I lower my head, pick up my pace just enough to close distance without announcing myself, and track her line through the rocks as the two drugged inmates gain on her, their shadows stretching long and ugly in the pale light.
“Don’t trip,” I murmur, like she can hear me. “Don’t be stupid. Don’t?—”
She glances back.
Not at me.
At them.
Her shoulders tighten, and I see the moment fear tries to steal her coordination, tries to make her legs lock and her breath turn into panic.
She pushes through it.
Runs harder.
Smart girl.
“Alright,” I whisper, knife hand loosening, readying. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”
And I keep tracking, close enough now that I can hear her breath when the wind shifts, close enough to smell the sharp tang of terror and the faint electrical heat of whatever device she’s clutching to her chest, as if she knows—instinctively, perfectly—that the only thing more valuable than her life right now is whatever she’s carrying.
Useful… or dangerous.
Maybe both.
And on Yatori, that’s usually the same thing.
CHAPTER 3
JORDAN
The maintenance shaft is too small for panic, which is maybe the only nice thing I can say about it.
I crawl on my forearms and knees through a rectangular throat of metal, the air stale and dusty and hot in uneven pockets where power conduits run close enough to bake the plating. Every few feet my shoulder scrapes a protruding bolt head, a sharp little reminder that the station was designed for cables and rats, not humans trying to outrun a massacre. Behind me, the server room swallows sound for a heartbeat at a time, and then the gunfire punches through again—muffled, distorted, but still unmistakable. Every time it does, my stomach tightens hard enough to make me taste bile.
The external drive thumps against my chest with each movement, tucked inside my jacket like a heart I stole off a table. It’s warm already from my body heat, and I keep one hand pressed over it as if touch alone can keep it from disappearing.
A tremor runs through the ductwork.
Not subtle. Not the station settling. Something heavy, distant—another explosive thud that shakes dust loose from seams and makes it sprinkle down onto my face. The grit catches in my eyelashes and coats my tongue. I spit, but there’s nowhere forit to go except onto metal that already smells like old insulation and burned oil.
“Okay,” I whisper, breath rasping loud in the cramped space. “Okay, Jordan. Forward. We’re doing forward.”
I force my lungs to take air in slow, steady pulls even though my body wants to hyperventilate like a malfunctioning bellows. The shaft angles slightly downward, then levels, then takes a left turn so sharp my hip drags. Somewhere above, the station’s emergency alarms start wailing in a new rhythm, higher and more frantic, and the noise vibrates through the metal like the station itself is screaming.
I keep crawling.
At the next junction, the shaft widens into a cramped service pocket with a grated access panel. I stop long enough to press my ear to the grate.
Sound floods in—echoing shouts, boots pounding, a deeper concussive crack that could be either an energy discharge or a door being blown off hinges. A faint smell of smoke drifts into the pocket, acrid and dry, and it hits the back of my throat like an accusation.
I peel away from the grate, swallowing hard.
“Not going back,” I murmur, more to the moon than to myself.
The duct splits. One branch leads toward the station’s lower maintenance spine, the other toward an exterior vent line—one of those environmental exhaust channels that dumps processed air into the wilderness to keep internal systems from overheating. I don’tknowthat for certain.
But I can read a layout, and this shaft smells like outside—faintly mineral, faintly cold.
