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

the back of my teeth, the urge to tell them about David’s message. I knew that by keeping it to myself I was keeping something from the investigation. I also knew I couldn’t truly trust anyone. Adisa seemed like he truly wanted to find the killer, but he had been with Parthenope for a long time, and nobody stuck around that long if they didn’t prioritize protecting the company and their own position within it above all else. I sure as hell couldn’t trust van Arendonk, a rich man making himself even richer by fucking over employees on the company’s behalf.

And as much as I wanted to trust Ryu, I knew it was too risky. I didn’t know them that well. What they liked about their work, what kind of gossip they collected, how they laughed at their own jokes, how their dark hair always fell into their eyes, those were the little things I knew, the bits and pieces collected during the time we’d spent together. They were one of the first friends I’d made upon arriving on Hygiea, the first to help me get past spending every hour of every day lonely and angry and itching for anything to take my mind off how my life was ruined, to forget for an hour or two how hard it was to escape the stares, the questions, the leering, and worst of all the shuddering, to stop thinking about the way people looked at me and flinched because I was everything they were terrified of becoming: a broken thing far from home, a helpless victim whose future had been devoured by the serendipitous cruelty of space, a walking purgatory stuck between the promises of the past and the mind-numbing bleakness of the future. Ryu had approached me in the canteen and they had been looking at my face, not my prosthetic parts, so I hadn’t snapped at them to scare them away. What I knew about Ryu was that they came from one of the innumerable private orbital habitats owned by some toxic Christian sect, the sort of micro-society where women were chattel, binaries were rigid, shame was rampant, and regular, generous donations to the reelection campaigns of Earth-based politicians ensured that human rights inspectors stayed far, far away. Why Ryu had left, how they’d ended up in the asteroid belt, what they had left behind, whether they missed it, how they dreamed their life might go, I didn’t know any of that. All I knew was that they would never go back. Ryu didn’t like talking about their painful past and impossible future any more than I did.

I couldn’t ask them for help. I couldn’t ask them to risk their job like that. Whatever usual parameters defined friendships, relationships, or friendly but distant exes, those rules didn’t apply anymore, not in the asteroid belt, where everybody was counting the dollars in their personal debt and the days on their corporate contracts, and information was more valuable than human life.

“Hester,” they said, when I did not answer.

“I am kinda messed up about it,” I said finally. “About David. I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

“Do you need—”

I eased away when they reached for me. “I need to find out who killed him.”

“Yeah. Okay. Do you want me to walk you to the warehouse?”

“Why would you do that?” I said.

Ryu laughed, although there was little amusement in it. “Because there’s a murderer on this station?”

“I’ll be fine. You’re supposed to be resting.” I reached out to touch their hand gently, barely a brush of my metal fingers over their skin. They had never flinched from those fingers, and they didn’t now. “I heard some asshole got you electrocuted in a maintenance shaft. You should take a nap.”

“Fine,” they said. “I expect you’ll have the killer identified by the time I wake up.”

TWELVE

Nimue in the evening was quiet but not silent, filled with an encompassing industrial lullaby of flowing air and humming machines and rumbling gears, the bumps and thumps and metallic whispers of repair bots just beyond the walls, all singing their own songs to their own melodies. It was not comforting, exactly, but it was familiar. Even so, I felt a prickle of unease between my shoulder blades as I entered the cargo warehouse.

The crew were scattered around the station, catching up on the work that had been delayed over the past few days. I didn’t like having our suspects out of sight, so I asked the Overseer to show me the location of everybody on Nimue. It wouldn’t let me look at any active visual surveillance; for that I needed permission from the company and the agreement of the Overseer, neither of which was likely at the moment. What I could access was a map with current ID tracking data. It would have to do.

Adisa was already in the warehouse, near the airlock where David had died. Sigrah and van Arendonk were in her office in Ops. Mary Ping was in her quarters, Neeta Hunter in the robotics lab. The rest of the crew were in the living quarters or in Ops. Nobody was in the mine. It looked like Sigrah’s insistence that they keep working had not persuaded anybody to give up their night for a full shift.

The Overseer turned on lights ahead of me and shut them off behind me, creating the uncomfortable feeling of being onstage and unable to escape an insistent spotlight. Everywhere outside of the light, down every long canyon between the stacked cargo containers and towering racks, the warehouse sank into deep gray shadows. The soft peel-tap sound of my gecko boots was disconcertingly loud. Around me long, shadowy canyons stretched between the towers of shipping containers. Even in Nimue’s slight gravity, my shoulder and hip were beginning to twinge. Every day it began as a gentle ache where the artificial limbs attached to joints that had been shattered