Free Awake by Viola Grace Page A

it was a very small part.
    With bumps, jolts and a lot of grunting, they got her tank to the open area outside the docking fittings.
    The ground was hidden beneath a thick mass of mist.
    The woman in the tank stopped hiding her eyes, and as she looked around her, panic filled her features. She thrashed and fought the walls of the tank, pounding from within and causing the men around Foros to laugh.
    He had a premonition of ill and backed away from the tank.
    The woman thrashed around, reached up and hauled on something in the top of her tank. A light blinked around the edge of the base, and Foros took the better part of valour. He ran for it and hid in a sealed room, waiting as he heard an explosion that rocked the station followed by the distinct noise of decompression.
    * * * *
    It was anticlimactic to say that they were not going to take her alive, but Kali knew that wherever they were taking her, she wanted no part of it.
    The sight of her friend Harri dead on the ground with a gun in her hands had triggered Kali’s final surge of energy. She thrashed around and reached up to start the explosive release at the base of her tank.
    Escape was her goal even though her limbs were too weak to help her in her flight. She pulled at the wires that ran through her body, trying to release the bonds that made her helpless.
    Instinct was taking over and urging her to run. She answered it the only way she could, she tried to agree with it and help it along.
    When her tank base exploded the bits of the charge that did not blow the legs off the Raiders buffeted her.
    Kali coughed, gasped and vomited fluid for a moment before she heard an ominous creaking. Warily, she turned her head and watched the metal surrounding the airlock flex and twist.
    She coughed again and let out a strangled, “Whoops,” before the airlock surrendered to the damage from the blast and blew her, the moaning Raiders and the dead of Lor station out into space.
    Naked, wired and floating, she didn’t die immediately. Her body curled into a foetal ball, and she waited for death as her first few breaths on the station became her last.
    Glowing mist surged toward her as everything went dark, and her last thought was, How can there be mist without atmosphere?

Chapter Two
    Odin wrapped himself around her and transported them both Home. He reformed into a bipedal shape and waited. The medical staff came running to the drop site, but he held up his hand. “We will need Xeric for this. Can you summon him?”
    One assistant flickered and disappeared while the others took his burden from him.
    Odin sighed, “She is a Relay, and her body won’t stay awake unless there is healing involved. There is a lot of trauma in her form.”
    The medical staff swarmed around her, and Odin watched from the sidelines.
    Ravikka appeared, and Xeric was at her side, a towel wrapped around his waist.
    “Are you sure she is the one?” Ravikka’s voice was low but clear.
    Odin nodded. “I am sure. She rerouted most of the systems through her mind in seconds, and then, she made a final bid for freedom that cost her her life. She is the one I was assigned to retrieve.”
    “She is so pale.” There was concern in her tone.
    “She is, but I think it has been quite some time since she was acquainted with starlight.” He watched with worry.
    Kaliana’s body was so frail, a delicate web that held her most magnificent mind. Her mind was what the Orb of Time had sent him after.
    In the thousand images of Kali, from this point on, they showed her with rippling red hair and a lush figure. How the Orb was going to achieve that in a body that was now outside the time stream was beyond him.
    What was more curious to him was the images where her pale ivory skin was transformed into dark space and starlight. He knew that it did not simply extend to her eyes, because in many of those images, she was in his arms, and they were tangled in an embrace.
    He had never thought that a mate waited for him