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

pulse point at Delicata’s wrist, then at his neck. “I can’t, I can’t feel anything. I can’t.”

Adisa tried his radio again. “We’ve returned to Ops. Avery? Do you copy? If anybody in the crew can hear me, please answer.”

“Radio range isn’t very long here, with the shielding,” I said. He knew that. I knew he knew that. But I felt like I had to say something, offer something, to fill the suffocating quiet around us. The higher Hunter’s voice went, the more frantic her breathing, the more numb I felt, as though her growing panic was draining the possibility of reaction out of me. The door to Ops was open. “We need to look for—”

Delicata let out a wet, crackling cough. Hunter squeaked and reeled backward, caught herself with one hand before she fell. Bloody spittle flew from Delicata’s lips, staining his chin and splattering the door that held him in place. There was a horrible sound, like the grinding of bones, from deep within his chest.

Delicata’s eyes opened. His lips moved, as did his one visible hand.

Adisa crouched beside him. “We’re going to get you help. What happened? Where are the others?”

Delicata exhaled the shaky, jagged beginning of a word: “Sh-sh-she, she—”

“She?” Adisa prompted. “Where did the others go?”

Delicata’s mouth twisted into a grimace, showing red teeth behind red lips, a gory mimicry of a smile. “T-t-too late. They’re walking right—think they can escape it.” He broke off coughing again, until the cough turned into a high-pitched wheeze of pain. “Too late.”

“Where are they going? Why is it too late?”

Hunter touched Delicata’s shoulder. “Ned, where are they? Where’s Katee? She called us.”

“I don’t think she did,” I said, very quietly. I didn’t know if Hunter heard me, but Adisa acknowledged my words with a glance and a nod.

For a few seconds, Delicata only breathed, sucking in desperate breaths with ragged and pained sounds. “The old base,” he said. “Think they’re running away to where it can’t—to where it can’t see them. I didn’t—I didn’t send it. It’ll find them. It has—it has eyes.”

“They’re going to the UEN base to escape the Overseer?”

“Stupid plan. Don’t like to go there anymore. Not—not now, not since it—it changed.”

“Changed? What do you mean?”

“Won’t—won’t work. Sig—Sigrah will . . .”

“What will she do?” Adisa said, more urgently. “Do you know where she is?”

That time there was no mistaking Delicata’s expression. It was a twisted, angry scowl.

“Fuck her. She’ll say it was me.”

“You mean Sigrah? What will she say?” Adisa said.

Delicata started coughing then, a horrible tearing sound, and bloody spittle sprayed from his lips, stained his chin, until the cough caught up to itself and he gurgled suddenly—his eyes widened—and he tried to say something, tried to force a word out—and stopped. He just—stopped.

“Ned? What are you talking about? Ned?” Hunter’s voice rose to a shout. She was shaking her head, her silver hair swinging, and she looked so unsteady on her feet I worried she would faint. “What the fuck is going on? Where is everybody?”

She tried to push past Adisa, but he rose to his feet and held her back. As soon as he gripped her arms, she burst into tears. “We need to check for other injured crew,” he said to me over Hunter’s shoulder. “Can you—”

“Right,” I said. It was eerie how calm I felt. I was waiting for Hunter’s panic to infect me, for her tears and shouts and gasping breath to spread, but it didn’t happen. “On it.”

As I left, Adisa was murmuring to Hunter, explaining to her what we should have figured out before we stepped into that lift: Katee King had not contacted us. The crew had not gotten the lift working. It was the Overseer, both times. Mimicking King’s voice. Drawing us in.

We would have been safer in the mine.

I passed through the door to Res to find the common area illuminated by only a few lights from the galley and the media playing on the wallscreen—they had traded Rachel Returned for Andromeda Sunsets, but had thankfully muted the swooping orchestral score. That and my flashlight were enough for me to see that the crew lockers near the entrance were open, boots and jackets and gear tumbling onto the floor. I cast my light around and spotted a few belts and cases opened with the contents spilling out. There was a half-finished tray of food on one of the sofas in the media area. A blanket lay rumpled on the floor beside a chair, as though somebody had left it there when they jumped to their feet.

The crew had left in a hurry, but there was no sign they’d had to force the door to get out. I checked a few of the lockers, consulting their content checklists to figure out what each had contained before. The bulky heat suits and powered work boots were still there, but the emergency vacuum suits such as the ones we had carried into the mine with us were gone. They had left expecting depressurization or radiation. For the old base, as Delicata had said. They had gone prepared.

I moved through the common area slowly. The sound of my gecko boots on the floor seemed impossibly loud, with only the hum of the station’s ventilation and the galley appliances to accompany me, and with every step I grew more tense, more aware of the heavy silence, more certain that in the next second I would hear the rain-soft clink of metal on metal and glimpse a silver bot racing toward me.

The only thing I didn’t recognize in the common room was a metal box with a hinged lid, sitting open on one of the mess tables. I stepped over to look inside. It was empty.

When I moved back, something else caught my eye.

There was a body tangled around the legs of the table. It hadn’t been visible from the door; it was obscured by the benches and deep shadows. It was Miguel Vera. His eyes, still open, blankly reflected the light from