Page 91 of Journey to the Forbidden Zone

His avatar sprinted down the corridor he’d just opened, the briefcase clutched tightly. Behind him, the thunderous scraping of claws and the guttural data-growls intensified.

He could sense more than hear other watchdogs converging from adjacent corridors, drawn by the alert. The maze, moments ago merely a navigational challenge, had become a lethal hunting ground.

Zed reached an intersection. Left or right? No time for analysis.

He veered left. Another door blocked the way. He didn’t slow. Extending his hand, he unleashed a brute-force decryption burst, sacrificing stealth for speed.

The door’s defenses flared, alarms shrieking silently in the data-stream, but it buckled and dissolved just as the lead watchdog’s snapping maw closed on the space where his ankle would have been.

He plunged through the dissolving doorway into another section of the maze. The watchdogs followed, relentless, their code-forms tearing through the remnants of the door like paper, their pursuit a storm of corrupted data and predatory intent.

Zed’s processors, optimized for logic and calculation, were now dedicated entirely to survival. The briefcase containing their only hope felt suddenly, terrifyingly heavy.

Carmen sat slumped at the small table in the mess hall, where she’d come to get away from the endless, stressful silence on the bridge. She stared at a ration bar she’d unwrapped but couldn’t bring herself to eat. It lay there, an unappetizing block of compressed nutrients, mirroring the lump of dread lodged in her own throat. The silence from Zed was a physical pressure, a vacuum sucking the air from the room.

The image on the viewscreen was burned into her retinas: Zed’s blocky form, clamped to the dark satellite, no signs of life emitting from it. Sent to die because she’d rolled the dice. Again. Just like sending him out there in the first place. Just like keeping Mila.

A trace of Mila’s pheromones seemed to coil in the air around her, a sweet counterpoint to the metallic tang. It brought back the sensory overload of Engineering – the cold deck plating against her cheek, the impossible stretch, the obliterating release as Mila took her apart and remade her.

Surrender. Pure, terrifying freedom. But now, the frightening possibility that it was all chemicals was back. That her defiance, her decision to bring Mila home, her very attraction, was just biology hijacking her will.

Was she compromised? Was she leading her crew to their deaths because she couldn’t think straight around a pair of green eyes and a scent that short-circuited her brain?

She shoved the ration bar away, the plastic wrapper crinkling loudly in the silence. Her knuckles ached where she’d grippedSark’s chair. Her shoulder, still bruised from the jump-drive failure, throbbed dully. Her vagina, sore from Mila’s relentless invasion, reminded her the finely wrought control she’d crafted for years was gone.

Weakness. Failure.

The hatch hissed open. Carmen didn’t need to look up. She knew the sound of Letitia’s heavy footfalls on the deck.

Carmen kept her gaze fixed on the table’s scratched surface. She couldn’t face her yet. Not after Engineering. Not after the things Letitia had surely heard the things Carmen had screamed.

Letitia didn’t speak immediately. She moved to the small galley counter, the sounds of her pouring water into a cup unnaturally loud. Carmen tracked her movements peripherally – the set of her shoulders, tense beneath her worn jumpsuit; the tight line of her jaw.

The cup clunked onto the table beside Carmen’s untouched ration bar. Letitia pulled out the opposite chair and sat down, the metal legs scraping against the deck plates. She didn’t touch the water. Her dark eyes, usually sharp and assessing, were shadowed, fixed on Carmen with an intensity that felt like a physical touch.

“He’s not dead, Carmen.”

She flinched, forced herself to meet Letitia’s gaze. The anger she expected to see wasn’t there. Not entirely.

Instead, she saw exhaustion. Worry. A deep, conflicted sadness.

“How do you know?” Carmen’s own voice sounded hoarse, scraped raw.

“Because the satellite hasn’t blown us to hell yet,” Letitia said flatly. “If his chassis was completely inert, if the connection was truly dead, that thing would have pinged our recognizer chip the second it stabilized. It hasn’t. So, he’s still in there. Fighting.”

Logic. Cool, hard logic. Carmen clung to it. Letitia was right. It was a thread, thin but real. She nodded, unable to speak past the sudden tightness in her throat.

Letitia leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. Her gaze didn’t waver.

“I need to say something.” She paused for a second. “And you need to hear it.”

Here it came. The confrontation. The I-told-you-so. Carmen braced herself, her fingers curling into fists under the table.

“I’m jealous,” Letitia said, the words blunt, shocking in their honesty. “Fuck, Carmen, I’m so goddamn jealous it burns.”

Carmen blinked. That wasn’t what she’d expected. Not even close.

“Jealous?” she said, trying to bring her mind into the conversation Letitia wanted to have. “Of Mila?”