Containment (A Sanctuary Novel) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Caryn Lix has been writing since she was a teenager and delved deep into science fiction, fantasy, and the uncanny while working on her master’s in English literature. Caryn writes novels for teens and anyone else who likes a bit of the bizarre to mess up their day. When not writing, Caryn spends her time obsessively consuming other people’s stories, plotting travel adventures, and exploring artistic endeavors. She lives with her husband and a horde of surly and entitled animals in southern Alberta. Find out more at CarynLix.com.

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Containment

ONE

MY BARE FEET POUNDED THE black floors, my breath coming in short, sharp gasps. Strings of flickering lights illuminated my way, and I jumped over a piece of something unrecognizable lying in the middle of the corridor. By now, on my twelfth loop, it was a conditioned response.

A thin sheen of sweat covered my body, one I wouldn’t be able to rinse away, and my foot throbbed slightly. Reed, our resident healer, had fixed my earlier injury, but either he hadn’t managed it completely, or I was experiencing ghost pain. Life on this alien ship had made me soft. No exercise regimen, no training sessions, nothing but sitting around worrying and ignoring increasingly frantic messages from my dad on Earth until my comm ran out of battery. I couldn’t afford to lose my edge. And so I ran, around and around the ship until I collapsed from exhaustion.

Cage kept pace beside me, bare arms gleaming, muscles sharp and defined even with our recent enforced inactivity. I scowled and put on a burst of speed, but even without using his powers, he easily kept pace. With his abilities, of course, he could have lapped me a dozen times before I blinked.

Like everyone else on this alien ship, Cage was an anomaly, a superpowered teen recently escaped from the orbital prison Sanctuary. Of course, even though I was an anomaly too, I’d worked as a guard before being taken hostage by the prisoners. I’d only banded together with them to survive an attack from vicious alien creatures, all while discovering my own lurking powers, which gave me much more in common with the prisoners than with Omnistellar, the company I had once devoted my life to. By capturing this alien ship on a wing and a prayer, we’d barely avoided the aliens hell-bent on assimilating us, and for some stupid reason, I’d thought that now things would calm down a little. Sure, we still had Omnistellar to deal with, and we were all criminals on the run, but the combination of freedom and a near-death experience had to count for something, right?

Not so much. Not living in the very pit of the vipers who’d tried to kill us. Taking the alien ship had been a victory. It was the only reason we’d survived their attack on Sanctuary and escaped with our lives. But every time we turned around, we faced alien technology, alien architecture. The ship didn’t want us here. We’d taken it, but it wasn’t ours. And nobody forgot that for a second.

As if constant prickling unease weren’t enough to keep me busy, I had my dad back on Earth probably thinking I was dead. I’d ignored his messages at first because I didn’t know what to say, how to tell him about Mom’s death or confront him with my knowledge that he’d implanted the power-controlling chip in me when I was young. As time went by, things only got worse, and now my comm battery was dead, so I couldn’t talk to him even if I wanted to. Add another layer of guilt, please.

And I wasn’t the only one who’d lost people. With so many friends and family members vanished from our lives, living with the perpetual shadow of the things we’d done to survive, it was no wonder our escape hadn’t proved an easy solution.

Some of us seemed to be able to live with those things more easily than others, of course. Cage jogged to a casual halt in front of me, leaning his hands on his knees and casting me the boyish grin that always made my lips twitch in return. Our current workout seemed to absorb every bit of his attention without a hint of the relentless stress in the back of my mind. Cage set the mood for the others, and I knew he took that role seriously. But even with me, he hadn’t offered any indication that his past decisions cost him a moment of sleep. “I give up,” he gasped now. “Mercy.”

“It’s not a competition,” I said, although it totally was, and I had totally just won—the test of stamina, anyway. Cage had more than matched my speed.

Cage pulled a bottle of water out of one of the supply bags we’d strung along the walls and passed it to me. Our fingers brushed, more contact than we’d had in two weeks, and I tried to keep my face impassive as I cracked it open. “Thanks,” I said, draining half the bottle in a single gulp.

He grabbed a bottle of his own and sank to the floor. I sat across from him, and we gazed at each other. The tips of our toes were almost touching, but the space felt wider with all the words and fears unspoken between us. Something had happened after Sanctuary. The night we’d escaped, I’d huddled against Cage and we’d clung to each other like a lifeline. But as the days passed and reality intruded, those touches, those shared jokes, those moments of peace and refuge vanished beneath the mountain of things we’d done to make those small moments possible.

I glanced both ways to make sure no one was in earshot and said, “I’ve been thinking . . .” About Matt. About what happened back on Sanctuary, that terrifying, horrible moment when the gun jerked in my hand. The shot I thought would save him, which ended up being the shot that ended him.

“Did it hurt?”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s a joke my dad would tell.”

Cage smiled, although the effort never quite made it past his lips. “That’s what I’m known for. What are you thinking about?”

Everything. The moment he’d argued in favor of killing the aliens on this ship, and how little the thought of genocide seemed to bother him. Rune shouting at her brother, desperate to prevent him from murdering an entire race of creatures, Cage’s furious response, his desperation to eliminate the creatures before they awoke and came after us again. The way every sound in every corner made me freeze in terror as if an alien might leap from behind a wall. The tension on the ship, so thick you could almost bathe in it. I settled for the thing most frequently on my mind: “Matt.” Matt. My friend, Cage’s friend, everyone’s friend, really. He’d been one of the only prisoners to treat me with respect from day one. And then the alien had attacked him, and I’d been the one with the gun.

I’d shot, of course. Who wouldn’t? To save a friend?

But I’d missed. In the wake of that horror, of Matt lying breathless and sightless on the floor, it had been Cage who’d dragged the body away, Cage who’d convinced me to lie, to say the alien killed him. And I’d been lying ever since.

A cloud settled over his face. “Kenzie, we’ve talked about this.”

My stomach twisted and scuttled for cover. So much easier not to discuss these things, to laugh and change the subject. But I’d been searching for the opportunity for days. “I know. And you were right, at first. Back on Sanctuary, we couldn’t tell anyone what I’d done.” The prisoners on Sanctuary had already viewed me with suspicion and hatred. If they’d known that I shot their friend, even accidentally, they never would have followed me off the ship. The truth would have killed us all. But now . . . “We’re all stuck together. I’ve gotten to know people better. They trust me, or I think they do.”

“They do.” He leaned forward, fixing me with his earnest gaze. “Or they’re coming to. But what do you think...