Maren waited until Gin’s shoes were in danger of disappearing from sight, then with a final glance at the door to make sure it was empty, she hoisted herself into the vent.

It was a narrow space, barely large enough to let her crawl on her hands and knees, and it took a fair bit of squirming to turn herself around so that she was facing the entrance. She hooked her fingers through the grill and pulled it down until it locked back into place. It wouldn’t stop the Cymics from following her if they realised where she and Gin had hidden, but at least it wouldn’t look astray if—rather, when—they became impatient enough to enter the room.

And that didn’t take long. Maren had barely managed to get herself facing forward again before a terrifying wail flooded her ears. Maren held her breath as she listened to the shuffling, scraping sounds coming from the creature as it searched the room. A loud bang, followed by a sizzle, told her the control panel had been destroyed. It was quickly followed by another wail and the screech of metal being torn apart.

“Go, go,” she whispered to Gin, who had come to a halt in front of her. With their noise masked by the creature’s furious destruction of the communications room, they crawled down the narrow steel passageway as quickly as they could.

The noise gradually faded behind them and then eventually ceased as the creature gave up on its rampage. Gin reached the offshoot and wormed into it so Maren could pass her.

“How long do we have?” Maren asked, careful to keep her voice quiet. Any sound they made would be muffled by the wall’s insulation, but she didn’t want to take any chances.

Gin had a far better head for time than Maren did. “Not more than nineteen minutes.”

“Damn.” The vents were safer than the passageways, but that came at the cost of time; if they’d been running, they would have been back at the rec room already. “Can you go any faster, Gin?”

“I’ll try.”

The vents were almost pitch dark, save for the slivers of light that speared through the grills placed every twenty feet, so Maren closed her eyes while she crawled, calling up the mental image of the ventilation system’s pathways. She led them past the meeting room and around the storage section then skirted the edge of the second-quadrant sleeping quarters. The only sounds she could make out were the shuffle of her hands and suit pants over the cold metal as well as Gin’s laboured breathing as she tried to match Maren’s pace.

Then two loud bangs shocked her so badly that she jumped, hitting her head on the vent’s ceiling. Her headache flared as her mind scrambled to figure out what was happening. Gunfire. Whose?

It couldn’t be Holly or Mark. They’d shown no interest in finding a conventional weapon when they’d been roving through the station. Does that mean it was Suriya? She’d been sporting that viciously sharp knife last time Maren had seen her, but it wasn’t impossible that she’d found a gun in the interim.