“What?” cried Iko. “I thought he was out! Did I crush him?”
“No, no, he’s fine. I just have to do something.”
Chewing on her lip, she knelt on one knee. Yanking her pant leg up, she unlatched the compartment to her prosthetic leg and found two small chips lodged in the mess of bundled wires. The direct communication chip glittering with its peculiar iridescence, and Peony’s ID chip, still caked with dried blood.
Those officers had tracked her through Peony’s chip, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if Levana’s minions had found her the same way.
“I’m so stupid,” she muttered, prying the chip loose. Her heart suddenly clamped up, but she did her best to ignore it as she brushed a quick kiss against the ID chip and threw it out into the field. It glinted once with moonlight before vanishing in the dark.
“All right. You can close the doors now.”
As the doors clanged shut, she threw herself toward the podship and pulled the power cell off the floorboard.
The engine room glowed with red emergency lights. Her retina display had already pulled up the plans by the time she slithered on her stomach to the ship’s exterior corner and unbolted the old power cell.
When she yanked it free, the whole ship went black.
She cursed to herself.
“Cinder!” came Thorne’s distraught scream from somewhere overhead.
Cinder flicked on her flashlight and tore off the protective packaging of the new cell, her breaths coming in short, panicked gasps. It didn’t take long for the engine room to grow stifling hot without the cooling system.
She plugged a cable into the cell’s outlet, then bolted it to the engine. Already she was forgetting how she’d ever managed to survive without the screwdriver in her new hand as she secured the cell to the wall. The overlaid blueprint on her vision zoomed in as she connected the delicate wires.
Gulping, she punched the restart code into the mainframe. The engine hummed, grew louder, and soon purred like a contented cat. The red lights flickered back on, and were just as quickly replaced with bright whites.
“Iko?”
The response was almost instantaneous. “What just happened? Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on?”
Exhaling, Cinder dropped to her stomach and wriggled back toward the door. She grasped the ladder rungs that led to the ship’s main level, calling out, “Ready for takeoff!”
No sooner had the words left than the combustors flared beneath her and the ship lurched up off the ground. Cinder screamed and grasped the ladder, clinging tight to it as the Rampion hovered momentarily before shooting up into the sky, away from the destruction happening in Michelle Benoit’s beautiful hometown.
When they’d entered orbit again, Cinder found Thorne in the cockpit, slumped in his chair with both arms draped toward the floor.
“We should clean our wounds,” she said, seeing the dark spot of blood on his shoulder.
Thorne nodded without facing her. “Yeah, I definitely don’t want to catch whatever he had.”
Her right leg shaking under her own weight, Cinder made her way awkwardly into the medbay, grateful she’d had the forethought to clear the crates away from it, and found an assortment of bandages and ointments.
“Nice takeoff back there,” she said when she joined Thorne in the cockpit. “Captain.”
He grunted, sulking as Cinder used her imbedded knife to cut open his sticky sleeve.
“How does it feel?” she asked, examining the bite marks on his arm.
“Like I was bit by a feral dog.”
“Are you light-headed? Woozy? You lost a lot of blood.”
“I’m fine,” he said, glowering. “Pretty upset about my jacket.”
“It could have been a lot worse.” She ripped off a long band of medical tape. “I could have used you as a human shield, like that officer.” Her voice hiccupped on the last word. A headache was coming on, starting in her desert-dry eyes, as she wrapped a bandage around Thorne’s arm and taped it.
“What happened?”