“Five seconds! Get in!” Gin screamed.

Maren closed the distance with three steps then threw them both over the threshold of the hangar. She felt the door skim her boot as it dropped behind her. Then there was a crash, and the door shook. One of the beasts had hit the locked barrier; she could see it through the window, a shred of its human face still attached to the hideous body, one blank eye rolling comically. Then the second reinforcement door slid past the glass, blocking the monster from view.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Maren let her body go limp as she lay on the airlock’s concrete floor, Saul on her right and Suriya on her left. Her chest was so tight from fear that breathing was nearly impossible.

“Maren?” Gin whispered. “Maren, I swear, you’d better be inside.”

“I am.” She grinned. “We all are.”

Gin released a string of swearwords, half of which Maren had never heard before, and finished with, “So help me, I’ll kill you myself if you ever scare me like that again. Airlock pressurising.”

Maren felt the gravity return to normal as the station’s systems kicked in. She twisted her helmet loose, pulled it off her sweaty face, and inhaled deeply. Suriya still hadn’t moved, but Saul had pushed himself into a sitting position and was taking off his own helmet.

“You okay?” she asked.

“That was stupid.” He threw the helmet aside. His face was blanched pale from pain, and he had a smear of blood on his jaw from where his lip had been cut, but his expression wasn’t angry. It wasn’t happy, either, and Maren squinted at him, trying to figure out what he was thinking.

“What, you think I can’t look after my team?”

“No.” His lips twitched slightly, and Maren thought he might actually be trying to smile. “If you’d left me, you’d have automatically become Station 334’s defence technician. Saving me was a bad career move.”

Maren blinked at him then burst out into laughter. Once she’d started, she couldn’t stop and had to wrap her arms around her torso to stabilize her aching ribs. “Damn it, Saul! Reckon there’s still time to open a window and toss you back out?”

This time, he did smile—a proper, deep smile that showed his teeth—and Maren found she liked it quite a lot.

The internal door behind them slid open, and Mark pressed inside, his face as white as a sheet. “What can I do? Oh, hell, you guys have gone hysterical, haven’t you?” His eyebrows descended in a distrustful frown. “I’m not good with emotional stuff.”

Maren glanced at the external door, where she’d last seen the black creature, and sobered. “I’m okay, but Saul’s leg is broken. Can you help me carry him?”

“Yeah, sure.” Mark sounded relieved. “I can do that.”

Maren shimmied out of her suit while Mark cut Saul free from his. The tough, reinforced fabric had suffered serious damaged at the hands of the creatures and Maren’s grenade. It had tears through many of its layers, and the front of it was charred black, but Maren still needed a pair of wire clippers to slice it open.