A/N: Sorry, a busy weekend meant no time to update this. Thank you as always to MissyHissy3 for betaing.

Chapter Nine

Chakotay watched as Kathryn turned the flashlight over and over in her hands, illuminating their small prison with rotating slashes of cold bluish light. There had been nothing else on the tray besides the bread and water, so were they meant to guess where the light had come from and who had given it to them? Or was there some clue to be found on the device itself? This was what they had been attempting to ascertain for the past five minutes, though such a thing was ironically difficult. The light, though welcome, wasn't powerful, and the very illumination it provided made it hard to make out anything on its barrel.

"May I?" He held out his hand, and Janeway passed him the light. Chakotay held it still and ran his fingers over its stem.

"What are you looking for?"

"The power source," he told her. "I'm just wondering whether…" Chakotay felt an indentation under his forefinger and put his thumbnail to it, prising open a flap to reveal a small aperture beneath.

Something slipped from the space and fell. He hurriedly turned the light over, trying to follow the object's route. Kathryn caught it before it hit the floor. She held her hand closer to the light so that Chakotay could see what lay in her palm. It was a small fragment of paper, no more than a centimetre square, folded over on itself several times. The Captain glanced up at him before beginning to unfold the square. It opened out to four times its size – larger, but still miniscule. Sheltered in the centre of the four folds was what seemed to be a circular fragment of plastic, traced with faint gold lines. It was small enough that the tip of Janeway's finger dwarfed it when she gingerly picked the object up.

"Know what that is?" she asked.

"Looks like a computer component of some kind," he ventured.

She smiled, and the gesture lit the room far more effectively than the light given off by the flashlight. "It's the locator beacon from a communicator," Janeway said. "Which means I think we can safely say that Voyager is coming for us."

Chakotay matched her smile, automatically reaching out to rest a hand on her shoulder as he would have had they still been in darkness. Their eyes met for a second, before Janeway blinked and looked away and Chakotay dropped his hand.

"There's something written here," the Captain muttered. "On the paper…" she held it up so that he could see.

Chakotay squinted, trying to make out the tiny sequence of words. "'Be ready'," he read. "'Get to the surface'. Then there's a sequence of five digits: 4-8-1-5-3. Does that mean anything to you?"

Janeway glanced up at him again, with an expression he didn't understand until she said, "It's the simple code we gave Tuvok before he joined your crew. When there was something in his communiqués that required a decryption algorithm to access, he'd include it."

"I see," said Chakotay. "Well, at least that means for sure we know who this comes from."

Janeway reached out and touched his knee. "He never had a bad word to say about you, you know. I read all of the reports he sent before the Val Jean disappeared into the Badlands. Tuvok might not have agreed with your politics, but he always respected you."

Chakotay wasn't sure that he agreed, but that wasn't a discussion they needed to have – certainly not now, and probably not ever. He smiled. "It's a long time ago. Tuvok and I might never be what you'd call close, but I'd trust him with my life, as much as I'd trust him with yours." He nodded at the locator beacon in Janeway's hand. "An instinct I think is borne out by that."

She nodded. "If we are in the mines, it makes sense that they can't beam us straight out. As an isolated component the beacon's signal will be very weak and the transporters wouldn't be able to lock on through solid rock anyway."

"Which is why we need to 'get to the surface'," Chakotay agreed. "The ship's probably planning a fly-by rescue – no need to put more bodies on the ground if it's not absolutely necessary."

Janeway drummed her nails against the flashlight's barrel, her face turned toward the door to their cell. "'Be ready'," she murmured, repeating the note's short order as if trying to divine additional information from the words. "Typical Vulcan brevity…"

Chakotay looked down and saw Kathryn's bare feet, white against the rough floor. "If we're going to be making our way through a working mine we need to do something about our feet."

"Agreed. Suggestions?"

All they had were the capes their captors had given them. Chakotay fingered the edge of the material. It was coarse – rough against the skin, but heavy wearing enough to offer some protection. "I think so. Can you stand for a moment?"

Janeway did as he asked. Chakotay knelt in front of her and gripped the edge of her cloak in both hands about ten inches from its lower hem. Then he ripped the fabric apart, tearing in as straight a line as possible to give him a wide strip of material. This he tore in half, and then, from the fraying edges, extracted several long lengths of coarse thread. Gesturing for Janeway to sit, he crouched in front of her and lifted her right foot, resting it against his thigh.

"I've never done this before," he admitted, beginning to bind the Captain's foot, "but I've seen it done many times. I watched my mother wrap my sister's feet when she was a week old, just as she had wrapped mine when I was a newborn. It's just a bonding ritual now, and of course the wraps are just for show, but presumably in the distant past this must have been what my people wore on their feet."

Janeway said nothing as he tied off the first 'shoe'. Chakotay placed her foot back on the floor before beginning on her left. Still the Captain said nothing, and he looked up to find her watching his face with an expression that he couldn't read. Chakotay smiled, and she dropped her gaze to where his hands were working on her foot. Tying off the second 'shoe', he let her go, and she stood up.

"How's that?"

"Good. Thank you." She turned to him. "I don't know that I'm going to be able to return the favour, Commander."

Chakotay was already ripping a strip from his own garment. "There's no need, I can manage." He had the sense that Kathryn was feeling awkward about something, and turned away to busy himself with binding his own feet in an attempt to give her some space.

"I'm going to put the locator beacon back where we found it," she said, a few minutes later as he was finishing up. "I think it'll be safest inside the flashlight."

"Probably the best place for it," he agreed, standing and testing out his new footwear. Not perfect, but it would do.

Janeway had her back to him. She sighed, reaching up one hand to squeeze a muscle in her neck. "Now I suppose all we can do is wait. I think we'd better turn the light off, Chakotay. We don't want it to run out of power."

"Agreed."

Kathryn turned toward him, the flashlight still on. They looked at each other, and Chakotay was aware of some slight charge in her eyes, as if for a moment he could still feel that racing beat of her heart against his chest, despite the fact that they were standing as far apart as they could in that tiny space.

Then she flicked off the light, and was drowned in darkness.

[TBC]