Chapter 32 - HUNTER #2
I duck down behind the boxes as Nico’s footsteps sound behind me, trying to keep my ragged breathing as soft as I can.
He stumbles into the intersection thirty seconds later, looking as furious as …
well, as a guy who just got a bunch of live wires jammed into his ribs and was nearly set on fire in a high-oxygen atmosphere.
‘Where are you?’ he mutters, studying each hallway off the intersection in turn, as I stay crouched behind my boxes.
‘Nico!’ It’s Blue Braid, dressed in a pressure suit, with a helmet under one arm. ‘Rover, let’s go!’
Without another word he abandons the chase, turning to follow her toward the garages. She must have got one working again.
Cleo, RUN.
I need to get back to slowing my sister down. I pull up my display from my cuff again, readying myself to plunge back into the station systems and find something to break.
It takes me a moment to understand why the bright lights projected in front of me don’t look right.
The air’s hazy.
I get to my feet, staggering – my body’s hitting the point of exhaustion – and see a stream of smoke snaking its way down the hallway. There’s a faint glow visible at the next corner: the direction from which Nico and I came.
Oh, come on. I haven’t been through enough?
Above me, fire alarms start to wail mournfully, drawn out and weird, like their batteries are failing. Fire, fire, says a woman’s annoyingly calm voice, dipping and elongating as the power fluctuates. Fire, evacuate.
Okay, so that’s on me. And the oxygen levels are high enough now that everything around me could go up in a minute, which means it’s time to run again.
I push myself to a jog, hurrying through the dying station until I leave the fire warnings behind. I crouch in what looks like a classroom – it’s decorated with kids’ drawings and educational charts.
It’s also one of the few rooms that has a window port, so I can see the red dust storm outside through the circle of clear material. Maybe it’s supposed to be educational for the students, or maybe kids have a special right to sunlight, I don’t know.
I sit my tired self down beside the porthole and reach out for my sister on comms. I don’t even know what I’m going to say, but anything that distracts her will do.
‘So, Marguerite. Was this a cry for attention? Did you suggest this to Mom so she’d finally give you that favorite-child trophy?’
Don’t you dare, she snaps back, instantly angry in my ear. I trusted you. I invited you in.
‘To murder club!’ I sputter, pausing to lean against the porthole for a second. Maybe the dust is clearing – I caught a glimpse of the landscape for a moment, red dirt stretching away into the distance.
I pray Cleo’s still out there in a rover, racing for safety.
This is the frontier, Marguerite says in my ear. You have to take what’s yours.
My next words come before I know I’m going to speak them. ‘That was never what we believed.’
It was never what you believed, she counters.
You needed the noble speeches to hide behind – you were never brave enough to look what you were doing in the eye and own the fact that you were saving yourself because you deserved to be saved.
You look down on the rest of us, but at least we knew what this was.
‘That’s not true! Marguerite, please. We said that we had to dream huge dreams, and make hard choices, but it was always meant to be for something greater than us.’
There is nothing great here without us! she snaps.
‘I don’t agree,’ I say. ‘I’m sitting here in this classroom, looking at these pictures stuck to the wall, thinking about the kids who made them.
About who those kids could grow up to be.
What they could do for this place, given a chance.
Trying to understand how my own sister is willing to murder the children at half a dozen different stations. ’
She doesn’t reply. Instead, the alarm above me starts up again. Decompression warning, says the woman, her voice slowing and deepening as the power bleeds away. Evacuate. Decompression warning.
‘Marguerite!’ I shout, but I’m moving, throwing myself off the desk and out the door. I swing around to slap at the palm plate, praying there’s enough juice left for the door to close.
It wheezes shut, and through the clear screen that’s supposed to let parents watch their children learn, I see the porthole blow, and the school supplies fly up in a flurry of white as the classroom decompresses.
I told her where I was. I’m a fool. But I’m not foolish enough to say anything now – to scream at her, like the anger burning inside me wants to do. Perhaps she won’t be able to tell the door closed. Perhaps she’ll think I was on the wrong side of it.
Should have come with me, Hunter, she whispers to my ghost.
I can hear alarms wailing in the distance and fire alerts starting to go off. The station’s dying around me.
Cleo’s not the only person running out of time. The station isn’t going to make it to the end of our countdown. That timeline never planned for us running around trying to destroy each other, shorting circuits and setting fires, sabotaging basic functions.
Any second now, fire is going to rip through the oxygen-enriched air and start blowing the seals that protect the base from the outside. The fire will make it a long way in just a few seconds – and then when the seals blow, Pax will decompress.
There’s nothing more I can do for Cleo – I have to hope she and Sabrina can stay ahead of Nico and Blue Braid for long enough to deliver their message. Maybe long enough to reach safety, even.
But the thought of Cleo out there on the red planet’s surface has given me one last idea, and maybe I have enough time to pull it off.
One last chance at maybe, just maybe …
I start to run.