My mind obligingly flashes on the breathless desperation of running down an alleyway, the debt collectors’ footsteps – Sabrina’s footsteps – pounding behind me.
Every moment of that was because of this boy and his family, I remind myself.
Hunter sighs, and I think the thunk I hear is his head hitting the floor of the pipe we’re stuffed inside. ‘What was it like here?’ he asks, slightly muffled. ‘Before the whole life-threatening-danger situation?’
I watch the water through the grille of the duct cover I’m holding in place. It’s still flowing steadily, spilling down the sides of the cabinets in small waterfalls and rippling out until it hits the far wall. (I know, you’re curious. Not long now, with any luck.)
I’m trying to think about what kind of answer works best for the person I’m supposed to be right now – what would make sense for an apprentice engineer to say. What might make him sympathetic, although – and the knowledge hits me in the gut again – he won’t be helping me anytime soon, once he figures out I’m a hitcher.
But weirdly, mostly what I want to do is tell him the truth, even though that’s a bad idea.
‘It hasn’t been what I hoped,’ I say eventually, when I realize I’ve taken too long to reply. ‘I’m not sure it was a good idea to come, even if I was in danger back home. I thought I was on my own there – I sure felt like I was – but at least I knew people. Here, I’ve been really alone, these last few months. And I don’t know what to do next.’
His hand tightens on my ankle again, and I wish I could feel the warmth of it through my suit. ‘Cleo, if we get out of this—’
‘Whenwe get out of this,’ I correct him.
‘Of course, when we get out of this,’ he repeats obediently.
‘Glad to hear you’re accepting some leadership, rich boy.’ I can hear myself joking, hear myself teasing him, but there’s this huge gulf between us, and he doesn’t even know it’s there.
‘Whenwe get out of this,’ he forges on. ‘You can write your own ticket to the GravesUP compound, or anywhere we’re connected to. I’ll help you find any position you want. And if you want to go back to Earth, I’ll have the debts taken care of and find you a ride.’
A strange, detached shock flows through me, like a weird kind of grief. This is exactly what I wanted. If you’d told me yesterday that I’d get this offer, I’d have done backflips. But now I know he won’t give it to me, not really.
Maybe if I can get to Graves before he finds out who I really am, I’ll have a chance of hiding there – but something tells me they’ll be a lot more efficient than the UN at sniffing out hitchers.
I’m searching for words when the alarm kicks in below. A red light starts to flash near the door, and a low, mournfulwhoopechoes around the classroom. The ventilation shaftvibrates with the noise, but I have to keep hold of the grille, so I can’t block my ears. The noise ricochets around my head, and I can feel it in my temples, my jaw.
Hopefully an alarm’s going off on the bridge as well, and in a minute we’ll have the company we’ve been waiting for. Honestly, the water should have set off an alarm ages ago; it must be over ankle-deep down there.Pax, you desperately need more funding.
Hunter and I both go quiet, and I shift my grip on the grate cover again. I can’t drop it too soon – this is going to be all about timing. Thankfully, it only takes a minute before the door opens, and I get my first close-up look at another of the mercenaries.
This isn’t the Martian, or Sabrina. This is the woman we first saw on the bridge, unpacking the guns. She has black hair with blue streaks dyed all through it, pulled back in a braid that hangs halfway down her back. She’s probably a spacer – her skin is that kind of almost translucent white that says it’s never seen the sun, and when her eyes dart around the room, I catch blue sparks in them that are probably vision augments of some kind.
As soon as Blue Braid opens the door, water starts to flood out through it. Cursing, she hustles inside and pulls the door shut after her, rather than let the water flow out into the hallway. So far, so good – we were hoping she’d be smart enough to do that.
To all our relief, she flips up the cover on the alarm button by the door and smacks it to silence the whooping siren. Then she sloshes over to the sinks and shuts off the water, beforeturning to take in the classroom. ‘What in the seven hells were these kids doing?’ she mutters to herself.
I loosen my grip on the grate – my hand’s so tense from curling into a claw that for a moment I think I won’t be able to straighten my fingers. But the cover drops into the water, and Blue Braid whips around at the splash.
Then I grab for the coil of wire, and begin to unspool it, letting the first wires slither down toward the water.
We both agreed we had to at least give her a chance to see what was about to happen. Hopefully it’ll look like the construction crew left the wires coiled on top of the duct, because build crews everywhere are slackers, and everything’s harder in a suit, so you’re looking for shortcuts. And now the humidity or something – she won’t have time to think – has caused the vent cover to pop out, and bad things are about to happen.
Good news: she’s not stupid. She takes one look at the wires spooling down toward the floor, spits a curse, and jumps up onto a desk, no doubt hoping that whatever it’s made of doesn’t conduct electricity.
The second she’s up there I drop the wires, and they spark as they make contact with the water. Then everything goes quiet. Blue Braid knows what’s up, though. She knows the water around the base of her desk is electrified now, conducting whatever current was in the wires that fell. She stays right where she is, easing down to sit on the desk like she’s planning a long stay.
I start scooting back along the pipe, resisting the urge to cackle with glee. Good luck to them, figuring how to get her out.
If Blue Braid’s friends open the door, electrified water will come pouring out. They’ll have to figure out how to shut off the power to the whole section, and that should take them a minute.
Meanwhile, Hunter and I will see how many others we can isolate before they get her free. If we can rattle them, whittle them down, maybe we really can force one into starting a rover for us.
Hunter must be moving backward behind me, but for a big guy, he’s silent. I press my hands to the floor of the pipe and gently slide myself backward again, toward the junction where we can escape.
Below, Blue Braid’s voice rings out, and I freeze.
