“Yeah, nobody is going to push us around!” I shouted back, collapsing in a fit of giggles. “Isn’t that right, Ange?”
“We are queens! We must show we are queens!” Angie cried, happy tears streaming down her face.
“Let’s go back through and show them we mean business!” Kirin suggested, grasping our hands and dragging us back across the lounge and out through the doors, with surprising strength for a woman so small and slight.
My legs felt wobbly as I walked, my eyes blurry, a giggle constantly threatening to bubble up. The Reapers looked at us in amusement as we approached, Angie waving her hand like she was the queen of England. Navan was still waiting in the same place we’d left him, though he got up sharply as I sauntered toward the table, putting his arm around my waist, a concerned expression on his face.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Did you find anything out?”
I pushed past him, removing his hand from my waist and clambering up onto the table before he could stop me. Angie climbed up beside me, putting her arm around my shoulders as I raised my voice to the room full of pirates.
“I am Riley, and I hereby put out a revenge bounty on the scavenger known as Stone!” I yelled. The room fell silent. “I want him taken alive, and I’m offering ten thousand credits for him to be brought to me in one piece! The scurvy seadog has disrespected my crew and stolen my pal, and I want him punished!”
The crowd roared my name, cheering my declaration. It seemed I had all the Junkyard pirates on my side.
Navan pulled me down from the table, to a chorus of boos from the nearby pirates who’d clustered around me. He ignored them, grabbing Angie too, hauling us both away from the casino like we were naughty schoolgirls. We giggled, raising our arms as they chanted my name. As we left, I took one last look at my newfound friends and noticed a hooded figure lurking in the corner, beside the casino entrance. The figure seemed to be watching us intently, though I couldn’t see their face.
A shiver of terror ran up my spine, but I was too many sheets to the wind to know why.
Chapter Fifteen
I awoke in a darkened room, with something pounding on the backs of my eyeballs. My head was pulsing, like someone had forced a pneumatic drill into the center of my skull, and my mouth was drier than the Sahara. I tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea came crashing over me as acrid bile rose up my throat.
“Lights on!” I rasped, praying I was back on board the ship and not locked away in some box in the middle of the scrapyards, abandoned by Kirin and her pirate crew. The truth was, I couldn’t remember getting back from the casino, or what had happened after I’d stood on the table and announced my revenge bounty on Stone. I vaguely recalled a shadowy figure, but that could well have been due to the drink. A second later, the bedroom sensors picked up my voice, and the lights blazed to life, searing my sensitive eyes.
“Lights dimmed!” I shouted desperately, throwing the covers over my head and trying to push away the sick feeling. I genuinely felt as though my insides were rotting away from whatever alien concoction Kirin had given me. This was probably what a hangover felt like.
Nonalcoholic my ass. That is the last time you ever drink anything an alien gives you, I scolded myself, noting the exception of Kaido’s serum. At least that was for some sort of useful, medicinal purpose, whereas this had been purely recreational.
My heart sank as I realized the full extent of what had happened. I hadn’t intentionally gotten drunk, but what if it didn’t matter—what if I became addicted anyway? What if I ended up just like my birthparents, an alcoholic who prioritized a buzz over the people she loved? After all, I still had that silver root in my system somewhere, wielding its addictive control over me. I’d avoided any effects so far, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t appear one day.
I also cringed as I remembered the way I’d clambered up onto the table and shouted about Stone, offering ten thousand credits for him to be brought to me alive. That was a hell of a lot of money, which wasn’t even mine to give. I presumed it was way too late to try to take it back or pretend I didn’t want a revenge bounty anymore. Some of the pirates would, likely, already be on the case, and if they came to me with Stone and I refused to give them their reward, I imagined there’d be hell to pay.
There was a hiss of hydraulics as the bedroom hatch lifted, and Navan walked in, carrying a tray. I was expecting him to be mad at me, after my actions the previous day, but he was smiling as he approached the bed.
“How’s my drunken pirate queen this morning?” he teased, sitting on the edge of the bed and putting the tray of food in front of me. I presumed he’d used the food printer to make it, but I wasn’t in any state to eat much. To my relief, it was a simple spread of plain toast and butter, with a steaming mug of herbal tea beside it—just the thing to settle my churning stomach.
“It’s not funny, Navan.” I grimaced. “I ache… all over, and my head’s all fuzzy. I told Kirin I didn’t want anything alcoholic. What if it’s done something to me? What if it’s like… the gateway to the same life my parents led?”
Navan leaned closer and brushed a strand of hair behind my ear. “It won’t be, Riley. You aren’t your parents,” he assured me. “I know you’re worried about the silver root, but you only had a couple drinks; you’re going to be fine. You’d need to drink way more than that to become addicted.”
“Why did I keep drinking it, though?” I pressed. “I should have known that it wasn’t nonalcoholic as soon as I started to feel funny.”
“That stuff turned out to be what we call a ‘zombie mix.’ I never would’ve let you drink it if I’d known,” he said sympathetically, scooching in beside me on the bed. “It’s a whole bunch of booze, mixed in with syrups and juices that take away the flavor of the alcohol. It’s a one-way ticket to oblivion, even for species with a higher tolerance—which humans do not have, by the way—and Angie was pretty sure you both drank about four of them.”
I groaned. “Everything hurts. Stroke my hair and tell me I’m pretty.”
He laughed, cuddling me into him and kissing my forehead. “You’re pretty.”
“How is Angie doing?” I asked.
“Not much better than you, though Bashrik made her get up and get some fresh air,” Navan explained, with a wry smile. “To be honest, I think she got rid of most of it on the gangway, when I was dragging the pair of you back here.”
“Did I do anything embarrassing?” I cringed, waiting for the news.
“You didn’t do anything embarrassing, per se, but you were shouting quite a lot of stuff about our… love life,” he said, grinning. “I’ve got to say, I came out of the whole thing looking pretty good, and you very nearly shocked the prostitutes with what you were yelling.”
Heat rushed to my cheeks. “Nooo…”
“Don’t worry. Kirin was even worse than you and Angie. She tried to proposition the tiger twins, but when they rebuffed her she punched them both instead, knocking one out and breaking the other one’s nose. According to Zippi, it’s what she always does when she’s had too much zombie mix. The sad thing is, one of them is actually in love with her… though I forget which one,” he said. “We had a bet on who would end up knocked out. Zippi owes me twenty credits.”
“Did I really announce a revenge bounty?”
“Oh yes, all ten thousand credits of it,” Navan said lightly, stroking my hair. “But hey, if it gets us to Lauren quicker, it’ll all be worth it. Plus, what else were we going to spend that kind of money on? Killick left a bunch of those devices, with about twenty thousand on each one. We’ve gone from being broke to filthy rich in the time it took to hijack one generous merevin’s cruiser.”
I was surprised by how casual he was being about all of this, but I was glad of it, too. I wasn’t sure my hungover brain could have handled a lecture. Navan probably knew that and was being extra sweet to comfort me.
“Did Angie tell you what we found out from Kirin?” I wondered. It wasn’t all that
much, from what I could recall, but it was something. Her glowing character reference about Stone had made me more hopeful that we’d find Lauren in one piece, with her life and dignity intact.
“She filled me in over breakfast this morning.” He gave me a tight squeeze that made me feel suddenly queasy again.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got anything to fix this, do you?” I muttered, feeling sorry for myself. I’d never been hungover before.
He plucked a tiny jar out of his pocket and tipped two lurid blue tablets onto his palm. “I thought you might ask that,” he said, offering me the tablets.
“What are they?”
“A cure-all for hangovers, headaches, tummy-aches—all the basic ailments of the universal race.”
“Even humans?”
He gave an uncertain shrug. “There are lots of humanoid species in the universe, and they don’t have any problems with it.”
Eager to try anything that would take this hellish feeling away, I took the pills and popped them into my mouth, washing them down with a gulp of the herbal tea. I waited, expecting them to get to work right away, but my head was still banging, and my stomach was still turning.
“They’re not instant,” Navan teased. “Come on, let’s talk about what we’re going to do with Stone and Ezra to take your mind off your raging hangover.”
I grimaced. “Well, we know that Ezra is coming back in a couple of days to meet his supplier, which we have to hope is going to be Stone. Kirin said that Stone always hangs around at the Salty Siren Inn, whenever he’s on the Junkyard. So, it stands to reason that he’ll be meeting Ezra there, if it’s him. From what Kirin said, it’s isolated, it has escape routes, and it’s familiar territory to Stone.”
“Do you know where it is?”
It was only then that I realized I had no clothes on, except my underwear. “Please tell me that you did this, and I wasn’t running around naked?”
Navan laughed. “I undressed you. I didn’t want you falling asleep in your clothes.”
“Where are my pants?”
Navan picked them up off the floor and handed them to me. Frowning, I rifled around in the pockets and found a screwed-up ball of paper in the depths of one of them. I remembered Kirin saying something about drawing the Salty Siren’s location on a map for me, but I couldn’t remember her actually doing it. And yet, I held the evidence in my hands. There, before my very eyes, was a hand-drawn map, showing the route from The Empty Purse to the Salty Siren. To my relief, I found the chunk of opaleine that Cambien had given me, too, tucked away for safe-keeping—my drunken self hadn’t let me down.
“What’s that?” Navan asked.
“Directions to Stone’s hangout. Seems my drunken mind can still do a few things right,” I said, relieved.
“We’ll keep an eye on the compass in that location and see if another green dot shows up. If it does, then we’ll know that Lauren is still with Stone,” Navan said. “With your president off on his tour with Ezra’s acquaintances, we stand a better chance of it actually being Lauren this time.”
I nodded, feeling the tablets start to work. “Plus, we won’t be alone when we ambush Stone. I saw the way those pirates cheered last night. They won’t be able to resist a bounty that big,” I said wryly, still wishing I could turn back time. “I guess, for now, we’ve got ourselves some allies in all of this.”
“Yeah, allies who are only loyal as long as the money’s good.”
I shrugged. “At least they’re on our side, which makes for a nice change. And they were chanting ‘Riley’ last night instead of ‘Fed-Smasher,’ which is a considerable improvement in my books.”
“I don’t know, I think ‘Fed-Smasher’ suits you,” Navan teased, lifting my chin to kiss me on the lips.
“I haven’t brushed my teeth,” I protested, knowing my breath was sour.
“I don’t care,” he murmured, catching my mouth in his.
Wrapping myself contentedly in his embrace, I cuddled against his chest. With his strong arms around me, I wondered if we could get away with spending the day like this. I didn’t feel like facing the universe and all its madness today.
“What’s everyone else up to?” I asked, nuzzling Navan’s neck.
“Bashrik’s cleaning vomit off the gangway, Ronad is taking a bath, Angie’s in one of the dressing rooms, and Mort has gone for a walk,” he replied.
I frowned at the last one. “He left the ship?” In a place like this, I was more than suspicious of the shifter’s motivations.
“It’ll be fine, Riley. He’ll come back to us—he’s got it good here. He’s not about to up and leave all of that,” Navan assured me.
“You were the one who told me not to trust him!”
“I’m not saying I trust him. I just… He was really starting to get on all of our nerves,” he admitted sheepishly. “He’s not going anywhere, though. You can believe that.”
“How do you know?” I protested, feeling anxious.
An amused expression drifted across Navan’s face. “Because Ronad slipped a tracker into one of his folds. I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me for making him do it,” he explained. “Anyway, as long as Mort isn’t alone on this ship, and able to steal it, I don’t care what that shifter does, or where he ends up, even if it’s in a Junkyard crusher.”
“That’s a bit harsh,” I said instinctively. Mort was annoying, but he didn’t deserve a fate like that.
“I just mean I don’t care what happens to him, as long as he doesn’t find a way to steal our ship from under us,” Navan replied, his tone a little softer. Looking apologetic, he added, “You should probably get ready to face the day. We need to prepare for Stone’s arrival.”
I groaned, pulling the covers back over my head. “I don’t want to do anything today! I want to lie here and remind myself why it’s a bad idea to accept drinks from strangers!” I grumbled, my voice muffled.
Laughing mischievously, Navan slid beneath the covers and pinned me down, kissing me all over, his hands slipping down to the curves of my waist. It was good I’d taken those tablets, because otherwise I’d have puked all over him, as he suddenly started to tickle me beneath the ribs, his fingers dancing across my skin. I writhed and screamed, trying to wriggle free of his tickling hands, but there was no way I was winning this fight.
“Do you give up?” he asked, chuckling.
“I surrender!” I howled, collapsing in a fit of giggles as he threw back the covers and wrapped me up in his arms, rolling across the mattress with me gripped to his chest. He nuzzled into my neck, making a low growling sound.
“You know I hate to use such torture techniques, but sometimes there’s no other option,” he said, releasing me.
I picked up a pillow and smacked him across the head with it, before darting away, leaping off the bed and onto the floor, wielding my stuffed weapon with skill. “You’ll never take me alive!” I squealed, a grin spreading across my face as he chased after me, grasping a pillow in his hands.
“Sneak!” he said, cornering me in the far side of the room. I flung my pillow, but he was too fast, ducking in underneath and enveloping me in his arms, squashing the pillow flat to his chest so I couldn’t smack him with it anymore.
“You win again!” I giggled, as he smothered me in kisses.
“You let me win,” he corrected me, grinning. “I know the damage you can do with a pillow. You went easy on me.”
“Ah, you know me too well.”
He brushed a strand of my hair behind my ear and gazed into my eyes. “So, you going to get ready?”
I nodded slowly.
He smiled, kissing me again. “That’s my girl.”
Peeling myself away from the embrace of my boyfriend, I headed for the bathroom. After taking a quick shower and getting dressed, I decided to go see how Angie was faring.
Bashrik told me she was still in the dressing room. I found her standing at the far end of the alien walk-in closet, looking completely in her element. Sh
e was playing with the holographic technology that allowed a person to see how certain clothes were going to look before they wore them. She flicked through some of the onboard dresses, which could be printed in the same fashion as the food.
I rapped my knuckles on the doorframe. Angie whirled around.
“Riley!” she cried. “I was just coming to see you, but I thought you might still be sleeping. How’s your head this morning?”
“Terrible. Yours?”
She laughed tightly. “Same. I felt like hell until Bashrik gave me some of those miracle pills.”
“So… what do you make of what Kirin said about Stone?”
“About him being a good guy?”
I nodded.
She shrugged. “I think pirates probably have a warped idea of what a ‘good guy’ is. He took Lauren, without permission—that’s not the action of a good guy.”
“That’s what I thought,” I mused. “From what she said, though, do you think Lauren might be okay? You don’t think that she might be the—”
“The new, smart girlfriend? No way! Lauren’s not an idiot; she’s not the kind of girl who ends up with Stockholm Syndrome,” Angie assured me. “I imagine Stone makes a habit of picking up pretty young things across the universe and forcing them into… well, who knows what. Lauren was probably having none of it, so he found himself a different girl to add to his harem.”
Our conversation was cut short by the sound of our special code beeping through the loudspeakers from the ship’s entrance panel. It was a tune we’d come up with so we’d know that anyone typing it in was a friend and not a foe. Even though the ship was still cloaked, we didn’t dare risk someone hacking the panel and breaking in, so we’d set the front hatch to open internally only—someone had to go to the hatch and physically let a person in. I could only imagine the hassle that had caused last night.
Leaving Angie in the dressing room, I went to the front hatch and pressed the camera symbol. Doctor Ulani’s face appeared on screen, though I knew it could only be Mort beneath the gray skin and doctor’s coat. He was wearing a wryly unamused expression on his stolen face, like he was completely at his wit’s end with everything the universe was throwing at him. I guessed he’d had a bad day on the Junkyard and felt a little sorry for him. Secretly glad he’d come back, I turned the handle to let him in and pushed the door wide.