“Friends of yours?” Scarlet asked.
Clarity returned to Wolf’s expression and he glanced at her, then down at the gun. It struck her as odd that he could be startled by it, when the howls had garnered no reaction at all.
“They won’t bother us,” he said finally, turning and heading down the tracks.
With a snort, Scarlet trotted after him. “Well, isn’t that a relief. We’re stranded in wild wolf territory, but as long as you say they’re not going to bother us…” She clicked the gun’s safety back on and was tucking it back in her waistband when Wolf’s gesture gave her pause.
“They won’t bother us,” he said again, almost smiling. “But you might want to keep that out anyway, just in case.”
Nineteen
“What is all this junk?” Cinder locked her jaw, straining to push a plastic crate that was almost as tall as she was.
Thorne grunted beside her. “It’s—not—junk.” The tendons in his neck bulged as the crate collided with the cargo bay wall.
Thorne tossed his arms over the top with a groan and Cinder collapsed against it. Her shoulders ached, as tense as the metal that made up her left leg, and her arms felt like they were about to fall off. But when she allowed herself to look around the cargo bay, a sense of accomplishment settled around her.
All the crates had been slid to the walls, clearing an actual path from the cockpit to the living quarters. The smaller, lighter ones had been stacked on top of one another and some were left out as makeshift furniture in front of the main netscreen.
It bordered on cozy.
The next job would be to actually unpack the crates—the ones that were worth unpacking—but that would be a job for another day. “No, really,” she said when she’d found her breath. “What is all this?”
Thorne slid down beside her and wiped his brow with his sleeve. “I don’t know,” he said, eyeing the stamped labels on the side of the nearest crate: an unhelpful code. “Supplies. Food. I think there are some guns in one of them. And I know I had a few sculptures from this really collectible second-era artist—I was going to make a fortune off of them, but I got arrested before I had a chance.” He sighed.
Cinder squinted at him. Sure that the sculptures were stolen, she found it difficult to muster any sympathy. “Shame,” she muttered, thumping her head back against the crate.
Thorne pointed at something on the far wall, his forearm jutting beneath Cinder’s nose. “What’s that?”
She followed his gesture, frowned, and with a cranky moan pushed herself back to her feet. The corner of a metal frame could be seen behind a tall stack of crates they’d left against the wall. “A door.” She drew up the ship’s blueprint on her retina display. “The medbay?”
Realization brightened Thorne’s face. “Oh, right. This ship does have one of those.”
Cinder settled her fists on her hips. “You covered up the medbay?”
Thorne pulled himself up. “Never needed it.”
“Don’t you think it might be good to have access to, just in case?”
Thorne shrugged. “We’ll see.”
Rolling her eyes, Cinder reached for the uppermost crate and hauled it down onto the floor, already disrupting their hard-won pathway. “How can we be sure there’s nothing in these boxes that can be tracked?”
“What do you think I am, an amateur? Nothing entered this ship without being thoroughly inspected. Otherwise the Republic would have reclaimed it all a long time ago rather than let it idle in that warehouse.”
“There may not be any trackers,” said Iko, making Cinder and Thorne both jump. They still weren’t used to their invisible, omnipresent companion. “But we can still be detected on radar. I’m doing my best to keep us out of the path of any satellites or ships, but it’s surprisingly crowded up here.”
Thorne unrolled his sleeves. “And it’s next to impossible to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere without detection. That’s how they nabbed me last time.”
“I thought there was a trick to it,” said Cinder. “I’m sure I heard once about a way people could sneak into Earth’s atmosphere without notice. Where did I hear that?”
“News to me. I got pretty good at sweet-talking my way into public hangars, but I don’t think that’s going to work with such a high-profile convict on the loose.”
Having found an old rubber band in the galley, Cinder fished it from her pocket and tossed her hair up in a ponytail. Her brain ticked through her memories until, with a snap, it came to her. Dr. Erland had told her that there were more Lunars on Earth than people suspected, and that they had a way of getting to Earth without the government taking notice.
“Lunars know how to cloak their spacecrafts.”
“Huh?”