We’ve Escaped Death! …Now What?

My ears rang and my body hurt, but I opened my eyes to find Cecilia and I were still alive. I grinned towards the princess, who was sprawled on the floor beside me. She responded by kicking my shin.

“What the hell was that?! You trying to get me killed?!” she screamed.

I scrambled away as she stood up and glared down at me, hands on her hips. I responded, “I personally think I saved you.”

“By throwing me through a wall?”

“Well we’re not jackal food right now, are we?”

I gestured towards the destroyed bridge across the street which we launched from. Any remaining jackals were scampering off with their tail between their legs. She huffed, and started exploring our new surroundings. I stood up and began wandering around too.

We had fallen from the third floor to the second. This structure used to be an office building, with abandoned cubicles filling the space. Everything inside was scavenged long ago, leaving only the eroded partitions between them.

As I explored, I heard Cecilia yelp, and I heard rocks tumbling from across the room. I ran towards a collapsed corner of the building, which created a pile of rubble that the princess must’ve fallen down. She laid at the base of the pile, gripping her arm. However, when I arrived, she sprang up and preemptively responded, “I’m fine!”

I hopped down the debris and joined her in an alleyway next to the building. It didn’t take long to notice blood trickling down her arm. Despite that, she trudged forward.

“Cecilia, wait—!” I grabbed her shoulder, and she tried swatting my hand away. “Stop it! I’m trying to help you,” I added.

Despite her objections, I sat her down on a nearby concrete block, pulling off the bandana around my neck. I wrapped her wound with it, and she looked away with an almost guilty expression.

“I don’t need your help,” Cecilia muttered. “Why are you doing this, anyway?”

I tightened the makeshift bandage around her arm. “What do you mean? I just wanted to help you. That’s all.”

I smiled, but she just glared back. Her antennae swayed again, possibly trying to gauge my intent.

“You want a reward for saving me or something?” she questioned.

I froze. It had crossed my mind, but I shook my head, dodging the question. “Look, I’m no saint, but I’m not just gonna leave someone to die.”

She stared at me, as if trying to decipher my soul, before giving up with a sigh.

“You’re unusual,” she muttered, pushing herself off the concrete and walking down the alleyway in a random direction. I jumped up and followed her.

“Where you going, anyway?” I asked.

She replied like the answer was obvious: “Back to the carriage.”

“And where is that, exactly?”

She went silent, continuing around a corner, into a long-forgotten courtyard. Any foliage that existed here had long since rotted away. I asked her again, and she snapped back, “I’ll figure it out! I’ve already gotten too much help from you.” She climbed up some steps and into a dilapidated building. “And I need to repay you somehow…” she mumbled.

I followed her into a destroyed hotel lobby. The remnants of a chandelier were strewn across the floor. The crunching of glass underfoot echoed around the room.

“You really don’t need to—”

“The Taizune family doesn't accrue debts,” she interjected, kicking a piece of brass from the chandelier across the floor. Its clanging filled the space. “And I hate having such a large debt to some stranger I met today.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could, she spun on her heel, jabbed a finger into my chest, and continued, “And I have nothing to repay you with right now, courtesy of you running away and getting us lost.”

I scratched the back of my head and giggled bashfully. She had me there. However, she began stomping away, so I instinctively grabbed her arm, almost falling as she pulled it away.

“You’re not seriously planning on finding your way back now, are you?”

“And if I am?” she responded tersely.

“Look outside!” I said. She grumbled as she glanced out a busted window, into the twilight. “It’s pretty much dark out by now. The carriage might be a little hard to spot, y’know? Not to mention all the rubble you’d have to navigate through, and the jackals prowling around…”

“And what do you suppose I do then, huh?” she retorted, pushing me away. “I can’t let all you’ve done for me go unpaid!”

I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “Fine. You want to repay me? Then here’s what I’ll ask of you.” She tensed up in anticipation while I took a moment to think about this. How greedy did I want to be? I was a pirate after all, but requesting money didn’t guarantee a way off the planet. Sure, I would have been richer, but not many natives of this destroyed megalopolis would have owned, let alone sold, a spaceship.

I decided to play it safe, sticking up my fingers to list two requests: “One: I want you to help me get off this planet without taking me to a scavenging operation, like the Johnston company.” She relaxed a bit, hearing the nature of my request.

“Fine. What else?”

“Two: I want you to stop, calm down, and sleep with me for the night.”

Her eyes widened and she blushed at the second request. I realized the implications of that statement, and just before she objected, I quickly explained myself: “W-wait, I don’t mean like that!” I backed away, putting my hands up. “I just mean that going out there right now is dangerous, and we should just hunker down somewhere and rest.”

Silence enveloped us. I gulped. She eventually broke it, asking, “...And that’s all?” I nodded, and she continued, “But that’s not enough to repay you in full…”

“Then I’ll come up with more requests later.”

To that, she looked down, and a smile crept onto her face. She mumbled, “You’re a strange one. You know that?”

I sighed in relief, seeing her in a better mood. “Yeah, yeah. So I’ve been told. Come on, let’s go,” I said, beckoning her up the single surviving staircase here.

On the second floor, the ceiling had fallen in places, blocking half of the space. Rooms lined the halls, though they were either stripped of everything, or the furnishings inside had been destroyed. Almost all of them were covered in rubble to boot. We eventually found a room which wasn’t completely covered in debris, and didn’t have a collapsed exterior wall—top tier for this city, it seemed.

We laid down on the cement floor on opposite sides of the room. As I tried finding a position that was even remotely comfortable, I heard a small voice from Cecilia’s side of the room: “Thank you…”

I looked over to see Cecilia facing away from me, slightly curled up, with her arms against her chest. Something told me she’d prefer to leave it at that.

“No problem,” I murmured before closing my eyes as well.

- - - - -

Meanwhile, in a tower of steel that almost looked like a spinning top, two beings stood alone in a meeting room among its top floors. One was a man with the face of a lizard. He wore a pinstriped suit and had scaly green skin. He stared through a window, across the flattened wreckage of Xios that surrounded the tower. The countless trucks, bulldozers, and excavators whose lights illuminated the darkness were mere ants from this height.

The other was a young Ora-Kurai woman, sporting the simple dress an attendant might wear. Her square face appeared uncertain as she reported to her superior.

“We’ve received a report of a Taizune transport that is to arrive at 07:20 relative solar time,” she said, flipping through her report with shaky hands. “It is to be carrying a Johnston Company intermediary who presumably got caught in the crossfire of yesterday’s conflict between the pirates and the Intergalactic Police.”

Her superior turned towards her, frowning. He propped his hands on the meeting table. His attendant continued.

“I’ve looked into this, and we had no—”

“We had no intermediaries scheduled yesterday,” the reptilian man interjected. The attendant stood straighter when he spoke. He stared at the mahogany table, considering something.

“One of the pirates crash landed here on Xios, yes?” he asked.

His attendant nodded, hugging the papers she was reading from. “Yes. He was presumed dea—”

“Presumed,” the lizard man repeated. The emphasis made his attendant step backwards. His gaze returned to her as he continued, “You know how we Axos operate, yes?”

His attendant nodded again. “Mhm. Money, money, money,” she said in a nervous, singsong voice.

“Yes. And we know an opportunity when we see one.” The Axos man smirked, pressing some buttons on his watch, summoning a holographic display showing a bounty board. “Get me a mobile task force to intercept that vehicle. And… let’s hedge our bets. Find a way to contact that pirate’s buddies. I hear those other two might just work with us.”

“Yes sir!” the attendant exclaimed, spinning on her heel and exiting the room to accomplish her assignments. The Axos man scrolled through the list of bounties, grinning as each reward grew larger than the last.