Page 125 of Dead Silence
Max’s gaze flicks away from me and toward the entrance to the cargo bay.
So I’m not the only one with divided attention.
In that second, I have a wonderful, horrible idea.
I’m going to die; I’m not sure there’s any way to avoid that now. But maybe I can do something more than give Verux a convenient story. Or even an inconvenient one.
I take a deep breath. “Over here,” I shout.
Reed shuffles into the room, tripping and crashing into things. His booted feet squeak in the spilled blood.
Max looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. And maybe I have. He taps his comm implant. “What’s your ETA, Montgomery?”
Ah, yes, poor Max with no one left to defend him except one ailing security team leader, who is… somewhere in this huge ship, injured and lugging the MAW.
I take advantage of his distraction to reach up one-handed, snatch the safety tether, and snap the carabiner to one of the utility hooks on my suit. I pray that they’re as strong as the reinforced ones on our LINA suits, which are made for this purpose. Well, not exactlythispurpose.
Max stares at me, suspicious. “What are you doing?”
Reed stumbles around the LINA into view, and Max visibly recoils at his appearance. I can’t look. I’ve got to keep my focus on Max and beyond.
“You did this to me!” he shouts, presumably at me. But almost asquickly, his attention shifts to Max. “You wanted me to die, Donovan?” he asks. He sounds more hurt than angry, but only for a second. “Just because you couldn’t handle the competition,” he sneers. “I’m going to show you hurt. When we get back and my father—”
Max opens fire on him before I can say or do anything.
The loud rapid pops freeze me in place; it’s so much louder this close. Silence rings in my ears once the weapon stops.
Reed doesn’t stagger back or stumble around clutching his wounds, as I’ve seen in movies. He simply folds in half at the middle and collapses. Like there’s nothing left to support him, and perhaps that’s the case.
I watch, horrified, a scream lodged in my throat.
But the muted thud of his body hitting the cargo bay floor snaps me out of my paralysis. Max edges closer, as if to confirm his kill. His attention is definitely elsewhere.
I suck in one painful breath, then another. Then I raise Diaz’s gun away from Max’s head and squeeze the trigger. The recoil makes the gun jump in my hand, once, then twice. The bullets crack into the extendable airlock.
For a heart-stopping second, nothing happens.
Max flinches automatically before he realizes that my shots have gone wide and high.
If my target were him.
He beams at me, delighted. “I told you, you don’t have the—”
The seal crumbles, fracturing into chunks that drop to the joint threshold of theAuroraand the extendable airlock. Somewhere, a tinny alarm beeps rapidly, warning of what’s to come.
Max looks back at the extendable then, his brow furrowed in confusion, but I see his realization, the moment it clicks and he turns to me. His eyes wide and mouth open in panic and fury.
But it’s too late.
One more piece of the hardened foam seal hits the ground, and a line has been crossed; the integrity of the hold vanishes.
And the vacuum of space does the rest. The air in here is dying to get out there.
In a fraction of a second, the extendable airlock bends and twists away from theAurora,like a giant cranky child crumpling a straw. Rapid decompression.
Max, the closest to the now open and unprotected cargo bay doors, vanishes almost in the same instant. And I catch one last glimpse of his astonished expression.
A tiny part of me mourns the loss of the man I thought he was. But that man never existed, it seems, so the mourning moment is quite short. I didn’t have a choice.
