CHAPTER SEVEN
After Rylan went upstairs there wasn’t much to do except get another round of drinks, with Simi teasing the bartender into adding more and more ingredients and garnishes. Jaime was used to drinking — drinking, sex, and reading were about the only things to do in the evenings at the facility he’d been in — but after finishing his first drink and Rylan’s, and getting a good start on Simi’s concoction, he felt a pleasant buzz settling in.
“Okay, but do you think he’s cute?” Simi asked. She had a tiny umbrella tucked behind each ear.
“The bartender?” Jaime glanced over at the bar. He wondered if those fish tattoos swam all over the man’s body or just his chest.
Simi slapped his arm. “Uh-uh. I put in some quality flirting with the bartender, so back off. I was talking about Rylan. C’mon, you must look at him.”
Jaime pulled some unknown vat-grown fruit out of his drink and studied it uncertainly. “Every time I look at him he’s glaring at me.”
“He is kinda grumpy, but there are ways to put a smile on someone’s face.” She took the questionable fruit from Jaime and popped it in her own mouth with a grin. “He’s always hanging out with you.”
“That’s because he’s guarding me.”
Simi shrugged. “There are worse ways to start something.”
“The first time he saw me he pulled a gun on me. And then I used his own arm to choke him. How’s that for a bad start?”
Her eyes grew wide. “You can work his artificial arm? That is so cool.”
“No, only if I catch him off guard. And it’s sorta bad manners when you think about it.”
“But if he let you, you could do things with that arm. Sexy things.”
“Um…”
Simi’s eyes had gone far away. “You know, I always thought being a wizard would be cool from a mechanical engineering perspective. But just imagine getting a bunch of high tech sex toys and then with your mind—”
“Simi!” Jaime felt like Rylan saying it, but he also felt embarrassed and somewhat intrigued by her ideas.
There was a hard slam of a glass on a table at the other end of the room. A man in one of the booths was standing up. He had an eye patch, but his good eye was glaring at them. Jaime flushed, they had been getting loud.
“What you’re talking about is an abomination,” the man hissed.
Simi snorted. “Sex?”
“No. Machines. Tech. Wizards.” That last was spat out.
Jaime hunched down lower in his chair, but Simi put her hands on the table and shoved herself up. She looked as a fierce as a person could while wearing colorful tiny umbrellas. “Dumbass,” she said. “You’re in space. Breathing air created from molecular separators, with power from a solar array. Tech is how you’re alive.”
The man stalked closer. His hair was shot through with gray, but he was tall and solidly built. “Technology is tolerated. For now. Until we can defeat our enemies, once and for all, and then live purely, the way man was intended.”
Simi rolled her eyes. “Man. Of course. You’re sexist on top of everything else. Machines are just tools, buddy.” She glanced at Jaime. “And wizards are people, with a little extra.”
Jaime wanted to sink lower, but the man was intent on yelling at Simi. “Sinner! You mock mingling flesh with machines—”
“Only if I don’t already have a date,” Simi laughed.
The man’s face went three different shades of red. Jaime started to get up, but the bartender had come over and he was yelling at the eye patch guy to get out. A heavy hand dropped on Jaime’s shoulder, and he felt a swift sense of relief. He looked up, expecting Rylan at long last, but instead eye patch’s three friends were standing around him.
“Now tell me why,” the man gripping his shoulder said, “she looked at you when she said wizard.”
“I don’t know,” Jaime said quickly. He glanced to where the bartender was trying to pull the eye patch man towards the entrance. “Shouldn’t you be worried about your friend?”
The man smiled. His teeth were discolored and chipped. “His salvation is assured. Yours, on the other hand? I have doubts.” With his free hand he pulled back the edge of his coat. There was a large knife strapped to his belt. “Come with us now.”
Jaime twisted out from under his grip, but one of the other men caught his arm while the third grasped his hair, twisting it so Jaime’s eyes watered.
“Jaime?” Simi said. “What are you doing? Leave him alone!”
The knife was pulled out and pointed at her and everything seemed to freeze, the room’s attention on the blade — even for the people at the other tables who were trying to ignore everything except their own drinks. The man with the eye patch shook off the bartender and made a big show of fixing his rumpled clothes.
“Get out of our way,” the man with the knife said. “We don’t need to hurt you. You’re misguided fools, but you’re still human.”
“So is he,” Simi said, her eyes glittering with tears.
“That’s to be seen. If he’s not a wizard, we’ll let him go.”
The man gripping his hair wrapped his other arm across Jaime’s throat and hissed in his ear, “What’s left of you. We’re going to cut you open, boy, and see what’s inside.”
There was the sudden loud click of a gun being cocked. From the stairs Rylan’s voice rang out. “You ever hear the one about the man who brought a knife to a gun fight?”
Rylan had stopped halfway down the metal stairs. The gun in his hand was steadily trained on the man with the knife, but his eyes kept flicking over to the ones holding Jaime.
“Oh, we got a gun.” The man with the knife smiled his chipped smile. The man on the other side of Jaime stepped back and pulled out a gun from the small of his back. His aim didn’t look as unwavering as Rylan’s, but he had a closer target, pointing the gun at Simi’s head.
Jaime could see Rylan’s eyes narrow. The guy with the gun was standing behind him, and he was pretty sure there was no clear shot for Rylan to take.
“There are four of us,” the man with the knife said. “You look like a professional, so I don’t doubt you know how to shoot. But will it be before Tal there shoots the lady? Or I cut her? Then there’s the boy. I’ve seen Keegan break a man’s neck before. Didn’t take long at all, and your friend’s got a real skinny neck.”
The man, Keegan, helpfully tightened his arm and Jaime grunted as it got harder to breathe. That noise dragged Rylan’s gaze back to Jaime’s, and Jaime scrunched both his eyes tight and then opened them again. Rylan frowned, and Jaime did it again.
The man with the eye patch started to rant about purity and judgement, but Rylan looked at Jaime, then closed his own eyes.
As soon as Rylan’s eyes shut, Jaime reached out with his mind. The dim lights of the bar abruptly flared bright — one bursting entirely in a shower of sparks. There were surprised cries as the blinding light suddenly plunged into darkness.
A shot rang out.
Jaime brought the lights back to normal levels, but Rylan was already in motion. The man with the knife was on the ground, with blood pouring from his shoulder. Rylan had jumped over the railing of the stairs and was running towards Jaime and the two men holding him. Jaime could see Tal, the one with the gun, blinking but still swinging the gun towards Rylan.
Jaime kicked out with both legs, getting his feet against the table. He was thinking to push back against the man holding him, to knock him off balance and hopefully into Tal, but all Jaime did was kick the table towards Rylan and get Keegan to tighten his hold even more.
Rylan slid across the table towards Tal, leaning back as the other man fired, the shot going over his head. Reaching Tal, Rylan drove the butt of his gun towards his head, his other hand reaching for Tal’s gun—
Suddenly Jaime felt himself dropping to the floor, the chokehold mercifully loosened, even as he heard a scream. Coughing, he saw Simi had plunged the knife into the back of Keegan’s knee. She yanked it back out and rolled away as the howling man tried to swat at her. Keegan gave up at grabbing for either of them in favor of sinking to the ground, holding onto his bleeding leg.
Rylan was standing over Tal, his boot on the man’s throat and a gun in each hand. “Any injuries?”
Jaime looked at the three bleeding men on the floor, but then realized Rylan was asking about him. He rubbed his throat. “I’m fine,” he said somewhat hoarsely as he got up.
“Simi?”
“All good.” She was wiping off the knife with a towel from the bar. “The guy with the eye patch ran out, though.”
“You need to go, too,” the bartender said. The fish on his chest still swam calmly, but he was angry. “There aren’t enough credits in the galaxy to cover what happened here.” He was looking at Jaime.
Everyone was looking at Jaime. The people at the other tables had gotten up during the fight to cluster near the back of the room, and they were muttering among themselves as they watched.
Rylan put both guns in his belt. “What about them?” He gestured to the men on the ground. “Do we need to make a statement to station security or—”
The bartender laughed. “Yeah, station security. There’s a price for starting shit in this place, and they’re going to pay it at the nearest airlock.”
Rylan stared down at the bartender. “They’re Commonwealth citizens and all three of them are still alive. They better stay that way.”
The bartender looked like he wanted to laugh again, but something in Rylan’s face stopped him, and he glanced towards the stairs. “Fuck. Okay. But you’d better move if you want to leave here with the mutant.” Jaime took a step back from the distaste in the man’s face. “Half the room likely wants to sell him, and the other to tear him apart. I honestly don’t know which side I favor.”
Jaime could feel the whispers, not from the people in the room, but the murmur of computer systems as they adjusted to the shifting instructions of the humans they served. “Rylan,” he said. “More people are coming this way. We should go.”
Rylan’s mouth tightened as he looked again at the men they’d put on the ground, but he nodded once. Moving backwards, he went to the curtain covering the entrance, gesturing for Jaime and Simi to follow him.
“This bar sucks,” Simi called back over her shoulder. “Not recommending it to my friends.”
Outside the bar, Jaime rubbed at his throat again, trying to make sense of the jumble of invisible information coming to him. Rylan, however, was looking at the people passing them in the wide, multi-story corridor.
“We’re way too exposed out here,” he muttered.
“Is that the eye patch guy?” Simi asked craning her neck. “With new buddies?”
Rylan pushed both of them back against a wall and behind a stack of rusted metal sheeting. He kept a hand pressed against Jaime’s chest, more reassuring than forceful.
“Which way back to the ship?” Rylan asked.
“Past them,” Simi said.
“We don’t want to lead them there,” Rylan said. “Don’t know their numbers or what weapons they have.”
“There’s another way to get back to the ship,” Jaime said. “It’s just a bit more… twisty.”
Rylan gave him a skeptical look that Jaime tried to return as stoutly as he could. “Okay,” Rylan said. He turned to Simi, pulling out the cap she had tucked into the pocket of her jacket and putting it on her head. “Goggles, too.”
She pulled out the wide goggles she had hanging from her belt and settled them over her eyes.
“I’ll take Jaime and draw them off,” Rylan said. “You take the direct route to the ship. We’ll try to lose them, but warn the crew we may be bringing company.”
Simi smiled grimly. “I hope they do show up. I’d like to introduce them to Mags’ rifle.”
“It won’t come to that,” Rylan said. “We’re gonna do our best to lose them.” He looked at Jaime. “Right?”
“Um… I guess so.”
The hand on his chest shifted over to his arm. It was weird how familiar that was starting to feel. “You go,” Rylan said to Simi. “Walk casual until you’re sure they’ve seen us.”
“How are we going to attract their attention?” Jaime wondered if they should shout or knock something over or pretend to make out. He wasn’t sure where that last thought had come from.
To his surprise, Rylan tugged on Jaime’s hair, the expression on his face close to a smile. “I think they’ll spot you. Besides, we’ll be the ones running.” He abruptly shoved Jaime forward. “Go!”
Jaime bolted, aware of Rylan just behind him. There were shouts. Jaime was able to dodge and weave through the crowds, while the broad-shouldered Rylan just barrelled through. Jaime found it hard not to stumble trying to concentrate on the overlaying maps in his head and the actual twists and turns of the corridors, but when he did trip, Rylan invariably caught him.
Jaime turned sharply, and Rylan nearly slammed into him, putting out both arms to catch himself against the wall behind Jaime. “Fuck,” Rylan said. “Give me a signal or something.”
Peering out from the cage of Rylan’s arms, Jaime could see the man with eye patch shoving past people at the other end of a long corridor. There seemed to be at least six others with him.
“Up there,” Jaime said pointing to the ramp beside them. Rylan grabbed him, and they both ran to the upper level. Jaime led them down another hallway as they heard pounding feet start up the metal ramp.
Jaime skidded to a halt in front of a large square grate. “Through here.”
“What?”
“There are maintenance shafts and corridors all through this station.” Jaime tugged at the grate. It seemed to be both welded and rusted shut. “We just have to, uh, get into them.”
“This is your fool-proof escape route?”
“I didn’t call it that! I said ‘twisty.’ Except it’s stuck.”
Rylan visibly ground his teeth. He moved Jaime to one side and then grasped the side of the grate with his right hand.
The metal groaned and then bent, until Rylan pulled the grate off entirely.
“Okay, that’s good,” Jaime said. “But we need to get it back on so it’s not super-obvious where we went.”
“Just get in and quit complaining.”
Jaime lifted a leg and crouched to get through the vent. Inside, the maintenance tunnel was high enough that he could stand and still avoid the pipes running overhead, but it was narrow. He realized he hadn’t considered their differing dimensions. “Can you fit?”
Rylan grunted as he angled to get inside the space. He nearly banged his head on the pipes before glaring at Jaime.
Rylan reached back to try and pull the grate into place. It stayed on, sort of, but there was no disguising that it was bent. “Good enough. Now, do you actually know where you’re going?”
“Yes,” Jaime insisted. “Um, mostly. The schematics might be a bit out of date. Like pre-Dark Age.”
“Oh, for—” They could hear voices coming closer. “Move,” Rylan hissed.
There were light panels set in the walls or overhead, but at least a third of them were broken, so the narrow space was shadowy. Jaime tried to steer them through the turns and up a ladder. A couple times they froze, hearing voices, but they didn’t seem to be in pursuit. Other people used these hidden passageways — either maintenance workers or those like them trying to avoid detection. Jaime was forced to switch up their route, taking them into dusty ventilation shafts that had them both on hands and knees. Rylan muttered curses when he bumped into pipes, but he didn’t question Jaime’s lead.
“You doing all right?” Rylan asked after a particularly narrow patch, sounding almost concerned.
Jaime looked back over his shoulder. “Yeah. Why?”
“You’ve been moaning in your sleep about being buried the last couple nights. I didn’t figure you for liking small spaces.”
Jaime thought about it. His heart was racing, but that was from fear of being caught. There wasn’t that blind panic he remembered from his dreams and the actual day. “I guess it’s okay. As long as nothing explodes. Or nobody dies.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Rylan said.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Well, you were a soldier, right? Is it weird for you being back in battle?”
“This is nothing like an actual battle. I wouldn’t have taken this job if I couldn’t handle a bar fight.” He paused. “I don’t kill people though.”
“You shot that guy with the knife.”
“In the shoulder. And I use small rounds. I know what I’m doing.”
“But you’ve killed before. You told me. The man who… did that to your arm.”
“Him, I killed.” The words sounded dragged out of him. “That was the last. The only.”
“Oh.” Jaime wasn’t sure what to say. “But that’s good, right? I mean, nobody likes to kill people.”
“Some do.” He put a hand on Jaime’s ankle, stopping him, and Jaime twisted back so he could look at Rylan. “Listen to me, Jaime. If those people catch us, you go. Don’t hesitate. I’ll do what I can to hold them off, but I can’t do everything. You understand? If you’re counting on me to protect you I can’t — I won’t be able to—”
“It’s okay,” Jaime said swiftly, not liking how haunted Rylan looked. “I don’t expect you to—”
“You should have someone who’s not going to fail you. But I’ll do as much as I’m able. I swear it.”
Jaime could feel the warmth of Rylan’s hand even through his clothes, and hear pain behind his words. He didn’t know what to do with either of those things, but he knew he believed Rylan.
“You’re awfully serious,” Jaime said lightly. “And pessimistic. We’re almost in the clear. No need for heroics, just cool, stealthy moves.”
A corner of Rylan’s mouth lifted. “Is that what you call crawling through the vents?”
“Well, it is stealthy.”
“More like dirty and uncomfortable. And you likely got us lost.”
“No way. We just have to—”
Jaime turned and started to crawl forward, but a sudden dip caught him off guard and he slid forward. Rylan yanked him back, hard enough that Jaime found himself beneath Rylan. Jaime could feel hard muscles against his back, the faint puff of air as Rylan exhaled. Jaime shivered, just a little. He couldn’t help but arch up to feel more of Rylan’s chest.
Rylan was solid and unyielding. Except for the almost infinitesimal shift of his hips downwards. On his hands and knees, Jaime obeyed his instincts and pressed his ass up.
“Jaime…” Rylan’s voice was almost a growl. Jaime would have thought it was annoyance except for the very not-annoyed hardness he could feel growing against him.
Jaime was very happy to stay exactly where he was for the foreseeable future, but he felt obliged to mention, “Um, so I was going to say we’re here.”
“What?” Rylan’s mouth was right at his ear.
Rylan’s strong arms were on either side of him, but Jaime pointed past them, towards a vent. “The ship? We’re at Yoon’s place.”
Jaime could actually hear Rylan’s jaw clench. He carefully moved away from Jaime and started to crawl past him towards the vent. The small space meant there was a fair amount of wriggling and sliding and physical contact required, which suddenly felt awkward.
Jaime peered over Rylan’s shoulder. They were on an upper level, so Jaime could look down and see Captain Yoon standing in front of The Wayward Prince. People in coveralls were at work on the ship. Jaime could see Bo and Dr. Stevenson with a few of Yoon’s employees walking directly beneath their vent.
He opened his mouth to call to them, but Rylan suddenly put his hand against Jaime’s lips. The hand was warm, and Jaime wasn’t sure what to do — he had an urge to lick the palm — but then Rylan pointed with his other hand.
One of the mechanics wheeled a crate past, revealing more of the hangar. Jaime could see the rest of the Prince’s crew now. Except they were all on their knees in a row, hands on their heads. As Jaime watched, Bo and the doctor were escorted over to the end of the row, where Simi was kneeling, and shoved down to the ground. Jaime realized Captain Yoon and the other people with her all had guns. And a large number of those weapons were pointed at the crew.