On instinct, Ellipse slowed the moment the lights went out. She told herself it was okay; the bounty hunter would slow down too. Most people got a little more cautious in total darkness.
Her boots clomped on the cement floor, and the echoes pulsed through the maintenance tunnel. She heard the bounty hunter behind her, his steps louder and heavier and comfortingly slower than hers. For a moment, she wished she had another species’ sense of smell or hearing. Universal Biology had noted that day tubai could navigate on smell alone, if the situation called for it. Sirens with exceptional hearing could echolocate.
But, no point in wishing now.
Ellipse shoved her hands out in front of her and kept running. On the fold monitor, with her cart of cleaning equipment, she took somewhere right under three minutes to travel from one end to the other. It had been what, ten seconds since she raced down the steps? She had no idea how running would change the time.
In her head, at least, she knew where she was. As she pounded down the tunnel, she imagined shelves of toilet paper and hundreds of bags of liquid soap, each different kind meant to be nontoxic to at least one species. Up ahead, the tunnel would bend right and then continue straight again shortly after.
Her fingertips brushed a bar of metal right in front of her. Maybe the bend was sooner than she thought.
She wrenched through the turn, one arm still stretched in front to make sure she did not bash into a wall. A few steps later, she heard a crash. Plastic crinkled as it toppled from the shelves, and the impact of a body on metal rang through the darkness. The bounty hunter howled a string of curse words.
Ellipse kept running.
She banged her arm as she turned left, back to the direction she had been running before, and her gut started to protest all the sprinting. Under her heavy steps, she heard the bounty hunter barking for backup.
“Warner and Guardson!” he shouted. “She’s headed for the bathroom between S-42 and S-44!”
Hecking heck. Ellipse should have predicted he would have a radio or something.
She stopped and listened. The plastic noises from the bounty hunter’s collision with the cleaning supplies kept trickling down the tunnel, and the whiny scrape of rubber boot soles against the concrete burned in her ears. He was getting up. Ellipse probably could not run back the way she had come. Her only hope of escape was to beat the bounty hunter’s day tubai associates to the other bathroom.
Ignoring the ache in her gut, she started running again. She pushed forward another several steps, hopeful that nothing obstructed the remainder of the tunnel, and then remembered that she wore a wristwatch with a light-up screen.
She glanced backwards. Even if she turned a light here, surely that would not give off enough light to reach the bounty hunter and let him see. Then she could move faster and have a better shot at beating the day tubai to the bathroom.
And if they were already at the bathroom, well, then Ellipse would have to deal with this pincer attack regardless of what she did now. She tapped on her watch and aimed the light out in front of her.
To be honest, the watch was not that bright. Ellipse could just make out the edges of the shelves and catch vague shadows where her feet shot out during each step. But that was enough for her to feel safe running just a little bit faster.
She sprinted down the remainder of the corridor, accompanied only by the sounds of her own footsteps, and managed not to trip when she shot up the stairs. The handle on the door leading into the other bathroom reflected the light of Ellipse’s watch, and she reached out for it.
As soon as her fingers wrapped around the handle, she pivoted. Her shins throbbed in protest, and she wrenched the door open, sending a wide beam of light down the maintenance tunnel. The bounty hunter’s footsteps crescendoed, and Ellipse heaved in a deep breath before racing out of the tunnel.
The restroom between docks S-42 and S-44 was a mirror image of the one across the hall, right down to the pattern of red, yellow, and grey tiles on the floor. Even the water in the trenches flowed to mirror the direction in the other bathroom.
Ellipse dashed to the exit, ears peeled for the sound of the bounty hunter’s boots or groaning hinges. She burst out into the open hallway and glanced around for the telltale white exoskeletons of the day tubai. And when she saw none, she ran for the Conics’s dock.
Ellipse made it all of five steps before her arm jerked back. Cool, smooth porcelain digits clenched around her bicep, forcing her to a stop. She felt the grating vibrations of day tubai speech rumble into her skin and shivered.
“Ah, got you,” the day tubai said. “You’re not getting away this time.” They tugged her closer and took hold of Ellipse’s other arm.
“You have no right,” Ellipse spat out.
The tubai shrugged, pulling Ellipse’s arms back at an uncomfortably high angle. “And you would rather be caught than draw attention, so which of us is the real winner?”
Ellipse decided not to answer. Instead she threw her weight forward, heaving like an ox hauling a plough. Her rubber-soled boots squealed on the cement before coming to a stop, having only slid a centimeter at most. She took another step, just like this one, and bent her knees so she would have her weight closer to the ground.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Ellipse remembered that day tubai exoskeletons were made of chitin, just like earthling insects. She had never had the privilege of picking up a real insect, but Universal Biology said chitin was pretty light. After pushing all those heavy crates around, surely playing tug-of-war with a day tubai would not be too awful.
She shoved forward again, stepping closer to the wall. All around her, the chaos of the shipping wing rolled along. A colorful group of saur chirped loudly at each other from the seats of forklifts, and a seemingly infinite line of corrugated metal crates, like the ones on ocean barges, floated down the hall on the central conveyor belt. The general din kept her from being able to hear whether the earthling bounty hunter had caught up yet.
Well, Ellipse figured he would soon, and she needed to be gone before he helped subdue her. She took another step and tried to shake her torso, but the too-smooth fingers around her arms held fast.
“Heck heck heck,” she muttered. “What do I do?!”
“You do nothing,” the tubai answered.
Ellipse made her next step particularly rough. “I was not asking you.” She looked around, took in all the saur and their chirping, and glanced across the hall, searching for the little signs naming each ship. The closest was a floater ship, and then a specifus ship called the Algebraic, and then the Conics. If the saur could yell at each other all the time, she could yell for her crew too, and the floaters and specifus would remain unaware of her predicament.
She took another step, breathed in deep, and bellowed. “Tejal! Focci! Help!”
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