Finn’s voice filled her ears. “Renna! Where the hell are you?” he demanded. “Get back to the Athena right now!”
“Screw you.” Renna shook her head, frantically trying to switch off the line. “Don’t come after me, Finn. I don’t want to hurt you, but I won’t let you take me in.”
“I don’t have a choice, Renna. It’s an order. Come back before we both do something we’ll regret.” His voice sounded cold, like a stranger’s, and an ache started at the back of her throat. How quickly he’d given up on her. Again.
“I’ve already done plenty of things I regret. I’m talking to one of them right now. But you know what? I have only one more thing to say to you. Fuck you for choosing them over me, and f**k you for believing I’d betray you.” She pressed frantically at the comm button below her ear, hoping to turn it off manually, but the line only crackled.
Viktis crouched beside her on the floor. “What’s going on?”
Renna shook her head as Finn’s voice filled her ears again.
“I don’t know why you keep denying it. We all watched you do it. I can’t believe I fell for your lies again.” Disgust filled his voice, sending a dagger through her heart. That hurt worse than her implant’s malfunction, but she forced herself to brush it off.
“Screw you, ass**le,” she said, slamming her head back on the floor. Her comm let out a burst of static as pain exploded through her.
And then everything was blessedly silent.
“What the hell happened?” Viktis asked, studying her worriedly. “Are you all right?”
Renna blinked up at him, trying not to moan as stars sparked in her vision. “Something went haywire. My implant let Finn’s comm through. We need to get the hell off this station.”
“Shit.” He took Renna’s hand and helped her to her feet. “Can they use the implant to track you?”
She nodded. “I lost my firewall in the hub. Gheewala will be able to sense my frequency now. We’re out of time.” Renna ignored the vertigo that sent her stumbling down the corridor and headed toward Kara’s dropbox in the middle of the district.
The small metal mailbox was virtually indistinguishable in the bank of other mailboxes, but Renna found it easily. She input the password for the keypad, and the door slid back.
A small holodisk and packet of information lay inside, and Renna quickly tucked them into her bag. She hoped there was something there that would lead them to Samil, or this escape plan would be dead before they even left the station.
“This is it. Now let’s get out of here,” she said. Viktis slipped an arm around her to help her walk.
They reached the pressure door that led to next district, and she shrugged him off. The warehouse area wasn’t known for its friendliness, and if the residents sensed weakness, they’d be on her in a second, taking her for an easy mark. She ignored the throbbing in her head and shifted her bag on her shoulder to pull it closer.
Viktis’s gaze never stopped moving while they walked, searching the alleys that led off the main corridor. Unwary people who came to this area often found themselves on the back of a cargo ship, headed for slave territories.
He nodded toward a group of ragged kids gathered in front of one of the warehouse doors. “Watch yourself,” he said.
Renna made eye contact with one of the kids, a girl of about fifteen with messy blonde hair and a firebird tattoo on her neck. She was part of the Cordoza gang. A recent member if the redness around the tattoo was any indication.
The girl met Renna’s steady gaze with a nod and said something to the boy next to her. All four pairs of eyes watched Viktis and Renna as they passed, but none of them moved to harass them.
Smart kids.
She glanced back at the girl. Maybe someday she could help girls like that—or, at least, help them get by. Someone sticking up for her when she’d arrived on station would have saved her life more than once.
“Through here.” Viktis pointed to an access door hidden in one of the wall panels. “This should be a shortcut through the center of the station. Save us some time.”
Renna followed him down the narrow corridor. Dim helo bulbs gave off barely enough light to see a few feet ahead, and she walked with one hand on her blaster. The access corridors were usually locked, but there were always ways to get in. And plenty of black market deals went down there.
Viktis ran down a flight of steps and pushed open the door at the bottom onto a lower level.
“Where the hell are we?” she asked. The smooth white walls and tile floors made it look like a medical wing—or worse yet, Navang’s facility. She fought back a shudder.
“A maintenance level between districts. Shouldn’t be anyone around, and I happen to have the keycard to the elevator that will take us directly to the Ortan port authority.”
“Just so happens, huh? Did you win that in a card game, too?”
“I’ll never tell,” he said with a sly grin.
The pair rounded the corner, and Renna froze dead in her tracks.
Finn and Lieutenant Blake stood at the other end of the hallway. The bright light shone on Finn’s dark hair, and even from where they stood, she could see the anger blazing in his blue eyes.
Finn aimed his blaster at her. “We’re taking you in, Renna. I have my orders.”
“Like hell you are.” She clutched her own blaster but didn’t pull it from the holster yet. That was a step she could never undo.
“Hands up.” He moved toward them, gun pointed directly at Renna’s breaking heart.
She should have known better. She should have never believed a word he’d said. But part of her couldn’t let it go. “You lied to me, Finn. You said you trusted me, that you’d fight with me against MYTH as long as we needed to. What happened to us trying to figure out what we had? What happened to wanting to be with me?”
He slowed, but didn’t lower his gun. “I could ask you the same thing. You betrayed me. Again. After promising you wouldn’t. I should have known you could never really be reformed.” His voice shook, and he cleared his throat. “We’re going to bring you in and you’re going to fix this. MYTH doesn’t tolerate traitors, and neither do I.”
“The only traitor here is Samil,” she said, letting her fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around her blaster. He’d given her no choice. A shot in the leg should stop him long enough for her to get away. “Samil is the one you should be going after, not me,” she argued. “Think about it, Captain. Why would I lie all this time? What’s in it for me? It makes no sense.”