“Define ‘not optimal’,” Raaze demanded.
“It means passing the checkpoint the long way round. Threading past people who might look at you twice. But it’s a route, and that’s more than we have at the moment.”
Cait glanced at Raaze. She looked small next to him. God, she’s cute when she’s wound this tight. He let his gaze linger on the line of her jaw, the stubborn set of her mouth.
“Do it,” she said.
“Proceed to the end of this corridor and turn left. There’s a stairwell that will take you down one level. From there, I’ll guide you through the maintenance section. Move like you belong.”
Move like you belong. He could do that.
Straightening up and rolling his shoulders, he started walking. Cait fell into step beside him, matching his pace without being told. Fred’s voice was a constant guide in his ear. Turn right. Straight for twenty meters.
Raaze turned. Walked. Cait’s footsteps stayed half a beat behind his, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her at his shoulder.
Stop. He stopped, and Cait nearly walked into his back. Someone’s coming.
A figure passed the junction ahead… maintenance uniform, tool belt, didn’t even glance their way. Raaze counted three heartbeats.
Clear. The stairwell should be just up ahead.
It was, and Raaze took the steps two at a time, boots ringing against metal, and emerged into the maintenance section.
Narrow corridors stretched in both directions, lined with conduit and junction boxes. The hum of climate control filled the air. He adjusted their pace to match the foot traffic. Not too fast, not too slow. Walk like you owned the corridor, because that was the trick. If you walked like you owned the pitch, nobody questioned why you were on it.
Great. Warball all over again. Just with worse lighting.
An administrator passed them, scrolling through a dataflex with a bored expression. He didn’t even glance up. The kind of male who’d been doing this job for fifteen years and had stopped seeing anything that wasn’t directly in front of his face about a year in.
Two techs came the other way, arguing about a requisition form. Something about signatures and the wrong date stamp. The taller one was red-faced with it. Neither of them looked at Raaze or Cait either.
A cleaning bot rolled out of a side alcove and bumped his boot before correcting its course. He resisted the urge to kick it into the nearest wall.
“Don’t,” Cait murmured.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You absolutely were.”
His lips quirked. She was right, but the fact that she was calling on him now, that she felt confident enough with him to call him on it, was cute. He liked it, liked it a lot.
Turn right, and go straight for fifty meters.
The corridor narrowed another half-meter on the turn, and the air got warmer. He felt the shift in the air, the hairs on the back of his neck rising.
Guard, Fred said, his voice sharp. Coming around the corner ahead. Fifteen meters. He’s not supposed to be here. You have maybe four seconds before he sees you.
Trall… Four seconds.
Raaze’s hand closed around Cait’s wrist, and he yanked her sideways through the nearest door.
He could have gotten it horribly wrong, and they were about to crash into the station’s command conference room or something, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. He just pulled it open, shoved her through, and followed, yanking it shut behind them just as the guard’s shadow appeared at the far end of the corridor.
It wasn’t the command conference room. It definitely smelled like a maintenance supplies closet.
Nice work, you actually got something right for once.
They stood in the darkness, his arms around Cait, holding her close to his bigger, harder body. The sound of their breathing was loud in the confined space. Too loud. What if the guard heard them?
