When did that happen? When Reed was chasing us? When we were squeezing past those furniture blockades?
I raise my hand to my cheek where the possible bite is. Or perhaps something worse got ahold of Kane for a moment.
Either way, though, he never said anything. Never made a noise, even an involuntary grunt of pain.
He’s not coming back. You know that.
Tears sting my eyes, and for a moment, the grief is overwhelming. I want to sink to my knees at his feet and beg him to wake up, to hear me.
I temporarily wrap his arm in a cleanish rag that I find in one of the storage bin drawers—Kane was the medic, not me, but right now infection is the lesser threat—and then I leave the LINA, closing up behind me.
It takes me longer than I thought—longer than I have—to find a mostly intact suit and peel it off its former owner. (The piano guy, as it turns out, is my best option. There’s certainly no damage to his suit. Or him—below the neck anyway.)
Every second I’m anticipating the sudden rattle-clank of the extendable bridge preparing for retraction. Which would give me a few seconds, perhaps a minute at the most, before the seal is broken and the wide-open doors begin to vent the atmosphere—and everything else, including me—into space.
This is taking too long. Too long. Too long. The words are a thrumming drumbeat in my head as I rush back toward the LINA, suit in hand.
An alarm on my suit beeps, startling me. “Warning,” an automated female voice says pleasantly in my ear. “Oxygen low.”
Of course it is. It wouldn’t surprise me if Max had ordered my supply to be shorted. Or maybefucking running for your lifeuses up a lot of air.
“Less than twelve percent remaining,” she continues. “Please proceed to a safe environment.”
Yeah, I’m working on it.
But I still need to find a helmet for Kane.
For obvious reasons, Piano Guy’s was not located with the rest of him.
I have a fraction of a moment’s warning. The scrape of footsteps, the slightly brighter glow of a light somewhere.
I drop the enviro suit near the outer airlock door to the LINA and turn—gun pointed—toward the corridor to the rest of the ship to face off with Reed.
It’s only as I make that turn that I realize my mistake. That corner of the cargo bay is as dark as ever. And would Reed have had the capacity to find a light and use it in his condition? He was, as last seen, thrashing around in the dark with no seeming plan to change any of that. His only focus was on reaching me.
Too late, I swivel back in the opposite direction toward the extendable bridge to theAres,keeping my weapon aimed. I’m just in time to see Max come into view, with a powerful flashlight. At the end of his rifle.
32
Everything about Max is so familiar—rumpled suit, worn shoes, steady serious expression—that my first reaction is, nonsensically, relief. It’s as if my previous experiences with him had coded him in my brain as an ally. A friend. And despite what I knew, what I’d experienced since then, that initial assessment had not yet been overwritten.
Or perhaps some part of me thinks my odds are better against Max than Reed.
Max sees me and jolts in surprise, before smiling in what appears to be genuine delight. And bringing his weapon—one of the automatic rifles that the security teams are carrying, looking comically oversized in Max’s hands—to bear on me.
“I wondered,” he says with a note of admiration. “I didn’t think the situation would have declined so quickly without some help.”
A tiny, automatic burst of pride at his praise fills me. I ignore it—hating myself in the process. It’s just… years of habit, and a sign of the role Max once filled in my life, I suppose.
I tighten my hand on my borrowed gun, keeping it pointed at his chest.
“How did you get out?” he asks, looking around, as if expecting to see Diaz and her team backing me up, having switched sides.
The problem is that if I fire and hit him, theAreswill just pull the bridge back and leave us to die. I’m sure someone over there is watching.
If I fire at him and miss, I’ll probably end up punching a hole in the airlock bridge—or the fucking fragile seal. Death wins again.
It feels like flipping over card after card in one of the team poker games I’d refused to join and getting nothing but jokers.
