Page 83 of Enthraller

She straightened her jacket and started walking, very deliberately brushing past the hover with Ed sitting on it.

She ran a hand down his arm as she went, in defiance.

No one touched her again.

32

The surroundings looked familiar,but Wren had been running for her life when she’d come through here, and during a storm, as well.

There had been a few breaks in the weather, and she’d escaped in the early morning hours, so it had been during daylight hours when she’d stumbled across the wreckage.

To the right, the nanos told her.It’s just through the trees.

She stopped, and thinking she needed water, Linao passed her a bottle.

She took it and drank, taking her time.

“How did Renard and his group know I was here on Ytla, and that they should kidnap me, specifically?” she asked as she screwed the lid back on the bottle. “Was that just coincidence?”

“Renard and his people had found those carvings months before, but they hadn’t found the other half of the wreck, and they needed more supplies. The scientific team had arrived a short while after them, and their arrival complicated things by making supply drops difficult. Our contact on the supply freighter couldn’t drop anything off for them in secret anymore.” Linao had taken out her own bottle of water and was drinking.It didn’t look like she was going to give anything to Ed, so Wren walked over to him.

“At least let him have his hands in front of him,” she said, and after a pause, Linao nodded to Fenton and he released Ed’s hands from behind him, and restrained him with his hands in front.

Once that was done, Wren handed him her water.

He hesitated, looked up at her.

She gave him a fierce look back, and with a tiny quirk of his lips, he took it.

“Thanks.”

Wren watched as Linao packed her bottle away, and decided to prolong the conversation. “So Renard told Navar where to find the carvings, so they’d have a civilian to kidnap? Why not kidnap one of the scientists?”

“Thatwasthe plan. They thought Special Forces would allow the scientists access to the carvings and they were going to take whoever showed up to check them out,” Linao said, flicking a look at Navar. “But someone up the SF hierarchy had a personal grudge against someone on the scientific team and refused to let them look at it. Insisted an SF consultant be called in. You were the lucky person.”

“Politics,” Navar said, and spat.

“Why not kidnap someone from the teams?” Ed asked. “Why bring a civilian into it at all?”

Renard gave a snort. “Because they wouldn’t have waited for a few days for the storm to pass to rescue one of their own team members,” he said. “Navar could argue it was too dangerous to bring a civilian through that weather, but one of their own? They wouldn’t have waited, and we needed time to get the supply drop organized.”

“But Iwaspart of the SF,” Wren said.

“A consultant. Not a team member.” Navar shrugged.

That had come through, loud and clear, Wren thought. It was why she trusted no one on the Nanganya teams any longer. She’d thought she was part of the group. She had been shown very clearly that she wasn’t.

“That puts you in your place,” Linao said, an edge to her voice, as if she sympathized with Wren. “So, how sure are you we’re going in the right direction?”

“Everything here looks familiar,” Wren said, letting her gaze sweep past the trees her nanos said were a landmark. “Maybe we need to slow down now?”

There was no way she was showing them the wreck. She had gotten the sense she and Ed were dead the moment their usefulness was up.

The early winter dusk was already creeping up on them, though, and she wondered what the plan was for where they were spending the night. Darkness was falling swiftly, and the clouds on the horizon were a nasty bruised purple.

As if she’d just noticed all this herself, Linao turned suddenly to Renard. “Did you bring any gear for us to sleep out?”

He lifted his head in disgust and shook his head. “No.”

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