“No safety for you there,” I murmured to myself. Where had I heard that?
Suddenly, I remembered—it was the weird vision I had seen after Victor had bitten me and given me an orgasm. And that hadn’t been the only thing I had seen, I thought, remembering the other vision I’d had—the one of him about to bite my neck. I had seenthatone when he had first touched me and we had both gotten that weird sexual shock.
What was the deal with me seeing weird things whenever he got me excited?
I had no answer for that, but my steps slowed as I got closer and closer to the glowing green light I saw at the end of the dark tunnel. Maybe it would be better to go back, after all. Maybe I should just suck it up and make the long trip home on foot, through the main tunnel. After all, the journey of a thousand steps starts with the first one and all that, right?
The feeling of danger was so strong that I actually started to turn back. But as I did, my boot slipped on a rock and I found myself falling. I gave a loud gasp and landed with athumpon my ass, no doubt bruising it on the hard ground.
“What was that?” I heard a voice whisper.
“Fuck if I know! Let’s find out.”
Shit! Scrambling to my feet, I began to run towards the main tunnel, heedless of the noise I was making. It didn’t matter because they—whoever they were—already knew I was out here. But maybe if I could just make it to the main tunnel I could lose myself in the crowd of foot-traffic—the endless masses of shuffling poor that were always trudging under the roaring crawlers trying to get from one city to the next.
I almost made it. I could hear the dull roar of the tunnel crawlers overhead and smell the fumes of their exhaust when suddenly two sets of hard hands grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Well, well,” said a voice in my ear. “And what have we here?”
“Dunknow, Bug’ger, but she’s dressed fancy enough—seems like a fair prize,” a second voice answered. “Let’s take her back to the cave and see what we can see.”
And they dragged me backwards, into the darkness.
TWENTY-TWO
VIK’TOR
The chief security officer of Far’quars looked rumpled and sleepily irritated when he answered my viewscreen call in the middle of the night. But when he saw who he was speaking to, the irritation was swiftly replaced by awe.
“B-baron Vik’tor!” he exclaimed, straightening up and running a hand through his hair, as though to neaten it. “To what do I owe the pleasure? What can I do for you?”
I explained quickly about the clothing and my need to locate them—and hopefully the person wearing them—immediately.
“Of course! At once!” He began the location right away, first finding the correct signals using the receipt Daw’snx had thoughtfully kept, then using the instruments and the tracking map to pinpoint the location of the signals of the clothing they had sold me.
“Ah-ha! I have them!” he exclaimed, but then a frown creased his face.
“What is it? Where are they?” I demanded. I had been waiting impatiently, trying not to interrupt him but I couldn’t wait any longer. My feeling that Natalie was in danger was growing by the minute.
“Well…that’s the thing, your Lordship,” the chief security officer said. “Almost all the signals are located in one place—just outside of Gaz’snx. But one signal—belonging to a single glove, which was purchased—is in a different location.” He looked up at me. “Which signals do you want the coordinates for?”
I frowned, the concern growing in my mind. If Natalie was still alive and wearing those clothes, hopefully she had most of them on. If she was somewhere and had on only a single glove, she would freeze to death at once. Her kind just wasn’t built for the bitter cold of O’nagga Nine. I had to believe that she had lost the glove and was wearing the rest of the clothing somewhere else—to think otherwise was to abandon all fucking hope.
I made a decision.
“Give me the coordinates of the group of clothes outside Gaz’snx,” I told him. “But keep tracking that glove—I want to know where it ends up.”
“Yes, Baron.” He nodded his head obsequiously. “Sending those coordinates to you right now.”
A discrete knock on the door and Daw’snx came into the room.
“Did you find her, Master?” he wanted to know.
I told him about the two different signals and which one I was going to follow.
“Gaz’snx is some distance away—should I ready your fastest tunnel crawler?” he wanted to know.
“No.” I was staring at the coordinates that were popping up on my viewscreen. “No, get the shuttle ready instead.” The little ship was what I used for interstellar flight, though it was also built to fly inside the Naggian atmosphere. It would get me where I needed to go faster than any crawler could—even a super-sonic one.