Page 12 of Sold to the Alien Smugglers

I can’t think in my panic. All I know is I have to get away.

Pausing in the doorway, I glance behind me. The bartender is huddling behind the bar, eyes wide and terrified.

I slap my hand against the button to open the door, and the moment it hisses open, las-fire brightens the bar like a crack of lightning.

The ship rocks. Sounds like thunder ripple across the hull. A final blast impacts directly with the huge viewing window, instantly cracking it.

There’s a moment of resistance – and then the air shield shatters.

The glass is sucked out into space – as too is my package of water, Tessa’s empty glass, and the two chairs we were sitting at.

I dive through the open door of the bar - desperately dragging Tessa behind me.

I turned and glanced through the doorway one last time – at the bartender, clinging to a beer tap as the vacuum desperately tried to suck him through the gaping window.

My heart steels itself. There’s nothing I can do. I punch the button to close the barroom door just as the bartender finally loses his grip. Through the viewport in the door, I watch him flailing as he’s sucked out into the abyss.

I’m sorry.

My headthrobs.I reach up and sink my fingers into my matted hair. They come away hot with blood. I must have really slammed my head against that wall. Now I’ve got a gaping cut right alongside the fresh bruise I’d earned banging my head against the wall of my sleeping compartment this morning.

With so many head injuries, it’s lucky I remember my own name.

Tessa screams. The whole ship shudders under another barrage of las-fire. The deck beneath me lurches left and right, trying to throw me off my feet.

A shower of sparks bursts from the wall, and smoke billows from the right.

I pause.

“This way!” Tessa does the guesswork for me – pointing to the left and darting down the hallway. She runs around the corner andthat’swhen I feel the first stab of terror.

I’m suddenly frozen to the deck - blinded by a flashback of Ling turning the corner in the exact same way the last day I’d seen her alive.

She’d run right into a Bullfrog electro-spear.

But Tessa snaps me from my grim memory – poking her head back around the corner and hissing: “Come on!”

I’m grateful to be jarred so sharply out of the memory. Shaking my head, I follow her, sprinting down the hallway until another billowing wall of smoke and sparks stops us in our tracks.

“Fuck!” Tessa staggers to a halt. “Fuck, Jamie! Where do we go?”

Tessa’s staring at me like I’ve got a plan. Her eyes widen – searching desperately for reassurance as the wall of choking, grey smoke rolls its way down the corridor towards us.

My lungs are scalded. Stars burst before my eyes.

I glance to the left, searching for that loose panel I’d kicked free earlier.

I slam my foot into the panel even harder than I did the first time, and it cracks open – swinging wide the doorway through which I’d found Tessa earlier.

I drag her back into the darkness. The faint light from the hallway illuminates the familiar scene – glinting across the trail of blood that leads to the shadows in the distance.

That was where the man I’d stabbed had lumbered away.

He might be alive or dead – either way, I’d sooner face him than what lay behind us. Smoke billowed through this hidden entrance, so I turn and slam the panel back into place, sealing us in darkness but stopping the rolling waves of that noxious smoke.

Terrified by the dark, I tap a button on my smart-watch and a circle of light surrounds us. Wafts of smoke glimmer in the LED glow. Glancing back at the panel we’d come through, I see that the seal isn’t tight. Smoke is continuing to get through, and my lungs are already burning from it.

I reach over and grab Tessa’s hand, leading her away from the smoke. We have to keep moving forward – deeper and deeper into the claustrophobic bowels of the Elnor.

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