Renegade Runner Nicole Conway (christmas read aloud txt) 📖

my teeth and peppering the windshield with bits of rock and salt.

One mile.

I screamed. Oh my god, we were going to crash into them!

One of the ships suddenly dropped from the sky like a rock to evade impact. Phox let out a maniacal laugh, snatching the sticks to the left to stop our spin at a fully-sideways angle, and we surged through the newly-made gap like a blur.

My pulse boomed in my ears as I watched the scanner-radar-thing. Both enemy ship blips fell in directly behind us, gaining fast. No weapons. The ships didn’t have weapons. They couldn’t shoot us down. I had to keep reminding myself that as I watched the ships get closer and closer.

Memories of that footage I’d seen of Sienne racing on the sky-screen when I’d first been bought flashed through my mind. The only way to stop or kill us now was to force our ship to crash or to keep us flying until our power cells were drained and we had no choice but to stop. That could not happen.

Not on my watch.

Unbuckling from my seat, I rushed to the back of the ship with Phox bellowing protests as I went by. I threw open a few of our gear compartments and dug through until I found what I needed: a spare belt like the one Phox had worn with the built-in retracting cable, my old sun-goggles, and the spare ammunition belt for my sniper rifle.

Game on.

I buckled the belt around my waist and quickly fastened the cable to one of the heavy-duty pipes that ran the length of the ceiling from the front of the ship to the other. I’d seen Phox using them as handles while he moved around before, so maybe they’d hold my weight, too? Hopefully. Slinging the extra ammo belt around my shoulders, I put on the goggles and snatched up my rifle, then loaded as many of the glowing blue rounds into the weapon as it would hold before I stormed for the side door.

“What the hell are you doing?” Phox yowled furiously.

Losing my damn mind, probably.

“Just shut up and drive!” I shouted back, then smacked the open command on the door’s control screen like I’d seen him do dozens of times now.

Hot wind howled in, snatching in my hair as I braced myself in the doorway and looked back. Keeping pace below and barely off our left wingtip, one of the enemy ships zoomed alongside us like they might try to force us into a collision with the side of the canyon. That was exactly what I’d seen on that footage before, anyway.

Not today, Satan. Suck on this.

I squeezed the rifle against the crook of my shoulder and stared down the scope. Warnings flashed across the scope’s display in big red lettering. TARGET PROXIMITY ALERT. SECONDARY IMPACT EXPLOSION RISK HIGH.

Ugh. Fine. We’d be long gone before that was a problem, anyway. Well, in theory, anyway. Holy mother of god, what was I doing?!

I panned the scope from the cockpit to one of the enemy ships’ engines, set my jaw, and squeezed the trigger.

The explosion sent a plume of fire into the air, blowing me back onto my rear end and making our entire ship pitch dangerously to the side. Phox yowled from the cockpit again, cursing me in every way imaginable. But below us, the enemy ship veered sharply, zooming dangerously close with blue and green flames belching out of the engine. I caught a glimpse of the panicked two-person crew inside, but I couldn’t tell if either of them was Sienne.

“BRINNA, HANG ON!” Phox shouted an instant before our ship flipped sideways again to zip through another narrow choke in the canyon.

I flailed. The rifle slipped out of my hands. My fingers scraped over the metal floor as I slid toward the open bay door. Shit, shit, shiiiiiiiiiit!

I fell, my arms and legs flailing. Cable spooled out of the belt until, at last, it snatched me to a halt. Dangling—I was dangling from the back of the freaking ship like a skier!

Right next to me, the enemy runner ship still burned like a firework. It rolled sideways, pitching out of control and colliding with the jagged side of the cliff with an explosion that shook me to the marrow and sent debris flying past me. Pain shot through one of my biceps as we streaked away, leaving the fiery wreck far behind in a matter of seconds.

Looking down, I fumbled with the small winch on my belt until I found the lever that retracted the cable. Slowly, it began to reel me in. I gripped the cable and pulled my legs in, daring to look back through my whipping golden ponytail at the one remaining enemy ship.

Sienne’s ship.

My eyes narrowed beneath my sun-shielding goggles.

One down, one to go.

21

PLAN B

My rifle was gone—lost in my scramble when I’d fallen out of the ship. So now I had to try something else. I’d already scraped together a super desperate Plan B by the time I reached the open bay door and hauled myself inside. After a few seconds of sitting on my hands and knees, panting, and coming to terms with the fact that I was still alive, I looked up to the cockpit, where Phox was still screaming his head off in a fit of blind rage.

Unclipping the cable, I pulled my goggles down around my neck, shut the door with another smack on the panel, and shambled toward him.

“You are absolutely out of your freaking mind,” he howled as soon as I flopped down into my seat again. “What is wrong with you? Do you have any idea what could’ve happened if—”

“Can you outrun her?” I wheezed, my body still shaking with a mixture of terror and pure adrenaline.

“Her?” He balked. “You mean that wasn’t Sienne you blew up?”

I shook my head. “The brawlers. No more beam cannon.” I let my head flop back against the seat and tried to focus on breathing. My