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  Most of the lower tier smugglers she’d met were typically stupid and greedy. A good runner knew that if someone disappeared, the drop was as good as gone, or it would take some time to lose the heat before you could recover it. Smugglers, though, had no such qualms. They were like scavengers that started circling before their prey was even dead—and this fellow had already missed his morning check in according to radio chatter.

  “This place is really giving me the creeps,” Kita muttered as they marched in near silence, the crunch of boots on debris and broken glass the only accompanying sound.

  The prisoner squirmed as he walked. She thanked her lucky stars he seemed to have a normal fear of being carted into an abandoned building by people who might want him dead. No life or limb threats had worked with any of the others, but she was holding out a silent hope that patience and the odds had finally come together in her favor.

  “C’mon…” the guy began. “Whatever your stew with Eladia is, I wasn’t a part of it.”

  “Yeah… but you are a part of imprisoning, poisoning, and selling human beings for profit. Which area of that is acceptable?” Caden spat, his lip curled into a snarl.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” the man said, wheeling on the small posse behind him. When his eyes fell on Kita’s gun, he hesitated.

  “What’s your name?” Aralyn asked.

  “W…why?” their captive demanded, his voice reedy.

  “We’re gonna need to know what to put on the headstone,” Caden said.

  “It’s Reed,” the man croaked. “I have a wife―kids, I―”

  “Save it, Reed,” said Kita, gesturing with her Remington for him to keep moving. “We’re not interested in your fake sob story. And we sure as shit have no problems marching people to their deaths, so I’d think of something more convincing if I was you.”

  Reed fell silent and limped as slowly down the long hallway as his captors would allow, and Kita gave Aralyn an enthusiastic thumbs up before recovering her assassin-chic façade once he wasn’t looking. Caden pulled Reed’s arm, tugged him into a nearby room, and found the lantern they’d used while camping out and waiting for their target. The light poured through the small area, revealing a paper-strewn floor, an old surgical table, and an array of rusted surgical tools sitting neatly on the table with mildewed paper beneath them. At the sight of the table and the instruments, Reed’s already pale face turned white as a sheet and he refused to take another step.

  He doesn’t need to know we don’t plan on torturing him for information, Aralyn mused as she saw his reaction, fighting the urge to push him before he was ready. She was eager; too eager, and if she wasn’t careful, Eladia’s goon might pick up on that and read it as desperation. She forced herself to lean against the counter of an old sink and cross her arms nonchalantly. Kita took a seat on the floor opposite her, gun against her lap, and Caden covered the exit. There was absolutely nowhere for Reed to go without running into one of them.

  “Have a seat,” Aralyn said, gesturing to the surgical table. “That leg must hurt.”

  Reed shook his head, though it was obvious the gunshot wound pained him. “No… I’ll stand.”

  Far away from the scalpel, Aralyn noted.

  “Start talking,” Caden commanded in his best no-nonsense tone.

  “About what?” Reed asked. His wide eyes kept flickering between the guns and the surgical tools.

  “Let’s play a game. It’s called ‘answer my question or lose a finger,’” Aralyn said, taking a few steps toward him. “Eladia. The bitch from Helios sent you on a little errand out here, did she not?”

  Reed hesitated only a moment before nodding. “Yes.”

  “Good. I see you understand the rules of the game,” Aralyn said. “Question two: Where is your stash?”

  Reed shook his head, opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. He said nothing, and Aralyn reached for the rusty scalpel.

  “It’s in the warehouse,” he said.

  “We’re learning, I see,” Caden said with a smirk from the doorway.

  “I didn’t want to do any of this, okay? You try getting a job after being in Tartarys!” Reed shouted, his face simultaneously white from cold and pain and red from fury. “You get dropped into the middle of a labyrinth filled with murderers and psychopaths, have to fight for every scrap of food and water, and then, if you manage to get the hell out, no one wants to hire you, even if you just went in for a minor offense!”

  Aralyn blinked at him a couple of times. She knew what he meant; Tartarys was a hellhole of the worst kind, and she would know, having had two stays there―one that was nearly permanent. Her entire life ended in that awful prison planet. It was where she’d met Eladia and gotten entangled in the job that she was still trying to get out of even now. He had no idea how well she knew Tartarys, and she wasn’t going to let him know, either. He couldn’t know that she felt his pain and understood his plight because she was in the same spot.

  Ironically, it all came back to Eladia.

  “I don’t care,” Aralyn said. “What have they got you smuggling from Eris that’s so damn important?”

  “I don’t know,” Reed said with a pout.

  Aralyn reached for the scalpel once more and plucked it from the table.

  “No, seriously!” he said, shying away from her and backing toward the wall. “They don’t tell me! I… I never even looked!”

  “Liar,” said Kita from the floor. “They tell you what to say if a customs agent ever actually gets their hands on it. What did they tell you it was?” Her eyes narrowed.

  Kita’s mother had sold her into orachal slavery when she was just a kid. If anyone knew the ins and outs of an orachal smuggler’s job, it would be her. She had successfully called several slavers’ bluffs already. It was a pity that it hadn’t gotten them further.

  Reed eyed her hard. “They said it was medicine for the outer stations.”

  “So it has to be orachal then, right?” Aralyn turned and stared at her compatriots.

  “Please. Of course it’s orachal.” Riordan’s voice fuzzed over their earpieces. “There’s no way Eladia’s actually involved in helping anyone.”

  “It’s medicine, okay? My stash is in the warehouse,” Reed insisted, hopping carefully along one foot to lean against the surgical table, despite his earlier protests. “They pay a crap ton for meds out in these old stations!”

  “Medicine?” Caden echoed, shifting his weight. “You expect us to believe that you’re working for the head of the human trafficking industry in Sol and possibly other systems, and you’re smuggling medicine like some kind of spacer Mother Teresa?”

  Reed shrugged. “Well, it… it doesn’t look like orachal,” he admitted. “Doesn’t smell like it, either.”

  Aralyn contemplated the news. She didn’t feel like he was lying, but there was no way to tell for certain. With his injury, he wouldn’t get far on foot, and they didn’t have time to run down a potentially misleading spot for where his stash might be. Riordan had been picking up excited chatters about the goon for most of the morning since he’d missed his check in with one of Eladia’s agents on the Eris station. Originally, they’d intended to grab the higher-up and leave the smuggler, but the agent had somehow figured out that something was wrong after only a few minutes of delay and high-tailed it out of the docking bay. They’d had to settle for door number two, and so far, it was turning out to be a risky move, regardless.

  “Rio, bring the ship to the warehouse,” Aralyn said, speaking into her wrist module. “Keep the engines warm.”

  “On it,” crackled Riordan’s voice.

  “What did you have in mind?” Kita asked, standing up.

  “Start walking,” Aralyn said, tossing the scalpel at the table.

  Reed nodded and limped forward, eager to be out of the small room.

  “I hope for your sake you’re not lying, Reed,” said Caden, grabbing his arm and dragging him forward once more, purposely choosing a pace tha
t was too quick for him.

  Kita hung back by Aralyn and pointed at their captive with her chin. When she spoke, it was in soft whispers. “You think he’s on the up and up?”

  Aralyn stared at his bloody leg and bit back an aggravated sigh. “No,” she replied, “but I think he’s more scared of us at the present than of Eladia or any of her people in the future. If he’s all the way out here, he’s a big time supplier… why is he giving up so easily?”

  Kita frowned. “That has me worried too, actually,” she admitted. “The smugglers that run this course make transactions with the outer systems’ suppliers, or at least they used to. This is a big money run, and he doesn’t care if he’s out a hundred thousand creds for it…?”

  While Caden kept their prisoner occupied up ahead, Aralyn mused anxiously. She knew enough to sense that something wasn’t right. As Kragg always said, she needed to “trust her gut.” She took the safety off of her handgun and removed the holster strap, just in case. They made it outside into the freezing weather inside the dome and headed back down the street to the old warehouse where their troubles began.

  “Please,” the smuggler began to beg again, “just let me get out of here before anyone else shows up. They’ll know I helped you, and I’ll…”

  He trailed off, but Aralyn really didn’t need for him to finish the sentence to put two and two together. She’d watched Pris’s eyes meet the back of her skull when Eladia realized the mercenary had helped them get into the Mercury compound. It was an image she still had nightmares about, and one she doubted she’d forget anytime soon. She felt guilty for putting the smuggler into such a position, but there were bigger things at stake than his shipment getting repurposed. If it came down to a choice between her life and some random orachal smuggling stranger’s, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which one she would pick.

  The warehouse’s double doors still lay ajar from their panicked flight less than a half hour prior, and snowflakes were drifting their way into the opening between the rusted metal.

  “Wait,” Aralyn called out, stepping forward and surveying the ground. “Do those look fresh to you?” she whispered, pointing down at a set of boot prints heading in and out of the door.

  The snow had been falling steadily since they’d dashed toward the research facility; she shouldn’t have been able to make out individual boot treads.

  Caden shoved their prisoner against the side of the building, out of sight of the doorway, and leveled his shoulder with the frame while the two girls followed his lead and moved out of potential harm.

  “This place have an upper story?” he whispered.

  Aralyn, recalling what little she had seen on her mad run through, shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  He slapped the metal door nearest him open with his palm, sending a tremendous bang and shockwave through the brittle building, but no gunfire came their way. He pointed his gun in and swept the area, stepping out of sight behind an old box.

  “Anyone in here?” he called out.

  Silence answered him, and he carefully peered around the edge of the box. Aralyn hurried in after him, taking cover on the other side behind an old table flipped on its side, and felt her hands sweating inside her gloves. Her nerves were a jangle of over-reaction and had been the whole time she’d been on the run, half-hunting Eladia, and half being hunted by her. And Caden’s father, was out there somewhere, too, selling innocent people into slavery and sending Spectors their way. Her blood boiled thinking of Proctor Madigan and his part in the mess they were in now.

  “I think it’s clear,” Kita said, shoving Reed through the doorway, her gun perched on his shoulder. “But someone was here, recently; Rio might have scared them off when he brought the ship around earlier. Maybe they’re hoping to clear out the stash soon.”

  Reed’s eyes swiveled in the direction of the far corner before they flickered away.

  “Thanks for that,” said Aralyn, holstering her gun and heading for his line of sight.

  He groaned quietly behind her as she made her way over and found what she was looking for: a recently disturbed pile of old straw hidden underneath a couple plastic bags of synthetic top soil. She pushed the bags aside and shoved the straw out of the way, and there, beneath it, was the lid to a lockbox.

  “Key?” she said, facing Reed as they brought him over.

  He glared at her, his mouth set in a firm line.

  “You either tell me, or we do it via strip search,” she threatened.

  Kita nodded. “She will, too. I’ve seen it happen.”

  Reed, determining the best prospect between being stripped naked in freezing cold temperatures or giving over the key card that would take his livelihood from him chose the latter and pulled it from inside his sleeve and tossed it to Aralyn.

  “Anything we should know about before we open that box?” Caden asked.

  Reed shook his head, his cheeks pink with anger.

  “Step back guys,” Aralyn warned anyway. She’d known enough smugglers and runners in her time to understand that a stash this important didn’t just get left hanging around with no assurances. She stepped behind it, grabbed the u-shaped handle, and lifted it, flinching as an energy bolt bounded from a gun secured to the lid and burned itself into an old timber across the room.

  “That doesn’t look like nothing to me,” Kita muttered, glaring at their captive.

  He at least had the decency to look sheepish that his plan had been out-maneuvered.

  “So was that your big game? Let one of us get shot and hope whoever you had running around here took out the other two?” Caden asked, glaring at him.

  The smuggler sucked his teeth and rolled his eyes, dismissing the charge with a quiet turn of his head.

  Aralyn dropped the hinged lid and stepped back around to the front. She and her team angled around the lockbox, which was nestled into the floor, and stared down at the twenty or so odd vials of what could actually have been non-descript medicine. She picked one up and studied it suspiciously, staring at the clear jar’s contents. Unlike regular orachal serum, which was silvery white in appearance with a somewhat pearlescent sheen, the liquid within the vials was clear―almost like water. The only thing that spoke to its viscosity were the lines of thick “legs” that clung to the sides and dripped back down into the main body of the vial when she swirled it around. There was orachal’s trademark soft pearlescence as well, but if it was orachal, it was one of the strangest versions of the drug she’d ever seen.

  “Huh,” she said aloud.

  “I told you. It’s not orachal,” Reed insisted.

  “You also said the box wasn’t loaded,” Caden reminded him. “Now shut up if you don’t have anything better to add.”

  Reed’s mouth snapped closed like a trap.

  “We’ve gotta check this out,” Aralyn said, replacing the vial. “It’s important to Eladia, and therefore important to us.” She lifted the box of vials up and left the box open.

  Outside, the sound of a ship’s engine approached, and Aralyn handed the box over to Caden as they made their way to the entryway, confirming it was the UDA spaceship they’d appropriated when Caden defected from the Spectors in order to help them along on their wild goose chase.

  “Same deal as the others?” asked Kita.

  “The very same, if he’ll take it,” Aralyn confirmed, turning to the smuggler. “You see, Reed, you’re in a bit of a pickle.”

  He glared at her with a stare hot enough to burn kindling.

  “We can give you a new identity and get you back to your ship, and you can go anywhere you’d like, totally off the map, free of a Tartarys sentence, and never see us or Eladia again.” She pointed at Kita’s gun and then her own. “Or we can keep our weapons trained on you until we get aboard the ship, and leave you here to limp your own way back to the docking bay, if you can, so that we can get a head start off this iceberg of a planet.” She shrugged. “What’ll it be?”

  Reed seemed on
the fence over his dilemma, and squirmed uneasily on the one good leg he had, which must have been screaming with pain.

  “Hurry it up!” Kita demanded. “This place is colder than ice and smells like a hot fart. I want to get out of here!”

  “You’ve got an ID maker?” he asked.

  Aralyn nodded. “On the ship you see behind me. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder and smiled knowingly. “It’s not connected to the database, so the ID is aesthetic only. You won’t be able to―”

  “Yeah, I know. Proper scanning stations won’t buy it. I don’t hit those up to begin with, as a matter of speaking.” He offered a wry smile.

  Aralyn felt the first dangerous kindling of hope within her. She had him, and they both knew it. “What’s it gonna be?” she asked.

  Reed sighed, crossing his arms. “Why are you doing this? No one rips Eladia Galven off and lives to tell about it. You know she’s going to find you.”

  Aralyn smirked. “That’s exactly what we’re counting on, actually.”

  Chapter Two

  “Thank the stars for cowards,” Kita said, kicking her feet up on the metal runner that ran the length of the bar in front of her.

  Next to her, Aralyn sipped delicately from a small shot glass on the counter and cringed as the full force of triple-distilled, home-brewed vodka punched her squarely in the gut and made her jaw clench. She was halfway through her fourth shot and already intensely feeling the effects of honest-to-Helios heavy liquor.

  “And for blabbermouths,” added Riordan. He took a long chug of a tall pint glass filled with dark amber fluid and set in next to the holo-table in front of him before picking up his cue stick. “It was practically a confessional.” He leveled a shot on the twitchy eight ball, lined his sight, and fired. The glitchy pool table froze, then counted his turn as a scratch. His glass fell through and went crashing to the floor. He sucked his teeth and slapped the stick down. “Bloody hell! Broken garbage. I know children that could have designed this better.”