that fit his criteria had the same meager offerings, crummy little bunks and cramped cabins with bathroom facilities shared by an entire deck. Maisie wouldn’t complain if he booked them on one of those flights, but he couldn’t bear the thought of asking her to sacrifice her comfort a moment longer.
He scrolled to the next screen and spotted a shuttle connecting to a mid-sized ship headed for Sector 16. There were two seats on the shuttle and one cabin left on the ship. By the price, it was a large cabin. He tapped the screen to get the details, but Maisie suddenly tugged on his sleeve. He glanced back at her, and she used her eyes to urge him to look to the left.
“I’m looking,” he said, keeping his head toward her so it looked as if they were discussing the flight on the screen. His practiced gaze finally found what she wanted him to see. Two men, both of them marked on the face with prison tattoos, haggled with a food vendor. They were ex-Land Corps soldiers judging by their size. The tattoos identified them as deserters who had been convicted of cowardice and sentenced to hard labor on a prison planet. He understood Maisie’s concern. Deserters only gained their release from prison by signing lifelong contracts as bounty hunters for the Alliance.
The glasses he wore and his knit cap would buy him some time, but he was taller than most of the people surrounding them. His build was lean, but he still had the look of a Harcos male about him. An appraising glance was all it would take to nail him as the one-eyed Shadow Force operative on the run with a fugitive.
Not bothering to read the details on the cabin, he hastily booked the flight using his travel card, tapping it on the screen twice to buy the tickets. The fake names on the card he had gotten from the safe house populated the fields, and he quickly poked the screen to agree to the seemingly endless small print about regulations and rules and advisories.
When it was finally done, he pocketed his card, closed out of the screen and glanced at the pair of bounty hunters now messily eating their food. They weren’t as slick as he was when it came to surveillance. Their behavior was obvious, and their gazes lingered too long on Maisie.
He tapped Maisie’s arm, and she started walking a few steps ahead of him in the direction he indicated. The crowd was heavy in this part of the skyport, and the corridors were too narrow for the constant flow of bodies. He let the wave of travelers carry him to the left of Maisie, staying parallel to her while also maintaining enough space to dart a glance back every now and then to keep track of the bounty hunters tailing them. Maisie met his gaze at each gate they passed, silently questioning whether this was the one or not. Each time, he shook his head, and she kept walking.
One of the bounty hunters—the taller of the two—started to move in Maisie’s direction. Terror captured her gaze and used tactical signals to tell her what to do. Enemy. Double time. Go around. Don’t land.
It was a mash-up of directions. He hoped she understood meant that he wanted her to move quick, loop the departure deck and lose her tail. She signaled she had received his information, and he trusted that she did. He gestured for her to meet him and then placed nine and then seven fingers against his chest to let her know which gate was theirs.
Nodding, she lifted her hood a little higher to hide more of her face. Like an alley cat, she slipped through the crowd and disappeared from view. His concern for her safety remained paramount, but he trusted the survival skills that had kept her alive so far. If anyone could shake that bounty hunter, it was Maisie.
A sidelong glance confirmed the other bounty hunter continued to shadow him. Terror angled toward the left, using his shoulders to make his way through the crowd crammed into the bottleneck of the corridor. He managed to free himself from the throng and kept close to the wall, inching forward until he reached a wider section. Most of the crowd seemed to be continuing straight so he chose to turn left, taking a set of stairs to a lower level of the skyport where he would have fewer witnesses if