Chapters (48)
- Cover
- Dedication
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Copyright
Liam hesitated, then swore and reached up, doing something to the grate. He pried it loose, letting it dangle from a corner. Unbidden, he extended a hand.
I took it, letting him help me down from my perch. “Thank you,” I said, stretching my sore back. Something popped in my spine, and I grimaced.
We stood there awkwardly a moment. I glanced around the room, a tiny space no more than five feet square, barely high enough to stand. There were two other grates in the walls, and an open maintenance hatch stretched between them. It looked like a good base from which to squirrel around the station stealing stuff. It was messy but not uncomfortably so. He’d arranged crates and blankets as rugs and furniture. It wasn’t even dim, at least to my eyes. Of course, I’d spent the last month on a spaceship designed for blind aliens, so what did I know?
“This is where you live?” I asked dubiously.
Liam scowled. “If you must know, I have a lovely set of quarters very near Grigori Danshov. This is where I go to do things I don’t want him to know about. And if you tell him about it, he’ll kill you, then me. Now go.”
“Not without my wrist monitor.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Liar.” I glared at him. “You didn’t have time to get rid of it. Why’d you take it in the first place?”
“Why do you think? So I could turn you in to Omnistellar and claim the bounty.”
Temper surged in my throat, but I swallowed it, forcing myself to be calm and rational. “If you wanted to do that, why not do it on Mars?”
He shrugged. “Maybe I just wanted one. It’s nice tech.”
I glanced at his wrist. “You’re telling me you’re cozy with the people who run this station and they couldn’t get you a black-market comm unit?”
Something beeped from a computer at the back of the room. Liam rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he sighed heavily. He crossed to the computer and deftly withdrew my comm unit, tossing it in my direction.
My heart flip-flopped right along with that shiny bit of silver, but my reflexes held true, and I snatched it out of midair. I closed my fingers over it, willing my breath to return to normal as Liam casually blanked his screen, but not before I got a glimpse of what it contained.
“Those are my comm logs!” I grabbed him, swung him around, and slammed him against the wall before he drew any of his fancy weapons. I’d been suspicious of Liam from the beginning, but now . . . “You’re spying on me, and you’re going to tell me why!”
TWENTY-ONE
LIAM SIGHED, SINKING ONTO THE crate. “It’s not what it looks like.”
“No?” I drew my hands into fists, shifting my weight subtly. He didn’t look ready to attack, but he was strong and lithe, and he carried those weapons. If he reached for them, I had to move first. “Because what it looks like is you using my comm unit to send Omnistellar my location and collect the bounty.”