Page 15 of Rebel
Lore and Tide locked gazes, and then Lore exhaled through his nose. “Get some rest.” He pulled the sleeping bag up around me and tucked me in.
Lore was tucking me in.
His eyes gleamed in the gloom lit only by the glow of the lamps stationed outside. “Get some sleep.”
I closed my eyes and snuggled down, and then sleep pulled me under.
I surfaced briefly to the rumble of hushed voices, but the words made no sense. They were speaking in their mother tongue, and the tone was argumentative, but sleep wasn’t done with me, and there was no fighting it.
* * *
“Rogue, time to get moving.” Vex’s warm breath tickled my ear.
I stretched and opened my eyes. “Whoa, how long did I sleep?”
“Nine hours,” Xavier said. “The temperature is rising so we should get going.”
Shit, I’d slept a full nine while they did hour shifts. The puffiness of Vex’s eyes told me he was paying for the lack of sleep. I shucked the bag off and rolled it up.
The zip to the tent opened. “Is she awake?” Tide nodded at the sight of me, clearly alert. “We need to get moving.”
His face was drawn too, but his was more than lack of sleep, there was a thrumming tension in the air and the scent of danger.
“What’s happened?” I looked from Tide to Vex then back again.
“Nothing.” Xavier bundled up the bags and began to pack them.
“Don’t lie to her,” Vex said. “She doesn’t need to be coddled.”
Tide ducked out of the tent, and Vex followed. Whoa, he couldn’t drop a sentence like that and then bail.
I crawled out after him. “What is it, Vex?”
“There’s something out there watching us beyond the light,” Vex said. “We think the lamps are keeping it at bay, but we only have a few hours of star power left. Tide says if we move fast, we can make it to the satellite station before we lose power.”
The tent was already down, and Lore was shoving it into a pack. I stood in the corona of light and listened, focusing over the sound of the guys packing up and stretching my senses outward. There was no movement. No sound, but there was definitely a presence. It tingled across my skin in warning, and then the deep shadows to my right shifted.
Okay, yeah, there was something there.
I grabbed a pack, hauled it on, and joined the guys. Xavier and Lore each carried a lamp. Lore at the rear, Xavier up ahead with Vex. Tide and I took the middle.
We began to jog.
I glanced at Tide’s tense profile. “How far to the station?”
“An hour and a half if we move fast,” he said. “Those things, whatever they are, might stop following us soon. We might just have been in their territory. They might not even be dangerous.”
Wishful thinking and too manymights. But my gut knew better, and it was trembling with the knowledge. “No. They’re predators all right, and we’re their prey.”
“How do you know?” Lore asked.
“I feel it.”
There was no other way to explain it. It was a visceral knowledge that nudged my fight-or-flight response. Shadows streaked to our left and right as we jogged.
Time passed with the scrub of our boots on the dirt and the puff of our breath as we jogged. Minutes slipped by as we ate at the distance between the campsite and the station, but the hunters remained with us, loping on either side of us, hidden by darkness so we could only imagine what horror waited for us.
“Fuck!” Xavier said. “They’re not letting up.”
