Redek (Barbarian Bodyguards Book 2) Page 8

  Inside the office, a tall, thin man with a long snout sat behind a desk staring at a screen on the opposite wall. A sport Redek didn't recognize was playing. "What can I do for you?" the man said, without glancing away from the screen.

  "How much to park my ship here?"

  "Seventeen Leerk a day," the man replied.

  Redek had never heard of the currency before. "Can I spend IU Credits here?"

  The man's snout flared. "No."

  "Can I exchange them anywhere?"

  "Take a left. It's four shops down."

  "Thank you."

  "If you're not back here in an hour with the money, your ship is mine."

  Redek didn't bother getting annoyed at the impolite man. At least he wasn't aggressive. He'd count it as a win. Still holding Maddie's hand, he followed the man's instructions. "As soon as we get the currency, we need to leave here as soon as possible," he told her. "If Damien is tracking my accounts and he has people nearby he could be here in a matter of hours."

  She nodded, though he wasn't sure she was listening. She stared in wonder at their surroundings as they left the hangar. Buildings that must have been forty stories tall and made of an ugly gray stone protruded into the sky, and in between each window was a billboard advertising something. The sidewalk was packed with people and none looked up from the devices they had in their hands. They didn't look like the same kind of phone either he or Maddie owned.

  She pushed further into his side to avoid the bustling people, but didn't look scared. "This is amazing."

  It wasn't so different than the principal city of Suytov. The buildings were uglier, and the crowds less sociable, but the atmosphere was similar.

  She would probably love it on his home planet—in his apartment, which sat high in a building and overlooked a busy street just like this one.

  "I want to take you back to Suytov one day," he said, squeezing her hand. "Show you my place, show you where I grew up."

  "I'd love to see it."

  Talking about the future as though it was guaranteed they had one was the only strategy he could take right now. It was like how, supposedly, if you were sad and forced yourself to smile, it would eventually cheer you up. If he willed it enough, hopefully it would come true.

  Inside the currency exchange, several women of the same race as the man in the hangar's office were sitting behind a desk. They must have been Lyskarian. Two were serving customers, and a third beckoned for them to approach. "Hi. How can I help you today?"

  "Can I exchange Credits to Leerk here?" he asked.

  "Of course. Do you have cash on you, or are you looking to withdraw from an account?"

  "Withdraw from an account," he said. "Can I withdraw both Credits and Leerk?"

  The woman opened her drawer. "We only have seven millions Credits in bills right now, but there will be more available tomorrow."

  "It'll do," he replied. He handed over a card with his bank details. "I'll take all the Credits, and," he paused. He had no idea how much the currency on Leerk was worth. Seventeen for the parking. He needed food, fuel, and, hopefully, a tablet or phone for Maddie. "Three hundred Leerk," he guessed. Fuel was always expensive. He hoped that would cover it.

  The woman nodded and handed him back his card. "Certainly, sir."

  The moment the account details had been entered, Redek felt like they were on a timer. He wanted to tell the woman not to bother counting out the Credits and just give them to him, he didn't care if the amount was short. Damien's men could be honing in on them any second, and he'd only just realized how badly he wanted Maddie to see his home. This wasn't how it could be allowed to end.

  When the money was safely in an inside pocket in his jacket, they strode from the shop. "We need supplies. One of these has to sell those."

  In the shop he realized that three hundred Leerk had probably been an extortionate amount to withdraw, and he was glad he hadn't let the woman behind the counter tell him how many dollars were left in his account after the transaction. They spent only twenty Leerk in the convenience store.

  Maddie peered over the counter when she saw a glass cabinet in the back with secondhand electronics locked behind it. “Could I get one of the phones?” she asked. “The cheapest one is fine. There are just some things I want to do.”

  “Get whichever one you want,” he replied, the Leerk burning a hole in his pocket.

  She squinted as she looked, and eventually picked a newer model. “And I need a data package. Something intergalactic.”

  The shopkeeper clicked his tongue at that. “You want one of the IU approved providers? Either something local or something intergalactic. They’re mutually exclusive.”

  “We’ll take one of each,” Redek said, wanting to tap his foot and say that they didn’t have time for this. He wasn’t sure what Maddie needed this for, but he trusted it was important. She knew what they were risking every moment they stayed here. He’d already abandoned the idea of switching ships. It would take too long to find another one now.

  Maddie declined the shopkeeper’s offer to set up her new phone for her, and thanked him. “I’m sorry that took so long,” she said, pocketing the device and data packages and picking up her pace as they headed back to the hangar. “It’s still not even been fifteen minutes since we accessed your account, though. There’s no way Damien could have gotten here already.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Redek agreed. “We just need to refuel, pay for the hangar space, and then we’re out of here. I’ll start asking around for people who might have an IU contact when we’re on the move.” The phone would be necessary for that anyway, he realized. He’d not been thinking ahead at all, too caught up in what was happening now.

  Inside the hangar, he headed for the office, fingers still laced through Maddie’s.

  “I’m here to pay the hangar fee,” Redek said, fingering the Leerk in his pocket. “And I need to ask you about refueling.”

  The man flared his snout with irritation as the commentators on the sports game went wild. “Refuel and then come and pay me for both. The—”

  He was cut off by a blaring alarm. Redek and Maddie both cringed at the high-pitched noise that filled the room.

  Finally, the man looked away from the screen with a muttered, “Shit.”

  “What is that?”

  “IU forces are here.”

  Redek’s blood ran cold. “What? Does this happen often?” Often enough to have an alarm, he supposed.

  “Not in five years.”

  What were the chances? Five years since the last IU attempt to colonize the planet and the IU showed up on the day Redek and Maddie touched down.

  “It’s Damien,” he said, sure of himself. “Somehow, this is Damien.”

  Maddie was still as a statue. “What?”

  “It has to be.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  He screwed his eyes shut, trying to think fast and failing. “I haven’t got a fucking clue.”

  11.

  MADDIE

  Damien was here and Maddie felt like she couldn’t breathe. Her body was giving up from the shock. How had they gotten there so quickly? Was this really it?

  Redek was frozen, too, and that was the really scary part. He was the experienced one. He was the one she had to rely on to save her from this mess. If he was stuck, then they were screwed.

  “What do we do?” she urged him again, ignoring his comment. “We have to get out of here. We could still get to the ship.”

  “If the IU are invading they’re going to be stopping anyone from leaving.”

  “Are they invading? Or are they just here to look for us?” Maddie had no idea what was happening. She’d known that Damien had powerful friends, but enough friends to get IU forces to intervene in a runaway case? It was far beyond what she’d expected. “What do we do?” she pleaded, hysteria in her voice.

  Redek turned to the hangar employee, who was pulling open his drawers and arming himself with various knives and
guns. “What’s procedure on the planet?” he asked. “Do you know how many people are here? What they’re here for?”

  “Stay the fuck away from me,” he replied, voice wavering. “I’m not getting into trouble because of you.”

  Redek clenched his fists and looked ready to threaten the employee, but restrained himself. “Tell me how to get out of here without going on the street.”

  The man shook his head, muttering under his breath and ignoring Redek.

  The wail of the siren got louder and faster, and Redek snapped. He strode forward, lifting the man off the floor with a fist bunched in the front of his shirt. “How do I get out of here without going on the street?” he demanded again. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”

  Maddie believed it, too. She could see Redek’s rage coming on. His skin was splitting and when he spoke his canines looked like the fangs in traditional vampire flicks.

  “There’s a door in the back,” the employee sniveled. “Behind a dumpster. It leads into the gang’s tunnels, they own the hangar and use it for smuggling. You can go there. But it’s dangerous.”

  Redek dropped the man so suddenly he couldn’t find his footing and collapsed into a heap on the floor. Maddie was too on edge to feel bad, though.

  She accepted Redek’s hand when he took hers and began dragging her from the office. “We have to risk it,” he said. “I don’t know how big this is or how long it’s going to last, but if they find us it’s over.”

  They found the door easily enough, and then they were jogging down the corridor. “What if we run into someone?” she asked as she tried to keep up with Redek’s long strides. “Do you really think there’s a whole army out there?” She looked up, but the hangar roof had been closed and she couldn’t see the sky. They were blind.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you think we should surrender?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “But people might die.”

  “You might die.”

  She swallowed her argument, feeling warm despite everything.

  They ran for what felt like forever, zigzagging down different corridors and making choices as to what path they should take seemingly at random. Somehow, they never ran into anyone else. Eventually, Maddie had to shake her head and tug on Redek’s hand. “I can’t,” she gasped. “I need a break. Just five minutes to catch my breath.”

  She’d never done much exercise on the compound before, and her lungs were burning from the exertion.

  Redek retrieved some water from the bag of groceries for her. “Here.”

  She sipped in between breaths, looking around the corridor and finally taking a good look at their surroundings. This was more of a tunnel than a corridor. They’d started off metal, but now they were encased with packed earth. “Where are we? What are these?”

  “I have no idea, but I’ve been taking ones that are leading us downhill. We must be quite far underground by now.”

  “I didn’t even notice,” she muttered, looking at the floor. It seemed level. “Is that a good idea? We’re trapped under here.”

  “It’ll take them longer to find us.”

  “But they will find us. With tunnels like this there’s no way they won’t get into them eventually.”

  “Well, then maybe you should have shared your plan,” he snapped, skin a dangerous shade of pink. He was losing control.

  Tears stung at her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I don’t know either. I guarded people. I never did anything like this before.”

  She buried her palms into her eyes and tried to take some cooling breaths. “Maybe I can get some information from the phone. Maybe we can at least see what’s going on.”

  Redek leaned against the dirt wall and nodded, taking a sip of the water himself. “If these are the gang tunnels, the gang must be on the surface dealing with the IU,” he decided while Maddie added the local data pack to the phone and began searching to see if she could find any news. “This planet isn’t exactly known for its cowardice. Maybe they’ve already chased the IU away.”

  “They have an alarm system, so they must have done it before.”

  Maddie scoured local forums and social media to try and get a feel for what was happening on the ground. People reported thousands of IU soldiers, all armed, walking the streets of the city searching for two fugitives. So far no one had been reported as hurt, and there was no mention of any gang activity. She relayed all of this to Redek.

  “They’re planning something,” he said. “If they’re not here but there are no reports, they’re planning something. The territorial gangs must be working together, too, if no one has made a move yet.”

  “So what do we do? Just wait until they make their move and see who wins out?”

  “I don’t know what else we can do.”

  Maddie slumped. “I feel like a sitting duck.”

  Redek wrapped his arms around her, letting her rest her head against his chest. “I’m sorry that I brought you here. It was a mistake.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was the best call. We could never have guessed this would happen.”

  “I should have known better.”

  Her lip quirked. “You’re not a god, no matter how convinced I was of it when I first saw you. We had to get money at some point no matter which planet we landed on, and Damien would have found us.”

  He tightened his grip on her. His skin had lost its pink tinge, and that was scarier than the thought of him losing control. He seemed to have given up, to have lost faith that they had any chance of getting out of there.

  Maddie wasn’t out of hope yet. They were on a notoriously lawless planet that had apparently kept the IU at bay for years. They could do it again.

  “I just wanted to keep you safe,” he murmured against her hair.

  “I didn’t want you to keep me safe. I wanted you to make me happy. And you did.” She pulled back. “If we’re going to just wait until the gangs do their thing, can we at least find somewhere that isn’t a stuffy mud tunnel to do it in?”

  It didn’t spur him on like she’d hoped for, but he nodded. “Yeah, it’s not the most glamorous place.”

  They walked down the corridor with laced fingers and a deafening silence. The fact there was still no noise from above them was welcome and awful at the same time. It meant they were completely blind, just waiting for Damien to find the tunnels and send his men charging after them. It also meant they were still alive, for now. They could still pretend they had time together.

  After the next corner, the mud turned back into metal. “We’ve not started ascending again,” Redek said in low tones, pausing. “This is still as far underground as the dirt tunnels.”

  It was still silent, though, and he kept walking. There were doors off this corridor, and he pressed an ear to the first one. “It’s quiet.”

  “Then let’s go in.”

  The door was unlocked, and inside rows of bunk beds lined the walls. “Oh. It’s a dorm room,” she said. The beds looked like they hadn’t been slept in, and there were no personal effects on the bedside tables. “I guess we stumbled across their barracks. Do gangs have barracks?”

  Redek had strode straight to another door on the other side of the room. “Right now all I care about is that gangs have bathrooms.”

  She chuckled, sitting down on the bottom bunk closest to the corridor and pulling out her phone.

  Finally with a couple of minutes to spare, she searched for the news articles on her parents’ deaths. She’d looked at them a thousand times before, but she’d still doubted herself. Part of her was convinced that her mind was tricking her: it was just denial, or confusion. After all, Damien had clearly tampered with her memory to make her forget everything before the night he’d stolen her away.

  She rubbed her head as the memories assaulted her. She’d thought about it all night when Redek was asleep against her, her fingers running through his hair.

  After taking a deep breath
, she tapped on the link to the article that had been open on her screen back at the compound at least once a month.

  And the picture that stared back at her wasn’t the same woman from her memory.

  She closed her eyes. She could picture her mom, see the exact face as Damien’s henchman had extinguished the light in her eyes, and it wasn’t the same woman.

  In her heart of hearts she knew that the woman from her memory was her mom—she’d known it from the moment the memory began, as if she’d just woken up a truth that had always been inside her—but the woman in the article was someone else.

  Maddie had no idea who. All her memories of this face were from the article in front of her.

  The bathroom door opened and Redek emerged. He frowned when he saw her face. “What’s wrong? Did something happen above ground?”

  “No. I subscribed to some feeds but none have updated.” She showed him what was on her screen. “This is a different woman than the one in my memory.”

  Redek took a seat beside her on the small single bed. He had to lean sideways because he was too tall to fit underneath the top bunk. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Then who is this?”

  “Then who am I?”

  She’d thought she was Maddie Lancaster, daughter of Lucille and Timothy Lancaster, who had been murdered in a horrible crime that she’d been the sole survivor of. Damien had convinced the papers to print that she’d died along with her family to try and prevent the perpetrators coming after her.

  She’d already known the second half was a lie, but the first half? She’d always believed that.

  Maybe she wasn’t even Maddie. Maybe that wasn’t even her name.

  Damien had really taken everything from her, even her identity.

  Redek wrapped a secure arm around her shoulder. “A name is nothing,” he said. “You could be called anything but you’d still be the same beautiful, smart, tech geek that I fell in love with.”

  Her lip quirked, but it wasn't a real smile. She didn’t even register the L-word. She had so many questions and no one to ask for the answers.