him was almost impossible, mostly because he never made any effort to understand her. He was always irritated by the paper and pencil she carried and reduced their interactions to little more than gestures and lipreading.
Maisie still didn’t quite understand how things had gone so wrong. One minute she had been in bed, sleeping as peacefully as one could in a damp, musty mine, and the next, she had been tossed out of her bed onto the floor. Her stepfather hadn’t even tried to stop the Splinter asshole who had knocked her around and dragged her out of the room by her hair. Unable to hear what the men around her were yelling or to see their mouths, she had been completely blindsided and confused.
Until she saw Devious, bloodied and unconscious on the floor of the interrogation cell. Someone had bashed him to bits, and she had known then that he wasn’t getting out of that mine alive. In that moment, she had been sure she was going to end up right there next to him, bloody and dying. Instead, she had been tied up, hooded and hauled away.
And now I’m here.
And Devious is definitely dead.
And that means Terror is never getting rescued.
Terror. The high value prisoner in the most secure cell in the mine. The man with one eye and terrible scars. The man she tapped out coded messages to while tending to his body and his cell. The man who had spit orange pulp in her face that first day and later seemed to look forward to her visits in much the same way she did. The man who had invaded her dreams and her thoughts and left her a confused mess.
Devious had intended to let Terror remain in captivity a little while longer. He never shared all of his plans with her, but when she had asked him how long he would let the torture and interrogation continue, he had admitted it wasn’t up to him. Someone above him had ordered Devious to stand down and wait.
That was the moment she had understood how truly stupid those men were. Devious just blindly followed his orders, trusting that someone else, someone more highly ranked, had made the correct decision. Even after Devious had confided in her that Terror had saved him more than once and that he owed him his life, he was willing to let Terror hang in that cell, starving and suffering.
Once she had realized that Devious was just as bad as the rest of them, she had made her choice. She was going to break Terror out, hide him in the woods with Red Feather friendlies, and get him back to his people. She had planned to hitch a ride with him and trade the information she had tucked away in her head for money and a ticket as far away from this sector of the galaxy as she could get. She didn’t care if she had to clean toilets on a space casino. She was done with her family and the war.
But the universe had other plans for her.
Plans that included someone betraying Devious and fingering him as a double agent and then exposing her as his accomplice. Not that anyone had ever asked her if she wanted to be his accomplice. No one ever asked her what she wanted or what she thought. They all ran roughshod over her and used her for their own benefit.
Irritated by the feeling of helplessness, she checked the sharp edge of the bone she had been honing against a rock. It seemed a bit macabre to use a bone in this way, but the materials available to her had been slim pickings. Satisfied with the edge to the bone knife, she started wrapping the handle with a long strip of fabric she had torn from her shirt. She needed to have a good grip when she attacked the guards. Cutting her hand deeply would only slow her down if she made it out of the camp and into the woods.
And then what?
She didn’t know. She had no idea where the camp was located or how far she was from a settlement. She would have to survive in the woods, try to navigate by the stars, and make her way to The City. After that, she needed to get off the planet, maybe to the colonies or even farther away.
Sound waves vibrated through her chest, and she paused her work for a moment. She couldn’t hear the thunder—couldn't