Chapter 22

If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said that nothing could take the rabid sexual hunger away from me. Yet genuine fear for your life, and watching violence up close and personal, will do that to you.

As I look around the room, I feel like something is off—more than the fact that every man has sustained an injury of one kind or another. Like, we might be fewer in number. I feel like I’ve been put through a wringer, squeezed out parchment-thin and brittle, like I might shatter if somebody touches me too hard… like my body can’t sustain this level of stress.

Yet, somehow miraculously, it does. People eat and drink, sitting down on the metal chairs. I’m cross-legged on the floor, watching as Ash, Noah, and Seb, along with two other men from the group, disappear into a side room.

As they leave my sight, my stress cranks up.

A week ago, I didn’t know them; or anything about Andromeda, really. Now, I feel like I’ve been trapped forever in this godforsaken place.

As my eyes shift over the group of men around me, I realize that no one is settling for the night. No packs are being unloaded besides the rations. There is a readiness about them.

We’re going to be moving again, soon.

Stepping inside this tiny bunker felt like I was stepping into a trap. Now I don’t want to step outside where it’s dark and we’re exposed.

Only, I can’t have it both ways. I wish I knew what the endgame was. Where are we going to? Is anywhere safe?

Derek said that the people of Andromeda had a smaller, scattered population; but how much does Derek even know? Who supplies all the bases? Where does the electricity come from? The weapons, the medicines, the virus? Somebody is putting all that in place.

My sphere of understanding has grown. This is the fifty-seventh planet they have assimilated.

Space travel is something that never crossed my mind when I was living under the dome, and just another inhabitant of Sarendon.

I wish I’d never gotten on that shuttle. Only, I’m here now, and I can’t turn back.

As Ash, Noah, Seb, and the other two men emerge from the room, the others reach for backpacks.

We’re moving. My legs don’t answer my command to function. How am I going to stand up, never mind walk?

Seb comes over to me. “Come on, princess.”

I kind of liked that term at first. Somehow intimate. Now I wonder how many other omegas he has called it. “My name is Isla.”

The look he gives me is indecipherable. He holds out his hand. Defiantly, I take another drink of my water. And then, because I can see everybody is preparing to move out and I don’t want to stay here on my own, I do the sensible thing and put my hand in his.

“Where are we going?”

He doesn’t answer because Seb the asshole is in residence today.

But then he doesn’t need to as a strange screeching noise from the center of the room accompanies the lifting of the trap door.

Dusty stone steps lead down.

“What’s down there?”

“A way out that doesn’t get us picked off in the forest.”

The first two bases made me feel claustrophobic at times: last night’s more so. I don’t enjoy being in this windowless room, and I definitely don’t want to go underground.

He purrs.

Damn that sound. “You can’t purr the entire way.” Hysteria begins to bubble up.

“I can if I need to.”

“They’re coming for us?”

He nods.

And there is the push I need to get my legs moving, despite my fears of being stuck underground.

Two of the soldiers disappear from sight down the steps. Two more follow behind them.

“We’re up next.” Seb picks up the backpack from the floor, shucks it on, and snaps the clips in place across his chest and waist. “You want to walk?”

“Yeah.”

The steps lead down to a tunnel that slopes gently downward. It is dusty, dank and stale, like the room above. Lights flicker on, illuminating only a few sections at a time, leaving the rest eerily dark.

I’m freaking out. Seb is still purring at my side, not that it really helps.

The trapdoor creaks as it falls into place, sealing us in. Same as with the front door, thick metal bars slot into place.

“Move out,” Ash says.

Nobody likes the tunnels. It’s fucking claustrophobic down here. Isla is looking skittish, and I can’t say that I blame her. You don’t assimilate a planet overnight, and the underground tunnel complex was established a long time ago, even before the domes.

The program is accelerating. Foundation work is happening at an accelerated rate as we race to bring worlds under the Empire, and the Uncorrupted race to claim them for themselves.

There are no prisoners in this war, only collateral damage in the next stage of human evolution.

It’s brutal. There is no question about it, but I also want to survive. And I already know I’d fucking kill or maim for Isla. She’s close to her limit. My alpha instincts are in riot, wanting to protect her, hating that I have to push her when she’s exhausted—those two needs sit in conflict when we are nowhere near safe.

The passage levels out after a while, but it’s weird when you can’t see more than a few sections in either direction. My wrist piece has the tunnel layout, so we all know where we are and where we are going since Ash pushed the route to everyone’s device.

She stumbles.

“Want me to carry you?”

Her glare makes me want to smile… and pick her up.

I keep my eyes on her. If she looks like she’s going to fall, she’s going over my shoulder.

I’m tired, too. We’re all fucking tired. But I won’t rest until we get another drop door between us and them.

I feel the boom as much as I hear it. It vibrates through the soles of my feet and shakes my body. It instills a sense of foreboding so pervasive it sparks a shiver that ripples across the surface of my skin, almost as if I’ve been shocked with an electric current.

“Run!”

The order doesn’t fully make it into my brain. Seb takes my arm and hustles me into a run, and then, somehow, while he’s still running, he snatches me off my feet and tosses me up over his shoulder.

The pressure of his thick shoulder against my belly and the joggling as he picks up his pace to a full-tilt sprint rattles my skull. I cling to consciousness with the same tenacity I cling to his backpack, all the while fighting the urge to puke.

Something is coming. Them. The Uncorrupted and their exoskeletons. They are inside and chasing us down.

I hang on to Seb’s backpack for dear life as his pounding pace tosses me around.

We pass under another thick metal doorway.

Seb slows and stops.

“Clear!”

And another great boom sounds as the heavy plate slides down.

But my mind is reeling from the image of dark shapes running toward us, the lights blinking on and off in rapid fire under their unnatural speed.

Exoskeletons. The Uncorrupted. The people who want to take me or take me out.

Seb slides me down so that I’m on my feet, and I pitch straight to my knees, witless with fear. We’re in a cavernous room full of gray containers of varying shapes and sizes. Is this where they keep the supplies? There is a pulley system embedded in the ceiling and a shaft leading up. I can’t see far enough to know if it reaches the surface. It’s cold here. Then again, it was cold the moment we hit the steps.

“We need to make a stand,” Ash says. “It won’t take much to pop through the door.”

As if on cue, a great thud comes from the other side of the door. I didn’t see exactly how thick the metal is, but there is a distinct dent in the surface. What the hell can do that kind of damage?

Another dull thud. Another dent.