Lowering her night vision binoculars, Linnea Quincy squinted across the field of scrub grass and rocks to the abandoned warehouse. She’d been lying in the dirt, freezing her ass off, watching the dark building for almost six hours, and there had been no movement or sign of life. The glass windows were shattered, jagged edges lining the gaping holes like an old man’s teeth, and the doors were boarded up.

But she knew they were in there.

The night’s breeze brewed up a small dust storm. Dirt and tumbleweeds gusted around her. Deep in her black thermal jacket, she shivered. The days on Earth were unbearably hot, but the nights were frigid without the lush atmosphere of generations past to insulate the planet. The weather was at best unpredictable, especially this far north, in the outskirts of Chicago.

At worst, it was downright apocalyptic.

When she’d come back to Earth from the Zynthar International Space Station just over a month ago, Linnea had expected Chicago to be a hub of activity since it was the last operating city on the planet. Instead, she’d found nothing but cracked, potholed roads and abandoned skyscrapers. The dull-eyed and slack-jawed people barely resembled humans, their skin stained from the pollution hanging low in the gray skies. The city limped by thanks to the commerce provided by the world’s largest space shuttle transportation hub.

Of course, that wasn’t counting the underground commerce: the human flesh trade.

Her watch buzzed as its timer struck midnight.

Let’s get this show on the road.

She crab-crawled back out of the warehouse’s sightlines. Her jacket puffed with dust when she pulled it off and bundled her gear up inside it. Rolling it into a tight ball, she tied the arms together. The thing was bulky, but it fit in the hole she’d dug earlier in the day. She scooped dirt into the crevice, filling in around the jacket and covering it up.

By the time anyone found it, she would be far away on an alien planet trying to rescue her sister.

I’m coming, Jude. Linnea to the rescue.

For good measure, she swiped dirt across her cheeks. She hadn’t showered in days, so the additional grime hardly mattered on her face. Locks of her dark blonde hair stuck to her scalp with oil and dust. Her ragged clothes were too big even for her curvaceous frame, her feet clad in thrift store boots that were meant to help her blend in.

She shivered, her hands shaking, but it wasn’t from the cold. Her heart hammered with adrenaline. She sweated from it. Finally, finally, it was time.

Linnea took one last look around the field before taking off. She ran in a half crouch, dodging around prickly weeds and sharp rocks. Ahead of her, a snake scuttled off, twisting over the dirt, and she had to hold down a scream. Distracted, she stumbled straight into a tumbleweed of briars that stabbed straight through the thin soles of her shoes.

She fell, sending up a small dust cloud, and tangled herself in the dried weed. For a second, she panicked. She kicked out, flailing, feeling trapped.

She took a deep breath. Keep it together, Lin. It was just a weed; she wasn’t a captive yet. With a sharp hiss, she yanked herself free. She picked herself up, trembling, and glanced around before continuing along, hobbling and mumbling under her breath.

She might have high tech gear, but she wasn’t trained in combat or stealth missions. That had been Jude.

Linnea preferred baking and romantic holavids. But she did know Krav Maga, and she could kick plenty of ass when she had to. And right now, she had to.

Jude needed her.

Linnea made it to the outer wall of the warehouse. Dead vines clung to the chipped bricks, and glass peppered the ground at her feet. She moved slowly, careful to not step on the shards. Rounding the building’s side wall, she stopped beneath a haphazardly boarded up window and listened.

At first, she heard nothing but the night’s breeze whistling over the dead grass and her own tightly drawn breaths.

Had Maeve been wrong about the flesh trader’s pickup location? They’d only had two months to figure out the plan, which had seemed like years to Linnea in the beginning, but now, crouching beneath warped, splinter-filled boards, it didn’t feel long enough.

What if they were wrong? What if she had wasted all this time chasing down the Chicago lead, and Jude was already dead? Maeve’s geothermal mapping of the warehouse had indicated people were staying here, in this very room Linnea stood outside of, but what if the warm bodies had merely been squatters? Not the stolen women she was looking for.

A rock crunched inside the warehouse, followed by the softest murmur of voices.

Her heart leaped with joy. They hadn’t been wrong!

Instantly, shame swamped her. She might have a way to Kladuu, but the women in there were stolen and about to be packed onto a slaver ship and taken to a secret planet far away from their homes. And there was nothing she could do to help them—setting them free would just make them easy targets to be recaptured out here in the barren wastelands of Chicago.

Guilt-ridden, she pulled the cylindrical device from the top of her boot. With a mental apology, she pulled the pin, stood, and dropped the gas bomb straight down onto the women.

It pinged off the ground. Linnea backed away from the warehouse with her nose covered. After a pop, the bomb went off. She expected screams of uncertainty and fear, but the women being held inside hardly reacted.

Eyes narrowing, she crept forward, careful to keep her nose and mouth covered, and peered through the slats.

Curls of smoke drifted over the warehouse floor. The room held almost twenty women, their bodies slumped against each other, none of them moving. According to Maeve, the gas needed a few seconds to fully knock a human out, but surely it shouldn’t have been this fast.

As the gas faded, Linnea scoped out the rest of the room through her narrow viewpoint. The walls were thick cinder blocks, faded and cracked with the time. But the door shone with metal bars and an advanced locking mechanism. All new tech. An overflowing shit bucket sat in the corner of the room. The floor, what patches of it she saw around the women’s bodies, was layered in dried rust-colored stains and dust.

Maeve had warned her the conditions would be bad. Awful. Inhuman. They were dealing with flesh traders, after all. But Linnea hadn’t been prepared for this. Her stomach heaved with worry for Jude.

She moved before she ran out of time. The gas would only keep the women blacked out for a few minutes. With one last peek to make sure they were still out of it, she ran for the back of the building.

Flesh trading pick-up points like this one rarely had advanced security tech along the perimeter. No cameras or laser motion detection zones. Nothing advanced. Raids came with the territory, and the aliens who bought and sold humans wanted to leave nothing behind that would tie their race to the crime, which meant that Linnea had a free run straight up the fire escape to the building’s leaky, saggy roof.

Praying she wouldn’t crash through, she stepped carefully across the space back toward the women’s holding room. Sucking in her tummy as if it would help, she wished she had Jude’s lithe, athletic body, but Linnea had gotten their mother’s curves. Her thick thighs and ample bottom had never bothered her until now when she might drop straight into an alien snake den.

When she was above the women, she allowed herself to breathe. She gauged the back corner of the room from the hip-high wall circling the roof and pulled out her second tool of the night. It looked like a silver pen, and if anyone found it up on the roof, they’d likely think the same thing, but she twisted the cap counterclockwise two clicks. A red laser beam flared out from the tip. Bent over the roof, she got to work.

Aimed at the roof’s plaster ceiling, the red laser burned a smoking cut straight through. It took a torturous long minute to cut out a Linnea-sized hole. She left one edge of the square uncut so the roof would fall back into place after she dropped down.

 She lifted the section of roof, checking to make sure she could fit. Up here, she got a better look at the women beneath her, none of which were stirring.

They were thin and pale in the moonlight, but their skin had an ashy tone, their hair dull with dirt and filth. Their clothes practically fell off them in tatters. And the smell.

Linnea’s eyes watered. The Kladian traders had to be monsters.

Crouched atop the roof, holding open her only chance at getting to her sister, Linnea considered dropping the roof back into place and making a run across the field the way she’d come, booking a ticket back to the space station, and crawling into her bed.

She wasn’t built for this. She wasn’t strong enough for this. The fierce one had always been Jude. Not her.

In the room, one of the women groaned. Another’s foot twitched atop the ground. They were waking up. Linnea had seconds if that.

She told herself there was no decision to make about whether or not she was going into that room, but she’d told herself a lot of lies since Jude’s disappearance.

But Jude would do it for her. If it had been Linnea out there on a hidden planet with a flesh trade and shape-shifting aliens, Jude never would have hesitated to come save her.

That decided things. Linnea wiggled her hips into the gap between the roof and her opening and slid in, gripping the roof’s ledge with all her strength. The cut section dropped on her fingertips, but she bit down her gasp of pain. At least it closed, she told herself, looking down, teeth gritted as she held her hanging body suspended above the women.

Should have passed on the leftover pizza this morning.

She grunted and dropped. The women lying around her didn’t stir, even as she staggered—the drop farther than she’d expected—and collapsed on top of one. She froze, waiting for the group to wake up and start screaming.

Yet none of them did much more than twitch and moan in their sleep. Linnea stood, glancing up. Her patch of roof had fallen perfectly, leaving no gap and no light. Breathing out a sigh of relief, she searched for her gas bomb canister. She found it beside a young woman, whose nose was broken and bruised. Linnea’s knees trembled at the sight. How much had these women already suffered? What laid ahead of them? She picked the canister up as delicately as possible.

On her tiptoes, she crept through the minefield of arms and legs to reach the corner, where the shit bucket waited. Holding her breath, she dropped the canister on top of the dark contents, making certain it sank on its own before turning away.

She could check hiding the evidence off her to-do list.

With a gag, she made her way into the opposite corner farthest from the barred door where she hunkered down and tried to become invisible.

Now she had to wait.

Now there was no turning back.

Icy cold fear crept up from the hard ground and wrapped around her skin, sinking into her bones to chip away at her marrow. Her teeth chattered with it. Her body trembled with it.

She wasn’t strong like Jude. She never had been.

She was the curvy sister of a famous pilot who had a body and face that men salivated over. Linnea wasn’t the savior. Even when they were little, and their father had been on a drunken tear, it had been Jude who took the blows first and wore their father out before he could come after Linnea. Even when her body had been cut and bruised, and Linnea had heard her crying late into the night, it had always been Jude who took the hits.

Tears streamed down Linnea’s cheeks.

Outside, through the boarded-up windows, a ripping gust of wind sent rocks and dirt smattering against the boards. At first, Linnea thought it was another dust storm until slashes of white light streamed in through the gaps in the slats, flooding the floor and blinding her. She held up a hand and squinted toward the back wall. A whoosh of air signaled a pressurized hatch opening.

Then she heard them.

“—sure they’re here?”

“From that smell, they have to be. Blessed Avilku, they stink.”

They spoke in the American Corporation’s universal language. Their words were crisp and unaccented and carried easily across the arid field. Linnea didn’t dare sidle any closer to the window to see outside.

“Gideon said they’d be in here,” a third voice said from right outside the warehouse’s walls. “Fifteen to twenty prime specimens, just like Savas agreed to.”

With her heart beating out of her chest, Linnea dropped flat to the floor and squeezed her eyes shut to match the women around her.

Had the aliens said ‘Gideon?’ As in, the Commander Gideon? Why would the Commander of the entire American Corporation’s galactic fleet have anything to do with an illegal flesh trading ring?

No matter the answer, the aliens had come to pick up their illegal wares.

She was going to an alien planet.

She was going to Kladuu.