Inheritance by Jennifer Foehner Wells

Author:Jennifer Foehner Wells [Wells, Jennifer Foehner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781973381884
Amazon: B01M02D49F
Goodreads: 39703626
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 2016-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

22

Darcy held back a sob, her mouth open in a silent scream. She lay curled on her side, pressing her face into the cold, hard surface of the sleeping cell as if that could push back the raw despair. Tears and drool pooled under her cheek.

How could she ever have let herself hope that she and Adam would escape, get back home, and live out a normal life? How childish that had been. A fantasy.

The truth was, she didn’t even know how to begin to accept this new reality. It felt like a living nightmare. The rules kept changing before she could adjust. Nothing was what it seemed to be.

If Hain was telling the truth, then Adam was gone, possibly forever. Her rock. Her biggest cheerleader. Her heart. That knowledge tore at her. What could she do? How could she begin to know what to do next?

She had all this power stored inside her, and she hadn’t been able to save him. She’d failed him and probably was incapable of saving herself.

She had two choices now. She could put her head down and accept that she was going to be sold as a weapon, and that she would possibly be forced to kill people by her new master, who would most likely turn out to be some kind of terrorist or dictator. Or she could put her trust in Raub, who was probably a criminal, and definitely dangerous and unpredictable, in order to attempt to escape the ship.

There were no good choices.

She turned it all over and over in her mind. But she couldn’t really think clearly. Her thoughts kept snarling in pain and despair and couldn’t get much farther than that.

She didn’t want to think anymore. She wanted the oblivion of sleep. She’d think about it all tomorrow. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so bad by then.

But she couldn’t turn her brain off.

There was one thing that always put her to sleep. She closed her eyes and thought through the sequence of the citric-acid cycle, so necessary for aerobic metabolism. She visualized each molecule and its enzymatic conversion into the next step in the metabolic chain, careful not to forget the three points at which NADH was formed, or how that molecule would later contribute to the production of ATP—the powerhouse of cellular energy—all of this taking place inside the mitochondria of every cell of her body.

She tried not to think about the apochondria Hain had told her about. Or wonder how they processed and stored energy.

If she forgot her place, she just remembered the mnemonic, “Can (cis-Aconitate) I (D-isocitrate) Keep (alpha-ketoglutarate) Selling (Succinyl-CoA) Sex (Succinate) For (Fumarate) Money (Malate), Officer (Oxaloacetate)?” It was a stupid, misogynistic memory device, but she’d never forget it, ever.

She was just drifting into that twilight space between sleep and wakefulness when a loud buzzing sound startled her back to alertness. She’d never heard that sound on the ship before. It sent a frisson down her spine.

Something was wrong.

She got up awkwardly on her knees, hunching to stay upright, her head bumping into the ceiling of her tiny cubicle.

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