“Wha…”

They heard you say you were going to shoot, so they got out of the way. They’ve tasted those guns enough times to be wary of them. But they won’t be giving up, not this easily. They know you need to get to Saul, so they’re going to wait and let you come to them.

Maren bobbed her head, trying to see down the hallway. The fight had broken most of the lights, and the single remaining fluorescent was flickering. She could see the doors lining each side of the path. Some closed, some open, any one of them potentially hid their attackers.

Gin was sheet white as she placed a hand on Maren’s arm. “We’re going to run?”

“No,” Maren murmured, as an idea started to form in the back of her mind. “No, I don’t think we’d be lucky enough to get past them again. Watch the hallway a moment.”

Maren pushed her friend to stand in the place she’d been occupying and pressed the gun into her hands. Then she pulled a small switchblade out of the utility set she kept in her pocket and jumped onto the control panel. Above the panel, set high in the wall and painted a matching grey to discreetly blend in to the room, was the grill that covered the ventilation system.

Most members of the station overlooked the vents. Maren herself had never really noticed ducts before she’d been put in charge of maintaining them. Since being stationed in 334, though, she’d spent countless hours crawling through the vents to reach inconvenient parts of the station that had suffered heat damage. She knew the passageways so intimately that, even without the map she usually brought, she was confident she could find her way to the rec room.

The transmission from earlier in the day had said the Cymic Parasites absorbed their host’s memories. Maren was banking on the idea that neither Mark nor Holly had been consciously aware of the ventilation systems, and so the monsters wouldn’t be, either.

Maren dug the edge of the blade under where base of the cover was pressed against the wall. She gave it a tug, pulling the vent free so that it swung on its top hinges.

“Here, quickly,” she hissed to Gin as she pocketed the blade.

Gin was fairly lax about letting her friend lean against the board, but Maren would never forget the look of horror that crossed Gin’s face when she saw Maren’s boots digging into the knobs and dials of her much-loved control panel.

“It doesn’t matter!” Maren grabbed Gin’s arm and tugged her onto the panel as well. “Jeeze, you communication clowns get so uptight about your precious equipment.”

“Only because you maintenance morons keep stuffing it up!” Gin huffed back but handed back the gun before letting Maren haul her into the vent.

“Crawl forward as quietly as you can,” Maren said. “It connects with another vent after about a dozen feet. Go into that side passageway so I can pass you.”