my glasses, I couldn’t accurately judge time, but it felt like just a few minutes. If I remembered correctly, the second and third gates were fairly close together.
At least eight soldiers filled the hallway, standing in a pool of light. “Is that the woman?” a male voice asked. “Where are the man and the miner?”
“She was alone,” the female who kicked me said.
I was unceremoniously dumped on the floor. I climbed to my feet and marched for the far elevators, the ones leading up to the base.
An older man grabbed my injured arm in a tight grip and spun me around. He sneered at me. “Where do you think you’re going?”
I think I’m getting you all to face away from the tunnel I just arrived through, I thought to myself. Out loud, I said, “I am returning to the base to contact MineCorp. That crazy son of a bitch I hired shot me! Me! He’ll never work again once my supervisors hear about this.”
Keep talking. My brain caught the signal before I even realized who it was from. Ian was nearby.
“And you all can kiss your jobs good-bye, too,” I said, my voice rising. “Who attacks a MineCorp representative? Don’t you know who I am? That bitch who stunned and kicked me is first in line for firing. She should be happy that I don’t demand her head. Release me this instant!”
The soldier holding my arm released me and everyone else laughed, but it had a tinge of uneasiness. Command might’ve said I was a fake, but my tone and accent said I was high class. I just needed to sow enough doubt to keep them distracted.
Keep talking and don’t move.
I mentally rolled my eyes. Like I was going anywhere. I launched into another tirade. “I’m going to demand that MineCorp immediately revoke all House Rockhurst contracts. You clearly cannot be trusted—”
The heat of a blaster bolt seared my left side. The soldier who had grabbed me dropped to the ground. The other soldiers in the hallway soon followed. Only two had managed to get shots off.
“Time to go, princess,” Ian said, stepping out of the shadows.
My whole body sagged in relief. “Can you find the key to the cuffs?”
“No need.” Ian popped the plastech cuffs open with his bare hands, which should have been impossible. I was beginning to think the word didn’t apply to Ian. But when he touched my wounded arm, his grip was gentle.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Is Ferdinand? Where is Ferdinand?” I looked Ian over, checking for injuries. He didn’t have any obvious wounds, but his shirt was soaked with sweat—what do you know, he was human after all.
“We’re both fine. Ferdinand is a little way back. Thanks to your virus, we’re going to have to go up the stairs. Can you do it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Can you? How did you get up here so fast?”
His grin was sin and temptation. “Stamina.”
A frisson of heat wove through me. “I see your ego didn’t take any damage,” I said with a laugh. “Go get my brother while I find my stuff.”
I retrieved my stuff from the soldier who had searched me. Thanks to the smart glasses I could see the gate to the elevators in the distance. I kept an eye on it, but nothing moved. Based on the number of soldiers here, this was the sum total of everyone they’d sent down.
Ian returned with Ferdinand draped over his shoulders.
“Think they’ll send a squad down the stairs?” I asked.
Ian shrugged. “Maybe. It seems like your virus is causing enough chaos that they’ll try to deal with that first, though. Have you heard anything from Aoife?”
“No. Coms are down. I only heard you because you were close.”
“Do you have a plan for once we reach the base level?”
“Keep climbing,” I said. “If the ship is still there, we take that. If not, we steal something.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
Ian set a grueling pace and I kept up out of sheer stubbornness. When I slowed, he took my hand and pulled me up a few floors until I recovered a little. He hadn’t been joking—his stamina seemed inexhaustible.
When he stopped a floor below the top, I nearly collapsed in gratitude. My lungs burned, my stomach burned, my legs burned. Everything burned. Now that we’d stopped, my legs trembled uncontrollably.
“This is the base level,” he said. “We’ll have to change stairwells to climb to the surface.”
I listened for signals, but the coms were still down. “I don’t know what’s happening