PAVEMENT POUNDED BENEATH Tessa Greely’s feet as she sprinted the distance from Conner Street up Contact Row. Dilapidated buildings crumbled around her and the people in this part of the city barely spared her a glance. She didn’t need to worry about any cops calling for her to stop; the police only came here to collect the bodies once the blaster fire subsided and all the dangerous criminals were dead or gone.

It also meant that no one looked twice at the man and the thing chasing her. She’d seen plenty of aliens over the past six years that she’d spent in space, but some of those guys were just gross. What needed that many tentacles? From the half a glimpse she got before taking off at a sprint back at the bus depot, it looked like four squids had plastered themselves to its face and then gathered up an octopus or two to hang down from its arms. If she had time to think more, she might have wondered how it could run so fast, but she was too occupied with getting away from the thing to worry about mechanics.

Fucking pirates. They were supposed to stay in space, leaving her safe on Earth. But no, of course the assholes had to come for her, as if this year hadn’t been bad enough already.

She should have just stayed on the Kella.

Tessa darted down an alleyway, her backpack bouncing against her back and heavy enough to throw her off balance. The honk of a passing car gave her a second’s warning and she ducked behind an old-fashioned dumpster, her foot slipping in something slimy enough to have once been food. She bit her lip to keep from making a noise and tried to breathe shallowly, the air so stinky she could practically see it. Voices floated down the alley, too quiet to make out. Tessa’s heart threatened to beat out of her chest but she held herself as still as a statue.

She’d never meant to come back to Earth, back to New York. She’d thought that she’d found her place on the Kella, that she’d learn her healer’s craft and travel the stars, seeing sights that most humans would never begin to dream of. It was moments like these when she knew that she should have let Kayleb NaMoren die. That was when everything went sideways.

One of the people chasing her spoke again and Tessa strained her ears, trying to make out their footsteps. But New York City hadn’t slept in centuries, and in the middle of the day there was no hope of making out the small noise over the everyday din of life in this wretched place. The alley she’d run blindly into didn’t dead end, a small miracle that she would have thanked God for if she were the praying sort. The other end of the alley opened onto a footpath with tall buildings shading it on either side. Across from her, a fire escape hung just out of reach. But Tessa feared that if she moved an inch her pursuers would be on her. And even if they only made it halfway down the way they’d see her; she only had cover from one side and the dumpster sat flush against the wall. Only rats could hope to slither behind it.

Papers rustled and she thought she heard chittering as if thoughts of rats had summoned them close. A whimper caught in her throat and she kept her lips snapped tightly shut lest it escape and betray her.

She didn’t want to die. God, she’d been so stupid.

The straps of her backpack dug into her shoulders, reminding her of her choice and her mistake. At the time, it had seemed like the only path to take, but looking back at the bodies she’d left behind in the last weeks made her resolve slip. Maybe she was just delaying the inevitable and taking her friends and allies down with her. Maybe if she abandoned her bag here, they’d stop chasing her and let her disappear into the shadows of the city, never to cause trouble again.

But Tessa hadn’t survived in space for years by being stupid. There was only one end to this deadly game.

She chanced popping her eyes up over the dark lid of the dumpster and almost collapsed in relief when she saw neither a man nor a terrifying squid monster waiting for her. But experience told her not to run, that she’d gotten away too easy and the people who chased her knew how to run their quarry down. One little alley wasn’t enough to trick them. So she looked again, taking in every brick in the walls and all of the garbage littered along the ground. At first her eyes passed over it, a small black box that might have been another piece of refuse. But she’d seen something like that before and the damn thing had cut a hole in her favorite pants and seared the skin off of her calf. The cheap healing cream she’d been able to find had sealed the wound but left a nasty scar from ankle to knee.

God, she missed the Kella with its shoddy medbots and almost unending supply of regen gel.

Tessa looked back down at where she squatted, squelching the revulsion at whatever gross shit had mixed together to make the sticky soup that coated the ground. Instead, she picked up a small metal lid to some jar that must have been thrown away in a shoddy bag. She flung the projectile out, hoping it skipped across the ground more like a rat than a piece of trash thrown by a person.

The black box jumped into action, shooting a red burst of blaster fire straight at the lid. She took a deep breath and nodded. Okay, she could handle that. A blaster box like that usually didn’t have a transmitter, and the battery wouldn’t last long. Either the pirates didn’t think she was hiding in the alley or they didn’t particularly care. Her thighs burned and the smell of the alley had faded to her senses enough for her to know that she’d smell of garbage all day, no matter how many times she showered.

She found another piece of fallen trash and threw it in a giant arc, watching as the red beams swiveled and sighted the target. Tessa threw and threw, the stench of burning trash and blaster fire sizzling in her nose, but she couldn’t stop. If she left the blaster box there before it burned itself out, someone might get hurt and she didn’t need another death or injury on her mind. Her heart hurt enough already.

It took several minutes and Tessa cringed at all of the germs that had to be crawling over her hands, sticky as they were with grime and filth. With a final burst of fire, a screech went up, echoing down the alleyway, and the acrid scent of electric smoke tickled her nostrils. Tessa threw one final bit of trash and no laser found it. It landed and rolled to the opposite wall unopposed.

Without another look down the alley, Tessa took off down the footpath and made her way to the hole in the wall motel she’d heard about from her sister, a New York prosecutor who used to handle criminal cases. The half-collapsing stone building that dated to the twentieth century had once been a respectable brownstone and now served as a den of prostitutes and unsavory characters. No guards there would ask questions about her presence and, even better, the android attendant at the door took cash. No trace that Tessa Greely had checked in, no way to track her.

Cheap plaster hung on three of the little walls of the room, the place barely big enough for a bed with a suspiciously stained quilt on top. Tessa grimaced but decided it would have to do for the night. She found the shared bathroom on her floor and nodded mutely to the made up woman who washed herself with a dirty cloth. Neither of them said a word, it wasn’t that kind of place. Tessa scrubbed at her arms and once her brown skin had turned red from heat and friction she splashed water on her face and ran a hand around her neck, trying to get the worst of the stench to go away.

Her clothes needed to be burned, but she only had one other set and couldn’t afford to lose these. She headed back to her room and switched into the cleaner pants and shirt before bringing the stinking pile of cloth back to the bathroom, where she submerged it in the sink and let the steaming water run for several minutes until it drained clear, rather than a dingy grayish brown.

Gross.

She wrung everything out and took the not quite sopping mess back to her room with her, where she hung it on the back of a rickety chair and on a rusted hook on the door. She doubted it would dry by morning, and that was just one more annoyance to add onto the shit sandwich that her life had turned into in the last three weeks.

Tessa collapsed back onto the bed, ignoring the stain, and pulled her bag up and let it rest on her lap. She unzipped the top and glanced inside to make sure that she still saw the glowing blue light from the little device that had given her so much trouble since negotiating her escape. The pirates would kill to get it back, which meant she needed to get it to someone who could use it against them first.

The first person that came to mind was her sister. Tamara had been prosecuting cases for the city of New York since Tessa was a kid, and while the age difference between them meant that they weren’t that close, she knew exactly how smart and resourceful Tam was. But Tessa couldn’t bring this kind of danger down on her with no warning. She had no communicator and she wasn’t sure what the pirates knew about her. They’d done a cursory scan when she’d been taken prisoner, but whether it was diagnostic or identifying she didn’t know.

Inrit would have known what to do.

Tessa remembered the red Detyen woman with a fondness she hadn’t felt when they’d shared space on the Kella, a ship that had seemed like home at the time. Inrit, it turned out, had an unsavory piratical past, but with her mate, the cyborg Max, they’d been able to get the ship out of one hell of a scrape when pirates attacked and boarded it.

If only they hadn’t taken off at the next space station. She and Inrit hadn’t really been friends, but if there was anyone she could walk up to and say hi, I stole some important pirate documents and now they’re pissed and following me and expect concrete suggestions rather than panic, it was her.

What about Kayleb? the traitorous corner of her mind that she’d shoved into darkness and tried to forget asked. Kayleb, who’d said wonderful things with that wicked sense of humor of his. Kayleb, whose eyes glowed red when he looked at her for too long. Kayleb, who’d kissed her like it was more important than breathing.

Kayleb, who’d looked at her after his injury and only seen a stranger.

She hadn’t been bitter at first. A little hurt, sure, but it wasn’t his fault that he’d been hit in the head and his memories jumbled. The doc on the ship had been certain he’d completely recover. But whenever Tessa tried to get close, his damned brother was there to shoo her off, as if she didn’t have a claim.

Then again, if Kayleb hadn’t told his brother about their... thing, then maybe it had all been a pack of lies from the beginning. Maybe it was all stupid tricks to get her into bed and take his pleasure. You’re my mate, I’d die without you.

Yeah, right.

When she closed her eyes she could still see him over her, one arm cradling her face as if she was a precious gem. She could almost remember his scent, part soap and part something hot and spiced and all hers.

No.

Tessa sucked in a ragged breath and pushed thoughts of Kayleb aside. Something in her chest ached and she absently rubbed her hand against her breastbone. It wasn’t like heartburn or anything she was used to, and she’d been feeling it since she made it to this damned city. Her heart was tugging at her chest, trying to pull her somewhere she needed to go.

She’d started feeling it sometime after she and Kayleb were together and if she had a knife, she’d dig in and cut whatever it was out of her and be done with him forever.

She stuffed the pirate device back into her bag and lay down, slinging the straps over her shoulders and cradling the bag in front of her so that it would be harder for someone to come in and grab. She buried thoughts of Kayleb and the Kella and her sister and closed her eyes. A few hours of rest and she could run again.

If the pirates didn’t find her first.

***

SIX MONTHS AGO

The Consortium was weird and Tessa didn’t like it. The colony of humans abducted from Earth and abandoned in this system was barely whispered about back home. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but it was so far away that few people saw the point in caring about it. Of course, that was how Earth reacted to so many alien overtures and threats. Their little solar system was out of the way of the major shipping lanes and on the other side of the galaxy from the ever growing Oscavian Empire. No one was a threat to Earth and so they were content to stay in their own safe corner of space.

Most of them. Not Tessa.

Her family would have paid for medical school at any of the top establishments on Earth, the moon, or Mars. But she didn’t want to be stuck in one place when there were sights to see that humans couldn’t even imagine. She loved seeing planets made completely of gemstones and aliens with six legs and four arms but no heads. She loved learning about anything and everything she could on the outer reaches of the galaxy.

But the Consortium freaked her out. It was too... human. They’d been abducted for thousands of years and yet she could see the roots of Earth in the shapes of the buildings and they spoke a language she could almost understand when they stopped speaking IC and she disabled her translator. Space was supposed to be strange and unimaginable, not hauntingly familiar.

So she’d spent most of her time on Nina Station, one of the four permanent space stations that orbited the planet, and said a prayer of thanks when the captain hired the necessary people and called an end to their overly long stay on the planet.

As the assistant doc on board, her time was split between training with the doc and his medbots and treating minor wounds that any first-year student could handle. Tessa wanted to do more, she knew she was capable, but Doc Grxa had his procedures and he promised that he’d give her more responsibility in good time.

She’d already been traveling on the Kella for months after four years of training on another ship. She wanted to scream at every delay, but this was a good place and she was learning things she hadn’t known before. It was just taking too damn long.

They had only been a few days out of the Consortium when everything went to shit. An Oscavian passenger had gone into labor while one of the medbots was in maintenance mode and the other was broken. The doc had his hands full with getting her seen to and she was left to monitor the comms and triage any other emergencies until the doc had the Oscavian in stable condition.

If the bots had been operational, they could have done it and she could have been learning at his side, but life on a ship required flexibility. No matter what Tessa wanted.

Still, she almost jumped when the call came in on the emergency line.

“We have a severely injured passenger, I’m relaying the location. Request immediate assistance.” She recognized Symes’s voice, a longtime crewwoman, though they’d never spent much time together.

“The doctor is currently engaged,” Tessa replied, giving the authorized response. “Please stand by.”

“Damn it, he’s bleeding out!” Symes didn’t yell, which only told Tessa how serious it was.

“Stand by,” Tessa said again and disengaged the call. She looked around and peered through the door to where the doc was tending to the Oscavian. He had the ‘do not disturb’ code engaged and Tessa was under strict orders not to override it unless the captain was close to death.

Symes had been close to panic and she didn’t get emotional, not unless she was on the comms with her wife or daughter. That meant whatever was going on was very bad. Tessa grabbed her bag and left her station.

The procedure itself was a blur. A red Detyen woman had done her best to save Kayleb, but neither she nor the cyborg beside her had the proper training to tend to him. His brother hovered over him like a mother hen. But once she started, it was relatively quick work to get the injured man to the med bay where he could be treated properly.

And then Tessa forgot to disengage.

It was an important part of being a medic. She had to step back from the injured, not take their pain into herself and tie her emotions to the prognosis. But there was something about Kayleb NaMoren that drew her in and didn’t let her go.

Several hours after his injury began to heal and she’d shooed his brother away with strict orders to take a shower and sleep for no less than four hours, Kayleb woke up. Something inside Tessa snapped to attention and she rushed into the small area where he rested to see him clawing at his bandages and trying to sit up.

Oh, hello, her mind whispered, I’ve been looking for you. Recognition tore through her, though she couldn’t say why. All she knew about him was that he was Detyen, injured, and had a brother named Krayter. And yet, she couldn’t help the smile that tore across her face when their eyes met. Though they were in deep space, far from any star, it felt like the sun rose, casting its warmth and light on her face and giving her hope for something she’d never known to wish for.

He smiled back and settled onto the bed, no longer fussing with his injury. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

And just like that, it was perfect.