Nina
I was pissed.
It was obvious Vane and his men were nervous about an imminent attack, that all of them could be in danger if a battle was to come. Instead of keeping me by his side, Vane had brushed me off and imprisoned me with the other Aberrants in the cargo hold. He hadn’t even given me a chance to offer my assistance.
I wanted to help, and he’d taken that right away from me. I felt practically useless down here. There was a very tiny sliver of gratefulness though if only for the fact that I could check on the status of my fellow humans that had been taken along with me since I hadn’t been allowed to yet. Everything else about it made me furious.
Vane and Dr. Rackamar hadn’t been lying when they’d told me all of the Aberrants were healthy. Some even looked better than when I’d seen them last. Most important, they were all safe and unharmed. I’d insisted on being placed in the same cell as Mari and the others. Javier had relented without much of a fight and I had gotten my way.
Mari grinned when she saw me. She faltered for a fraction of a second when she realized that I was naked, but she quickly recovered and ignored it entirely. No one else commented on it either and I was thankful for that.
“Didn’t think I’d seen the last of you, Nina,” she had whispered when I entered the cell with her. When Javier had left and no more of the crew were close enough to hear, she moved closer to me. “So, what have you been up to these past few weeks?” she added next, her eyes twinkling with curiosity. She passed me a blanket and I used it to cover myself.
The fabric felt rough on my skin. As much as I wanted to cover myself, the feeling of the cloth felt foreign and almost uncomfortable. I pulled the blanket closer anyway and ignored the fact that hiding my body seemed awkward to me after being made to be bare for so long. I shook it off though as I tied it around my body like a dress.
It was time I remembered myself.
I quietly told Mari my story, filling her in on everything that had occurred since she’d last seen me. When I finally finished, she drew back and shook her head.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“We fight back,” I answered.
“How?” she asked. “I’ve been down here for a while now and it seems impenetrable. The cages are designed to hold much stronger beasts than us. The bars don’t budge no matter what we do. The main doors of the cargo hold have interlocking systems that engage to make sure no one gets in or out that isn’t supposed to.”
“Everything has a weakness. You just have to find it,” I answered.
I looked around, surveying the room. It was clear that Mari was right about the locking system and the strength of the cages we’d been put into. Outside the bars, there were a multitude of crates lashed together, a number of barrels stamped with various alien languages that I couldn’t read, as well as several large metal boxes that held God knows what. The room was full of cargo and I briefly contemplated if any of it was legally obtained. Probably not.
I didn’t know if anything inside those containers that would help us, but it would take too long to search them all. Not that it mattered, because we would have to figure out how to get out of the cages first.
I started to study the cages more closely. Similar to the spaceship I’d been on from Earth, Vane’s men had separated us by gender into two different sections. It appeared that there had been individual enclosures at one time, but they’d opened the dividers between each one into two big cages that were connected to each other. The cages holding the men were similar, separately them evenly between the two attached prison cells. The bars were strong, thick, and narrow enough that we couldn’t slip through them. Not even the smallest female here would be able to get out that way.
My eyes turned upward, finding no signs of weakness in the ceiling above us. I looked down and assessed the floor next.
A single large grate on my side of the cage captured my attention. It looked fairly heavy duty, but the screws around the edges were rusty and at least a couple were missing entirely. I stood up and wandered nonchalantly over to it, kneeling down and looking at it more closely. It appeared that there was a large tunnel underneath, perhaps a part of the ventilation system. I turned my head and tried to see where it went, but I couldn’t see much into the darkness below. I took my hand and held it over the grate, feeling a draft of air caressing my fingertips. That meant it had to go somewhere. That it wasn’t just an open room of some kind beneath us.
“We may be able to get out from below,” I muttered quietly. “We’d just need something to get these screws out and then we’d all have to work together to lift this thing when no one is watching.”
“I’ve got just the thing maybe,” Mari said, her voice sly.
I turned my head and watched as she flipped a small dagger in her hand.
“Clever girl, where’d you get that?” I asked, unable to stop myself from grinning.
“I learned from watching you,” she winked, and I snorted back a laugh.
“I stole it from a guard when he wasn’t paying attention. The one that brought you down here in fact,” she added a moment later.
“Indeed,” I answered, smirking with amusement.
Over the next several hours, Mari and I strategically placed women around us to conceal the fact that we were working on removing all the screws from the grate. The work was slow and frustrating at times, but eventually we were able to loosen them all. After that, we finished the work with our fingers. Mari pocketed all of the screws, just in case we’d need them later.
After the work on the grate was completed, we had to bide our time until the guards stationed around us were distracted or left entirely. I watched them quietly from the corner of the cell. They seemed impatient and uneasy, shifting their weight from side to side as though they were waiting for something to happen next.
The ship shuddered a number o
f times and I assumed that we were preparing to land on Kraken Prime, like Vane had planned for some time now. He must have decided that it was safe enough to stop and fuel the ship, even though there was a threat of another pirate vessel not far off. The guards tensed and a number of them left the room, leaving only a skeleton crew to guard us.