Chapter 23
His Voice Echoes
Jenna woke up with her whole skeleton aching to a melody she’d never felt before. Fallcet and AAMC guys had not roughed her up. She was cold because she was wet and on a steel floor. A towel had been thrown over her and she clutched it to her chest before she remembered the time she woke up in the lizard tank. She hadn’t been cold than because Sardius had the Octavians strip her under the heat lamps. She realized it would be better for her if she used the towel to dry off her body rather than her clothes.
Besides, there was no one around to know what she was wearing.
Jenna didn’t know where she was. The four walls around her were metal and painted green, as was the floor. The ceiling above her was a grate, and she could see a chain holding in the middle. There were no doors, and only one small window. It made sense that she had been dumped in a room that was probably a shipping container of some kind. She’d know what kind if she had more time to learn about the universe instead of always being pressed to do nothing but her job.
Her eyes hurt from the light and the effects of the tranquilizer weren’t wearing off. She looked out the window, but the view was discouraging. The light above was meant to illuminate her only.
All she knew was that she was cold and the only thing that could do to help herself was to get out of her wet clothing and dry herself off.
It was slow going.
Every move she made was like wading through mud, but eventually, all her clothes were off her. She laid them out around her. There wasn’t much floor space in the container, but there was enough for her to stretch them out. She peered above her with blurry eyes and wondered if they would pour more water on her from above.
She couldn’t see what was past the grate, just that there was a roof above her and hard lights beaming down on her like she was in a Costco. She hoped there wasn’t a camera.
She dried off, folded the towel into a pillow, and sat on it. Her wet hair dripped down her back. She crossed her arms and pulled her knees up to her chest.
Once she’d stilled her breathing a bit and recovered a bit more from the tranquilizer, she heard something.
Someone was humming.
She hummed something back.
The humming stopped and the person who had been humming a dull melody began whistling a cheerful tune. Jenna wasn’t very good at whistling, but she tried to follow suit.
“Is there someone in a cell next to me?” she asked, calling through the window that wasn’t even large enough for her to stick her head through.
“Are you alright?” a voice called back.
At first, Jenna didn’t know what to do. That voice. She knew that voice. It was the sound of the one man she had longed to hear.
“Sardius!’ she shouted back.
“Shut up, Jenna. We don’t need anyone hearing that name.” his voice came back sharply.
She plugged her mouth with her hands and for a moment she couldn’t hear anything except her blood pumping in her ears. It was him! It was him a thousand percent! It was just like him to be in a jail cell. He was the kind of man who had to be contained and all of a sudden, so was she. Her mind raced a mile a minute and she couldn’t do anything but hold her hand over her mouth and breath.
It was him!
***
Jenna was in the container, swinging from a chain that hung from the ceiling. She had a window she couldn’t really see anything through, and she couldn’t fit through the window. Her clothes were drying on the floor and she had wrapped the towel around her after she discovered she was not alone.
Sardius was in one of the cells next to her. He had been humming, then whistling, but he had stopped doing either of those things after she had called out to him. Instead, he was breathing and the sound of air going in and out of his lungs was ragged. She wondered how that hadn’t been the first thing she noticed when she woke up. It was a sound she ached to hear.
She wanted to talk to him, but he’d told her to shut up. Sardius never told her to shut up. Because of that, she felt a certain amount of urgency to obey him.
He had started moving around in his cell and she realized he wasn’t in the cell next to hers, dangling from the ceiling, but a few over.
Eventually, she heard the scrape of metal. Looking out her mini window, she saw that he had removed a few of the screws in the grate above him and hoisted himself onto the ceiling of his cell. He was merely a shadow standing straight and tall and beautiful. His shadow was what she always imagined his body would be like. She saw him hold onto the chain and work out a path on the tops of other cells to get to hers.
“Jenna, put your hand up,” he hissed, just loud enough for her to hear.
“I’m not tall enough to reach,” she replied.
He saw her face in the window. Jenna could tell by the way he held his head, though he was still a silhouette with light and shadow coming in odd bursts in the prison or warehouse. Jenna was inclined to think they were in a warehouse. There wasn’t a toilet in her container and the whole place didn’t smell of urine. She felt certain they weren’t in a holding cell that was accustomed to holding people.
As quietly as a cat, Sardius moved from container to container until he was next to hers. He started working on a part of the grate that was on the opposite side of where her window was, so she couldn’t peek out at him. She could only see his hands moving a miniature screwdriver around in circles to remove a section of the grate. His knuckles were the ragged bare bones of a boneman.
She tightened the towel she had wrapped around herself. At the very least, she wanted to be dressed when they met for the first time.
“Jenna,” he said her name in a low whisper. “I’m going to drop myself into your cell and when I do, you must promise me to stay completely quiet. You’re not going to like what you see and though you will be angry with me, you must stay quiet or we’ll be caught and my escape plan will be shot to hell. Can you promise me that you will keep your voice down?’
“I promise,” she whispered.
“Swear it,” he insisted.
“I swear,” she said, her heart thumping like a mad animal.
He dropped down into her cell, landing with his boots on her discarded wet shirt and the light came on him.
“Ryatt?” Jenna said, recognizing him immediately.
He shot her a look that was an ‘I told you you’d be mad’ look combined with an ‘I can’t help it if you’re stupid.’
“I suppose this building is made in a similar way to my jail in the Xypher Zone. I suppose the way the sound echoes makes my voice sound the same here as when I was jailed. You recognized me immediately when you didn’t before. I guess it all makes sense,” he said contemplatively as he turned to face her.
So… Ryatt had been Sardius all along.
She smoothed out the wrinkles between her eyebrows and instructed him softly, “Say something. Anything. Say more.”
“I’m not happy with this, Jenna.” His voice was Sardius’. Exactly. Perfectly. The cadence, the spacing between the words, the accent, the tone, and everything else.
“Why are you going by the name Ryatt?” she interrogated, keeping her promise to keep her voice down.
“Why are you in a towel?” he retorted.
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“They soaked me and dumped me in here with a towel. What was I supposed to do? Stay in my wet clothes?” It was barely a whisper, but the sound was traveling so well through the empty spaces that it was still too loud.
They looked at each other angrily and then stood way closer together… right up against each other.
“Where’s your earpiece?” he asked his lips in her empty ear.
“I don’t know. I don’t think it was with me when they soaked me in the fish tank,” she replied, putting her face right up in his ear.
After only two lines, it was already the most romantic argument she’d ever had.
“Answer my question from before. Why are you going by the name of Ryatt?” she pressed.
He rolled his eyes, gripped the side of her head in one hand, and pulled her toward him. “When I woke up in this solar system after I escaped the Xypher Zone, I was so messed up that the people who rescued me could only get two words out of me. One was ‘prison’ and the other was ‘riot’. I said them over and over again in no order because I was delirious. I’d had a few bad blows to the head. The nurses thought that I was saying my name and they interpreted my name to be Ryatt Prizen. When I was conscious enough to understand that was what had happened, I decided very deliberately to let them continue calling me that and to just let that become my name. You have to understand that even if the governments have shifted in my solar system, there are more people in this universe who I have pissed off and if I gave up my name, I could be next to you without consequence. See? I did it to be with you. I thought that when I met you at the fight on Spikay Two, you’d hear me call for you from the ring when I won and you’d know me. I thought you did know me and that was why you kissed me so hotly, but then you left the ring and blew me that flirty little kiss. You didn’t know me.” He pulled away and let her look into his eyes of mud and stars. “You know the rest of the story.”
Jenna swallowed. If that was the whole story, she felt that if she had been in his shoes, she would have been very unhappy with that outcome. However, Jenna was about as sentimental as a rock. Pulling him toward her, she almost put her tongue in his ear. “I’m calling bull on that being the whole story because you could have told me the truth at any moment since you started working for me. However,” she huffed before she conceded intelligently. “Maybe now isn’t the best time for me to get the details.”
“Whatever. Don’t drop your towel,” he bit back.
“I’m not warm enough to put those clothes on,” she said practically. “How did you get out of your cell anyway?”
“I’m wearing my boots. There are tons of gadgets in the soles, including something as rudimentary as a screwdriver. However, I do not have a spare set of clothing stowed away inside them and we can’t wait for your clothes to dry. It’s a waste of time anyway. There’s water everywhere. We’re not getting out of here without getting wet.”
“Bah,” Jenna said, almost making too much noise. She snatched up her dripping panties and pulled them on under her towel with a series of wet slaps.
He turned his back.
“What’s the point of that?” she hissed as she grabbed her bra. “It’s not like you haven’t seen everything I’ve got about a hundred times.”
“Yeah, but not in person. It’s totally different,” he murmured over his shoulder.
Jenna sorted her bra out, knowing he absolutely wouldn’t turn around, so she prioritized speed. “Whatever. Thank you,” she said, gritting her teeth and putting the chilled undergarment back on. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“The floor is water, so we’re going to walk on top of the containers until we get to the edge, then I’ll do some acrobatics on one of the chains and get you to the ground. From there, I’m not really sure. We’re still on Octavia Prime, but beyond that, I have no idea where we are.”
Jenna finished putting on her clothes. “How did we get snatched from my palace?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “Are you dressed?”
“If you call this dressed, then yes.”
He turned around and immediately saw what she meant. The clothes stuck to her like she had entered a wet T-shirt contest. He looked down at her body once and then focused his eyes on hers like he didn’t see anything else.
“I’m just trying to piece together why they brought you along. They don’t need you, do they?” Jenna whispered to him.
“Get on my shoulders,” he said, crouching down. “I’ll lift you up high enough that you should be able to get on top.”
Jenna did as he said with her shins grinding into his shoulders and with some major effort on her part, she did as she was told and got on top of the container. Then he smoothly lifted himself up with no help from her.
“They didn’t want to take me along,” he said, returning to their previous conversation, as he pointed out the route he wanted her to take on top of the containers. The route led to a rectangular red light on the wall that was undoubtedly a lit-up exit sign.
Jenna stepped onto the next container easily, and it wasn’t so light that it moved a lot when she put her weight on it.
Her boy kept explaining in a soft voice as they walked. “I fought them in the palace. It wasn’t like the last time the AAMC came to call. There was a lot of confusion. They had a Shushfief, obviously meant to confuse and cancel out Smoothie. I don’t know how their fight went. I’m unhappy with that. I fought the Adamis in helmets and facemasks. I don’t even know who I fought, but I managed to hurl myself into the pod where they’d placed your body. I thought you were dead. It was a relief when you weren’t, but I couldn’t wake you. They flooded the chamber with gas and separated us. I woke up in my cell and I was convinced everything would be alright because they were too stupid to take my boots off.”
“Why didn’t they?” Jenna asked, taking his hand for support as she stepped onto another container.
“They probably weren’t smart enough to deal with my feet.”
Jenna paused and thought back. She was certain she’d seen his feet before, but she couldn’t recall what they looked like. As she filed further back in her memory, she realized she’d never seen him without socks, even though she’d seen him without shoes many times. “Huh. You’ll have to show them to me later.”
He gave her a wry grin. “We won’t be doing that. I have enough problems right now. Forget about my feet.”
She returned his grimace. “Like that’s going to happen, but now that I haven’t screamed or made an unruly fuss, perhaps now is an okay time for you to explain to me why you didn’t tell me you were Sardius when I arrived at Spikay Two.”
He frowned. “Do we have to talk about it now? I’d rather chew glass. And look, we’re almost at the exit.”
“But I’ve been such a good girl, not screaming,” she said, as they got on the very last container.
“Not now. I have to get us down from here.”
The distance between where they were and where they needed to be at the exit was impassable for Jenna as jumping that distance would break her legs if the fall didn’t kill her.
Sardius examined the chain on the container because there was no nice way to get to the ground from where they were. The exit sign seemed to have been put there merely because the warehouse was so large, they needed exit signs everywhere if only to let you know where the wall was. Once he figured out where the chain led, he clicked open his shoes and pulled out a pair of tools that were nothing more than a set of handles with hooks on them.
Jenna thought they looked useless and stupid until he started climbing the chain with them, driving the hooks into the links of the chain without having to touch them. He was very impressive, moving his body up like gravity didn’t exist, and gravity was heavy on Octavia Prime. Jenna was astounded. She wanted to shout a droll comment to him about what a stallion he was and how he should have opened with that instead of a fistfight when he got high enough to change to another chain.
She held her breath as he swung to the chain that would get him to the ground.
Once there, he climbed down in a shockingly short amount of time. Soon, he was on the floor in front of the exit. He found the correct chain for the container Jenna was on and lowered it by flipping a switch.
When their faces were almost level, he gave her a smug smile as their eyes met, and then helped her off the container.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was you?” she persisted quietly.
“We really don’t have time for this, Jenna. We have to get out of this building. Let’s get a move on.”
He took her hand and the first thing Jenna noticed was that he wasn’t wearing his gloves, which meant that his hand was not at all comfortable to hold.
He pushed the button to open the automatic door in front of them.
Naturally, it was locked and the doors didn’t budge.
He cursed and let go of her hand. “Obviously, the door is locked. Obviously, we’re not supposed to leave. Obviously. Obviously. Obviously.” He lifted his foot and pulled a small pack of tools from inside the sole. Then he pried open the control panel.
Jenna watched him.
Did he know he was a little weird, being a prizefighter and a computer boi at the same time? That was an unusual combination, but he seemed unaware as he yanked on cables, found the one he wanted, and went to snap it with his wire cutters.
Nothing happened. He couldn’t cut the wire.
He was muttering in irritation before, but when he couldn’t clamp the blades shut, he got quite impatient.
Jenna watched him, completely amused as he leveraged all his strength into the tiny handles of the wire cutters. They weren’t going to do the job.
He was back into his boots in the next second, producing a very unpleasant-looking knife with a serrated edge. Folding the wire around the edge, he brutally pulled on the edge.
Jenna thought he was getting somewhere with that because bits were flying, but when he took the knife away, the wire was intact and the knife was ruined.
Jenna crossed her arms and bit her lip on a giggle while Sardius stared at the problem in disbelief and confusion.
She would have to rescue him.
Jenna bent over and said softly, “If you say one word about what I’m about to do, it will piss me off in a way I won’t even be able to describe. Wire your jaw shut and do not say a single thing. No joke, no comment, no witty remark. Nothing.”
He refrained from saying anything as Jenna bent her head even further and caught the wire with the large sharp edge of her crown. It broke instantly and Jenna stood upright as the doors opened.
Sardius put a hand over his mouth and kept his face away from hers while he put his tools back into his boots.
Jenna didn’t need him to say anything. She could hear a thousand snarky comments playing in her head.
She was a can opener!
At least she was good for something!
Who knew tiaras had so many uses?
Interrupting her infernal monologue, Sardius stood up, took her hand again, and led her through the door.
Glancing at him, Jenna was curious as to whether or not he thought what had just happened was funny, but his face was steely like no muscle in his face would move if there was a nuclear explosion in front of him.
She nuzzled the side of his arm and almost took off her nose. Fetch, he was boney!