The creature’s sounds faded. Levi still had the weapon at his hip, no map he could carry, no objectives, and no idea what the scenario wanted from them.
Play the game the way it wants to be played.
“We need information,” he said, and started toward the evacuation map.
“Levi.” Asher’s voice was behind him, sounding less like an address and more like a warning.
He turned around. “We’ve been running since we woke up, and I don’t know anything. I don’t know our roles. I don’t know what those things are. I don’t know what this ship wants from us.”
“We know we’re alive,” Asher said.
“That’s a starting point, not a plan.”
Asher looked at him for a moment, and then he crossed the distance between them — unhurried, like the corridor was a room he owned — and Levi’s feet decided not to move. He stopped close. Too close, which was the only distance Asher seemed to understand. His fingers came up and tucked a piece of Levi’s hair back from his face, and Levi’s brain briefly went blankbecause the gesture didn’t go with the corridor or the jumpsuit or the five bodies two hours back.
“You think too much,” Asher murmured.
“One of us has to,” Levi breathed, trying to ignore the goosebumps forming on his skin.
The corners of Asher’s mouth turned up. His knuckles grazed Levi’s cheekbone on the way down, slowly, and the warmth stayed on his skin after his hand dropped. Levi shouldn’t have noticed.
Stop noticing things.
He couldn’t stop noticing things.
“We need information,” Levi said again, because he needed to be saying something. “We find out what this scenario wants, and we work it like we worked the sanitarium.”
“Together,” Asher said. Not quite in agreement. Just the only part he cared about.
“Together.”
Asher smiled and stepped back, gesturing down the corridor ahead. “Lead the way.”
They found the voices twenty minutes later.
Or the voices found them. Radio chatter, carrying cleanly through an intersecting corridor with unhurried footsteps, like the specific rhythm of people who knew what they were doing and where they were going.
“Thermal confirms two heat signatures in maintenance corridor C-7.”
“Copy, moving to intercept.”
“Kane is armed and extremely dangerous. Mercer may be under duress…”
Levi ducked into a recessed arch over a door and glanced back at Asher.
Asher’s hand was already on his weapon. He’d repositioned, his weight shifted, body angled between Levi and the direction the sound was coming from, in the half-second it took Levi to process the words.
“They have information,” Levi said quietly.
Asher’s eyes locked on him. “They think I’m dangerous.”
“You shot five people.”
“I shot five people who were in the way.” He said it the way someone would sayI moved the chairs. “That’s different.”
“Asher.”
“We don’t need them,” Asher said as he stepped closer, and Levi’s shoulders hit the wall before he decided to step back. “We figured out the sanitarium.”
