Princess of the Void

He can’t pick the guitar up or he’d end up smashing it. He goes through the logbook instead. Back to the pages behind him. He sees what the other night shifters wrote. Blinking lights, flushing toilets. Nothing in here from the day crew. Now and again he comes across a torn-out page.

A rattle above him. A screw clatters to the floor. He looks up.

The AC vent opens and Batty falls into his lap.

“Grantyde,” she gasps.

“What the fuck!” He nearly falls backward out of the chair.

He looks into the cell and sees a vent on the ceiling, hanging by two screws. The other two are halfway unthreaded. It was the pick. It must have been. She used it to jimmy the thing open. This is his fault.

No, not his fault, he decides, as the little alien shivers in his lap. This is thanks to him.

Batty’s lighter than she looks. She lays her face on his chest and shakes. Her skin is shockingly cold, but as she trembles and her breath puffs onto his neck, he realizes it’s from her trip through the vent. She’s warming up already.

“Batty.” His heart is thundering. “What the fuck—”

“Shhh.” She puts her finger to his lip. She rubs his stubble. He didn’t really believe this would ever happen. Her skin on his.

She lets out a string of words. Grantyde is in there. His arms are locked by his sides, knuckles white on the chair.

She’s fiddling with his tie, examining the knot. Her fingers tremble. Her foot nudges his forearm. “Hand,” she says.

She stares into his eyes. There are no whites in there, he realizes. It’s all red and black. The iris might not be an iris at all. They do that shining flash they do sometimes, as though a filmy camera shutter clicked across them. Her voice is lower than he’s ever heard it. Low and raspy. “Grantyde hand Batty.”

She’s asking for his heat, he realizes. He lifts his hand. There’s a ruddy groove in it from where it dug against the chair. He places it on the small of her back, near the stalk of her tail. A sigh escapes her at the warmth of his palm against her chilly skin. Her nod of approval tickles the fringe of her silky hair across the web of his thumb.

His other hand joins in, and lays across her shoulder blades. He could close his fingers around her at the narrowest point of her hourglass. He feels his pulse in the back of his throat.

Her ears wiggle. A smile twitches at the edge of her mouth. Her hips shift as she squirms further into his lap. She’s small, but she doesn’t feel delicate or thin-boned. She feels solid. She feels made to be touched.

His thumb runs along the ridges of her spine. Her skin is satin-smooth. Her stare is patient, content to let him explore.

How far?

His touch lightens. His sanity reasserts itself. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Sorry. I can’t—can you—” He shifts, trying to communicate that he needs to get up.

She hops off of him and points to his logbook and his pen. Her eyes flicker. “Hand,” she says. He passes both to her.

She speaks in her language as she sketches a diagram. There’s the chamber, and there’s Grant sitting in his room. She scribbles the vent connecting the two and a two-way arrow through it. She draws another arrow pointing out away from the vent, and then X’s it out. She holds her hands up and brings them together.

“The vents are too small,” he says. “You can only get from there to here.”

“Tuusmal,” she repeats.

“You need to get out that way, don’t you?” He points at the door to the hallway. “Up the elevator. But you need—” His hand closes around his ID. “You need this.”

She nods. Her eyes do that now-familiar glow they have whenever she’s being intense. “Home. Up. Taiikari. Keayae’kmainaema Maekyon.”

He nods. “Kiyai kamainama make-on.”

She snorts. “Grantyde. No.”

“We’re gonna do this soon. I swear.” He gestures to the vent in the ceiling. “But tonight we really have to get you back in there and put that vent back where it goes. Can’t do this without thinking it through. Accounting for the obstacles in our way. Maybe bringing some supplies in.” He imitates writing something down in the logbook, a look of concentration on his face. “Gotta plan.”

She sighs and nods.

“I want to know what you’re saying. I want to get you to Taiikari. I do.” There’s an ache behind his eyes. Drake was so right and so wrong. He should never have spoken to Batty. Never gotten this close. But he can’t treat her the way he’s been told to. Can’t look at her and see anything less than a prisoner. A prisoner who barely shares a word with him, but who has made it overwhelmingly clear:

She wants to go home, and she needs his help.

She points at the ceiling and rattles off a round of gibberish.

“You want me to help you back up in there?”

“Help.” Her ear twitches. She nods. “Up.”

She hops onto the console. He stands and offers her a boost. She carefully places the sole of her foot on his interlaced hands. Her weight shifts as she stands. Now he’s looking up at her, along the valley between her breasts and into those piercing reds. He has a very clear view of what’s between her legs.

It’s like the rest of her. Small, cute, blue, and human enough to close a tingling, invisible grip around his stomach.

She bends down. She pushes her forehead against his. He feels the tingle of her exhale on his lips.

They stare at each other for a few moments.

Then she hops upward and scampers into the vent. He lets out a breath he didn’t even realize he was holding and sits down in the swivel chair.

Batty’s face appears in the vent. Her eyes are glowing in the dark. “No saying,” she says. “Vaneakanaia’zamanaraianama. No saying Drake.”

She says his name with a surprising tinge of venom.

“Don’t tell anyone about this?” He adjusts the tie she loosened. “I won’t. But listen. Batty. You can’t be leaving that cell yet, okay? I have to—I’m gonna figure something out. I don’t know how we get you home. We don’t have the technology. But I’m gonna get you out, at least.”

“Help,” she says. “Help Batty home Taiikari.”

“I will,” he says. “I swear to God. I will if it kills me.”

He watches her thin fingers wrap around the vent’s fans and pull it back into place.

Morning comes, and at every step of his departure, he’s tallying obstacles and plans and contingencies. Which of these checkpoints can they just use her camouflage to pass through? Those cameras—are they infrared, to better track their inmate? What does he do about Drake? The man seems placid at their farewell. Is he suspicious? Where did that guy with the submachine gun come from? Is there a garrison here?

So intense is his concentration that he’s already halfway home by the time he realizes Batty stole his phone.