Page 360 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

“What are you doing!?” I demanded quietly as I followed him up the steps to the panel.

If we got caught at a bank because I wanted money…

things would get really bad for me. He tilted his head my way, his eyes like starry night skies twinkling at me, mirth in every line of his face.

He held up the tip of one wriggling tentacle, the other wriggling out from his hood to reach for me.

I was starting to get used to that; it was a little like he had two pet snakes who were extremely smitten with me.

“Getting you your money,” he said casually.

Was he fucking kidding right now? Had I somehow gotten embroiled with a freaking bank robber?

Then he astonished me even further by thumbing the tip of the tentacle he was holding, a little patch of skin sliding away to expose a tiny hole.

With his other hand, he pulled a little cable with glowing, glass-fiber-like ends from one of the seams in his coat.

It looked alive as he touched it to the hole he’d revealed in his tentacle, sliding right in.

“Nav-port,” he declared. I knew what those were, and that definitely didn’t look like any normal nav-port.

Those ports were installed in the back of a person’s head, allowing them to hook themselves up to a ship’s computer so they could use their actual brain to run the super-fast calculations needed for navigating at Faster-Than-Light speeds.

As advanced as the aliens out here were, they still couldn’t build computers small and fast enough to do that—and fit onto a ship.

Why was his mind at the end of that long tentacle?

And what did he think he could achieve by hooking himself up to the security system of a bank through it?

From what I’d learned, most minds were barely able to function as a nav-computer.

Some people got lost inside that data stream as soon as they hooked themselves up for the first time.

What he was about to do was crazy, dangerous, and completely unheard of.

With a few quick motions from his agile hand, wielding one of his handy tools, the screen popped free from the access panel.

It didn’t take him long at all to get the other end of his cable attached to some wires inside.

I had never seen a navigator in action, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, maybe that he would close his eyes or that his face would go slack like a zombie or something.

Akri grinned at me, showing off a set of sharp, white teeth with canine teeth slightly more pronounced than a human’s, but definitely not hitting that vampire territory yet.

“Please observe the street. In case of traffic, tap my shoulder.” I wanted to look away and do as he said, but I was utterly fascinated when his starlight eyes began to flicker, like the stars were dancing.

Then the colors shifted from white to red and orange, and I gasped at how pretty that looked—and how bizarre it was.

“Watch the street, Jenny,” Akri said, startling me.

I hadn’t thought he was still aware of what I was up to, but apparently, he was.

Doing as he had asked, I made myself turn away so I could watch for people.

He was right, I needed to warn him as soon as anyone came by.

But all the businesses were dark here; I doubted we’d see any traffic.

It didn’t take more than a minute before I heard a click, and then the soft humming of the force field disappeared.

I dared a quick look over my shoulder and realized that Akri had done it; he’d turned it off and opened the front door to the bank.

We could get in now. Had he disabled the cameras inside as well?

He was already unhooking himself and rolling up his cable, although he didn’t take it out of his tentacle.

“Come,” he said, gesturing at me to follow him through the door.

Since we were far less exposed inside than outside, I did as he suggested.

My stomach was in knots the entire time, but my body tingled with excitement as well.

This was not what I expected to be doing with my freedom.

I would never have considered breaking into a bank back on Earth.

Here, it was actually a little cool, too. I was already a fugitive, so why not?

The inside of the bank consisted of a stone floor, a service desk, and a wall with partitioned little nooks.

It looked almost like a bank on Earth might, though this place was small and looked as if they hadn’t even tried to spruce it up.

There wasn't a single potted plant or painting in sight—just stark gray everything.

Akri confidently strode across the square room, ignoring the service desk, and headed straight for one of those nooks. I followed him, unsure of what he was going to do next; he was entirely unpredictable.

I also didn’t know exactly how banks worked here.

Credits were digital, though there were chips with standard amounts and chips you could load directly with specific sums. I wasn’t supposed to handle any kind of payments at Drova’s bar, but I’d made sure to learn as much as I could about the monetary system here.

I had to—if I wanted to survive out here.

It was those separate chips that I’d managed to steal here and there and squirrel away.

I didn’t have a com device to access my ‘credit’ account, so that was the only way I could get my hands on money.

As an added bonus, those chips were untraceable, so they were my best bet.

When I reached his shoulder to peer around him and see what he was up to, Akri had already hooked himself up to the computer.

This went even quicker. In less than a minute, several credit chips thunked out of the slot at the bottom, and I hurried to collect them.

Reading off the amounts with astonishment, I saw it was more than enough.

This was the equivalent to nearly a hundred thousand dollars.

I could easily buy passage to a safe world with it.

I could get myself into Kertinal space for sure, but even better would be reaching Aderia.

This would definitely be enough for that.

“Wow, Akri, that’s plenty,” I said when I realized more chips were falling. More than I could carry on my person. I didn’t have anything to put these little chips in other than my bra or apron pockets; neither was meant for carrying such large amounts of money.

His head tilted down to look at me, and his pretty eyes stopped sparkling as he focused.

Immediately, the clattering chips stopped dropping into the slot.

“Are you certain, Jenny? It is no trouble at all. You can have as many credits as you want.” He shrugged a muscled shoulder, the leather of his coat making a gentle creaking noise as he did so.

Gesturing at the screen he was hooked up to, he added, “The credits are untraceable when added to chips like these.”

“I’m sure,” I said firmly. “I can’t possibly carry more, even if I wanted them.

This is more than enough to start a new life with.

Thank you.” I didn’t need much anyway. I wasn’t a city girl; I’d grown up in the country, where my father had taught me how to hunt before I’d even learned to read.

All I wanted, once I got off Ov’Korad, was a quiet cabin in the woods somewhere.

And I liked to work, so a job would be nice, too.

Akri still looked dubious, but he did as I asked, shutting down the system once more and unhooking himself from the device.

I’d gathered what I could and tucked it away on my person, but there were still chips on the floor when I was done.

Those he picked up with nimble fingers and pocketed with a shrug.

“We must hurry. I have set the system to power back up in two minutes,” he told me.

I immediately turned for the door, my eyes seeking out the cameras that were tucked into the corners of the room.

He knew what I wanted to know before I even asked: “There will be no trace of us. I disabled them before we entered and erased the footage from outside the bank.”

There was still no one out on the street, but since there were no homes here, that made sense.

It looked like we were getting away with it, robbing a bank without triggering any kind of alarm.

I started giggling once we’d turned the corner, then outright laughing when Akri looked at me with a completely baffled expression.

“Are you experiencing a malfunction, Jenny?” he asked, when I was still laughing two streets later. This guy said the weirdest things, and it was starting to grow on me. Did he truly not get that I was having a reaction to the adrenaline after that stint we just pulled?

“Yeah, I’m great. Come on, let’s find a place to hunker down for the night. I’m cold.” I gestured down the street, vaguely in the direction of what I thought was the port. We had to go that way in the morning, so we might as well find a hiding place for the night along the way.

“You are correct,” Akri said, then shrugged out of his long leather duster.

“Take my covering. This body is more suited for lower temperatures than yours.” I didn’t say no to that, letting him drape the coat—warmed by his body—around my shoulders.

It was blissful to finally be warm again, and as an added blessing, his coat smelled like him; it smelled good.