worked,” he said. This was as close to bragging as the young man had ever come.

Arthur slapped him on the shoulder. “Good work.”

Tobin quickly plugged in the equipment for the patients and collapsed onto the sunken couch that had been pushed against the wall. “I can’t believe we have to do this another dozen times.”

“We better hurry, then,” Arthur said. The two boys left to begin the process again.

It took all day. When they were finished moving all the patients and equipment, the apartment was stuffed full of gurneys lining the wall, piles of medical equipment, bags of medications and syringes, gauze, alcohol rubs, and latex gloves. They’d left a few token machines and gurneys in the infirmary, hoping the New Horizon crew wouldn’t notice anything amiss.

That night, after a long hot shower to soothe his aching muscles, Arthur lay on his bed wrapped in a terry-cloth robe he’d found in the closet. Sarek knocked on his door. “You awake?”

“Yeah.” Arthur kept his eyes on the book he was reading. “What’s up?”

“You think they’re going to find us?” Sarek said.

“Eventually.” Arthur nodded and turned the page. He’d always been able to do this: carry on a conversation and read at the same time. It had always unnerved his mother. “The only reason they haven’t found us already is they’re not looking for us.”

“I’ve been thinking.” Sarek rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “They’re not just salvaging equipment and species…”

Arthur nodded. “They’re working on saving the ship.”

“Which means they think it’s spaceworthy.”

“For a while maybe.”

Sarek’s eyes looked black in the dim light from Arthur’s bedside lamp. “Which means maybe we can take it back from them.”

Arthur closed his book and gave Sarek his full attention.

“There aren’t many of them here,” Sarek said. “If we’re going to take the ship back, we should do it before more of them come.”

“But what about our parents on the New Horizon, and the rest of the kids? Do we leave them behind?”

“Of course not.” Sarek pressed the heel of his hand to his temple. “That’s the part I can’t figure out: how to get them here.”

“I wish we could talk to Kieran,” Arthur said. Sarek and Arthur made a good team, but it was really when Kieran was with them that things worked well. Something about Arthur’s broad knowledge, Sarek’s technical skill, and Kieran’s creativity made the right chemistry.

Sarek shook his head with frustration. “All our plans to deal with Anne Mather until now have been pretty—”

“Useless?” Arthur finished the sentence with a mirthless chuckle.

“What do we even have to bargain with?”

Arthur held up his hands. “This ship. That’s all we’ve got.”

The two boys studied each other in silence. When Arthur saw Sarek raise his eyebrows as an idea struck him, he thought he knew what his friend was thinking.

“No way,” Arthur said. “We’re not good enough pilots.”

“Arthur,” Sarek said patiently as he turned to go. He was a last-word hog. That was another thing Arthur had learned about him. “Think about it. What do we have to lose?”

That night, despite his exhaustion, Arthur lay awake, listing the Empyrean losses in his head. The fish hatchery. All those salmon and trout and shrimp and mollusks, gone forever, but their eggs were probably frozen. They might be able to bring some species back. Entire wings of the granaries had been lost, but the emergency pressure doors that cut through the center of the ship had held well enough that most of the fields on the port side were intact. The nursery and the school were completely depressurized, and the starboard-side living quarters were uninhabitable. His own apartment had been there, and now he could probably never go back for his diaries, his photographs, his computer, his beloved books. Sarek’s apartment was lost, too, though Arthur had no idea what his friend missed from his former life. Sarek rarely spoke of heartbreak.