Chapter Thirty Two

  Ornette slept in her dorm room from the time she was dropped off until one hour before she was supposed to be in the dressing room. Then she rose like a zombie from the dead, stumbled to the cafeteria, ate something that might have been brains (it might have been a quinoa salad), and went back to her room only to brush her teeth before taking her seat to prepare for filming.

  “How was your time with Varner?” Clandestine asked, coming up behind Ornette and meeting her eyes in the dressing table mirror. The redhead looked sleek in her dressing gown with her eyebrow raised.

  Ornette had already signed her nondisclosure agreement. “About the same as my night with Hans,” she replied.

  Clandestine pinched her shoulder. “You should have acted just like Orpah when you guys went bungee jumping. Maybe if you cried louder than her, he would have chosen her instead of you.”

  Ornette’s eyelashes fluttered at half-mast. “I agree. I didn’t even think of it. I just love throwing myself off things.”

  “Well, stand up,” Clandestine ordered like she was Ornette’s mummy. “I want to say goodbye to you properly before you get kicked off the show.”

  Ornette stood up, and Clandestine hugged her with both her arms pinned to her sides. “Look, I’m sorry I was snotty earlier.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ornette said, trying to pat the other woman’s elbow with her arms pinned.

  “I’m not the only one who’s sorry,” she said, backing off and looking into Ornette’s eyes. “I’ve been counting my rosary beads that you’ll get bought by Fen or that man you mentioned, Desmond. You deserve to have a nice purchaser... For once.”

  Ornette was truly touched. “Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

  Yilin came up behind her. “I’ve been cheering for you too. Though I am sad you’re going to get kicked off the show before me. I thought it was going to go the other way. I thought they were going to save the most desirable women to be auctioned off last, but it seems it’s going the other way. Mikayla was just everyone testing the waters. You would have been off last week if the viewers didn’t want to keep you on. After all the good ones are gone, Papa Bear is going to be left with the least desirable of us all.”

  “Is that you or me?” Clandestine asked Yilin sardonically.

  “I hope it’s neither of us. That guy is gross, but after Ornette goes, he’s going to chase me,” Yilin bemoaned like it was already a fact and not a prediction.

  “Why?” Clandestine frowned, looking confused.

  “I’m the next smallest. Silvania is also Asian, but she’s tall and I’m short. I figured out his kink. Varner likes tiny girls. He’s going to say something gross about how I’m his little China doll and make me sit on his lap.”

  “That’s a weird kink,” Clandestine said, allowing her frown to deepen.

  “How much do you weigh?” Ornette asked Yilin.

  “A hundred and thirty-seven pounds,” Yilin said with an eye-roll.

  “Can you starve yourself down five pounds just to be safe?” Ornette asked seriously.

  “No. I have already been taken aside by The Coordinator. He told me that if I try to shed a few pounds by refusing to eat, they’ll sue me for breach of contract. The amount they’ll sue me for will be more than my salary for the whole contract. I already spoke to a rep from Sleeping Beauty Inc., and they say I’ll be on the hook for it. I don’t have the money, and they say the math is sound, so I should be safe. The Coordinator is no joke, and he’s offered me an insane bonus if I don’t squirm.”

  “So, you’re going to stick with it?” Ornette asked carefully.

  “Yeah, well, I could use the money, and every dude in the universe loves carrying a tipsy Asian girl on his back. So I can drink my way through it,” Yilin said in a sweet and sour tone of voice.

  Ornette was sorry and wanted to say more, but The Coordinator came over and shooed the other girls away. “You’re lucky,” he said as he helped Ornette with the corset laces on her back. “Varner sent me a message saying that he can’t come to help you get ready. He’s busy.”

  “Hooray,” Ornette cheered as The Coordinator finished tying her.

  That was when Ornette’s bracelet started to beep.

  “What’s that?” he asked, looking over her shoulder.

  “It’s a message from my owner saying I have to return to my room,” she explained. “That’s weird.”

  “That’s very weird,” The Coordinator said. “You have to go because it’s an official request, and Sleeping Beauty Inc. rules trump ours, but make it snappy. Like really snappy!”

  “Really? I’m number twelve. Everyone else goes before me.”

  “No. You’re number ten now because two other girls were voted off. Hurry.” He swatted Ornette and sent her back to the dorm rooms in her turquoise gown.

  Ornette unlocked the door by waving her hand in front of the lock and entered the suite with a flourish. “Desmond,” she called once the door was shut.

  She couldn’t see him. She went into the bedroom, and at first, she thought there was a trail of red rose petals that led from the white linen bed to the dressing room. Then she realized the red marks were not rose petals, but blood splatters. She raced to the dressing room.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Desmond was there. He was half inside the cylinder of the shoe rack, and he had blood stains spreading on his white suit. There were two gashes in the side of his neck, and that left stains down his lapels and a deep red mark widening at his hip.

  “What happened?” she asked, rushing him.

  “Well, someone didn’t want me to attend the auction tonight, and he thought that if I had a few nicks in my neck and a few blood stains on my suit, I would be forced to stay away,” Desmond explained, a little drooper than usual.

  “You mean Varner?”

  “Yeah, except he didn’t think I’d feel the same way about keeping him from the auction, so I got him on the side of the head, and that really pissed him off, so he knifed me in the appendix.”

  “How do you know that’s your appendix?” she shouted.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice mangled with pain. “I know he got me in the right side above the hip. That’s where your appendix is.”

  “Have you called a doctor?”

  “I called you. Help me tie this up.”

  “How?”

  “Surely, you have something with a little tension to it that you could wrap me up in. Women have things… scarves, leg warmers, yoga pants, pantihose? We need to stop the bleeding.”

  Ornette grabbed a box of pantyhose and started pulling them free. He grabbed the tie-dye skirt and shoved it over his injury. Ornette used the pantyhose to bind it down. After tying it, she grabbed another set and did it again.

  “Do another pair,” he begged after she was finished. “The pressure helps.”

  “You need a doctor,” she insisted.

  “The wound is not that deep. I’m just being a baby. Help me down the tube.”

  “In this dress?”

  “Take it off if it’s bothering you, but we need to go.”

  She was confused. “We? I’m not doing the show?”

  “The MC stabbed me. No. You’re not doing the show,” he said as he attempted to reposition himself so he could make his way down the ladder in the center of the shoe rack.

  Ornette undid the zipper on the side that was the quick way out of the dress after the corset had been tied. Then she stood staring at the clothes in her closet like a weirdo. She had no pants. Everything was dirty. She grabbed her bathrobe, threw it over her shoulders, stuffed her arms in the holes, and tied it at the waist.

  The tube beneath them was long, with emergency lights at regular intervals on the way down. The bottom of the tube was lit, and Ornette could see a white floor, so she wasn’t scared. The only thing that worried her was whether or not Desmond could make it down safely. He was moving slowly.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’d be able to go faster, except I keep accidentally looking up at you coming down the ladder. It’s quite the show,” he said with a rueful chuckle.

  “Shut up,” she instructed with an eye roll. The view up her housecoat was nothing to write home about. She was wearing opaque pantihose and though it was brownish, it did not look anything like her bare skin. “Like seeing up my housecoat is a treat.”

  “I wasn’t talking about seeing your pantyhose. I was talking about seeing you in the tunnel. I have been aching to take you out of your room. I have been parking my helocarrier under your room since we began this. I wanted to sneak you out and take you for a ride.”

  “Where would we go?” Ornette wanted to know. He was talking about taking her to the actual place she dreamed of when she closed her eyes and meditated to clear her mind from the cobwebs of the day. Her inner vision opened to orange clouds and something indelible from her past that made her feel safe, even when she knew she hadn’t been safe. It had all been an illusion, but Desmond was talking about giving her the closest thing to it.

  “Must we go anywhere?” he asked, arriving at the bottom of the tunnel and slumping against a wall while he waited for Ornette to descend the remainder of the ladder. “It’s Venus. There’s nowhere to go, and yet, there’s everywhere to go.”

  Ornette arrived beside him and pulled his arm so he would put his weight on her shoulders. “So, we’d just fly around?” She was used to talking in a way that kept all her feelings to herself, so she didn’t sound excited about the prospect of cruising on Venus.

  “Unless I’m very much mistaken, you are the kind of girl who just wants to fly around.”

  Ornette’s breath caught, and her heart skipped a beat. She almost forgot he needed a doctor.

  They were in a helocarrier antechamber. Ornette helped him into the pilot seat, and she took the co-pilot chair. Once they were buckled in, he started the sequence to initiate liftoff.

  They were under the floating city.

  “How was this built under my room?” she asked curiously.

  “I’ll explain later,” he said shortly through the microphone at his mouth that relayed into the headset she wore. “Right now, we need to get out of here and I…” He pressed the wrong button, and Ornette immediately slapped his hand to stop the action.

  He had just opened the landing gear, which he really didn’t need at that moment.

  “Are you feeling well enough to fly?” she questioned desperately.

  “I…” he said faintly.

  Ornette didn’t wait for him to answer. She pressed the controls to turn the co-pilot chair into the pilot seat, and she finished the liftoff sequence. In their case, it meant falling into the clouds instead of lifting off into them.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as they skimmed under the metal panels of the city.

  Ornette had never been under a floating city on Venus, and she loved the experience. She loved it so much that she forgot to listen to his answer. A second later, she was asking the question again, but Desmond didn’t answer. He was slumped in his chair.

  If he was unconscious, he was done giving commands, and Ornette plotted a course to the nearest hospital.

  It would have been great if she could have gotten there, but the circular monitors on the dash were going berserk. There was an alarm going off that she’d never seen before. It took her a moment to understand what was happening. The engine compartment was being sealed off because their ruptor had breached, and with the glass case broken, the dangerous aspects of the ruptor were spilling all over the engine.

  Ornette had never seen an error like that in a helocarrier before. Rupter cases were made of plate-diamond. If it was breaking, that meant someone had broken it on purpose.

  They were losing altitude.

  Ornette sent out a distress call, but they were losing power. As they fell, Ornette held onto the controls and stopped them from spinning, but she wasn’t able to gain altitude.

  The view from the windshield was the story of her life. She had been coasting between orange clouds, skimming in impossible places, and suddenly, everything had gone dark. The clouds had changed from rich cotton candy to angry, black clouds with bronze linings. She was falling, falling, falling. She was supposed to fly. She was supposed to rise, but the descent could only be slowed; it couldn’t be stopped. The bronze lining disappeared, and the yellow light was blocked utterly, like a dragon cloud swallowing the sun.

  When the ground rose to meet them, the helocarrier crunched in a way that terrified Ornette. What if the engine case cracked and the virus that powered the ruptor came through the cracks into the cockpit? Ornette did not need to die from MTN after everything she’d been through.

  She pressed the buttons to send out a non-stop distress call. Then she undid her five-point harness and reached to Desmond’s belt to undo it.

  The fall had woken him. He was groaning. “What happened?”

  “Don’t talk. We need to move to a compartment further back and seal off the cockpit.”

  Once they were in the back with the cockpit sealed, there wasn’t much they could do other than wait for help.