Breakout Read Free Page A

him. That’s not the same thing as being struck by lightning for your crimes.”
    â€œLet’s not wax philosophical. The others are waiting for us to pack.”
    â€œIt won’t take long, I only have what I’m standing in.”
    â€œMore than you had when you came in.” She studied the charred spots on the merc armor. The damage told a compelling story about the pain he’d suffered, fighting for a few meters of rusted metal.
    This place’ll hurt you worse before it’s done, grind you up and spit you out.
Truth was, Jael wasn’t invincible as he’d been when he arrived on station. Because Jael had given her a primitive blood transfusion in saving her life, Dred now had half his healing swimming around her veins, somehow, and while that was good for her, it also chewed a foreboding hollow in her gut. She suspected there would come a point when he regretted saving her because there was always, always a cost for kindness. Especially in a place like this.
    In the end, Perdition always wins.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    JAEL could tell something was eating at Dred, but she wasn’t talking. Instead, she silently bundled some gear into a blanket and created a makeshift pack with enough proficiency to make him think she had experience sleeping rough. Now that was a sweet mental picture, imagining her free and easy beneath a night sky. The constellations wouldn’t come into focus, but that didn’t matter. The abstract was enough.
    Once she was done, he followed her back to the others, keeping one eye out for an ambush. This would be the perfect time for Silence to finish them off, but he hoped she had been sated by the recent slaughter.
If I’ve any luck at all, she’s reveling in her triumph.
    Everyone else was ready to go when they got to the common room, and Keelah led the exodus. They passed through what used to be the eastern barricades, now just a jumble of shrapnel. Blood spattered the walls, and biological material had dried in crusty chunks. The stench was similar to massacres he’d survived, and the smell carried him back to the killing fields on Nicu Tertius, where the marshes sucked at his boots and swallowed the dead. That fast he was lost, fog everywhere, separated from the few mercs who had survived the butchery some idiot noble called a battle, and a child’s face leapt out of the whiteness. He bent to check for signs of life, but this girl was more than two days dead; her eyes didn’t blink at his retreat, the mossy foliage, or the large, green-backed fly that landed to sample her remains.
    He stumbled forward, and Dred was in front of him, eyes narrowed. “You sick?”
    Only of the killing. The dying. The dead.
Their ghosts were always with him. Sometimes it felt as if he had a spectral army at his back, and now it wasn’t just the ones he’d murdered but also the ones he’d chosen not to save.
    â€œNot exactly,” he said.
    She aimed a hard look at him and let him pass her before she fell in at the rear.
Guarding my back.
The idea filled him with so many conflicting reactions that he couldn’t name the emotions, and it was enough that some of them were good. Keelah took them into the ducts before any of Silence’s people attacked; that didn’t mean they weren’t watching, of course. But once they vanished into the walls, they could reappear anywhere.
    The route was dusty and winding, and the lack of footprints made Jael think the aliens hadn’t used these passages much. He lost all sense of direction along with concept of time; the narrow space, people ahead and behind, it hadn’t seemed nerve-wracking before—when they had a whole settlement waiting for them to return. Now, everything was different, not a recon mission but a group of refugees fleeing for their lives.
    At last, Keelah guided them into a small room hidden in engineering. At least, that was how it sounded,