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Hex

I spot Eleanor immediately. She’s lying still on the second cot on the right, her face scrunched and pale as if she is in great pain even though she looks sedated. “Mong! Over there!”

The two of us rush to her, Aran on our heels. An IV drip is hooked to her right arm, where all the veins are bulging in an unusual way.

“What is this? Can we take it off?” I shake the thin plastic tube.

Aran squeezes my shoulder and retrieves the pack of fluid from the IV pole. “It’s saline, probably to prevent her from dehydrating.”

“We need to wake her up! She can probably tell us what happened and who did this to her.”

“Hex.” Aran halts me as I begin opening drawers in search of something to counteract the sedatives she must’ve been pumped with. For her to look this way, she must’ve been here for quite some time, maybe even since the day she disappeared. “It’s obvious what happened. They are testing drugs on the staff.”

I pinch my forearm, my heart beating so quickly, I can feel every thump along the side of my neck. I can’t imagine it’s consensual either. And there are so many of them, too. We knew something bad was happening here, but it didn’t cross my mind that it could be this level of bad.

“Why would they do something like this?” I question out loud, a lump forming in my throat as I take in the vast lab.

This is the worst. All those VIPs need to pay for what they’ve done to these people!

“If I had to guess, they must’ve synthesized a new variant of that drug,” Aran answers, rummaging through the glass cabinet with ampules in various colors that’s across from Eleanor’s cot. “They must be testing its effectiveness before they roll it out.”

“And what better way to make sure it performs than testing on the crew of a two-week long exclusive cruise…” Mong adds, his voice jittery. “I can’t believe they were doing it right under our noses, too. What if…” His eyes scan the room, fear swimming in them. “What if I had been next?”

I don’t like the thought of that, so I squeeze his hand in reassurance and don’t think about it. “But you weren’t. Now let’s wake Eleanor up?”

He nods and helps me look for a way to bring Eleanor back to consciousness. My breathing is haphazard, my skin feels itchy. I don’t like this place, and I want to leave as soon as possible so the bad guys can be brought to justice.

A part of me questions if that will even happen. I am not na?ve—if entire governments are involved, they’d do anything in their power to prevent this from getting out. We’ll need to be very careful how we go about it, and most of all, we need indisputable proof before we even think about going public.

I survey the space once more, searching for cameras. But I come up short. There’s nothing. Annoyed, I click my tongue. Mrs. Lynx and the other assholes have taken precautions—there is no surveillance for me to steal. I flick my gaze to Aran, who’s made a mess of the folders and documents on the nearest desk. I think he’s already looking for other incriminating evidence, but what if he doesn’t find anything either?

Taking a deep breath that does little to calm me, I cast my eyes over the sleeping people once more. If we can’t find anything, we’ll need help from someone who was directly involved.

“Hey, Eleanor. Wake up,” Mong says, gently shaking the sleeping woman.

Aside from the saline IV drip, no other solution is being pumped into her, so whatever they’d used to sedate her must be relatively strong. But if it’s been a while—and it looks like it has been—surely it must be about to wear off.

Sadly, neither Mong’s nor my efforts are enough to wake her up. What if it’s not a sedative? What if she is in a coma or something because of side effects from that evil brainwashing drug?

“Try this.” Aran nudges me on the shoulder. I make space for him, and he injects something into her IV. “It’s a counteracting agent that I found in the cupboard with sedatives. It should help wake her up.”

It does, and quickly. She opens her eyes within a couple of minutes, mumbling something as she tries to sit up.

“I’ll find Katy! She must be here somewhere,” Mong hollers once she’s recognized our faces and looks a tiny bit less like a disoriented deer.

“Wait,” Eleanor croaks, shivering. She hugs herself as tears fill her eyes. “She—They—”

A surge of icy alertness washes over me. I clench her hand and rub her back.

“Did something happen to your friend?” Aran asks flatly in his business tone.

The woman nods, the tears dripping down her cheeks. “They—I went to talk to… Mrs. Streiss. Katy was there and…” She coughs harshly, clutching her chest. “I tried to help her! But I couldn’t. And then they injected me with—” she cuts herself off, bawling now.

Goosebumps crawl all over me. This is horrible. And it almost happened to me, too. I inhale with my whole chest, focusing on the air flowing through me so the flashback of the VIPs ganging up on me doesn’t consume me. I am fine, Aran saved me. He didn’t let the worst happen to me, he protected me, just like he’s always done.

I can’t imagine the trauma Eleanor will have to deal with. But we are here now. She’s safe, and once we are back in Japan, I’ll have Aran get her any help she might need.

“She’s dead. I’m so sorry.” Eleanor continues to cry, wiping snot and tears from her face. “I’m so sorry, Katy. I never should have invited you to that party.”

“It’s not your fault,” I coo, stroking her wavy black hair. It’s clumped in a few places, which only serves to prove that she’s been here since the night of the party.

“But it is! I knew…” She whimpers, hanging her legs off the cot. “I knew they intended to test that stupid drug here! But Mrs. Streiss promised it was safe! I had no idea any of this—” she frowns at the sedated people and presses her palms into her face. “Oh my god.”

“Just focus on breathing,” Aran cuts in, hovering behind me. “You were manipulated.”

She shakes her head. “I knew Mrs. Streiss wasn’t the benevolent woman everyone believed she was! I… helped her screen some of the staff on the cruise!” She sniffles, going even paler. “They planned it, from the very start. To use the unsuspecting employees as guinea pigs. And… And this isn’t the first cruise either. Her former assistant left right after the previous one…”

Or maybe that’s not even what happened. They probably just suffered the same fate these people did. The timelines align. In the months since Matt and Kieran came from the US, there could’ve easily been more than a few attempts to synthesize a working mind-control drug. I snap my gaze to Aran. He nods grimly and rubs my back. This is horrible. Every rich snob on this ship deserves to die.

“We need to do something…” I mutter, pulling out my tablet and connecting it to the nearest computer. “There must be some way to expose this.”

“The reports,” she says as Mong helps her to her feet. They keep reports with the results from the tests. “I… I’ve seen them before, but I didn’t know what they were exactly.”

I bypass the login screen with the help of my reliable custom-made hacking program, then proceed to scan through the myriads of files. While I’m waiting to get a hit, I come across some kind of a document. It’s a contract or something outlining the parties involved and how much money each of them has poured into this drug. It’s a big list, and it has even bigger numbers on it.

“Aran, look.” I hold Mrs. Lynx’s tablet that I’ve made mine so he can see what I’m seeing.

He takes it, frowning more with each page he goes past. Curious, I take a peek, skimming alongside him.

“Oh, shit. All the big players are on this ship!”

We already knew that there would be key players here, but not that it would be a staggering ninety-five percent of them. The names of the remaining five are also in that document too, so I make sure to download it. It will make taking care of the bad guys so much easier.

It’s not long before I get a hit on my search for test results, but just when I start the download, an alarm sounds, and the entire lab is plunged into bright red.

Uh-oh.

I twist my head back, causing the chair to spin with me, and make awkward eye contact with Mong, then Eleanor, and finally with Aran.

“I think they found out what we did.”

The moment the words are out of my mouth, the glass sliding door shatters with multiple loud bangs. Aran throws himself at me, and Mong does the same to Eleanor, all four of us falling to the cold tiled floor with painful grunts as bullets barrage us and break everything in their path.

Seriously? Not again.

“Stay down!” Aran yells, keeping me tucked under his body.

It’s not like I was planning to go for a walk while being shot at. But I guess he said it for the others’ sakes too, as I doubt either of them has had the pleasure of finding themselves in a deadly situation like this one.

Fear snakes its way through me, but with it comes that thrill I taste whenever I get involved in something dangerous. Usually, Aran isn’t part of it because he’d never let me get in that kind of trouble in the first place, but things are different now. We’re together in this, partners who have each other’s back.

I fucking love it.

“Tien,” he says into my hair before popping his head over the cabinets we’re using for cover. “I need that second gun. Do you still have it?”

I kind of forgot he handed it to me, but when I reach back, it’s holstered to my belt. “Yes.”

“Give it to me.”

I grab the dangerous thing and shove it into his hand, pausing as I am about to let go. “Wait. Does that mean you don’t trust me to cover for you? I’ll have you know I am a very accurate shooter.”

He does his version of an elegant scoff. “Games don’t count.”

Just then, there is a break in the fire. He yanks the weapon from me and vaults over the furniture, shooting both guns at the same time as he charges at our enemy. The guards fall down one after the other until there is not a single one left standing.

It’s surreal. This is the coolest, most badass, crazy psychopath-daddy thing I’ve ever witnessed Aran do in my life. And it doesn’t end there either. Nah. More people arrive a second later, but he’s ready for them, ending their attack before it’s even had the chance to commence.

“Hex!” He yells, crouching by the base of the stairs. “Can you get the door closed? They’ve disabled the scanner and manual override controls!”

“Gimme a sec!” I unlock Mrs. Lynx’s tablet. The screen has cracked, but otherwise the device is holding up just fine.

A couple of screens later, I’ve found a way to reboot the door via an emergency protocol of the secondary network. It works like a charm, and soon Aran is back with us. Someone’s blood is smeared all over his suit and his hair is a sexy mess, but that’s fortunately all the damage he suffered. He’s not injured.

As I am about to make sure of it by conducting a very thorough check of his body, a red warning alert triggers on the tablet. I glare at it and my blood turns into ice.

“Hex.”

Oh boy, this is bad, the pinnacle of horrible endings.

“Hex.”

It’s really looking like a potential game over, and it’s not because it’s only a matter of time before they find a way to undo my system lock on that door.

“Tien,” Aran speaks in my ear, his voice stern and commanding. When I don’t respond, he cradles my face between his hands and forces me to look at him. “What’s wrong?”

I gaze into his eyes. “We have a problem. I offloaded some monitoring apps when I gained access to the hidden network and they just got triggered because someone issued a fatal drone strike on the ship.”

Everyone goes still, pausing whatever they were doing as they comprehend the gravity of our suddenly very and really deadly situation.

“I’ll call Kwanchai,” Aran rushes out, phone already in hand.

“There’s no time. The little bugs will be here in twenty minutes,” I counter, my mind racing as my fingers try and fail to find a way out of this checkmate.

“We need to get off this ship!” Mong huffs out, his chest rising and falling too quickly. “Are they seriously going to kill everyone?”

It makes sense, if they wanted to destroy all the evidence and kill any witnesses. After all, better safe than sorry.

“Can’t you hack the drones?” Aran suggests, sounding genuinely worried now.

“Don’t you think I would have done it already if I could? Intercepting them requires special tools, which, if you haven’t noticed, I don’t have! Hacking is not that easy, you know. Sometimes all I need is a device and access to the network, other times it takes a lot more than that!”

Fuck, fuck, fuck, I need to do something or we are all dead!

[Attention. This is an emergency. Please head to the lifeboats on Decks Two and Three.]

Lifeboats. Yes, of course! There are lifeboats on every ship and that must be how the evil billionaires plan to get off! I imagine there isn’t enough space for everyone, but they wouldn’t care. As long as they save themselves, everyone else can suck it.

Yeah, no thanks.

I quickly navigate through a bunch of systems, locating the one responsible for the boats. There are a total of forty-one, with forty of them accessible via those two decks from the emergency message. Wait, just forty? For this massive ship? Isn’t that a little too few? Before I can arrive at an answer, I get distracted looking for the last boat. It’s not in any of the official menus, so it takes me a while to actually pin it down.

Holy shit. It’s right here, just outside the lab’s smoking area!

Grinning, I issue a bunch of nasty commands, overriding the stand-by status of all but the lab lifeboat. This immediately triggers the holding mechanism to release and drop the boats into the water. None of the cranes were manually activated, and the system didn’t detect any weight on any of these boats, so this means that no one had time to reach them before my sabotage.

Next thing I know, I’m cackling like the villain in an action movie, my companions staring bewildered at me. But I can’t help it. The evil billionaires are stuck here with their prototype drug. For safety reasons, they don’t have another copy, just the useless failed variants. I can end this suckass conspiracy here. I am. This will set them and their plan to take over the world with the help of brain-zombie soldiers back by years. Maybe even decades.

Holy shit, I’ll be a hero.

It’s taking me everything to contain my excitement. I’m buzzing. I need to move, to jump, to run, to have wild sex with Aran.

“There’s a boat by the smoking area. Let’s go!” I press the tablet to my chest and tug on Aran’s sleeve. “I released all the other ones. This is the only one remaining. And it’s ours. None of the bad guys are getting off this ship. They are stuck here and will die along with their shitty drug. And as for the rest of these assholes”—I squeeze the tablet closer to my chest—“we’ve got their names. They’ll get what they deserve, just like the ones here.”

Aran squeezes my hand and bolts, running so quickly I can barely keep up. Mong is right on our heels, helping Eleanor so they don’t fall behind. She’s elated right now, going on about penguins and ice cream and secret balls in Paris. It must be the drugs or the sedative.

Everything turns into a blur as we race against the drones. It’s like I’m in the process of separating from my body, so my spirit can fly off and have a rave party in Heaven. Or Hell. Cold ice licks my spine as I realize what I have done. I prevented the bad guys from escaping the ship, but what about all the staff? What about the people here in the lab?

“No, no, no! We have to go back!” I thrash against Aran’s hold, my heart trying to hammer out of my chest. “Fuck the billionaires, but we need to help the rest of the people!”

Aran squeezes my hand tighter when I try to slip away. “Hex, listen to me. We don’t have time. We have to get away from here.”

“But the people—I did this!”

“No. There weren’t enough boats. The staff would’ve never gotten to them,” he argues, his words hard to comprehend. “We don’t know if an alarm even went off across the ship.”

“No, but… We heard it! In the labs!”

He cups my head and gazes into my eyes. “In the labs that they own. Where their product and specialists are. Whoever ordered the strike is probably the only one aware it’s happening. And they would never let the staff get off the ship. It would be too risky.”

I can’t think. This is too much. We have to help these people, but we also need to run or the drones will kill us.

I have no idea if it takes us five or ten or fifteen minutes to get to the smoking room, it’s hard to breathe and think and move. I’m crashing, the adrenaline draining off me at the worst possible moment.

But I still make it onto the boat. Aran hauls me with ease, getting everyone in before he activates the crane and hops inside. We hit the water hard as the telltale buzz of the drones reaches my ears and overpowers the angry screaming and shouting I can hear from the ship.

Then it’s another race as the faint blinking red lights approach us like a flock of deadly bees. The motor of our boat roars, fighting the rumbly waters as we speed away from the St. August. It feels slow, too slow, my heart barely able to take it.

The gigantic lit up behemoth of a ship gradually shrinks in my view, reaching the size of my palm by the time we pause for a breather. The red lights gather around it, forming the circle.

Then there is silence, and after it, the horizon explodes.