“Buzz us if you need anything,” she told Renny, but he wouldn’t look up from the floor. She turned and made her way on jelly legs up the stairs to the galley, where Acorn was already helping herself to a box of raisins that had spilled during the turbulence.
Kane rushed to scoop up the fruit. “Stop her. The last time this happened, she ate too much and upchucked on my laundry.”
Cassia sniffed a laugh. She picked up Acorn but handed her another raisin while Kane’s back was turned. “That’s what you get for leaving your dirty clothes on the floor.”
“My clean laundry.”
Doran slogged to the cooler, still green in the face as he filled a bag of ice for Solara’s swollen eye.
“Here, let me do that,” Cassia said. She tucked Acorn in her breast pocket and reached for the bag. This was her job as ship medic. Besides, Doran was going about it all wrong. The best cure for swelling was a cool gel mask, not ice, followed by an application of camelback leeches. “You sit down,” she told Doran. “And you,” she added to Solara, who was probing her puffy eyelid, “hands off. You’re making it worse.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Solara teased. Doran added a fake salute.
Cassia set a smile free as she left to find her med-kit. She enjoyed falling into her old routine. This was the most normal she’d felt in ages.
A while later, after she’d treated one black eye, a sour stomach, and dozens of abrasions, she sat beside Kane on the bench and cocked an ear toward the cargo level to listen to the murmur of voices. She couldn’t make out any words, but Arabelle had stopped shouting. That had to be a good sign.
Renny had docked them inside an asteroid crevasse, but they couldn’t hide forever. Cassia’s people needed a cure, and she wouldn’t find it in a cave. Maybe her tech team on Eturia could run a search on the term adelvice and point her in the right direction. She should probably contact General Jordan, too.
“The hub wasn’t a total bust,” she whispered, leaning in to form a huddle. “We found a puzzle piece or two. We know that Marius’s financial backer is somehow tied to adelvice, and whatever that is, it’s important enough to kill for.”
“Don’t forget the Zhang mafia,” Solara said around her gel mask. “They belong on Earth, not in the fringe. I doubt it’s a coincidence that they were operating out of the same hub as Marius’s contact. Your husband’s probably in bed with the mob.”
Cassia agreed. It made sense. The financial backer had powerful connections within the Solar League, not to mention access to illegal weapons. Plus Marius’s father had described the backer as “the most twisted” man he’d ever met. That certainly fit Ari Zhang’s profile. What she didn’t understand was what Zhang would stand to gain from the deal.
Doran shifted nervously in his seat. “Did you notice who bought Arabelle?” When they shook their heads, he told them, “Reegan Fleece. I’ve heard of that guy. He’s kind of an urban legend on Earth. They call him Necktie Fleece because he has a thick scar across his throat and he likes to use a garrote for his kills.”
“A garrote?” Kane repeated. “That’s how the pirate lord of sector three died.”
Doran lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know if Necktie did it, but I’m glad we didn’t run into him at the restaurant. Arabelle’s boss was a puppy dog compared with him.”
That raised an interesting question for Cassia. Renny had once bragged that Arabelle was an electrical engineer on Earth, and a successful one. So why would a mafia hit man buy her and then outsource her to a restaurant to sell food from a cart—a job anyone could do? It seemed like a waste of human resources.
“Tell me about her boss,” she said. “You held him at gunpoint, right? Was that before or after he met Daro the Red?” At the confused looks the crew gave her, she clarified, “Did the deal go sideways because you didn’t have enough money, or because the mob met a pirate lord and panicked?”
Solara shared a glance with Doran and Kane. “Both, I guess.”
“It happened so fast that it’s hard to tell,” Kane said. “Why?”
“Because at first I was afraid Arabelle might be a spy,” Cassia explained. “That’s why I wanted her scanned before you brought her on board. But if she was a plant, the mob would want you to have her. They would’ve made the deal easy.”
“Not necessarily,” Kane argued.
Doran nodded. “Yeah, it would’ve been suspicious if they’d let her go without a fight.”
“But the scan came up clean,” Cassia said.
“And she didn’t come with us willingly,” Solara pointed out. “Kane grabbed her and ran. It’s not like she had time to stuff a wire down her bra.”
Kane tipped his head in concession. “Still, something about this doesn’t feel right. What we need is a place to lie low while we figure out how it all fits together.”
“Very low,” Solara said. “Just because we’re out of sight doesn’t mean we’re hidden. The mafia ship can pick up our current if they have an electrical scanner. We should probably shut down all the systems and disconnect the batteries.”