time we spent searching together gave me a chance to ask how he’d survived so well in the lab for three full days. It turned out he’d had food and water in a small pack and used empty biohazard bags for those bodily functions I’d wondered about.
On day four of wandering the Dark, I gripped my console, growling and wanting to give the damn thing a good shake.
“I can’t find it!” I had to get what was left of my crew to safety, finish drawing six bags of blood, and then get to the Grand Temple on Reaginine before Bridgebane’s ten days were up. If he survived the Overseer’s wrath about letting me get away—again—my uncle would expect the deal to stand. If I didn’t pay up, he’d take either Mareeka or Surral to Hourglass Mile, I had no doubt.
“Then finally tell me what we’re looking for!” Shade whipped his head around. “I can’t navigate without coordinates.”
“It moves,” I said. “There are no coordinates.”
“It what?” he ground out in frustration.
I pressed my lips together. Fuck it. “The Fold.”
“The what, baby?”
A ripple of awareness shivered over me every time he called me that. Shade was like a goose-bump-raising plague. “The Fold. The rebel hideaway. Our safe zone.”
He frowned. “Well, it must be big. A huge spacedock. Or on a planet, right? Why can’t you find it?”
“Because it doesn’t exist on this side of things.”
His face went blank. Yeah, I’d lost him there.
“You have to fly through an almost untraceable gateway to get there. The others say it hurts like hell.”
“The others?” he asked, frowning again.
“I don’t feel it,” I admitted to him. I never had.
“A1?” he asked.
Shade’s question was a good one. I’d often wondered that myself, although before I’d been using the Overseer’s words for the differences in me—freak, alien, mutant. Really positive stuff.
I shrugged. “Maybe.” Among us, we’d always chalked it up to the vagaries of the Fold, and I’d let the crew think it was a quirk in the gravitational warp and not a quirk in me.
But now, I’d done it. I only had one secret left, and that was the blood exchange Shade and I had agreed to. Otherwise, I’d told everyone here everything—called a fucking powwow in the kitchen as soon as Fiona could walk and spilled my guts. Because fuck it, we needed the truth here. We needed to protect each other and survive. Because fuck, fuck, fuck!
“Where is it?” I yelled, giving the base of my console a kick that hurt me more than it.
“Look for denser Dark,” Merrick said. Again.
“I am! We all are!” We had been for days. At this rate, I was going to have to leave the Endeavor and the serum in the relative safety of the Outer Zones while Shade took me to Reaginine in his cruiser.
That would be fun to explain to the others. Just sit tight for a day or two while I hand over a weapon to the enemy.
And being trapped in a tiny starcruiser with Shade was sure to go well.
I glanced at the man in question. We hadn’t spoken about anything that had happened before the attack on the Squirrel Tree. Or touched. Or been alone together. We hadn’t talked about us at all.
I went back to glaring out the bridge’s windows. Deep breaths. Focus.
First the Fold. Then Reaginine. Then I’d figure out how to get Shiori back.
I fought the growing ache in my chest. Her screamed “I forbid it!” haunted me, but how could I not?
“What if it’s not here?” I abruptly asked. “We’ve scoured all of Sector 17, so what if it’s in 18 instead?” Just because the Fold was almost always somewhere in Sector 17 didn’t mean that it had to be. It could have been anywhere in the Outer Zones.
Merrick looked pensive. After a moment, he nodded. “Look around the Tarrah System first. It was there about fifteen years ago. That’s the last time I heard about it being outside of Sector 17.”
It suddenly seemed really handy to have a rebel older than Jax, Fiona, and me on board. None of us knew anything about where the Fold had been hanging out a decade and a half ago. Hell, we couldn’t even find it now.
“Shade.” I glanced at my navigator. “Set coordinates for the Tarrah System.”
Shade nodded, raking his gaze over me before turning back to his controls.
Something quivered in my belly. Despite neither of us addressing the giant elephant in the spaceship, there was no doubt in my mind