Page 11 of Healer Hunted

Giving up, I gave Aradne a nod and the two of us guided the hovercart into the hallway. I expected her to take it to the hovercart storage, where we could probably dump their bodies down the laundry chute. They’d be stuck in there for quite some time, the next shift of laundry wouldn’t go down there until morning, and coms didn’t work down on this planet, so nobody bothered to wear any, they wouldn’t be able to call for help.

Except Aradne pushed the cart on, and I realized she was thinking ahead. The security booth, the palm print. I scanned the hallway, making sure we were alone before I grabbed that floppy hand, counting to three before pressing it to the palm scanner, and leaped inside with my glue gun raised. I thought a guard would be sitting behind the security desk, but there was no one there. Deflated by the lack of action I stared at the gazillion buttons, wondering how I was going to disable everything.

Aradne fixed the issue for me, she charged into the room after me, picked up the chair, and slammed it into the screens with zero hesitation. The loud crashing sound made me flinch, but the resulting mess was definitely worth it, that security booth was toast. Just to be sure, I grabbed a bottle of strong cleaning solvent from the bottom of the cart and poured it all over the desk. Smiling in satisfaction at my sudden partner in crime when it made everything hiss and spark.

An alarm was going, some kind of low beeping which did mean that someone had been warned that the security system was down. Aradne and I heaved the cart down the hallway at a clip, running flat out into the laundry room. We groaned and strained as we slid each body down the chute, hearing them land with a hard thud.

We shoved the cart in a corner and jogged to the mess hall, which was almost entirely full. I snatched a ration bar from the tray, Aradne following suit, and the two of us had only just parked our butts on the bench when a guard stuck his head inside.

I was struggling to hide my panting breaths, the sweat coating the back of my neck. Was anyone going to speak out? Were they going to question us to see if we’d all been here or not? I groaned internally, was Mikasul present? She’d definitely rat us out. I was grateful that Aradne had helped me, she didn’t need to do that, but now it looked like I was going to get her into terrible trouble.

Except Mikasul was nowhere to be seen, and a few more spots were still empty. With all the extra work we had to do, it seemed I wasn’t the only one struggling to get done in time for the evening meal.

The guard, a Rummicaron just like the one posted outside of Luka’s suite, frowned at us with disinterest. Then he opened his huge, shark-like mouth and growled out a warning for us to stay put. Unlike the Dumb Duo, he had a remote to activate our pain collars, and he waved it in the air to make sure we understood how serious he was.

He disappeared down the hall the next moment and the mess hall burst into a noisy commotion as the girls started to speculate what had happened. I saw more than a few eyes dart my way, or linger on Aradne, but the tall Xurtal woman was pretty terrifying to most. No one wanted to get on her bad side, rumor had it she’d once been a gladiator.

Moira was the only other female in the room that I kind of got along with. She was a slender blue-skinned alien, of a species I didn’t know the name of. She gave me a worried, wide-eyed look but didn’t say anything.

We were questioned for several hours before we were allowed to leave for our quarters, but of the dozen girls, no one said anything about Aradne and me arriving late. They’d interviewed Moira first, right in front of us, and she’d set the tone when she’d vehemently claimed that we’d all been here, eating.

It was a mistake that the guards interviewed us all together, we were just repeating the same thing now. I was sure that if they’d interviewed us separately, some of the girls would have spoken the truth, but like this, we were all sticking together. I could only hope that this would last long enough that I could still sneak off tonight, that this wouldn’t result in a guard in our corridor tonight.

By the time we were released to wash up and head for our bunks, all of us were flagging, hanging onto each other, draped over the tables as we struggled to stay awake after our hard day of labor. I was relieved to shut the door to my bunk room behind me and crawl into bed. How many hours of sleep did I risk taking before I headed for that spaceport exit?

Mikasul strutted into the room before I had settled down, a smirk on her face. “Had a fun evening I heard!” She crowed, “Sucks for you, while all that went down, I was dining with the Director!” She fluffed her long silky black hair over one shoulder while she smugly looked at me, “Oh, the foods I just had!” She launched into a long-winded description of the fabulous meal she’d partaken in and I rolled over and yanked the pillow over my head, hoping to drown her out. That lady was obnoxious.

Chapter 7

Luka

The room was dark when I leaped inside, but my eyes had already adjusted to the gloom of the hallway. The narrow room held two bunks and a row of pegs from which clothing hung. My eyes landed on the small lump on the top bunk first, and the glow of Noa’s blonde hair told me enough.

The bottom bunk held an Aderian woman and my stomach curdled at just how deeply my mother had sunk. While each life was as valuable as another, the fact that she had stooped to enslaving her own species somehow felt even worse. Most species didn’t do that, they considered themselves superior to the species they subjugated, and rationalized it that way, sick as it was.

Large, liquid black eyes, blearily blinked up at me from a face that I faintly recognized. I had no time to connect the dots, this woman might scream, or call for help. This was what Pato had tried to warn me about. I moved in, doing what I’d learned from Sunder, pinning her in place while also covering her mouth so she couldn’t scream. “Pato, get Noa up,” I told the little monkey riding on my shoulder. His slight weight was immediately gone when he leaped onto the top bunk.

The female I had restrained came fully awake when I pinned her, bucking in my grip but she was no match. I easily kept her subdued. My brain finally clicked onto the knowledge that had been tickling the back of my brain. “Mikasul?” I asked, “What are you doing here?”

She stopped moving, her dark eyes roving over my face until she recognized me. They went wide then, in shock, or confusion. My senses told me the latter, which meant that she had known I was here. She was calm, so I gambled and took the risk to pull back and let her up. The woman had been my mother’s loyal assistant for at least the last decade. I had seen the two thick as thieves as they worked well into the night.

I wouldn’t trust this lady further than I could throw Ziame, which was to say not at all. She, like most Aderians my mother employed, lacked the so common basic empathic ability or had a twisted version of it like my cousin Ceralion. So when I stepped back, my body remained tense and ready to interfere, I also remained solidly in front of the exit so she wouldn’t make a break for it.

What I couldn’t stop myself from doing, was lift my eyes away from the viperous female to look at Noa. She was sitting upright on the top bunk with nothing more than a pooled blanket around her hips and a snug, white tank top to cover her. It outlined the soft shape of her breasts, the dark outline of her nipples shining through the thin fabric. I could tell at last, that the tattoos curled around her pretty shoulders but ended in a few delicate sprigs and curls on her collarbones and the upper slopes of her breasts.

She made a coughing noise and I yanked my gaze up to her face in time to see the laughter in her blue eyes. “Up here pretty boy, what are you doing here? I was going to meet you at the exit to the spaceport!” She swung her legs out from under the blanket and over the edge of the bunk, ready to jump down. I wanted to help her, then forced myself to stay put, lest Mikasul made a break for it. The Aderain woman was avidly studying Noa and me.

I couldn’t help but stare at Noa’s pretty legs, her colorful flowers decorating her until well up her thighs. Tapering into a point high up on the outside of her legs, the tattoo was made to look like a pair of sexy, colorful stockings. I was going crazy with the urge to stroke my fingers along that pretty skin, my body heating with desire, my cocks straining against the back of the zipper holding these damn tight leather pants closed.

She leaped down gracefully and hurried to shimmy into one of the uniforms dangling from a hook on the wall. I stopped her and handed her the pants and shirt instead, which she gratefully took. The clothing swamped her, but she was adept at rolling things or tucking them were necessary to make it work.

While these weren’t really my clothes exactly, it still felt a little like she was wearing my things. A primal instinct I didn’t even know I had was filling me with satisfaction, she was dressed in my scent now, in things I’d provided for her.

“I didn’t know that,” I told her, privately thinking that it was better not to mention our real destination in front of my mother’s old assistant. She’d fallen from grace, or she wouldn’t be here, but that didn’t mean that anything we said in front of her wasn’t going to end directly in my mother’s ear.

“Let’s hurry, the cameras are still disabled, I heard the guards say they don’t have all the parts,” Noa told me. How the cameras had ended in that state was unclear, but I figured Noa had had a hand in it. Good, that meant no one saw me on the way here. Now I just needed to figure out how to deal with Mikasul.

“Oh, I won’t say a thing, you can trust me Lukalyn,” the female said as if she’d read my mind. “If you’re escaping, please take me with you!” Her eyes shot from Noa to mine, a cunning expression on her face that she didn’t do a good job at hiding. From my empathic senses, I felt a lot of insincerity, though I’d already known I couldn’t trust her. This female was an adept liar, or she used to be but life hadn’t been too kind to her.