ANDROMA
“ANDROMA! OH, GODSTARS, WAKE UP!”
She was lying in the darkness beside a burning ship. Her father’s voice called to her, muffled as if he were underwater.
His hands gripped her face, and they were warm against the frigid night.
She wanted to keep sleeping, but the voice was desperate. A pleading, almost ruthless thing that begged her to wake.
* * *
Andi opened her eyes and gasped.
Cold. It was so cold.
Dex hovered over her, his hands on either side of her face. “You’re alive,” he choked out. His breath slipped away from him in a thick cloud. His eyes were wide. Terrified, as if he’d been staring at her corpse. “I didn’t know if... I couldn’t live if you were...”
Shock overwhelmed her, and she struggled to keep the panic at bay. Her chest ached as if she’d been shot, each breath threatening to snap her apart. She tried to gasp in air, but there was a weight on her chest.
“Can you breathe?” Dex asked. “Stay with me, Androma!”
He began to pull something heavy off her. It felt as if he’d pulled a boulder from her chest.
She gasped in a breath and realized, with horror, what had been on top of her.
A corpse.
Now when she breathed, she felt the cold press of something beneath her, like an uneven carpet. Slowly, with the rational side of her mind—the part that had been honed by years in military school and then, later, life on the Marauder with the girls—she gained control of her thoughts.
Assess the situation. Remember to breathe.
But Godstars...the smell. Andi choked on it. She looked left and right. Corpses, all around her.
She gasped in another breath. The weight of death and the pressing odor of decay were everywhere, filling the small transport ship they were in. Stiff, frozen fingertips pressed in between her shoulder blades. She felt the sharp prod of a bare foot leaning up against her knees. And finally, a woman’s hairless head, her four eyes wide and unblinking as Andi turned her face to get a closer look at her surroundings.
“Get me out.” Andi gasped again. In her mind, all she could see was Kalee, dead beside her in the transport ship, eyes closed, blood everywhere. “Get me out!”
Dex pulled and shoved and finally, finally, she was free.
He wrapped his arms around her and they practically tumbled backward. Together, Dex’s arms still around her, they sank back against a metal wall, the corpses near their toes looking as if they were trying to pull them back into the pile with dead, frigid fingers.
“What the hell happened?” Andi asked through her teeth.
“Soyina shot us,” Dex said. “She actually shot us.”
He was still holding her. Andi knew she should pull away, but he was so warm and the transport was so damned cold.
Finally, after she stopped shivering, Andi removed herself from Dex’s grasp and turned to look at their surroundings.
Low, rounded metal ceilings seemed to press in on her from overhead, the walls equally claustrophobic. There was a single door across the small space, and as Andi breathed in again and quivered from the putrid stench, she felt a rumble beneath her.
It was the unmistakable feeling of a ship’s engine roaring as a pilot, likely behind that closed door, accelerated. Her body swayed with the motion, which meant the ship was small.
The memories clicked into place. Soyina, that sneaky fiend.
Andi could still see the way the Revivalist had leveled a gun at them in their final moments inside Lunamere, still feel the pain that had bloomed across her body. Then darkness. A space as empty and unknown as a black hole. Soyina had made good on her promise to get them out of Lunamere, that much was true. But Andi had never imagined it like this, on a transport ship designed to cart dead bodies from Lunamere to the Junkyard, out past Dark Matter, where dead ships and even deader people swam endlessly through the starless sky.
Andi lurched to the right, and a wave of nausea hit her along with the scent.
She wouldn’t vomit.
The Bloody Baroness did not vomit.
Andi took another gasping breath, forced her body upright and promptly loosed the contents of her stomach.
Into Dex’s lap.
His mouth opened and closed as he stared at the mess.
Then, incredibly, he laughed. For a moment, she thought he’d lost his mind. But then the chaos of the past job and the realization that they had escaped Lunamere and lived to tell the tale swept over Andi.
She laughed with him. When she could laugh no more, she got a good look at him for the first time in the dim emergency exit light above their heads.
Beneath her sick mess, he was covered in dried blood that stained his black suit. A green-and-yellow bruise had spread across his forehead, as if he’d been smacked with a hammer the size of a fist.
She’d seen bruises like this before, from Gilly’s double-triggered gun. A stunner bullet, meant to incapacitate, but not kill.
Soyina, Andi thought again. She was devilishly smart, capable of completing their mission while saving herself at the same time. But this certainly hadn’t been part of the plan. And what if Soyina’s bullets hadn’t been stunners?
Black holes ablaze.
Death had never felt so close.
“We actually did it,” Andi said. “We actually made it out.”
Then her heart lurched against her chest.
Valen.
Andi turned, staring across the lumpy space, wide enough to fit thirty dead in a row.
“Help me find him,” she demanded. “Help me find Valen!” When Dex didn’t move, Andi cursed and began to dig through the cold dead on her own, swearing to the stars that if she’d screwed this up after all they’d gone through, after all the lives she’d stolen...
There. Across the pile at the opposite end of the transport, lying facedown, his shredded back open and bare. Andi crawled toward him, ignoring the disgust roiling in her gut, the feeling of wrongness spreading through her as her hands pressed down against frozen, scarred skin.
He was cold when she reached him, but his pulse was there. A delicate flutter. Dex finally joined her, and together they heaved him over onto his side, careful not to touch the lacerations on his back. The wounds looked like sharp claws had shredded his skin, allowed it to heal and shredded it all over again.
Andi’s gaze traveled to Valen’s face.
It was the first time she’d truly been able to stop and look at him, to study the way his features had changed in some places and stayed the same in others.
His hair was shorn near the scalp, but she recognized the dark mahogany color he’d had years ago. His cheeks were shallow, the bones protruding at sharp angles. And his lips, once full, were colorless and empty.
“It’s a wonder he’s not dead,” Dex said.
Andi found herself unable to respond. Staring at him was like staring at her past. But saving Valen—her one chance at redemption—hadn’t changed the emptiness she still felt inside.
The void was still there.
Seeing Valen had simply opened it up, and now it threatened to suck her back in.
“How long have we been out?” Andi asked.
Dex shrugged. “Not sure. I woke up and then I saw you and...”
She couldn’t forget the haunted look in his eyes when he woke her.
Soyina’s voice echoed in her mind. We didn’t, you know. Your comrade wanted to whine like a baby about his feelings for you.
But Dex wasn’t allowed to have feelings. He wasn’t allowed to look at Andi the way he had a few moments ago, wasn’t allowed to hold her face as if he were cradling the world in his hands.
Andi dismissed those thoughts. He’d been shocked. He’d thought his partner was dead. Of course he’d been concerned.
“Lira’s probably wearing a hole in the floorboards of my ship with her pacing.”
Dex raised a single brow. “My ship.”
She didn’t argue this time, knowing in her heart that she’d already won the fight long ago. With effort, Andi tore her eyes away from Valen. The job wasn’t done. She wouldn’t relax until they were back on her ship, reunited with her crew and had Valen taken to the med bay, where Alfie could get to work on healing him.
Plus, the smell was starting to get worse.
Asking for Dex’s help wasn’t one of her favorite things, especially after he’d just seen her lose control upon waking. But she knew he was the only way they’d be getting out of this damned transport before it emptied them out into the Junkyard.
“Dex.” She said his name like a sigh, hating the way it felt so familiar on her tongue.
They were too close together. Too alone, despite the corpses and Valen’s unconscious form beside them.
“Androma,” Dex replied, inclining his head.
“Do you remember the night you bypassed the locks on my door in your old Junker ship?”
“How could I ever forget?” Dex’s eyes glittered like stardust. “Your nightgown was—”
“Not a point of discussion right now,” Andi hissed, cutting him off. There was the old familiar annoyance. She sighed. “Can you do it again? To that door?”
He glanced past her shoulder, his eyes sparkling with a different sort of mischief as he nodded.
“Good,” Andi said. She looked down at her boots and began to remove their laces. They were strong and sturdy, luckily not frayed from the fight in Lunamere. “Then do it now.” She coiled the bootlaces around her fists, then pulled them taut. The strands sang with a satisfying twang.
“Are you going to kill me with your shoelaces, Baroness?” Dex asked.
Andi looked at Valen’s sleeping form, begging the Godstars to keep him breathing until they got him to the safety of the Marauder.
“No,” she said as she began to crawl back across the bodies. “But I am going to take care of the pilot once you get us through that door. And then you are going to fly us back to my ship.”
“Not you?” He raised a brow at her. “After all the fear you’ve instilled in others, you’re still too afraid to fly a—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Andi spat out.
“Does your crew know?”
Andi was silent, and he smiled like he knew her secret.
Like he’d very much enjoy keeping it for himself.
* * *
Five minutes later, Andi sat in the copilot’s seat, a fresh corpse tossed in the pile behind the open door. Another tally, another face to haunt her. Dex took the throttle and angled the transport toward home—the glass starship that sat waiting like a gem in the starlit sky.