Seconds later, the balcony door above me closed.
I was still standing there, fighting to keep from passing out, when the light came on in the room behind me. I turned my head, terrified out of my mind.
A little old lady stared at me, her wrinkled mouth ajar as she gaped at a face I could barely see reflected in the glass. She clutched a pearl handbag, still holding the drapery cord she must have pulled to get a view of the night sky out her west-facing balcony. I had what looked like two blackening eyes, a swollen cheek, cut and bleeding lips. I touched my forehead, forgetting her briefly as I focused on my reflection. My hairline was bleeding too.
I contemplated a story to get her to let me in, then simply turned, limping for the opposite balcony wall. Gripping the glass divider, I climbed, fighting not to cry out as I put part of my weight on my swollen knee to boost myself up.
Gripping the glass divider, I slid around it with one leg, then eased down until my butt rested on the railing of the next balcony over. I placed my feet on the terrace floor and staggered to the glass door. After trying the handle and finding it locked, I walked the length of that balcony and did the same on the other side.
I repeated this again seven more times.
Finally, I had to rest. I leaned on a glass door leading into a darkened stateroom...worried I could pass out from the pain in my knee.
As soon as I’d regained my breath, I yanked myself up, teeth gritted, shielding my light more thoroughly than I could remember doing.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t tried the door yet.
I gave it a tug. The glass slid smoothly on its track, unlocked.
My brief elation flattened as I thought through my options once I was back inside the ship. I had no way to get off, short of trying to drop one of the lifeboats, which didn’t seem like a realistic option. Whether I left the cabin or stayed, I ran the risk of being caught by roving bands of infiltrators...or clubbed to death by Frank and Norma Jean from Great Falls once the Rooks convinced them I’d tortured and killed their pet poodle, Mr. Bigglesworth.
Giving a dark kind of laugh, I eased through the gap in the balcony door.
The room was empty.
For a moment I just stared at the darkened space, fighting to catch my breath. Even if there was a way to do it safely, I couldn’t leave the ship. I needed to find Chan, or Eliah. I needed help.
I’d take the stairs.
If they already had Revik—
But I couldn’t think about Revik yet.
Terian stared at the VR shadow of the squad leader.
“I am confused,” he said. “Please explain, ‘you lost her’...I am not following.”
“Sir.” The squad leader grew audibly nervous. “We made visual contact and she rabbited. We tracked her to a stateroom—” He cut himself off, sensing the other’s impatience. “We’ll find her, sir. We’re doing thermal scans of the wake now, in the event she jumped or fell—”
“Fell. As in, fell off the ship.” Terian’s lips twisted in puzzlement, replicated in painstaking accuracy by his virtual avatar. “Really. So that’s a possibility? The planet’s only living telekinetic seer may have accidentally ‘fallen off’ a moving vessel into freezing cold salt water...to be chopped into small pieces for the seals to eat? We are exploring that option, yes?”
“Sir, I—”
“Do you have any idea what I will do to you, if that scenario eventuates?”
The infiltrator’s shadow fell silent.
Terian said, “Yes. Good. Now, I would like you to explore options other than the ‘falling off’ one you seem so fond of...”
“Yes, sir. Of course, we—”
Terian terminated the link.
As his physical vision cleared, he found himself staring around at a damaged segment of corridor on the fifth deck, illuminated only by the sickly glow of an organic yisso torch.
It looked like what it was—the scene of a prolonged gunfight in a relatively tight space. They’d locked him down in one segment of corridor, but it took more than an hour to subdue him from there. The pastel and gold ship’s interior was barely recognizable.
As the torch panned, the swath of light illuminated holes in plaster walls. One still smoked, but they had finally gotten the last of the guns away from him, too.
Terian’s extraction team stood in an uneven half circle now, staring down at a being that was finally on the ground, although still not fully unconscious. Two of the med techs hunched over him, trying to assess the damage to his nervous system, if any, from the third dart they’d finally hit him with.
“He wasn’t to be killed,” Terian muttered. He looked at the leader of the extraction team. “He wasn’t to be killed, Varlan...I said two darts. No more.”