Renegade Runner Nicole Conway (christmas read aloud txt) 📖

Oh, no. If he was actually asking for help, it must’ve been even worse than I’d thought.

“You listening?”

“Yeah,” I answered quickly.

“We’ve got three big problems right now and I need you to keep an eye on one of them.”

There were three now? Just freaking great.

Immediately, the image appeared above my panel—a hovering, glowing hologram depicting a topographic map. He pointed to the small, triangular shape at the center of the image. “That’s us. There’re lots of regulations about how much of this kind of tech runner crafts can have, so this only gives you about a one-mile radius in every direction. Better than nothing, though.”

“Got it.” I nodded.

Cornering sharply, Phox steered our ship with an expert precision I had to envy. We blurred through the canyon’s sharp turns and jagged, boulder-strewn bottom and blitzed through the ribbon of light that marked the first checkpoint. The instant we passed through the checkpoint, the screens along the dashboard lit up with a sudden rush of graphics and scrolling symbols like data. Phox swept his hand over the broad, rectangular screen directly in front of him and made a swift, upward flourishing motion. It moved all those projections onto the windshield’s large heads-up display, quickly scrolling them until, at last, one image remained.

I recognized the shape of the planet and the glowing zigzagging line right away. That was our path to the next checkpoint.

“How far is it?” It was difficult to tell on the hologram.

Phox’s features had gone steely with focus as he dialed up the thrusters, sending us zooming forward at blitzing speed. “At least six hours if we don’t stop, run out of power, or, you know, get blown out of the damn sky. But there’s a bigger problem.”

Something bigger than Sienne and brawlers? Fantastic.

He spun the globe hologram on his panel, making the larger image rotate, too. And when he zoomed in to our current location—I saw it. Off to the side was a big red, yellow, and green flashing blob like something from a weather radar.

“It’s a storm,” I guessed.

“Yeah. A bad one,” he said, his voice halting and catching, as though he were having a harder time breathing. “Looks like it’s about two hundred miles across. It’ll churn up the salt granules and sand on the ground, which will chew up our engine if we try to fly through it. We’ll have to stop and wait it out if it comes our way.”

“If? We can’t tell where it’s going?”

He gave a shrug. “We can guess. If it stays on track, we should be fine. But the weather on Thermax is finicky. Heat from the suns, winds, and even some of the solar storms coming off the stars can change things fast. So keep an eye on it.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek, stealing a sideways look at him as he winced and sucked in a sharp breath. “You’re hurt.” I tried my best not to make that sound like an accusation.

“I’ll be fine.” He shook his head a little, as though trying to shrug it off.

My heart sank. “How bad?”

“I said I’ll be—”

“Dammit, Phox, don’t give me that crap right now! If it’s serious, I need to know,” I shouted back.

His mouth snapped shut, his jaw going rigid as he stared straight ahead. His blood-smeared hands shook as he gripped the steering joysticks until his knuckles blanched. “I … I don’t know,” he admitted quietly.

My heart throbbed, battering against my ribs as I stared at him in horror. Oh god. Was I losing him? Was there anything we could do? We only had basic medical supplies—nothing that would help if it was something internal or serious.

“Hey.” He growled through his teeth, showing me a primal snarl. “I said I’m fine, so watch the storm and tell me if it gets any closer or changes course. Priorities, human.”

I bit down on all the things I wanted to scream back at him. Flicking my gaze back to the screen before me, I glowered at the storm flashing in psychedelic colors over the holographic globe and tried to ignore the one raging in my brain. That idiot could not leave me.

Not now.

Not like this.

20

FLY IT LIKE YOU STOLE IT

We tore through the canyon landscape, screaming past jagged channels and steep cliffsides with both engines howling at full speed. So far, so good. Not another runner craft anywhere in sight even on our radar. I started to hope.

Stupid, really. I should’ve known better. That was usually when things went badly for me.

Another high-pitched alarm blared through the cockpit as a red blip appeared on the screen dead ahead. Then another. They were lined up, waiting at an area of the canyon that funneled down into a narrow bottleneck. No way to get around them.

“Yeah? Think that little barricade is gonna make me slow down so you can take a shot with that beam cannon again? Screw you, Sienne,” Phox thundered as his big, corded body tensed and his grip on the joysticks tightened. Blood stained his teeth pale blue and drizzled from his chin, his expression crazed with rage.

I seized my armrests as he leaned into the throttles again. My vision grayed as the g-forces pulled the blood toward my feet. Breathe. I had to breathe.

Ahead, a glimmer of sunlight off metal caught my eye. Two runner crafts hovered side-by-side, only about twenty feet off the ground. Wait, were those figures standing on top of them? One of them seemed to be crouched down, shouldering a huge weapon like a rocket launcher right at us.

The walls of the canyon narrowed around us, funneling us toward the bottleneck—into the teeth of their barricade. No turning back.

Phox shouted something I couldn’t understand over the roar of the engines about two seconds before he pitched both sticks to the right, sending us into a spiral. We spun like a bullet through the air, whipping toward the enemy ships.

Five miles.

Four.

Three.

Two.

An explosion rocked the canyon off our right wingtip, the impact rattling