Renegade Runner Nicole Conway (christmas read aloud txt) 📖

pull of the cable and belt around my waist was the only thing keeping me from flying off to my doom. But it was enough.

From where I stood, still gripping the belt of ammunition, I stared straight down the nose of Sienne’s ship …

Right into her eyes.

Sienne.

I knew her instantly. Her pale, oval face remained eerily calm and her thin lips were set into a straight, indifferent line. Even with her short, jet-black hair pulled back away from her face and a strange, glowing yellow mark around her left eye—I knew it was her. No doubt about it.

Our gazes locked through the windshield of her ship and for a single, fleeting second, I felt it. Fury like a solar storm crackled in the air between us. A connection. A sense of knowing. We weren’t allies. We would never be. Sienne wanted to kill me. She probably would.

Unless I killed her first. Either way, I was gonna make her work for it.

Clenching the ammo belt tighter in my fist, I reared back and took aim. One shot was all I had. Maybe it was all I’d need. The big, cylindrical engines fitted on top of the wings of her ship were bigger than ours, after all. All I needed was a slam dunk.

She seemed to figure it out about a second before I hurled the belt stocked full of explosive glowing vials at her ship as hard as I could. Sienne’s eyes went wide. Her mouth opened slightly. The last thing I saw was her pitching backward in her seat as though she were trying to evade my throw.

It didn’t work.

The belt bounced off the side of her ship and directly into the right engine’s intake.

BOOM!

The explosion blew me off my feet again and I dangled, clinging to the cable and frantically throwing the lever to reel myself back in. Heat blasted at my back as the tunnel around us shuddered. Giant hunks of rock and crystalline stalactites the size of city buses cracked off the ceiling and crumbled all around, pinging off our ship or smashing to the ground below. I shut my eyes tightly and curled into a ball as I dangled, slowly inching toward the open doorway.

Another bone-rattling crash made me yelp. I couldn’t help it. I had to look.

Peeling my eyes back open, I whipped around to see what’d happened.

Sienne was gone. All I could see through a swirl of dust was a massive heap of boulders and hunks of salt that had caved in to completely block off the path behind us. Was Sienne underneath that? Or had she managed to stop before it fell? She’d still had one functional engine, right?

I bit down hard. It didn’t matter. She was gone. We were safe.

Er, well, sort of.

29

JUST JUMP

My knees wobbled dangerously, giving way as I basically collapsed inside the ship again. Sprawled on my back, I sucked in deep, ragged breaths as I listened to the hum of our engines. Gradually, their noise softened and the ship drifted smoothly to a halt, lurching as Phox deployed the landing gear and touched down on the cavern floor.

“Brinna!” He sounded genuinely terrified as he appeared over me, his odd, animalistic eyes reflecting the dim light of our cabin. His brow drew up with wild concern as he studied me.

I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing.

“Uh … Brinna?” His worried frown deepened. He probably thought I’d finally lost it.

Maybe I had.

“That’s two!” I wheezed, holding up two fingers for him to see. “Two ships I’ve blown up.”

One of his dark eyebrows arched up. “And?”

“You’ve only blown up one. I’m winning!” I giggled until tears streamed down the sides of my face and I could barely breathe.

Phox’s mouth scrunched and he stood up with a roll of his feline eyes. “Of all the humans in the universe, I end up stuck with the one who keeps jumping out of the damn ship and doing one stupid stunt right after another,” he muttered under his breath as he stomped away, back to the cockpit.

Rolling over onto my side, I pushed myself up to sit on the floor and begin taking off the belt to toss it aside. “Oh, stop whining, you big baby. That was awesome and you know it.”

He flapped a hand at me sarcastically. “Whatever.”

That jerk. He did know it. Like I couldn’t see him smirking to himself in the reflection on the windshield.

I threw myself down into my seat next to him and sighed, wiping my eyes and collecting the shattered bits of my sanity. “Well, at least she can’t follow us anymore, right?”

He made a sulky “Hmmph” sound and didn’t look up. Big dummy.

“What now?”

“Now we try to find a way out of here. These tunnels aren’t charted, so I’ve got no map to fly by. Best-case scenario is we get insanely lucky and randomly find a path that dumps us out somewhere near the next checkpoint or, even better, the finish line. Worst-case, and far more likely, is that we never find our way out, our power cells drain with no way to recharge them, and we die of thirst down here in the dark, where no one will ever recover our remains.”

“Gee. With an outlook like that, it’s baffling you’re still single.” I rubbed the back of my neck, wiping away the sweat that was running from the base of my ponytail down my back.

“I’m single because I choose to be,” he barked defiantly.

“Suuuure.”

He went on growling under his breath as he ran through a series of engine checks, giving them a good, long purge of any lingering sediment now that we weren’t running for our lives. Then we were off again, slowly easing through the twisting dark caverns with nothing to guide us except our running lights turned down to their dimmest setting. Phox did have a point. We ran on solar power, and there certainly wasn’t an abundance of that down here. So how long could we keep our engines