Chapter 26
Twenty Six
Kira
Kira planted a hand on the railing and levered herself over it.
Heart in her throat, forehead creased in concentration, she fell.
A second later she hit the container below and rolled. Right over its edge. Then she was falling again.
The walkway she’d just been standing on gave way with a crash.
Kira found her feet, hauling ass like her life depended on it.
Mostly because it did.
She strained, reaching for every ounce of speed she had as the rest of the containers came down.
For a brief moment, she thought she felt a trickle of ki infuse the muscles of her legs. She didn’t have time to stop and analyze the feeling as the containers from above collided with those below, knocking them askew.
Kira hit the end of her row and made a sharp right.
The wall of stacked containers next to her rocked. Tilting. Tilting. Until it hit the point of no return and toppled over in slow motion.
“Ah, crap,” Kira cursed.
Why did the weirdest, most dire things always happen to her?
The fear of being crushed to death gave Kira wings as she flew down the row, containers toppling behind her in a deadly game of dominoes.
The floor shook ominously.
She wasn’t going to make it, Kira realized. The falling containers were too fast and she was too slow.
In one last desperate bid for survival, Kira dove, sliding the last few feet through the quickly narrowing gap.
There was a loud crash and the ground trembled.
Panting, shocked that she was still alive, Kira sat facing rigidly forward, her eyes trained on the endless rows before her. In the aftermath of what just happened, the unexpectedly mundane sight felt surreal.
Slowly, slowly, she glanced back over her shoulder.
A neon colored skull grinned at her. Macabre and bright. X’s in place of eyes. Stitch marks for its mouth.
Kira patted its forehead. “Close one.”
Too close.
Graydon’s voice echoed from afar. “Kira!”
Relief swept through her. “Here!”
Oh, thank God. Graydon was alive. She wasn’t going to have to sift through this gigantic mess looking for his crushed body.
“Stay there. Don’t go anywhere,” Graydon yelled, sounding a little closer than before.
“Like there’s anywhere for me to go,” Kira muttered, looking at the endless rows.
With a grimace, Kira tried pushing to her feet.
Her body protested.
Loudly.
Kira lowered back down. “Shit.”
She hurt. Every muscle. Every tendon. They screamed from the abuse she’d heaped on them without a second thought.
The worst was her ankle.
Kira moved it and immediately wished she hadn’t as it started throbbing.
“Yeah, that’s definitely twisted,” she murmured.
She’d probably done it when she rolled off the container and landed wrong. Thank goodness for adrenaline.
There was a loud crack somewhere in the mess of containers.
“No,” Kira whined.
Why? Why did this always have to happen to her? It was someone else’s turn.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Kira threw herself forward. Where she was just sitting, the floor caved in, the mess of containers falling into the gaping maw. Her skull friend among them.
More and more containers slid into the sink hole, expanding it outward.
“No, no, no,” Kira moaned, scrabbling for a handhold as the floor fell out from under her.
By some miracle she managed to grab the edge of a container, hanging on for dear life even as it started to tilt.
This was the end. She was going down.
Kira had already mentally prepared for the drop and the pain that was sure to follow when everything jerked to a halt, nearly yanking her shoulder out of its socket in the process.
Confused—but grateful—she twisted to see what had happened. The container she clung to had managed to avoid the fate of its brethren by millimeters. When it started to go over, it tilted, the very upper edge catching on containers stacked next to and above it.
Dangling in midair, Kira walked her hands along the container’s narrow lip, moving back toward solid ground. “Fucking Titan. Every single time. I swear this place hates me. Never again. This is the last time I come to this damn station.”
Either a fellow salvager tried to fuck them over. Bounty hunters attempted to collect on the price on their heads or Jin was getting mugged by one of the criminal child savants littering the station.
“Jin, come in. Can you hear me?” Kira tried.
She didn’t have high hopes. At some point in her dash, she’d managed to drop the squirrel.
As expected, there was no answer.
Reaching the edge of the pit, Kira transferred her grip, making sure to test the stability of the floor first. Only when she was certain it could bear her weight did she start to swing her leg up.
Someone dropped from one of the walkways above. Their landing sent tiny vibrations through the metal of the floor.
Don’t collapse. Don’t collapse, Kira silently chanted.
She scrambled for a better handhold as she started to slip.
“I’ve dreamt of this moment. The great Phoenix, finally at my mercy.”
The visage of a general greeted Kira when she finally moved her attention from not falling. “Lothos—you have me at a disadvantage,”
Not many people made Kira feel like prey. Lothos and his brothers were among the few.
Kira’s arms shook from the strain of supporting her weight. A slight tremor started in her muscles. Already injured, this was testing her reserves further. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could maintain this.
“I don’t suppose you’d help me up,” Kira tried.
“No.”
“Thought so.” Kira tried to smile but failed. “I suppose you’re upset about your little friend.”
Lothos’s red markings, so like the markings of Kira’s primus, stood out in stark contrast against the dark gray of his skin as he squatted in front of her. “I knew you were in the trees that day.”
Kira grimaced as she nearly slipped. “Is that right?”
“I could have ended this then.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I ask myself that every day.” Lothos lost his detached look as he finally focused fully on Kira. “I guess you could say I still had hope. You and me—we go back a long way.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s been that long.”
Kira’s hands began to cramp. She adjusted her grip, doing her best to ease the strain, but it was just a matter of time.
Her arms would give out. She would fall.
She might die. She might not.
At the very least she’d be heavily injured. Unable to defend herself when Lothos followed her down.
Because he would follow her.
He’d come to kill her. His desire to claim vengeance for what he thought she’d done so fucking predictable that it was a wonder he’d managed to so thoroughly blindside her.
She felt foolish. And stupid. And really, really pissed off.
Fyr told her this would happen.
Kira was momentarily distracted by the sound of someone approaching. Their footsteps measured. Steady. As if they had all the time in the world.
“I guess it no longer matters.” Lothos extended his claws toward her throat. “You’re going to be dead soon.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
Taking a risk, Kira let go of the edge with one hand, latching onto Lothos’s wrist in a split second. She jerked him to her. He jolted forward a few inches before he managed to dig his claws into the ground, preventing her from yanking him over the ledge.
“So close,” Kira grunted.
Lothos’s features showed the effort it took to stay anchored. “I suppose it was too much to ask for you to go quietly and peacefully to your end.”
“You got that right.” Kira put her lips next to Lothos ear, speaking so only he could hear. “Babylon, mother fucker.”
Jin
Jin tried to access the shipyard feeds, growing increasingly frustrated as the station’s system resisted his efforts. “I swear if you’ve gone off somewhere to get yourself killed, Kira, I will never talk to you again.”
Something—or most likely someone—was interfering with his connection to the station’s systems.
What was of more concern to Jin was that they’d also somehow managed to break his link to his spawn. Jin hadn’t thought that was possible short of the spawn’s destruction. And yet, there the spawn was in his mental landscape. Safe and existing but not responding to any of his instructions.
“Dearie, dearie me,” Jin mumbled.
Their enemies got smarter every day, and as always, they were left scrambling to keep up.
“Something wrong?” Dylan asked from his corner of the room.
“You could say that.”
Jin lifted his head to listen to something only he could hear.
Ah, there it was. Right on cue.
“There are mice in our walls.” Jin threw off the cozy blanket Dylan had procured for him, setting it aside with a touch of regret before collecting his scroll and a few of the other odds and ends that littered his bed.
He’d kept his bargain with Torvald, not creating any spawn despite the pressing desire to do so. But nothing in that deal precluded the creation of weapons.
He now had a stockpile of them. All made under Dylan’s watchful eye.
“What are you doing?” Dylan asked.
“Preparing for a mouse hunt. What does it look like?”
Really, these Tuann could be so dense sometimes. Kira would have had things figured out before he tossed off his blanket.
For that matter, so would Raider.
Finn’s response was something of a question mark, but Jin was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’d lasted this long with Kira. The Tuann had to have something going on between those ears of his.
“I am not familiar with that term. Mouse hunt. What does it mean?”
Jin tapped the side of his bag and opened the top. “Wake up, my dears. It’s time to go to work.”
The chitters and squeaks that came from inside made Jin smile. As did the scrambling of tiny feet and the buzzing of wings as his spawn poured out of the opening.
“Under my clothes. Hurry, hurry,” Jin crooned.
His spawn scuttled and winged their way across the room to delve under any piece of clothing they could reach. The bottom of his pants. The collar of his shirt. Up his sleeves even.
Jin held as still as he could, a tiny giggle slipping free every time one of them brushed up against a ticklish spot.