Page 23

I grunt. But I open my eyes. The red haze is getting worse.

So’s the nausea, even though I can’t have anything left to puke up.

Just in case, I reach down into the armrest pocket of my couch with my working arm.

Fumble around until I feel folded cloth and pull out a flash bag.

I drop it in my lap along with the meds.

Now I got everything I need, except entertainment.

Watching the scenery out the front viewer don’t make me feel any better, although I appreciate how fast we’re moving.

Kez really isn’t wasting any time. The view’s pretty monotonous over the ocean.

A blur of blue-green above, a blur of darker green below.

Kez turns her head and grins at me when we pass over a string of black dots in the green blur.

Outniss. Otherwise, she’s focused on flying the ship.

Once we clear the Cloudline, the Cloudlands’ defensive barrier, she opens up the afterburners.

The Infinity’s well-dampered, but I still feel the vibration as we head towards Mach-1.

I watch the numbers tick up in the corner of the viewer.

Realize I’m fading in and out when I notice gaps in the sequence.

“Talk t’me, kitten.” The slurring’s getting worse.

“Thirteen minutes,” she says tersely. The flight from Tiv to Hemos usually takes forty. She’s really not wasting any time.

“Keep it ... under three,” I remind her. She’s not rated for anything faster than Mach-3 on suborbital flights. And she’s hurt.

Her voice tugs me out of a grey haze. “You’re not bleeding much,” she tells me. She says it without looking at me, so either she’s already taken stock of my injuries, or she’s just saying it to reassure me. “But you’re coming up black and blue all over.”

“Impact trauma,” I say. I don’t remember anything between the explosion and waking up after the crash, but I’m guessing the worst hit I took was when I hit the ground.

Good thing we took a skimmer rather than a hover.

I’d have a lot worse than a concussion if we’d fallen from the ten meters hovers usually travel at.

“You saved my life,” Kez says. I can hear the smile in her voice. Even if I can’t see it. My eyes have drifted shut again, even though I didn’t want them to.

“Another one . . . you owe me.”

“Hale, if you don’t open your eyes, I’m going to have to kick your ass. Which I’m only doing out of looove.”

I chuckle weakly and force my eyes open a fraction, which is all I can manage. Everything beyond the darkness of my eyelids is a shifting blur. But my eyes are open.

“Call Doc Gray,” I mutter.

“Myhre said she’d have a team waiting for us.”

“Call Doc.”

“Stay awake and I will. We’ll be on the ground in nine minutes, Hale. Just stay with me.”

“Always with you.” I swipe at my face with my left hand. My nose feels wet.

“You’d better be. I will follow you to the ends of the goddamn universe if you even think about going anywhere.” I hear her adjust a control. “Leave your nose alone. It’s just a nosebleed.”

Feels like my brains are leaking out my nose. “Stalker.”

“Call me whatever you want. Just stay awake.”

I feel myself drift. Try to force myself awake, but it’s becoming harder and harder. My body wants to sleep, to heal. It doesn’t understand that I might not wake up. “Hard,” I mutter.

“Are you? Seven minutes and I can take care of that for you. How do you want it?”

“Pervert.” The spaces between thoughts are getting longer. The gaps between thought and word wider.

“Can I ask you something, Hale? Seriously now.” She looks over at me, a shifting of the pale blur that’s her head. I manage to raise an eyebrow. Even that hurts. “Am I really bad at it? Giving you, you know, head? I mean, you never ask for it. You go down on me all the time.”

“N-ow?” She wants to analyze our sex life now?

“Why not?” She shrugs, dark blur on lighter blur. “I’ve got to keep you awake somehow.”

I shake myself out of the haze to ask, “Right now?”

“Yeah, I mean, if it’s something you don’t want to talk about, I’ll understand. I just wondered, you know, am I doing something wrong?”

She’s got to be kidding. “Fuckin’ ... now?”

She blows out an irritated breath. “Well, give me something else to talk about!”

“Not bad.” Fuck me, of all the times. “I don’t like it.”

“I know you’re a little fuzzy right now, but did you just say you don’t like head? Because—” She pauses. I feel the vibration, distant, more of a shiver through my gut and sinuses than anything else, as she adjusts the flaps. “That would be a first. Jeez, Chain didn’t want anything else.”

“Don’t compare met’him.” I give her an answer I probably wouldn’t give under other circumstances. “Reminds me ... of slam.”

“Oh,” she says. “I, uh, I get it.”

“No, you don’t.” She couldn’t possibly understand how it becomes a commodity, a currency, in the hole.

Something that should be warm, intimate, intensely pleasurable.

There’s none of that. It’s just the quick and dirty release of physical tension.

Like shitting. Nothing other than chains reminds me more of the five years I lost. “Tell you. .. ‘nother time.”

“Good—” She’s interrupted by a shudder. The muted, metallic clank of the landing claws grasping the landing platform. She breathes out, a gust of deep relief. “Because we’re here.”

I hear her throw off her flight webbing and climb out of her chair. But I can’t see it; even the grey blur has darkened to blackness.