His Mate to Keep by Ivy Sparks

11

Merrit

I laidon the bed next to Xavier, trying my best to breathe. He stretched out on his back with his eyes closed. His breathing breezed through his nostrils in a gentle, soothing tide.

It had been a few days, but we were sure we knew the sentinels’ patrol pattern. And soon we were going to make our attempt.

I whispered in Xavier’s ear, “How can you sleep at a time like this?”

“There’s no need for me to stay awake when you’re jumpy enough for us both,” he growled without opening his eyes.

“How can you be so calm when you know what we’re about to do?”

“Lie still and close your eyes. It isn’t time yet.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Pretend to sleep, then. It works for me.” I started to lift my head to look around the lab, but he whispered under his breath, “Lie down. Don’t look. Don’t draw attention to yourself.”

I rested my ear back on my elbow and returned to watching him rest. Every passing hour made me more fascinated with him. The particular curve of his jaw, the wrinkle of skin where his ear connected to his scalp, the mound of bone around the base of his horns—he really was a magnificent specimen of masculinity.

Sometimes I wondered if I just imagined having sex with him. Neither of us started any further intimacy. Maybe it was a fluke and we would never do it again.

Just when I thought he really had drifted off to sleep, he turned his head, opened his eyes, and looked right at me. His voice sank to a sultry undertone. “Are you scared?”

He hovered so close to me, I could have kissed him then. “Not scared. More like tense. I’m not excited about probably getting killed in the next hour or two, but I’m not scared, either. I’m not looking forward to it. I just want to get it over with.”

“You’ll be fine. You fight well enough. You’ll probably survive.” He glanced down at my mouth. Was he thinking about kissing me too? That was when he said, “It’s time.”

My heart hammered against my chest. This was it. We were breaking out of here—or trying to. I stood and casually made my way to the corner. He followed me just as casually.

Once I reached the corner, I whispered, “What do we have to do?”

“Keep as flat as possible against the corner. I’ll boost you up and you’ll find a section of the ceiling that flips back. When you put your head through the hatch, you’ll see the field generator.”

He squished his big body into the corner as well as he could without crushing me. He leaned down and cupped one of his hands. I put my foot into it and he hoisted me up. He didn’t wobble once while I groped along the ceiling.

This was certainly a two-man operation, as neither of us was tall enough to reach the hatch by ourselves. Had our captors never thought of this vulnerability? Or had they, and we were wrong to assume it’d be this easy?

Once, I glanced over my shoulder to see if any sentinels were nearby. Xavier tried to hold me steady. “Pay attention, Merrit. Try to work quickly.”

I got down to business. In a second, my hand pressed against a section of the ceiling that folded inward. It revealed a space big enough for my head and shoulders to fit through.

Xavier lifted me a little higher and my head went through into a dark, small attic. A bunch of blinking colored lights flashed on a panel less than an arm’s length away. “I found the generator! There’s a button next to it.”

“That’s probably the power supply button. Press it.”

I did. Nothing happened, but before I could ask what the problem was, Xavier dropped me. He yanked his hand from under my foot and I plunged through the hatch into the cell again. He caught me before I landed.

We weren’t in a cell anymore. The two glass walls no longer existed. We had a clear path through the lab, but I had no idea which way to go.

Xavier grabbed my hand. “Let’s go. We don’t have much time before…”

At that moment, a sentinel clacked past us, carrying another alien in one of the glass cases. The robot almost trundled right past us before it noticed anything wrong. Xavier and I stood rooted to the floor, not daring to move.

For a second, the sentinel remained motionless while the alien in the case gaped at us in disbelief. Then, without warning, a deafening alarm screeched through the lab. “Subject escaped! Subject escaped!”

I lunged for the aisle, towing Xavier by the arm. “Come on! Now is our only chance!”

The alarm startled every other subject in the lab. They started attacking their walls, bellowing in hysterical frenzy, and jumping up and down. The ruckus they made almost drowned out the alarm. The sentinel forgot about us as it surveyed the rest of the cells, perhaps worried the containment failure wasn’t just isolated to our cell.

We broke into a dead run across the lab. The sentinel got a hold of its senses and raced after us, throwing its arms in our direction. Xavier dodged them, yanking me right and left by the shoulders.

When that didn’t work, the sentinel’s arms transformed into what looked like laser guns. I gasped, but fortunately, Xavier was one step ahead of me. With his superior hearing and reflexes, he dodged us left and right, each time narrowly avoiding the shots.

Halfway down the long aisle that seemed to have no end, one blast ricocheted off the floor and shot into the ceiling. A section of paneling exploded, and a long line of cells vanished in the blink of an eye.

The aliens inside stood stunned and disbelieving for a second until Xavier’s voice broke through the din. “Come on! Move out!”

A few giant rhino-like beasts reacted first. They bellowed in rage and stormed into the sentinel’s path. They caught it and smashed it to the floor. The sentinel popped off a few more laser rounds, but all that did was enrage the beasts as they stampeded off to cause more chaos.

Xavier and I dashed on, but more sentinels appeared behind us and from either side. They came out of the walls themselves with their weapons drawn and started laying down a carpet of laser fire across the lab.

The sight snapped the rest of the subjects out of their trance. The former prisoners pounced on the sentinels and started tearing the robots apart piece by piece. They broke off the sentinels’ weapons and used the lasers to destroy the rest of the field generators.

Xavier skidded to a halt near another opaque wall as the lab descended into pandemonium. “We have to get out of here,” he yelled over the noise.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “How do we get off this facility?”

“There’s a dispatch bay on the lowest level of this base. Ships come and go from there all the time and the experimenters have shuttles and long-range craft in stock for regular use. We can escape from there.”

Just then, an explosion roared through the lab. Xavier and I both spun around to see that some prisoners had gotten a hold of the sentinels’ weapons and were blasting away at various gas lines. At this rate, the entire place was going to blow up.

Xavier charged away, and I raced after him. After heading down several ramps, we emerged onto an enormous flight deck as big as the lab itself. Instead of cells, dozens of ships crowded the landing zone.

Tiny runners dotted the lanes. Massive freighters floated through a protective force field that showed the stars of space beyond the opening. The freighters landed and took off from the flight deck while robotic cargo containers and personnel carriers buzzed between them, loading, fueling, crewing, and repairing. Armed sentinels surrounded every craft, and more lined the scaffolding on all sides.

There was no way we were about to take them all on.

Xavier tugged me into a small corridor, and I gasped as I saw the walls lined with guns. “Armory,” he said simply. “I spotted this corridor during one of my early escape attempts.”

He grabbed the biggest, baddest looking rifle on the wall, while I went with something a little more easy to wield. He then put his back against the exit and glanced out into the cargo bay again. With careful aim, he took a shot at one scaffold, causing it to collapse and crush a dozen sentinels.

That first shot alerted all the other sentinels who started firing. The robots working on all the ships scattered and the flight deck became a sea of mayhem too. Xavier took this chance to make a move, weaving through various containers for cover. I followed, yelling, “Where are we going?”

He yelled something back at me, but I couldn’t make it out over the noise. An explosion burst out of the floor to my right and I veered left to save my life. At the same instant, Xavier seized me by the shirt and towed me back toward him. From what I could tell, he was leading me straight into the sentinels’ fire.

Before I knew what was happening, he skidded around one of the giant freighters. The sentinels’ lasers hit it instead of us and one of its engines blew in a devastating boom.

I screamed again, but before I could react, Xavier tackled me. “This way! Hurry!”

Another barrage of explosions rumbled through the ship as the sentinels hammered it with continuous shots, but Xavier wasn’t interested in the freighter. He hustled me to one of the tiny runners parked behind it. The giant ship protected it from the lasers.

“Inside!” Xavier bellowed. “We’re almost clear.”

He pushed me up the ramp and into the tiny flight compartment. There was barely enough room for both of us inside. He sprang for the pilot’s station. “Now I just have to figure out…”

I laid my hand on his arm. “Stand aside. I’ll handle this.”

His eyebrows shot up, but he moved out of the way. “How do you know how to fly one of these?”

“This is a Bigviat craft. We commandeered dozens of these on the Starglider.” That was good news. The Bigviats made reliable ships and had some good technology. What a Bigviat craft was doing here, I didn’t know, but I wasn’t about to complain.

He didn’t answer, and I turned my attention to the controls. I powered up and lifted us off the flight deck. Was there some security code to get through the force field to freedom? Would we explode trying to escape?

I retracted the landing gear. “Merrit…” Xavier began.

At that moment, the freighter behind us exploded with a catastrophic crash. A mushroom cloud of burning gas and shrapnel struck the runner and picked up a dozen other ships in the shockwave.

The impact hurled the runner and all the other debris toward the force field. I caught a flash of an alarm on the console and an alert that read, “Emergency Override. Thermal release…”

The force field dropped, and the fire propelled us through. Silence, blackness, and peace enveloped the runner. The flames winked out and the other ships drifted in different directions.

I grabbed the controls and activated the engines. I turned the helm as far away from the facility as possible and gunned the throttle to the floor.

We were free of the lab.