Dead Space by Kali Wallace (top romance novels txt) 📕

“Fuck you, David,” I muttered. “Fuck you so fucking much with every one of your own fucking machines. Avery, get out of my way. I need to see if there’s anything we can salvage.”

I shook their ankle insistently and dislodged their gecko soles from where they were perched. They slumped toward me in an awkward tangle of limbs.

“Shit. What the fuck? Can you hear me?”

That was wrong. That was not fucking okay. Even without the radios, I should hear their reply. They should be moving.

With my heart racing and my breath coming in short, painful gasps, I shoved Ryu to one side and stomped my foot into the wall to propel myself upward. There were still little arcs of electricity darting outward from David’s device, leaping down the shaft in a chaotic dance. I tried to ignore it—tried to tell myself that if I wasn’t electrocuted yet, I probably wasn’t going to be—and twisted around to get a look at Ryu’s face.

Their headlamp was smashed, their faceplate cracked. Scorch marks spiderwebbed over the top of their helmet. On the inside of their faceplate was a smear of blood.

“Shit. Shit. Avery!” I shook them frantically. The blood was coming from their nose and their eyes were narrow slits, but they did not respond. “Fuck. Okay. I’ll get you—fuck, I’ll get you out of here. Come on.”

No response, but I kept talking, kept spitting out that nonsense stream of babble and reassurances. I needed help, but I couldn’t call for it. I squeezed up beside Ryu and began the clumsy, painstaking process of getting us out of there.

The descent felt endless. The only light came from my headlamp, and the sound of my own breath was loud in my ears. My fear grew with every second. The crack in Ryu’s helmet, those scorches—they had been shocked, but I didn’t know how bad it was. It looked like their nose was still actively bleeding. It took a hell of a blow to smash your nose into the front of a space suit helmet. Their neck could be damaged too. I could be making everything worse by moving them. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t check for a pulse—couldn’t risk removing the suit, not with the remnants of David’s light show still sparking and snapping around us. Which had to be exactly what he had wanted, the ratfucker. He had designed rovers to operate on a hostile moon that spent the vast majority of its time within Saturn’s magnetosphere. Nothing he did to create death rays of electricity was an accident.

If he weren’t already dead, I would have murdered him myself, just for being such a raging asshole as to build a self-destruct trigger like that to protect his shitty criminal scheme. After asking him who the trap was for. And why. I would only murder him after he answered my damn questions.

“You are going to wake the fuck up,” I said.

My chest hurt. It was the kind of hurt that came from the inside, the kind of hurt you didn’t know was possible until you had your body blown up and replaced with spare parts, and sometimes your parts and those parts didn’t quite know how to cooperate in situations of high physical stress—situations that were, according to my doctors, supposed to happen never. I was having trouble steadying my breathing. My heart rate was out of control.

I stopped for a few seconds to breathe. Ryu slumped against me, limp and unconscious. I tugged one of their arms out of my way. “Avery, you piece of shit. You are going to wake the fuck up and this is going to be so bloody awkward.”

It had always been awkward between us, even when we were in our ill-defined relationship. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to make any attachments on Hygiea. I told myself it was because they weren’t my usual type. I usually went for short, femme, more than a little mean, smarter than everybody and well aware of it. Not warm and wiry and friendly and unburdened by excessive ego. I told myself it was because I had no time for a relationship when I needed every spare minute to extract myself from Parthenope’s clutches. I told myself I could never be sure if they were looking at me or my shiny new body parts. I told myself a lot of things, so many that I hadn’t noticed right until Ryu stopped coming by my quarters that I was the only one who cared about my endless litany of excuses. Then I told myself it was better that way. I had more important things to deal with. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care.

“I am going to be so fucking annoyed with you if you don’t wake up,” I muttered, and I started moving again, down and down and down.

It couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes before light filled the shaft around us, but it felt like so much longer. The electrical sparks and ribbons had been so searing, so bright, my eyes, both artificial and not, were still smarting from the onslaught. I only noticed the new light because I saw my shadow move when I was still, and it startled me so much I thought, for a second, it was another surge of lightning. Somebody touched my foot.

I jerked in surprise and looked down. I couldn’t remember the name of the crew member who waited below us. A woman, dark hair, worried expression. She was saying something I couldn’t hear. I only understood when she gestured for me to let her take Ryu. I had some trouble getting out of the way and jostled Ryu in my clumsiness.

“Sorry, sorry,” I muttered, trying to make myself small, trying to be gentle. “We’re getting you out of here. We’re getting you help.”

Ryu gripped my wrist suddenly. I yelped in alarm. They were awake, their