Hotbloods 6: Allies

I shrugged. “Just in case.”

“In case a wire jumps out at ye?” Stone laughed, turning subtly toward Lauren to see if she was laughing, too. To his obvious disappointment, she wasn’t even listening to him.

“Okay, well, if I’m not back in twenty minutes, send out a search party,” I joked, steeling myself. “I might have tripped in the dark and smacked my head on something sharp.”

“Be careful… Watch out for the goblins,” Navan murmured, the dimmed light sending him off to sleep again. He was so delirious from lack of rest that I doubted he’d even be able to remember sending me off to the engine room. He probably hadn’t meant to do it in the first place, his fevered mind making him say things he didn’t want to say.

Shoving the gun into the waistband of my pants, I headed out of the cockpit and crept through the main space of the ship, checking for any sign of hidden monsters. For a moment, I wondered if Mort might be responsible for all of this. Perhaps he’d snuck back on board and tucked himself away in the deepest, darkest crevice of the vessel, just waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Here, out in space, we were at our most vulnerable, and someone like Mort would definitely have played on that.

Shaking off the weird feeling bristling through me, I pressed on down the right-hand hallway until I reached the hatch that dropped down into the engine room. Clambering down the steps, I was surprised to find that the room was lit. Emergency bulbs had come on, filling the place with an unsettling green glow, which made me feel like I was in a haunted house at a funfair. At any moment, I thought a sheet on a coat hanger was going to come flying out at me, followed by a dime-store Frankenstein’s monster.

Using the strange green light, I found my way to the electrical mainframe at the far side of the engine room. It was tucked away in a large metal cabinet, underneath the bedroom Navan and I shared. Here, there were no weird symbols to decipher or control panels to understand, just straightforward, good old-fashioned wires, fuses, and circuits.

“Let’s see what we can do with you, eh?” I said, speaking aloud to calm my nerves. I opened the cabinet door and peered inside, startled by the sight before me. Although there were reams upon reams of neatly tied cables, one section seemed to have been tampered with, the cables pulled out and cut, severing the circuit altogether.

I followed the thick cable up through the cabinet, using my eyes once the wire went too high for my fingers. It snaked up the wall and across the top of the engine room ceiling, before disappearing out into the main body of the ship, where it was no doubt hidden behind the wall paneling.

It really was concerning, but the severed cable itself was an easy fix. I just had to use connecters on either end of the cut pieces and reattach them. Some connectors were already tucked away on a ledge at the bottom of the cabinet, but I first needed to find out how lively the cable was. Scanning the room for anything I could use, I settled for a scrap piece of metal with a rubber end. Holding the rubber end tight, I approached the severed section of the cable and touched the piece of metal to it.

A bright blue light surged up the top end of the cable, racing along the line like a greyhound on a racetrack. I followed it intently, knowing I was going to need to switch off the main electrical systems before I did anything, unless I wanted to be blown halfway across the room.

As I followed the blue light, I froze. My eyes were drawn to something overhead, clinging to the power cables. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was my eyes playing tricks on me, but then it flickered again, a clear shape emerging. A dark figure lingered above me, fazing in and out of sight.

It seemed we had a stowaway… and they were wearing an invisibility suit.





Chapter Twenty-Nine





I made a show of following the line of cable with my eyes, doing my best to ignore the flickering figure above me. It didn’t look like they knew their suit had malfunctioned, whoever they were, and I wasn’t about to make it obvious—not when they lingered between me and the exit. If they’d gone to the trouble of using an invisibility suit, they would undoubtedly leap to attack the moment they knew their cover had been blown.

I huffed out a troubled sigh. “Dammit, I’m going to need another pair of hands for this,” I mumbled, keeping up the pretense. “Must be space rats or something.”

Picking up a few of the connectors from the ledge inside the cabinet, I moved slowly back through the engine room, careful not to draw any attention to myself. I wanted our hidden friend to think they’d gotten away with it, even though I could feel their eyes on me as I made my way toward the stepladder, which led out of the engine room and back into the main body of the ship.

The climb back up through the hatch was one of the most terrifying experiences I’d ever endured. I was convinced the suited shadow was going to snatch at my legs and pull me back down at any moment. What made it ten times worse was trying to escape while keeping an air of calm, not wanting the shadow-person to know I knew they were down there.

In fact, without the surge of electricity to help, causing the suit to flicker, I had no idea whether our stowaway had exited the hatch after me. They might have been walking right behind me and I wouldn’t have known. The thought of it sent a shiver up my spine.

Where had we even picked this person up? Had they found their way in from the depths of space? Had they crept on board while we were still on the Junkyard? Had they snuck on while we were lingering near Vysanthe? It was impossible to know, and even more impossible to ask. All I knew was, we were in very real danger. Already, they’d sabotaged our navigation system, and now they’d moved on to our general support systems; it was only a matter of time before they started knocking out the most important systems we had on board.

On the way back to the cockpit, I followed the dimmed lights of the hallway, though the light of the main space was still blacked out ahead, I almost jumped out of my skin as Stone emerged from the shadow, stepping into the hazy glow. A wave of relief followed. I knew it was a long shot, but the ambaka’s skills might be the only thing that could capture our stowaway. If he could set his third eye in the right position, we could freeze the stowaway. The only problem was figuring out where the shadow was hiding. After all, I didn’t know if they’d followed me this far—I couldn’t sense anyone, and I couldn’t hear anyone, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

“All done?” Stone asked, with a note of disappointment. “I were just comin’ to see if ye needed a hand. I’ve been wantin’ a look at the wirin’ on this thing ever since I joined yer all.”

“I hit a bit of a snag,” I replied calmly. “Actually, I was coming to find you. I knew you’d been dying to see the wiring and you’ve got experience with this kind of thing, so I thought you might be able to help me out. It was a bit more complicated than I expected. Something weird has happened with the cables, and I can’t fix it on my own.” I flashed him a look that I hoped told him there was something else amiss. He peered at me curiously for a few moments, before giving a casual shrug.

“No problem, lass, I’ll help ye out. You want me to fetch anyone else?”

“No, it’s okay. I think you’re the best man for the job.” I didn’t want to draw more attention to the situation, if the stowaway was watching us. If I went and got a group of people together, they might start to suspect that I was on to them.

He grinned. His calm demeanor was rubbing off on me. “Always am, Ri.”