* * *

DEEPER

The girl has short, dark hair, medium-dark skin, and a cunning, cutting look in her eyes that can only be described as catlike. She’s short, maybe five-three, and looks even shorter with her curvy, compact frame. Other than her general age, the fact that she’s a female member of the International Space Corps, and the fact that she’s strikingly, almost disturbingly pretty, she has nothing at all in common with Lana Marsden.

Lana…

Fair, slender Lana, with the long, soft brown hair and the deep blue eyes. Lana… who had whole galaxies in her eyes.

Lana.

Catch takes a deep, deep breath as he blinks at the girl in his wavering vision. Those calculating eyes cutting through him, finding him lacking. Pathetic. He’s damaged goods, and she knows it.

No. Nothing in common with Lana.

Maybe that’s why he’s here.

But then, of course, there’s the leather. The straps that hold the girl, bent over, bound to the desk. Those remind him of Lana… fragments still in his head, still burning him up, smoldering like live embers under his skin, no matter how he tries to snuff them out.

Drugs. Abstinence. Denial.

Memories…

Her faint vanilla scent. The sound of her desperate cries, her panting breaths, her soft sighs. The feel of her skin, soft and hot, against him.

Lana… bound to the hook in his ceiling, to the hook in his wall. In a collar and cuffs. On a leash.

Lana…

“Harder,” the girl says, her eyes on Catch.

Blaze steps forth and smacks her with the black leather crop. Right across the ass, both cheeks; leaving another pink mark alongside the others and making the girl buck and gasp in pleasure-pain. Her eyes gleam with satisfaction. She smiles.

She smiles at Catch, and the room does an ugly spin-out.

He shuts his eyes, hard, black holes imploding behind his eyelids. Needing to escape this place. The cube, so dank yet vibrant; close and hot; stifling and cool. Large, then small. There’s not enough room. He’s so high, his eyes roll in his head when he scrapes them open. It’s the Pull or the Zag or the Exotica, he doesn’t know which. Which pill was the one that put it over the top.

“Do you like her?”

He realizes Blaze has asked him a question, that it’s dangling in the air between them, but it could’ve been ten minutes ago. His tone is absent, his focus on the girl—the girl whose sharp, dark eyes are still focused on Catch.

And Catch can’t even compute the question.

Like.

Her.

What’s to like?

What’s to like about any girl, no matter how pretty she looks in bondage, if she isn’t Lana Marsden?

Blaze looks over at him, cocking a coppery eyebrow when Catch doesn’t answer. He stands at the edge of the light, his pale, sculpted face pitted with shadow, twitching and vibrating like he’s not even real, just some viz model beaming out over a bad datastream.

It’s the Pull. It’s stretching everything out; the high, the need, the hours. Making everything else unreal. How long has it been since he entered this room? Half an hour? Half the night?

He can’t unscramble the time inside his skull.

“I think he’s tripping out,” the girl says, laughter behind her words, but she doesn’t laugh. It’s hollow-echo-quiet in his head as Blaze frowns and strikes her again, the snap of the crop-whip against naked flesh too crisp, too loud.

The girl winces and Blaze says, “Shh.” He runs his hand, gently, over the marks on her backside, and when she looks up at him, finally… the naked devotion, raw and tender, still fresh, so like the way Lana used to look at Catch… he feels bile rise up from deep in his stomach.

He swallows it down.

But he can’t seem to move as he sits here on the edge of the couch, his entire body tense but immobile, disconnected from his thoughts.

Because she does remind him of Lana.

Everything does.

Natalie. That’s her name. Or something with an N…?

He doesn’t remember her rank any more than he remembers her name. He doesn’t care. Doesn’t care if this is a violation of the Code of Conduct, if it’s a giant Fuck you to the Fraternization Policy, if the girl shouldn’t be here at all, in an officer’s cube late at night, in bondage, about to get fucked six ways from Sunday.

He doesn’t care about any of it anymore.

The girl meets his eyes again, her pupils dilated with arousal, her mouth open. Getting off on the crop, on Blaze’s familiar attention, so focused on her, mellow and hot. But getting off on Catch, too; on his rising discomfort as he watches her there… helpless but not helpless.

What the fuck is he doing here?

Blaze invited him. Brought him here, let him in, bound the girl while he watched. Because he wants Catch to watch, to see.

To participate?

But this is not Catch’s scene.

Take him, or I’ll whip you myself and let him watch.

That was Catch’s scene. The one he directed, for Lana, for himself. Some stranger, a nameless officer brought into his cube to fuck her.

The scene that fucked everything up.

The scene he shouldn’t be thinking of right now.

You made me feel worthless. Do you know that?

That was what she said.

Worthless…

And still, he thinks about it. Still, he watches the scene before him. His cock hard in his cargos, throbbing with the force of the Exotica vibrating through his veins.

He watches Blaze strip off his shirt, his pale, muscular chest already gleaming with sweat, with the exertion of what he’s been doing to the girl to cause all those pink lashes on her pretty skin; with the exertion of holding himself back from all he really wants to do. He doesn’t look at Catch as he moves closer, behind her. As he runs a hand over the swell of her ass, squeezes one of her cheeks and digs his fingers in. As she winces, as she gasps.

More…

And Catch keeps watching.

He watches Blaze take out his cock, hard and ready, and tease her with it until she squirms and starts to beg. He watches Blaze start to fuck her. Slow, torturously slow, as the girl begs for more.

Harder…

Please… harder…

Until Blaze gives it to her harder, so hard the desk, bolted to the floor, groans and creaks with the strain, and the girl struggles to breathe in her restraints.

And Catch is right back where he once was… that final day… fucking Lana, as she gasped and moaned for more.

“Shut your mouth…” Blaze stuffs his fingers in the girl’s mouth and she bites down, sucking on him. With his other hand he squeezes her ass so hard his fingers dig into her flesh up to the first knuckle. Hard enough to leave a hand-shaped bruise he can jerk off on later; Blaze likes to leave his mark.

Not Catch.

Catch never left a mark on Lana. Never hurt her like that. Never left more than a blush of pink and red, that one time he paddled her. Never wanted to hurt her, really hurt her.

Only wanted to please her.

Harder…

He fucks her harder. Gives it to her in a relentless rhythm, driving her open, forcing her to take him deeper…

But then he stops.

He releases Lana from her binding, buckle by buckle, kissing her everywhere he struck her. She slithers off the desk and onto the floor as he falls back on the couch. She’s crawling to him, crawling up into his lap, rubbing his cock through his pants… and when he smells her, when he tastes her as she snakes her tongue into his mouth, he realizes it’s not Lana. It’s not real.

No. This is real.

The other thing… The other thing isn’t real.

Lana isn’t real.

Lana’s gone.

And the girl in his mouth, her hand starting to rub him off through his cargos, starting to unzip him, isn’t her.

He pushes and she falls, sprawling, naked, on the floor. Nina? Naomi? He reaches for her but Blaze is in his face too fast, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, hauling him up and slamming him against the wall.

He doesn’t fight.

“Sorry,” he chokes out. “Fuck… I’m rolling…” His tongue is heavy. His pupils are blasted open, the ceiling light so bright in his face he winces.

“No shit,” Blaze mutters. “Let’s take a fucking walk.”

The corridors are a blur. He can’t walk right.

The next thing he can comprehend, he’s lying face-down on a bed. He’s alone. It’s his own bed, in his own cube. He can tell by the mess.

He falls asleep. He wakes.

He sleeps again.

Over and over…

Somewhere in the endless night, he imagines messaging her. Her. Typing a com to her on his tablet. Can practically feel the smooth glass of the screen beneath his fingertips.

Icanstillfeelyourheartbeatagainstmyskin

He stares at the words on the screen, blinking. The neat line of tidy, glowing letters jitters and throbs, blurring together.

Real?

He blinks again. The tablet weighs heavily in his hand. He can’t remember falling asleep or waking again. Can’t tell if this is a dream. I always will, he types, then blinks, trying to clear his vision.

IalwayswillIalwayswillIalwayswill

His thumb hovers over the glowing dot—SEND—that will send the message with a single swipe.

Then he types: You’re all I ever dream about

He stares at the words, but they vibrate and blur until he can no longer understand them.

He drops the tablet and puts his head in his hands. Takes a shaky breath, so deep his ribs hurt; the lingering damage from his last fight. He lies back on the bed and stares at the amber light recessed into the low ceiling above his head, just letting it burn… until a blurred fringe of light at his peripheral vision makes him shut his eyes, dizzy.

In the darkness, angry stars explode. A kaleidoscope of colors spins in on itself, a giant light-dragon eating its own tail, around and around…

There are so many things I should say

that I should have said

but it all comes down to one

Tablet in hand again, his fingers shake as he taps out the words.

Next time I see you, you’re mine.

You’remineyou’remineyou’remine

He closes his eyes against the blur. Doesn’t even know if it’s all gibberish.

He sends it anyway.

Then he collapses on the bed, thinking of her.

Lana.

He’s still tripping, hard, the Zag coming on in a black wave, leveling everything in its path. He’s got his cock in his hand, hard… then soft. He jerks himself off, tries, but he’s still too high to get there. He can never get to her anyway. She’s too far away.

It’s always like this.

Until he gets the knife…

He digs under his mattress for it, and when he finds it, when he drags the blade across the flesh of his upper, inner arm, that soft, tender flesh where it hurts the most, he can feel her again. He can smell her vanilla scent. He can practically taste her skin. She’s here with him, so vivid… and he comes harder than he has in weeks, his skull splitting down the middle.

Then he’s sucked back down, into the undertow of black.

When he wakes again, the tablet is vibrating next to him. A message has come in.

He sits up and grabs for the tablet, fumbling, swiping the screen to wake it from standby. But it’s the same message he always gets when he coms Lana.

Pain, jagged and fresh, claws its way up inside his chest as he reads the familiar words, as he struggles to find his breath.

Message undeliverable.

He collapses on the bed, clenching his teeth in a silent scream.

Every day.

Every day, he’s sent her a com. Every single fucking day since she left. One hundred and twenty-six days. Sometimes twice a day, sometimes ten fucking times. And every day, the same result.

Message undeliverable.

He hurls the tablet across the room. It hits the wall. He doesn’t look to see if it’s broken. He doesn’t give one fuck.

She’s gone.

Lana’s fucking gone, and she’s never coming back.

* * *

An alarm is sounding, shrill and all-pervading. It’s in Catch’s skull, behind his eyes, in the marrow of his bones, ringing.

He pulls the pillow over his head and ignores it.

Then the voices start. Moments later, or hours. He doesn’t know which. But he knows those voices.

He rolls over, pushing away the pillow, his body aching. His lips sting, dry and cracked. His arm itches where he cut it last night.

He’s naked and there are men in his cube.

He looks up at them with one cracked eye, the light overhead stabbing deep into the back of his brain.

It’s Hilt and… First?

“Turn off the goddamn light…” His voice is so dry, so weak, he doesn’t know if they hear him. They’re still talking, making too much noise. Their voices come in and out as Catch blinks his disorientation away, squinting, wincing into the light.

“… like I told you,” Hilt is saying. They both have their hands on their hips as they look down at Catch like a couple of disapproving grannies.

“How long has it been…?”

“… got written up last week…”

“First?” Catch croaks, blinking at his best friend. He struggles to sit up.

But First isn’t here.

This is Station Seven. Catch and Hilt are on Station Seven. First is out in the deep, all three of them reassigned this quarter.

First can’t be here.

Which means…

“Fuck… I’m so fucked up…”

The First hallucination gets in his face. “Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?” Then Catch’s arms are seized by a pair of giant hands and yanked upward, and his body follows, wobbly and weak, as the First-who-is-not-First drags him from his bed and across the room.

Hilt stands back, hands still on his hips, his service cap pulled low over his eyes, watching. And suddenly Catch’s cube comes into focus around them. He perceives it, and himself, the way anyone else would—with distaste.

The disarray. The broken tablet on the floor. The stale must of sex and sweat and unwashed clothes.

The thin cuts on his arm, dried with scabby blood.

He’s hauled into the tiny bathroom and tossed into an ice-cold shower. He doesn’t have the strength or the will—or the gross motor skills—to put up much of a protest. The officer standing over him slaps his face, hard. “Get your shit the fuck together, Trist.”

Trist.

Only one person ever calls him that.

“Nuh… no… it can’t be you…” Catch’s tongue feels too big, his mouth too dry as he struggles to make words, to swallow.

“It can, and it is. Flew in this morning, along with half the fucking fleet. Did you not hear that siren? It’s not a drill. Every operable Crasher on Six and Seven is being mobilized. Seven’s taking on a shitload of personnel from ships in the area that are being called in. Civilians, too. Cruisers, research ships, whatever the hell is out there, it’s coming in.”

“Civilians aren’t allowed on Seven,” Catch says stupidly, struggling to keep up.

First just tosses him a towel with a snort of disgust and strides out of the bathroom.

Catch follows as fast as he can, dripping wet, blinking, trying to see straight as he wraps the towel around his hips. “The Crashers? They’re sending out all the Starcrashers?” Catch swipes a fistful of his dirty clothes from Hilt’s hand and starts getting dressed, vaguely registering that Hilt’s been trying to tidy his cube. “Are you going? If you’re going, I’m going.”

First and Hilt exchange a look Catch can’t even begin to comprehend in his current state. His thoughts are too slow, his edges dulled, his vision still fuzzy around the edges.

“No one’s been cleared to fly since eleven hundred,” Hilt informs him. “Special Forces only. Rangers will be deployed soon.”

Rangers.

That hits a raw, festering nerve. Catch was once a Ranger. Still is, technically, just not on active duty.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t call him up.

He picks up his tablet, but it’s dead, the screen badly cracked. He looks at the clock on his wall; almost fifteen hundred.

He slept all fucking day.

“We’re awaiting orders,” Hilt says. “There’s a meeting in an hour.”

“Yeah, and your ass better be at it,” First puts in. “Which means you’ve got time to shave and scrape your brains off the walls or whatever the fuck you’ve gotta do before you report.”

“They have to give us our wings back,” Catch says, sounding way the hell more sure about this than he feels—at least, where he’s concerned. He’ll be totally fucking stunned if they don’t make First a pilot again; can’t even believe they kept him grounded as long as they did. “They’ll tell us at the meeting. If they need Crasher pilots, they can’t keep us grounded. They’d be better off—” He stops short at the look on Hilt’s face.

Hilt tips his chin toward First, and Catch notices, for the first time, that First is wearing his black service jumper. His pilot’s outfit.

Complete with black-and-silver wings stitched above the insignia.

“Told you. I flew in this morning.”

“Flew…” Catch can’t quite wrap his head around the word, though it should mean everything to him.

Once upon a time, it did.

But he just blinks, foggily, at his best friend, at those shiny wings above his lieutenant’s insignia.

Lieutenant.

First’s been promoted.

Catch swallows thickly… resolve hardening in his throat like a rock he can’t quite choke down. So unaccustomed to this feeling; the sudden whim taking hold, solidifying into something essential. Into a sense of fucking purpose.

Like something actually matters again.

“Wherever you’re going, I’m going.”

First says nothing as Catch digs through his closet for a clean shirt. A button-up, like Hilt is wearing.

“They have to give me my wings back, too. You told them that, right? Adam?” He turns to find First gone, the door sliding shut in his wake, and Hilt still watching him. “The hell’s he going?”

“You’ve got worse problems than all that shit.” Hilt’s tone is a strange blend of caution, warning, and sympathy. “Those ships that just came in? Your girl’s on one of them.”

Catch just stands there, half-dressed, unable to process this. He didn’t even say her name, but they both know exactly who Hilt’s talking about.

Hilt pats him on the ribs and heads for the door as Catch struggles to wrap his head around it. Lana… here… on his station.

Right now.

“She’s not my girl,” he manages to say, but Hilt is already gone.

* * *