Page 32 of Alien in the Depths
“I told you not to turn any lights on when we’re doing the rounds,” came a sudden voice from the other room. It was high and weedy, but unmistakably threatening, and Zaraq suddenly shot up, leaving the spilled contents of the box.
“You think I don’t know how to do my job?” came a second voice, this one gruff and heavy.
Panicked, Zaraq knew he only had seconds before the guards followed the source of the light and found him. Grabbing his pack with one hand and a zapfa ray in the other, Zaraq scrambled away from the cabinet just as the men entered.
“Hey!” the weedy one shouted, but Zaraq had already run, darting through another doorway that led into a grand dining room.
Undeterred, the guards followed closely behind, yelling for him to stop.
But Zaraq hurtled through the room, knocking down chairs behind him in a desperate bid to block their path. He was pulling over the chair at the head of the dining table when he heard the first shot.
The telltale sizzle of a blaster whizzed past him, just narrowly missing his ear, and instinctively, he ducked. The zapfa ray was still clasped in his hand, and using the table as cover, he sent off two shots. One of the yellow rays connected with a frosted glass sconce just beside the doorway. The other just narrowly missed the gruff guard who Zaraq recognized now as Joran—a thug in the security team he’d always disliked.
Before the two men could recover, Zaraq fired a shot into the glass door beside him. In a flash, he emerged from the table and ran through the shards to the house’s vast walled garden.
He could hear the guards inside, scrambling over the chairs and through the glass.
“Was that Zaraq?” he heard Joran yell.
“Who?” yelled the weedy one, but Zaraq aimed to be far away from there before that question was answered.
With all the energy he could muster, he sprinted through the garden until he reached the street. A new pod was in the drive—the guards’ presumably—and Zaraq silently hoped they were stupid enough to have left the code unlocked.
Knowing Joran, I might be in luck.
The two men were coming from around the corner of the house just as Zaraq jumped in the pod’s driver’s seat. To his utter relief, the DriveAI welcomed him as soon as he closed the door, and within seconds, he was speeding away from Vexis’s home.
Several blaster shots followed him, one hitting the pod’s side mirror, but nothing that would slow him down.
As Vexis’s home grew smaller and smaller in the rear mirror, Zaraq let out a deep exhale, emptying the air from his lungs as if to breathe out the remnants of his adrenaline. His hands were still shaking a little as he pulled off the blue gloves he’d been wearing this whole time, stretching his fingers back and forth.
Apart from some chafing from the suit, and a small cut on his cheek from a piece of flying glass, he was entirely unharmed.
“I got lucky,” he reminded himself, playing over the last ten minutes in his mind.
He knew he should have been more careful and staked out the place longer before entering.
Of course, Vexis had guards, he thought.
Yet…
As he directed the pod through some of the lesser-known back alleys and smaller streets, he felt a sudden elation course through him. Against all odds and in spite of his mistakes, he’d made it out. A broad grin crept across his face at the thought.
He’d been running from his past for so long, convinced he’d never come back to Rikuus, and even more convinced that no one would ever believe his innocence. But tonight had changed everything. His heart rate began to slow as he breathed in again, and he reached over to the pack he’d thrown into the passenger’s seat beside him.
Zaraq moved aside the zapfa ray he’d thrown on top and, patting the pack, felt the familiar shape of the sigma blaster. This, he knew, was his ticket to freedom. Now, not only did he have proof that he didn’t kill Ryka, but he also had a whole family of people who believed him, who had fought for him.
He couldn’t wait to get back to the room and show Sofia. But as the pod pulled up outside the Kaylian Hotel, Zaraq’s comm suddenly chimed.
If he hadn’t still been wearing the purple makeup, anyone watching would have seen the color drain from his face as he read the incoming message.
Chapter 13
Sofia
The thumping bass of the tightly packed club filled Sofia’s ears, coursed through her body, and vibrated in her chest as she stepped deeper into the belly of Goendir. The place immediately got her hackles up, its sticky floors tugging at her high heels while all around her, the club’s seedy clientele yelled, drank, smoked, and danced in varying states of inebriation.
The walls were painted a dull black, the occasional strobe light picking up the grime that had accumulated there over the years. Other than those bright flashes, the whole place was dark and shrouded in smoke. The music, apart from being bad, was loud, and Sofia could hardly hear herself think.