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

twisting in midair, and turned a corner into an intersecting canyon of cargo containers.

I heard them land, heard the pounding of their boots on the warehouse floor. By the time I rounded the same corner, they were well ahead of me. I raced after them, running as fast as I could, my heart thumping with the effort. No extreme exertion, the doctors had said. Gentle exercise only. Let your body learn to move again. I fucking hated being scolded by doctors.

At the end of the shipping containers, I charged into a broad, open space for about two steps before my left leg slammed into a solid obstacle at exactly shin height.

There was a solid clink of metal on metal, followed by an explosion of fiery-hot pain in my hip joint.

“Ratfucker!” I stumbled and fell, dizzy with pain.

It took a moment for me to catch my breath. I had run into a stack of long metal bars, set directly across the gap between the shipping containers. I staggered to my feet, gasping for breath. The bars hadn’t been there before; they were from one of the pallet stacks several meters away, the ones I had passed while looking for the incinerator. The killer had moved them—taken them from the stack and placed them here—and they had done it quickly, breaking the metal bands on the stack and moving four-meter-long unwieldy pieces of metal in seconds. All before I caught up to them.

The killer was scrambling up a ladder on the warehouse wall, quick and agile as a spider. I stepped over the obstacle—fuck, my hip hurt—but they were already four meters above the floor, five, six. They reached the open entrance of the cargo transport tunnels and an alarm beeped. Radiation warning. They were entering a zone of low shielding.

The alarm didn’t stop them. They scrambled over the edge and disappeared into the tunnel.

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.”

I couldn’t follow. Even if I could climb the ladder with a wrenched hip and a bleeding hand, I couldn’t risk going unprotected into a low-shielding zone. I sure as hell couldn’t risk chasing after an armed killer without weapons or backup.

I turned instead and limped back through the warehouse. Every step was agony. Every breath felt raw and shallow.

I staggered like a drunkard back to Mary Ping’s body. I grabbed my radio and PD, and turned my attention to the PD first. The Overseer was still showing me active tracking data for the station, so I brought up the map and panned over it quickly.

“Come on, come on,” I muttered. “Who the fuck are you?”

I found myself and Mary Ping on the map—she was a red dot indicating a medical alert—and Adisa coming toward us. Sigrah and Delicata were with him. I found the transport tunnels.

“Come the fuck on, where did you go?” I muttered, scanning over the map frantically. “Where are you?”

“Marley!” Adisa’s voice carried through the warehouse.

“Over here!” I shouted. I had no idea how to describe where I was.

The sound of noisy gecko soles slapping on the floor drew closer, and Adisa came running up with Sigrah and Delicata right behind him.

“What the hell—” He stopped abruptly when he saw Ping.

Sigrah tried to push by him. “Mary! What happened?”

Adisa held out his arm and stepped in front of her. “Don’t. Stay back.”

“What the fuck did you do to her?” Delicata said, whirling to face me.

“Nothing. It was—I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see their face. They were wearing a mech suit—”

He made a noise in his throat, something between a gasp and a growl. “That’s not possible.”

“—and I couldn’t identify them,” I said. “They fled into the cargo tunnels. I’ve got the tracking data but we need a head count—”

“Here? Not fucking possible,” Delicata said again. He stepped up close to me. “What the fuck did you do?”

“Back off, Ned,” Sigrah said, her voice low and tight.

He whirled around to face her. “What the fuck is going on here? This isn’t fucking right. You know there’s something going on. You never said—”

“I said back off, Ned. Let the safety officers do their jobs.”

Delicata gritted his teeth; I saw the muscles working in his jaw. He was glaring at Sigrah, having apparently forgotten about me, and she was glaring right back. I would have given anything to hear whatever it was he had been about to say, the words she had cut off so cleanly.

“Go,” Sigrah said to him. “Gather the others in Res. Everybody. I don’t want anybody alone right now.”

Delicata nodded curtly. He cast one more look at Mary Ping, his expression dark and troubled, before leaving.

Adisa was already on his radio. “. . . and wake up Ryu and tell them to get the hell out here, aye?”

“On it.” Van Arendonk’s answer was clipped. “What happened?”

“Not sure yet,” Adisa said, looking at me. He crouched beside the crushed bot, the one I had smashed with my boot. He studied it for a second before picking it up gingerly, turning it over in his hands. “Somebody attacked Mary Ping. Marley saw it but wasn’t able to identify the killer. Marley? Where did they go?”

“Into the cargo tunnels. I can’t fucking find them,” I said. “I’m looking. I’m looking.”

I was smearing blood all over the PD as I tried to navigate the maps. My hand was shaking. I wanted to slump against the container and slide down to the floor. The ache in my hip was unbearable and my head was throbbing. I wanted to close my eyes in a dark, quiet room. I wanted to erase the last hour. I could not stop hearing Mary Ping’s screams. The bitter, powerful smell of the accelerant from the bots was seared into my nostrils.

Adisa stood up and turned to Sigrah. He still had the crushed spider bot in his hand. He held it out to her; she flinched away from it.

“Did you know you had this on your station?” he asked.

Sigrah glowered at the spider. “Am I supposed to know what that