“You literally have two minutes, then I’m heading for the city with or without you,” I said. “Your time starts now.” I started counting in my head. It kept me focused. My thoughts were slowing. I’d pushed myself too far and now I was dangerously close to making a fatal mistake.
Loch stepped a meter up the canyon then froze. He didn’t even seem to be breathing. He held statue-still for thirty seconds then slowly sank down.
“There’s a hidden door. Just saw a kid sneak out and head for the canyon farther down. I don’t think he saw me, but we need to move. I didn’t see any guards. We’ll run for the fence.”
I stomped my feet and promised myself the largest cup of real hot chocolate I could find. It would be an extravagant expense on a planet this isolated but worth every penny if I survived long enough to claim it.
“Okay, let’s do this,” I said.
Loch grabbed my wrist and pulled me up the final rise of the canyon. The fence was only about twenty-five meters away, but nothing gave us any cover. It looked like a hodgepodge of whatever the citizens had leftover rather than a true fence. Old doors and windows, pieces of plastech, and scraps of wire were all held together by welds, ropes, and prayers.
We pounded across the open space. It took all of my concentration to run. Twice I stumbled, and Loch’s grip on my wrist was the only thing that kept me upright. Exhaustion clawed at me with soft, sweet fingers.
We reached the fence and Loch dropped my wrist. His hand left a band of heat on my flesh. I wanted nothing more than to curl up next to him and leech away his warmth. I shook off the images of our naked limbs entwined and followed him down the fence line.
The door was only visible once you were standing right in front of it. A bit of rope worked as a pull and two pieces of barbed wire tied around a fence post were the hinges. This section of fence was on rocky ground, so no footprints gave away the location.
Loch opened the door, peeked through, then reached back to pull me through with him. It was immediately clear that this was not the best part of town. Trash littered the street and the plastech houses were dark and shuttered.
Cheap and easy to build, plastech houses were the first buildings to go up on any new planet. It seemed the local residents then decided to take matters into their own hands, adding levels with mud bricks and closing off alleyways with the same.
It was either very early or very late because the streets were empty. Or this section of the city had been abandoned. While that would help us hide, mercs generally didn’t cede sections of the city without a reason.
Loch led us through the streets like he knew where we were going. I did my best to keep up, but the world was hazy around the edges by the time he stopped in front of a decrepit building. He paused at the door, then swung it inward and stepped inside.
The inside wasn’t any warmer than the outside, but at least the walls blocked the cutting wind.
“Stay here,” he said.
I blinked and he was gone. How long had I been standing here? I forced myself to walk around when I wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball and sleep. In the faint light that filtered through the filthy windows, I saw that the front rooms of the house were mostly empty. A few pieces of broken furniture proved that someone had once lived here, but they seemed to be long gone.
“Come on,” Loch said. “I found a room with a heater.”
I followed him deeper into the house. It was dark enough that I couldn’t see what I was stepping on. He stepped into a dimly lit bedroom, complete with a tiny bed and thin bare mattress. It looked a lot like the bed in the cell on the Mayport. True to his word, the heater in the wall was struggling to warm the room. The overhead light panel produced enough light to see by, but it must have been set to its lowest setting.
Loch shut the door and dragged what looked like a broken dresser in front of it. My heart rate spiked and adrenaline cleared away some of the cobwebs in my mind. I’d followed him like a puppy into a room with a bed and only one exit—an exit he’d just blocked.
“Strip,” he said. He started pulling off his own clothes.
Oh, hell no. I backed away. He was strong and fast and not half-frozen. Even if I could grip a knife, it wouldn’t do much good. That didn’t mean I was going down without a fight.
Loch glanced at me then froze. He straightened. His eyes dropped half-closed and his mouth curled into a melting grin. My heartbeat kicked up and not from fear. The man could stop traffic with a look like that.
“Ada,” he drawled, “if I wanted to fuck you, I wouldn’t have to lock you in to do it.” He stalked across the distance that separated us while I stood frozen. “I prefer my women warm and willing. And since you are neither, you’re just going to have to imagine how good it could be.” He cupped my jaw with a warm hand and glided his thumb over my lips. “Now strip before you die of hypothermia. And leave your underclothes on.”
By the time I’d shed clothes down to a short-sleeved shirt, bra, and boxer briefs, Loch was down to his own boxer briefs and had laid out several emergency blankets on the bed. He raised an eyebrow at my clothing but didn’t say anything.
“In you go,” he said, holding up the edge of a blanket. I slid across the crinkly foil blanket to the edge of the bed facing the wall. “Lights on or off?” he asked.
“On,” I said. Definitely on. I needed to be able to see him.
“Okay,” he said. He slid into bed behind me and the mattress dipped under his weight. I tensed and held myself still on the very edge of the bed. A warm arm around my waist dragged me back against scalding skin. He cursed the air blue. “You should’ve told me you were this cold.”
Modesty forgotten, I pulled his arm farther around me and wiggled to get as close to him as possible. With the emergency blankets covering me from neck to feet and a large, warm body at my back, I finally felt like maybe I would survive the day.
I don’t know how long I’d drifted in and out of sleep before the shivering started, but once it began, sleep was a distant memory. I shivered so hard my teeth chattered. Loch turned me over so I faced him and tucked me into his chest with my head on his arm. He wrapped both arms around my back and threw a leg over my lower body.
Hours or perhaps days later my shivers slowed down and I dropped into an exhausted sleep.
When I awoke, I was alone in the bed, and I was warm. In addition to the emergency blankets, I was covered by two long cloaks. I rolled away from the wall and every muscle protested. Apparently shivering was a full-body workout.
Marcus sat propped against the wall by the door, studying a small com tablet. “Do you want the bad news or the worse news?” he asked without looking up.
“What happened to the good news?”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?” He continued without waiting for a response, “There are exactly zero commercial flights out of this shithole. Three days from now a merc ship is leaving for the nearest station, but for reasons that should be obvious, that’s not our best option.”
“Is that the bad or the worse? Wait, did you do a sweep of this stuff to make sure it’s clean?”
“That’s the bad news. And yes, I checked for bugs, all of it is clean. The worse news is that Rockhurst’s team landed two hours ago. So far they don’t seem to have alerted the locals to who they’re searching for, but it may only be a matter of time.”
“They landed the Santa Celestia here and no one blinked an eye?” Yamado may have left the planet to the mercs and smugglers, but that didn’t mean they’d overlook a rival House landing a battle cruiser on their planet, worthless or not.
“No, they left the Santa Celestia in space. It’s too large to land here. They’re in a smaller unflagged merc ship, probably one they kept in the Santa Celestia’s hangar for covert planet landings.”