There was a ringing, pounding sound located somewhere behind his eyes and his head thumped with every heartbeat. The air smelled like burned wiring and he tried to mutter a curse, flailing a hand toward where he thought the console should be. There shouldn’t be that smell, not if the air filters were working.
Not unless the burned wires were just that close.
Someone caught his hand, held it in place. He thought he heard a voice but it was lost under the ringing. He cracked an eye open. The world spun around him.
Why am I on the deck? He could see the bottom of the console and his chair. He opened the other eye, groaning quietly, trying to reach for his head.
“Hold still.” This time, just barely, he could hear her. “Head wounds bleed like a bitch and you’ve got a cut on your forehead the size of my little finger.”
“Did we make jump?” he croaked, wincing again. He let both hands drop, trying to focus on Kelcie’s face.
“We’re in jumpspace,” she confirmed. “Not sure what happened right before we jumped, but we made it. Please tell me that we had a heading before we jumped.”
“I had the course laid in already,” he said, closing his eyes in an effort to tamp down rising nausea. “Habit. Always make sure that I get that done as soon as I can just in case.”
“Just in case,” she echoed. “Do I want to know why you developed that habit?”
He managed to grin. “Would you believe that it was something a family friend impressed upon me?”
Would you believe it’s something your father told me was the best advice he could ever give me?
There was silence for a few seconds. “Maybe.”
He took a breath and then winced. “Smells like burned wiring.”
“Probably the bulkhead above you. Hope it wasn’t anything important because something’s toast.”
Damn. I’ll have to check later. “Won’t know until I look. Is anything flashing red on the console?”
She took one of his hands and pressed it over a piece of cloth on his forehead—probably where he was bleeding. “Hold that there as hard as you can while I look.”
It wasn’t as if she was giving him much choice but to obey. “Okay.” He felt as much as heard her stand up, could almost sense her furrowed brow, her frown.
“No,” she said after a few seconds. “No, everything looks okay. Nothing’s flashing red.”
“Then we’re probably okay as long as the console doesn’t look like it’s damaged.”
“It’s not,” she said, kneeling back down. “Just you and the bulkhead. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “Help me up?”
“I’m not sure if I should.”
He choked on a laugh. “Are you going to make me spend the flight on the cockpit floor, then?”
“Okay. Okay, maybe not. Let me just—”
“It probably needs stitches and we’re not going to do that in here,” he said. “The kit’s stowed in the galley. We can either stitch it or glue it—whichever you’re more comfortable with. Not sure if you’re going to trust me to sew myself back up.”
“Not when it’s your face,” she said, a trace of wry humor lacing through her voice. That was good, in his estimation. She was steadying.
That was enough to steady him, too.
The world stopped spinning a few seconds after he was sitting up. He paused for a moment, then started to climb to his feet, leaving her scrambling to help.
“I thought you just—”
“Yeah, well,” he muttered. “I know what you thought.” Still holding the piece of cloth against the gash in his forehead, he looked over the boards himself slowly, reassuring himself that there was nothing to worry about.
Nothing except that ship showing up in orbit. Whoever was on the ground must have come rom there. I’ve gotten myself involved in something a little more serious than I thought—not that what I knew before I saw the Obsidian wasn’t bad enough. For a second, he leaned against the console, closing his eyes. Kelcie’s hand closed on his shoulder and squeezed.
“Davion?”
“Once we get this gash handled, I’ll have to change course. Just in case.”
She flinched. “They can track us?”
“Usually no,” he said slowly. “But I’d rather be safe than sorry. Guessing you would, too.”
She exhaled, nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Think we can wait that long?”
“Further out we get before we drop out of jump and correct, the more options open up,” he admitted. “Options aren’t a bad thing.”
“No, I guess not.” She took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. He reached up to squeeze her hand before he started for the hatch and the corridor beyond. “I’m guessing that we’re not staying in the Protected Zone?”
“No,” he said. “No, we’re not. We’re heading back to what a lot of folks would call—wrongly, in my opinion—the civilized galaxy.”
Kelcie choked on a laugh, falling in behind him as he headed slowly for the galley. “I’ll admit that I didn’t get much of a chance to form any kind of informed opinion on the matter. I think I almost regret it.”
He flashed her a smile over his shoulder and shrugged slightly. “Maybe someday.”
“Maybe,” she agreed.
He snapped on the galley lights as he stepped through the open hatch, heading for the small table at the center and one of the chairs tucked tight up underneath it. “Kit’s in the first cabinet there by the door, bottom shelf.”
She pointed to a row of gunmetal gray cabinets set beneath the countertop. “The lower ones?”
“Yeah,” he said. The chair scraped quietly across the deck, the sound sending a new lance of pain stabbing through his head from ear to ear. That’s probably not good. I want to sleep it off, but not sure if it’s going to be safe to do it. “There’s a suture kit and there’s glue. Either’s fine.”
“You sure?” She pulled the large white box off the bottom shelf and lugged it over to the table. “Hate to do one when the preference is for the other.”
He snorted softly. “I’m just glad I’m not doing it to myself—though it wouldn’t be the first time if I had to.”
“There’s a story there,” she observed, cracking the kit and starting to pull out gauze and disinfectant.
“Several, in fact, though I’ll admit that they don’t hold up well in the retelling and my head’s thumping too much to put on a good show.”
Kelcie grimaced. “That’s less than great.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
Gently, she nudged his hand aside so she could clean the cut. The bleeding had slowed, but he could tell that it hadn’t stopped completely. The flow started anew—accompanied with a nasty sting—as she started cleaning it. His nose wrinkled slightly and his jaw set, but he kept any sound of discomfort trapped behind his teeth.
“I’ll just have to keep an eye on you,”she murmured. “There’re pain meds somewhere in that kit, aren’t there?”
“Yeah. I’ll take something once the course is handled.” He probably could have taken something now, while she had the kit half torn apart, but it wouldn’t kick in until after the course was laid anyway. A little bit longer wouldn’t kill him. “Probably right before I lay down.”
They lapsed into silence as she finished cleaning the cut. He imagined that he knew now from the sensation—the sting, the pain—alone exactly how long it was, and how deep. It was much deeper than he would have liked, all things considered. He’d begun to think she was just going to do it all in silence when she finally spoke again.
“We’re going to have to be careful, aren’t we?” She reached for a tube of wound glue. “Once we get to wherever we’re going and leave the ship.”
He shrugged with one shoulder. “Part of it depends on where we go. Being careful’s probably not a bad idea. Anything come back to you?”
“Nothing that makes sense,” she said, then sighed, looking down as she fiddled with the tube. “I don’t know if that scares me or not.”
“Well, clearly every plan around all of that has changed. Originally you were going to have a quiet place to work through everything. What comes next probably isn’t that quiet.”
“It definitely feels like we’re on the run,” she said quietly, then leaned forward to start working on the cut again. “Because we are, aren’t we?”
A sigh escaped him. “Guess so.” I was trying not to think about it that way, but she’s right. We’re definitely on the run at this point—they’ve chased us from where I thought we were safe and now we’re going to be ping-ponging around, trying to find a good place to go to ground or lay low until she remembers. The possibility that they could stay aboard the ship hadn’t escaped him and was at least part of his plan, but they’d need more supplies sooner rather than later. She’d also need more clothes that didn’t make it look like she was some kind of refugee from period film—or the Protected Zone.
One problem at a time, Eamon. One problem at a time.
A rueful smile curved his lips despite his discomfort. She arched a brow at him.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“Just getting ahead of myself,” he said, careful not to move his head. “That’s all.”
“Oh.” She shook her head, smiling a little. “Worse problems, right?”
“There certainly could be.”
She nodded, setting down the wound glue and getting a bit of gauze to clean up the blood still on his face. He held still, letting her work, only moving when she sat back. “There we go. Best I can do.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” he said, starting to get up. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Try not to scare me like that again, huh?”
He grinned. “I’ll certainly try.”
He squeezed her shoulder and she reached up, fingers wrapping around his for a moment before she let go, her attention turning to cleaning up. He took a slow, deep breath and started back for the cockpit. He was already throwing his thoughts, his magic, toward plotting a new course for a new destination.
There was still work to do.
