Renegade Runner Nicole Conway (christmas read aloud txt) 📖

liquid trickled from one corner of his mouth. Was that … blood? Fear hit me like a cold dagger to the pit of my stomach. He was hurt—badly. Wasn’t he? I didn’t know. I didn’t have any medical training. I didn’t know what to do! Should I move him? What if his back was broken? Or his neck?

“W-We gotta move,” he slurred as he reached up to shakily grasp my hips and lift me off him. “B-Back to the ship. Now. T-They saw us. They’ll be coming.”

I grabbed his arm at the wrist and helped drag him back onto his feet. He wobbled and weaved dangerously for a few steps, then stopped to shake his head and spit a mouthful of dark blue blood onto the ground. My heart wrenched. What did that mean? Had he punctured something internal? Ruptured an organ? Was it internal bleeding? What if he was dying?

Tears welled in my eyes and I didn’t dare let go of his arm. No way was I leaving him behind. We’d gotten dragged into this mess together and, dammit, that was how we were getting out.

Maybe he could read the absolute terror in my eyes because he fanned a hand at me indifferently. “Calm down. It’s not that bad. Just bit my damn tongue through, I think. I told you, I’m tougher than some puny human.”

“Fine,” I managed hoarsely. “Be tough in the direction of the ship, then, huh?”

He muttered a long, garbled string of profanity as he stumbled through a jog beside me. Ahead, our ship sat right where we’d left it. Our safety. Our only hope.

Behind us, the twin dwarf stars broke the horizon just as we reached the airlocked door. The sudden bloom of blinding light and heat sucked the breath right out of my lungs. With both our helmets blown to smithereens up on the clifftop, all I could do was squint and try to shield my eyes.

Phox opened the door and we basically fell inside, toppling into a tangled heap. Phox didn’t stay down long. He scrambled up to smack a hand on the panel just inside, and the airlock door snapped closed with a comforting hiss and rush of cool air.

For a moment, all I could do was sit there, wheezing for breath and trying to rationalize what had just happened. Something, or someone, had shot at us. But how? From where? Surely not that battle. It was so far away. How was that even possible?

“Get up,” Phox commanded as he lurched past on his way to the cockpit. “We gotta get the hell out of here before they find us.”

“Who?” I blinked up at him, still shaking off the fact that we’d just unsuccessfully bungee-jumped off a giant cliff and somehow survived.

He paused, his jaw tensing as he regarded me with a steely, ruthless scowl smeared in blood from his mouth and sweat that drizzled down from his hairline. “The Furies,” he answered darkly. “They must have spotted us or picked us up on their scanners—it doesn’t matter. We’ve got minutes, Brinna. So strap in. Sienne is coming for us.”

19

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE

Me—Sienne was coming for me.

That was what he really meant to say, except he didn’t know the truth. I knew that as I sank down into the left-side chair in the cockpit. Through the buzzing haze of adrenaline, my injured leg throbbed and burned. I’d pushed it too far in the climb up that cliff, and god only knew what I’d done to it during the fall back down. But now wasn’t the time to worry about that.

My hands shook as I quickly buckled into the harness, sweaty fingers sliding clumsily over the metal buckles. Beside me, Phox was still weaving on his feet a little as he shambled into the cockpit and threw himself down into the chair beside mine. He began to strap in, too, then immediately fired up our engines with a flourish of his hands. The screens across our broad control panels flashed to life with a flurry of flashing warning lights and a beeping of alarms. Not good.

Cursing like mad, he brought up the holographic image of Thermax and spun it to our location, zooming in.

“Two enemy energy signals approaching fast,” he growled through clenched teeth as he kicked up the throttles and brought up a new display projected directly onto the glass windshield.

“Two?” I choked. How was that possible? Did Sienne have two ships?

The somewhat normal-looking steering wheel compacted, folding on itself and tucking away as two slender joysticks emerged on either side of his chair’s armrests, extending over across his lap. I jerked back, drawing my hands to my chest as the same set appeared on my chair, too. Why in the world would I need those? I wasn’t going to fly this thing, right? I didn’t know how to fly anything, let alone an alien ship!

“She’s probably working with a brawler team. A brawler team with a damn long-range beam cannon.” He coughed and wheezed, pausing to wipe more blood from around his mouth.

He was in bad shape. He shouldn’t have been driving our ship like this.

My jaw clenched as all my internal insecurities crumbled to one cold, hard truth: I needed to know how to fly this thing. My focus sharpened and I sat forward, watching as Phox prepped the ship for flight. Top three switches down, bottom circular thing spiraled until it flashed green, check both power cells for maximum output on the bottom panel, bring up the internal navigation computer to hologram mode to show which path to take—I had to memorize every single detail.

Phox suddenly threw the steering joysticks downward and our ship did an aerobatic backward turn, whipping around on a dime. I tensed, a yelp of alarm breaking past my lips as my body snapped back into the seat. My heart thrashed in my ears as I bit down hard and forced my eyes to stay open. No getting scared now.

“H-Hey, I need your