Bonds of Brass (The Bloodright Trilogy #1) - Emily Skrutskie Page 0,129
until I hit a wall. Go until I hit a corner. Ignore any other noise but my desperate breathing and the hammer of my heart. If I thought about this right, I should be exactly where I intended to end up. I brace against the support, stick my leg out, and bring the heel of my boot down hard.
The ceiling tile beneath it cracks neatly in half, and this time I remember to close my eyes against the cloud of dust and particleboard chunks that rises in its wake. I fight back my hesitation, swat once to clear the air, and roll sideways, trying not to take the rest of the ceiling with me as I drop through the rectangular hole.
I land hard on my feet right in front of the door to the stairwell. Checking over my shoulder would only slow me down—I grab the handle of the door and dive through. My legs pump furiously as I thunder down the stairs. I think I’m bleeding in a few places where I must have cut myself in the crawl space. My toes still throb from kicking the table.
All things I can deal with later. I spill out onto the first floor and kick through the emergency door, bursting into the open air.
The base is in an uproar. Cadets and officers scramble every which way, and the hangars are abuzz with ships jockeying for precious runway space. I flatten against the wall as a Beamer—not the Ruttin’ Hell, not our Beamer—swoops overhead, rotary thrusters screaming to lift the stubborn transport into the sky with every bit of urgency it possesses. Berr sys-Tosa’s sounded the retreat, and everyone’s rushing to get the hell off this forsaken planet.
Think like Wen. Think like Wen. I keep myself braced against the wall, trying to pick out the noise inside the detention center over the evacuation’s bedlam. There’s no way I don’t have pursuit on my tail. Footsteps sound in the stairwell. I tense, watching the door’s seams.
When it swings outward, I duck out from behind it and loop my arm around the soldier’s neck. He flails for his gun. I beat him to it, snatching the blaster off his belt. No time to check the settings—I flick the safety off, fire a shot into his hamstring, and hope for the best. He immediately slumps, and I leap back from him, pulling a face as the bolt’s charge tries to bridge into my body.
The door slams shut. I switch the gun’s settings and shoot the latch, melting it into place.
The soldier’s blaster goes in my belt. His hat on my head. His badge and identification in one of my jacket’s inner pockets. I slip out of Wen’s mentality long enough to mutter a quick apology and prop him up against the detention center’s wall. He’ll come around in a few minutes. He won’t be stranded.
At least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I take off running across the quad.
The loudspeakers on every building blast orders, but my flight-mode brain takes an extra second to translate them. I hear familiar locations, familiar designations, things that should be ingrained after two and a half years of training here, but my mind is sluggish, my thoughts scattered. I pause in the shadow of one of the main hangars, giving my head time to catch up to the rapid pounding of my heart.
If everything went right with the academy head, I was supposed to rendezvous with Gal and Wen on the south side of Trost once Wen had ditched the Umber pursuit. We said “once.” We probably should have accounted for “if.”
Now I have no idea where Gal and Wen have ended up. I fried the comm that could have contacted them, and even if I hadn’t, the patrol took it on the prairie. We never anticipated the governor’s surrender. Not when we were so certain we had gift-wrapped the Archon forces. Gal thought he could outmaneuver Berr sys-Tosa.
Now our plan is ashes at the system governor’s cowardly feet. Now Gal’s caught in the middle of a war I was supposed to end before it started. Now I don’t know how to reach him.