Cyborg Nation Kaitlyn O'Connor (books to get back into reading TXT) 📖

pain intensified until she couldn’t help. Gabriel shifted closer behind her as Gideon helped her onto her side. When he’d positioned her against Gabriel, he moved closer, sandwiching her between them. A sigh of relief drifted from her lips as she felt their warmth envelop her until she ceased to tremble and finally drifted to sleep again.

Light woke her again. She lay trying to block it for a while, but her mind threw off the mists of sleep and began sifting through flashes of memory. This time she didn’t feel pain until she tried to stretch. The movement didn’t just create pain inside of her, though, it surfaced the memory of laying between Gideon and Gabriel.

She saw what was left of the ship when she finally opened her eyes but it took her many minutes to figure out that that was what she was looking at. Most of both sides were missing. A large section of what had been the port hull was curled back. Wires and strips of metal and tubing hung down from what had been the ceiling. It wasn’t until she spotted the chairs that she realized she was looking at the front end of the craft, or at least what was left of it. A portion of the floor of the mid-section was still attached.

The nose of the craft was flattened, crushed back against what had been the control console until she had to wonder how Gabriel and Gideon had managed to walk away from it.

The moment that thought clicked in her mind, though, a flood of images followed. She’d been in no state to note their condition, not consciously. Unconsciously, her mind had collected the images. They hadn’t walked away without a scratch. Both of them had been torn and bloody, limping, moving stiffly in pain.

And they’d still come to find her before they’d even tried to do anything about their own wounds. Twisting her head to search for them, she saw Jerico and Gabriel carefully sorting through the wreckage. There was no sign of Gideon and panic gripped her.

Chapter Sixteen

“Gideon!”

Both Jerico and Gabriel whirled at her call. Dropping the items they’d found, they hurried toward her. Gabriel reached her first. “You must not call out!” he said, his voice harsh, urgent as he dropped to his knees beside her.

Bronte’s heart fluttered uncomfortably in her chest. “Why?”

Jerico and Gabriel exchanged a look. “The trogs will have seen the crash. They will be searching for us.”

Whatever, or whoever, the trogs were, Bronte had a feeling she didn’t want them to find her if they made Jerico and Gabriel uneasy. “Where’s Gideon?”

“He followed the path the craft tore through the jungle to search for our weapons.”

Bronte frowned, battling the growing, nameless fear. “He went off alone? Without a weapon?”

She could tell by the look on their faces that they didn’t understand her alarm. “He took the laser pistol,” Jerico supplied finally.

She tried to sit up. Gabriel caught her shoulders to push her down again but it wasn’t necessary. The moment she tried, fiery pain seared through her. She went limp, trying to catch her breath.

“You must not move yet,” Gabriel said gruffly. “The wounds have only begun to close. You will open them again.”

“What happened?”

“We crashed.”

Bronte closed her eyes. She’d forgotten what it was like to get any information out of them, especially when they were trying to keep her in the dark, and she suspected they were.

“Are you hungry?”

She wasn’t, but she nodded when Jerico asked anyway, knowing she should eat something. She wasn’t just injured, she was so weak it took an effort to do anything at all. She knew she’d lost a lot of blood and she hadn’t taken in food or water in a very long time.

“We can not build a fire,” Jerico said apologetically when he returned a few minutes later. “So there is no way to heat or cook food.”

Because of the trogs—who were probably out looking for them—and they couldn’t leave because they were afraid to move her. They didn’t have to tell her that. She would’ve known even if she hadn’t been a doctor and well aware of just how bad her injuries were.

She should be dead, she realized abruptly, not just weak and in pain. She’d been impaled by a flying piece of the disintegrating craft, pinned to her seat by it, and there was no doubt the internal damage would have to have been extensive when something that big had gone all the way through her.

She would be dead except that Gideon and Jerico and Gabriel had risked their own lives to give her nanos, slashed their arms to force the microscopic bots to the surface and milked them from their bodies and into hers. As vague and mixed up as her memories were because of the shock, she recalled enough to know that they’d been injured badly enough to be in serious need of their nanos themselves quite aside from their own blood lost from injuries that had made sacrificing more to help her life threatening for them.

She could see they’d finally gotten around to tending their own wounds after they’d done what they could for her, but she could also see that both Jerico and Gabriel were showing signs of a good deal of trauma. Aside from the numerous blood soaked bandages they were sporting, their coloring wasn’t even close to their usual healthy glow. Both of them looked nearly as pale and washed out as she felt and she knew Gideon was in no better shape.

Instead of taking the food and water Jerico held out, she lifted a hand to explore the place along her mid-section where she’d seen the metal sticking out of her. It was bandaged but even the light pressure of her hand made it hurt deep inside of her. Vaguely, she recalled being jostled until she’d felt like screaming, or crying because she’d been too weak by then to scream, and realized they’d been bandaging her wounds.

And her leg.

She