ANDROMA
ANDI WOKE TO pain lurching through her skull.
She was lying on her back, staring up into the darkness. Or she could have been staring down, for all she could tell. There was no end to it—no glimmer of moonlight shimmering on the walls, no smudged outline of her feet sprawled out in front of her as she slowly sat upright.
This wasn’t like the transport.
There it had been black all around, but the too-hot heat of a ship’s working engine beneath her—a feeling that reminded her just enough of the Marauder—kept her calm. Calm enough to focus on the plan. The prize at the end of the Lunamere tunnel.
This was something else entirely.
This darkness felt as if it held a thousand watching eyes, a pressing sort of black that seemed to seep into her very soul, settling deep inside the marrow in her bones.
She shivered, but she didn’t think it was entirely due to the cold.
The ground beneath her was rough, made of stones that felt like blocks of ice. Andi ran her hands across it, pleased to discover that her shackles were gone. As she moved to push herself to her knees, however, her head seemed to wobble as if under the stupor of spiced Rigna.
Or, Andi thought, as she raised her hands to her temples, feeling a lump where some Xen Pterran guard had punched her with his electric gauntlets, the stupor of whatever tranq they knocked me out with.
This could have been her life—should have been her life. Locked away behind bars, awaiting the death penalty, the ghost of her best friend the only thing to keep her company.
That familiar wave of fear spiked through her, and Andi wanted to reach for her swords, to slash and slice and tear apart that piece of herself as she tore apart the bodies of others. Death after death, to cover up Kalee’s. To give herself the kind of fate she deserved.
But then a groan sounded out from beside her.
You’re not alone, Andi remembered.
“What the hell?” Dex rasped. “Andi?” Seconds passed, with the sound of his labored breathing seeming to echo against the cold stone walls. She could hear his hands as they groped against the floor, searching. She didn’t even flinch away as his fingertips scraped hers and he froze. “Please tell me this is Andi, and not some love-hungry Xen Pterran carriage slug named Stubby.”
Despite herself, Andi laughed. The massive slugs were gruesome, oily beasts that tried to bed anything with a heartbeat. “It’s me,” Andi said. Then she pulled her hand away, immediately colder with the absence of his touch.
“How long have we been out for?” Dex asked.
“Hell if I know,” Andi said.
Time seemed to have slipped away from them. Soyina had said they only had one hour.
Hardly enough time to make their way out of their cell and find Valen, especially with shadows as thick as the obsidinite walls surrounding them.
Andi reached down, feeling the varillium cuffs around her wrists with relief. For a moment, she feared they wouldn’t be there, that somehow the Lunamere guards had managed to break the impenetrable varillium—impossible as that may be without the right tools—or that Soyina had taken Dex’s Krevs and left them in here to rot together.
A terrible turns of events that would have been.
But there the cuffs were. Cold on her wrists, and with them, a surge of solid hope. Andi pressed the small button on the back of each cuff, and light flooded from them. A talisman to keep the shadows at bay.
“The best gift you’ve ever received, Andi,” Dex said. “I wonder who gave them to you?”
She remembered the day he had gifted them to her, and how many Krevs he’d saved up to pay for the cuffs to be designed and installed by a surgeon he had connections with on a tiny rogue moon near the center of Mirabel. The installation had been painful, but once the cuffs were in place, Andi felt nearly whole again. On the outside, at least. They were a gift she’d always be grateful for.
Andi sighed. “One of these days, Dextro Arez, I’m going to help you pull your head out of your own ass.”
Andi turned away, then slowly rose to her feet, ignoring the shouts of pain from her fight-sore muscles. The cell had one gate, with obsidinite bars so thick that Andi instantly knew they’d have been screwed without Soyina’s help. The material was almost as strong as varillium. There was no way they would have been able to break out of here otherwise.
She pressed her face against the cool bars, staring out into the black abyss beyond.
No movement. No shadowed shapes milling about. Far off, she thought she could hear screams, or cackles of laughter. But the darkness had a way of playing tricks on one’s senses.
“My head feels like it’s been cracked in two,” Dex whined.
Andi rolled her eyes. “If you’re done complaining,” she said, remembering how much of a baby Dex could be when he had an ailment of any sort, “we need to get moving. We don’t know how much time has passed, and if we don’t make it to Soyina with Valen in under an hour, we’re not leaving this dump alive.”
Dex rolled to his knees, cursing as he stretched out his muscles.
“Voluntarily letting myself get beat into submission,” he said, “is not one of my prouder moments in life.”
Andi raised a brow as she braided her hair back from her face, then flexed her muscles to test for any weak spots she hadn’t noticed earlier. “I wasn’t aware you had any moments to be proud of.”
Dex hauled himself upright. “You’re the worst partner I’ve ever had, Androma Racella.”
Andi stuck out her tongue at him, then reached out to test the cell gate. The handle turned, but the gate was heavy. She leaned against it, digging into the bars with her shoulder.
The gate creaked and groaned in protest.
“I’d say I agree with you on that point,” Andi whispered, stepping aside to make room for Dex as he joined her, “but I think Soyina takes the award on this one.”
They pushed on the gate together. “Soyina has her charms,” Dex said through gritted teeth. “You have to admit it.”
Andi seriously doubted that, but focused her attention on their escape.
“This would be a good time to talk,” Dex said.
Andi sighed. “We’re in the middle of a prison with the clock literally ticking down on our lives, and you want to talk now?”
Their shoulders pressed up against each other as they worked at the gate. “I can’t seem to get you alone,” Dex said. “So, yes, while we’re trapped inside of a prison cell, it seems like the best option.”
“We don’t owe each other a conversation,” Andi said. “We just have to finish this job, and the deal is done.”
“There are two sides to the story we share, Androma.”
Andi grimaced. “I don’t need to hear your excuses, Dextro. Now push.”
“If we get out of here alive, promise me you’ll just hear me out?” Dex whispered. “I won’t ask again. We can talk about the past, and...end it for good.”
“Things ended when you sold me out.”
“Five minutes,” Dex said. “Please, Androma. Don’t make me beg.”
She smiled then. That would be interesting.
“Five minutes,” she said. “If we get this damned gate open and get Valen safely out of here.”
With a final shove, the gate popped open. It swung outward with a horrible cry, then hung ajar, the light from Andi’s cuffs casting crooked shadows against the black wall just beyond, no more than a few arm’s lengths away. No guards came running. No prisoners shouted out from cells nearby.
The darkness was strange and still, just begging them to step out of their cell and explore.
Andi looked left, then right.
Nothing but bars, as far as the light from her cuffs allowed her to see.
For a moment, she and Dex simply stood there, staring out at the narrow hall, their boots frozen on the threshold of their cell.
“Looks like I’m halfway to earning my five minutes. What’s the matter, Baroness?” Dex finally whispered. Andi could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. “Scared?”
She feared a lot of things.
Loneliness. Losing the lives of her crew or damaging her ship beyond repair.
But not darkness. That was a part of her; the very thing that had allowed her to survive for this long.
Only one hour—or less, depending on how long they’d been out for—and the silence would be shattered by blaring alarms, the frenzied tap of guard boots on stone floors, the click of bullets sliding into rifle chambers held by guards who would shoot not to disarm, but to kill.
This is what she had trained her whole life for.
The thrill of the moment had arrived.
Without a word, Andi took a step forward, shedding the weakest parts of herself as she allowed the Bloody Baroness to take over.
Dex followed, and together, they left their empty cell behind.