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

the first room in the row. For a moment I saw her only by the light shining around the corner and through the walls of windows. There was a mechanical clank—a door unlocking—and the light dipped, concentrated behind the window, snapped off.

Lights came on inside the room. Behind the windows, Sigrah removed her helmet and set it aside. She turned, peering down this way and that; she was looking at consoles and screens. Her expression was hard to read from where I stood, but while she moved quickly and with purpose, there did not seem to be panic or fear in her demeanor.

I waited until she was turned away from me to slink quickly back along the machinery. She would have surveillance now, security control, weapons, anything she wanted.

The lights could come on at any moment, but for now the darkness protected me. I ran across the open space to the row of rooms in the center. I pressed myself against the wall and waited to hear the door open again or the crackle of a radio or the clink of metal spider legs.

Instead I heard a gentle whir, very faint, obviously mechanical. It sounded like a fan, something weak and small, but I could not see it, could not see anything at all. My eyes strained in the darkness. It was coming from above, and after a few seconds it was joined by another just like it. One to the left, one to the right. Still no lights came on on. I had no idea if Sigrah had surveillance access yet. She could be looking right at me. She could be calling upon weapons I would never see in the darkness.

I flinched when I felt something fly past my head. In the faint, faint light from Sigrah’s control room, all I could see was the hint of motion, a shadow among shadows, moving so quickly it blurred before my eyes when I tried to track it.

My mind filled with stories I’d heard as a child: rumors of heat-seeking and motion-sensing machines stalking through the Underground tunnels beneath London, remnants of the war set loose on Earth by Martians determined to claim their revenge. Family dogs blasted to soggy red pulp in suburban gardens. Homeless men chased like animals through the streets of Southwark. The same from my father’s side of the family in California, where my cousins spoke of craters in the desert where homesteads used to be, of children snatched from schoolyards by gleaming insectoid prowlers, of an old woman who mistook a threshing bot for a recycler when she stepped outside and her head—so the gruesome story went—rolled into the street while her body slumped in her front hall. There was no truth to the rumors. The war never reached Earth. All the violence had happened on Mars or in space. But the stories were terrifying precisely because the machines were real.

I held my breath until the whirring sound faded. Slowly, carefully, I turned my head to look for it, whatever it was. A smudge of movement well above me, but no light, no reflections. It faded into the enveloping darkness. I took a few more steps, feeling my way, my heart pounding.

Another few steps. My hand slid from the wall into empty space. An open doorway.

I slipped into the room and shut the door quietly. Breathed a cautious sigh of relief when the latch caught. Breathed again when the whirring machine retreated.

A few steps into the deeper darkness and my boot connected with something soft but immovable. I lurched forward, caught myself. I leaned down to find the obstacle on the floor.

Touched the cool, smooth, familiar material of a vac suit.

Traced with my fingers along the length of an arm. The curve of a shoulder. A warm, exposed face.

TWENTY-TWO

I jolted upright and stumbled backward a few steps, slammed into the hard edge of the doorframe. My heart was hammering and my breath coming in quick rasps. I couldn’t hear anything else, couldn’t hear if the drone was hovering right outside the door. I felt an arm. Warm skin. A face. Light, light, I needed my fucking light—I switched it on, remembered half a second later to bank the glow with my hand. I let my eyes adjust.

There was somebody lying on the floor right in front of me. I dropped to my knees and reached for them.

“Hey,” I whispered, scarcely daring to make a sound. “Hey, are you okay?”

I recognized the black hair braided into rows: Melendez, the crew’s geologist. I stripped off my glove and reached into the collar of her vac suit to find a pulse. She was alive but out cold. I didn’t see any obvious injuries, no blood or head wounds, but I couldn’t examine her thoroughly while she was wearing a vac suit. She was on her front, with one arm caught awkwardly beneath her body, the other reaching above her head and gripping the ankle of a boot. Somebody else’s boot. She wasn’t alone.

I panned my light over the room. My hand was shaking so much the beam danced over the walls and corners and dusty consoles and people on the floor.

They were all here. I crawled past Melendez to reach Dolin, who was lying in a sprawl next to Dietrich-Yun. Elena Yee was just beyond them, Balthazar right beside her. All of them were unconscious. All wearing vac suits with no helmets. Katee King was curled onto her side at the base of a console; there was blood on her face, more matting her hair, staining the gloves of her suit. Ryu was next to her.

“Oh, fuck, Avery.” I lurched across the room, tripping over Yee’s legs, and fell to my knees beside Ryu. I turned them onto their back and brushed their limp black hair off their face. “Come on, Avery, wake up. Wake the fuck up.”

I couldn’t tell if they were breathing. They looked