Page 36 of Fight or Fly

Leona

IWOKE UP with a poundingheadache and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. An unpleasantly hazy blank space separated my memories of the recent past—searchlights blinding me as hissing metal canisters flew through the windows—from wherever the hell I was now.

There was a kind of strange hissing background noise here, too—but it was different than before. More of a low drone.Airplane,my brain identified helpfully. I pried sticky eyelids open. It felt like dragging sandpaper across my eyeballs, and I could only see blurry shapes without detail. To make matters even more unpleasant, I desperately needed to use the restroom.

A soft groan of distress escaped my lips. I would have committed murder for a glass of water.

“Leo?” Kam’s soft rasp cut through my confusion like a razor blade. It sliced through my numbness to release the cold terror that I’d forgotten about in my drugged haze.

I made another wordless noise and reached in the direction his voice had come from. My arm jerked to a halt, unyielding metal digging into my wrist. I pulled fitfully against the restraint. Metal clinked against metal.

“You’re handcuffed to the seat,” Kam said hoarsely. “We both are. We’re on a plane—flying south, I think. Are you all right?”

More memories crowded in. Dear god—the gas canisters. I’d thought they’d used the nerve agent on us... that we were all as good as dead.

“We’re alive?” I croaked. It came out sounding like a question. I tried to reach for him again, only to remember the handcuff when it pulled me up short. I lifted the other arm instead, reaching awkwardly across my body. Chilly fingers tangled with mine and squeezed.

“For the moment, we are,” Kam replied.

I blinked rapidly, desperate to get some moisture in my eyes. “Jax?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Here,” came the tight reply.

Tears of relief at the proof that all three of us had survived finally allowed me to lubricate my eyeballs, and blink my surroundings into some kind of focus. We were on a mid-sized turboprop plane, based on the engine noise. It was daytime. Kam and I were each handcuffed to our metal seat frames by our right wrists, with our left arms free. Jax, by contrast, was shackled hand and foot, his muscles bulging as he strained against his bondage.

We were at the front of the plane—Kam next to me in the window seat, with Jax across the aisle from us. I craned to look behind me and found a good two dozen stony-faced military or paramilitary types watching us fixedly. My stomach dropped.

One of them unbuckled his seatbelt and rose, approaching us. He stopped and looked down at me for a moment before extending a canteen toward me. An angry red burn mark covered his right cheekbone—a few blisters decorating the center, and the eyebrow on that side half singed away.

“Drink,” he said, in a heavily accented voice.

Russian?From the heavy vowel and the way he swallowed the ‘k,’ I thought it must be.

I let go of my grip on Kam and took the canteen cautiously, holding it with my free hand so I could unscrew the top with my cuffed hand. The water was lukewarm but seemed fresh, so I drank cautiously—cognizant of the current state of my bladder.

The fear was going to hit me properly any time now. There was only one thing this could mean—we’d been captured by the Committee. And yet... aspects of the situation feltoff, somehow.

I offered the canteen to Kam. He shook his head, so I capped it again and handed it back to the soldier.

“Thank you,” I told him, trying to feel out the situation a bit more. “May I ask whose custody we’re in?”

The part of me that remembered being dragged out of my apartment in the middle of the night wanted to cringe back in fear, expecting a blow in retaliation for my question. But my higher brain functions were still rebooting—not quite on board with the program yet. It allowed me to pretend this wasn’t what it realistically had to be, and let me act with a level of courage and detachment I probably wouldn’t have been capable of displaying otherwise.

“You are prisoners of the Euro-Soviet branch of the Committee on Alphomic Suppression,malyshka,” he said. I’d been right—there was no mistaking his Russian accent. “Be glad you did not succeed in killing any of my men, or this flight might have been much less pleasant for everyone involved.”

Jax jerked sharply against one of his wrist shackles, the seat frame creaking with strain. It was pretty clear he’d have been happy to take his chances with that.

“Where are you taking us?” Kam asked, trying his luck since the soldier seemed willing to talk.

“That is not your concern,” the man said.

“Why the Euro-Soviet branch, though?” I pressed, desperately attempting to get some more brain cells firing. “Why not the North American branch? Aren’t we outside your jurisdiction?”

The man gave a thin smile that twisted with discomfort when it pulled at his burn injury. I wondered which of our Molotov cocktails had been the one to get him.

“Not for much longer,” he said.

That was unhelpfully cryptic. Practicality raised its head before I ended up making him angry or driving him back to his seat.

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