Page 39 of Jarran

“You could have killed him,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Would you have, if he’d recognized us?”

“No.” He didn’t have the time or space to explain why he would not do that, unless he had no other choice.

She held his gaze for a moment before he turned back around and they continued down the corridor.

The docking bay was two levels down. Jarran had them take the service ladder instead of the lift. Evie climbed behind him and dropped to the deck below with a soft thud. The bay was dim. Six vessels sat in the launch cradles. He identified the one he wanted immediately. A Sifter scout ship. They were small and fast. There was room for a single pilot and one crew member. Or passenger. In this case, Evie. It also had a long-range communication array.

He led them across the bay, keeping to the shadows along the wall. Evie matched his pace. There were a handful of crew members in the bay, doing service checks and maintenance. No senior officers, thankfully, and no one who would sound an alarm if a pilot with all the correct access codes took out a scout ship. The hatch of the vessel Jarran wanted was sealed with a code lock. He punched in the master override. Pella Rin had set this code himself. Durik should have changed it and hadn’t, or couldn’t figure out how to.

The hatch hissed open. They climbed inside. A worker glanced over, saw the hatch slide closed and returned to his duties. The cockpit was tight, and Evie wedged herself into the space beside the pilot’s seat. She strapped herself in and cast him a wary look. “You know how to fly this?”

“Pella Rin knew, so I know.” Jarran had dropped into the pilot’s chair and powered the ship’s systems. The console lit up. His hands moved across the controls and the movements were automatic, embedded in muscle memory. He tried not to think about how many times these hands had done this before. Preflight check. Thruster alignment. Navigation array online. Launch cradle disengaged.

The bay doors opened ahead of them. Black space, scattered with the dense rock field of an asteroid cluster stretched out before them. An alarm started somewhere behind them, distant and muffled. Someone had found Durik, most likely, which meant it was time to go.

Jarran hit the thrusters. The scout ship launched from the cradle and shot through the magnetic force field and into the dark. The asteroid field closed around them, with massive rocks making slow rotations. He flew through the gaps, threading the ship between formations that would have crushed them flat if he’d miscalculated by a meter.

They cleared the field. Open space stretched ahead, vast and black and empty.

Evie let out a breath. It was long and shaky, and sounded like she’d been holding her breath since the corridor.

“We’re out,” she said.

“We’re out.”

He didn’t set a course because he wasn’t sure where they should go. Instead, he sat back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment. His hands shook. His ribs ached where Durik had hit him. The cut above his eyebrow had dried to a stiff line of crusted blood, but stars, it hurt. The heat beneath his skin was gone entirely now, and in its absence he felt hollowed out. What he wouldn’t give to be back in the agricultural bay right now, letting Evie attach electrodes to his forehead. Or running through Tagja City’s tunnels with Taron.

That gave him an idea. He opened his eyes and looked at the communication array.

There was a frequency he and Taron had invented as boys, but it was old. Decades old. It had been a pattern of pulses they’d set in their short-range comm devices—little more than toys, really—and they’d used it to find each other in the dark. Three short taps, two long, three short. A rhythm that meant one thing: I’m here. Come find me.

He programmed the pattern into the array. Set it to repeat on a loop, broadcasting on the old frequency, pushing the signal out into the black in every direction.

He had no way of knowing if Taron was listening. No way of knowing if the frequency was still monitored, or if anyone in the galaxy knew what the pattern meant. It was a message in a bottle. A boy playing in a dark tunnel, hoping his brother could hear him.

He sent it.

Then he took Evie’s hand and held it gently. He couldn’t imagine a scenario where this turned out okay for them, but he sat in the pilot’s chair of a stolen ship with the woman he loved beside him, and he watched the stars.

SEVENTEEN

Evie slept in her seat with her head at an awkward angle, since these small ships were not meant for sleeping. They were meant for short, intense combat at close range. Her breathing slow and even, her hand still loosely curled around his. The shuttle hummed beneath them. Beyond the clear tekglass windshield, the darkness of space was a cold void.

Jarran had disabled the small vessel’s tracking modules shortly after their escape. Once it was clear they were away and not being followed, Evie had fallen asleep and hadn’t stirred since. Stars knew, she had earned it.

He took the opportunity to look at her, mapping every contour of her face. Relaxed in sleep, her jaw softened and the crease between her brows was gone. She looked at peace, and not like she’d just spent the last several cycles being held captive on a Sifter vessel, tending to a fractured male who kept remembering new reasons to despise himself.

He needed a plan now, as he was neither a patient-slash-prisoner of Baylan authorities or Durik. One option that had been on his mind since they’d cleared the vessel’s sensor range was just…disappearing. Pella Rin had done it for tericycles, sliding between identities, passing through systems like smoke. Jarran could use those skills one last time. Shed the name, shed the face, shed everything.

He could set a course for the outer systems, where the shipping lanes thinned and the Coalition’s reach frayed to nothing. Find a station and even alter his appearance to look like a different species. He could find work and buy passage on a cargo hauler heading somewhere remote and quiet, maybe a colony world with soil and sunlight and no one who’d ever heard the name Pella Rin. In time, with no appearance of Pella Rin, both sides would assume he was dead and stop looking.

He could grow things again. Build something small and clean. A life measured in seasons and harvests and soil quality. But, not with Evie.

That was the part that made his chest ache. He loved her. He knew that, now. He loved her, and that meant he couldn’t keep her. Durik would search for him. The Coalition would search for him. Anyone standing beside him when they came looking would be caught in the blast. And even if he brought her with him to this remote, imagined place to be a farmer, that was no life for her. Evie deserved a full life, not one spent in hiding with a convict.