Page 56 of Starfighter’s Salvation

Cassia. Brennix. The apprentices. The convoy crew. Halix walked off on his own feet, still holding that scrambler unit until a medic on the Resolution steered him into triage. Tavar came off last, but he was alive. A miracle no one but Gina could have managed.

“We got them all out. We made it.” Gina smiled at me and then her knees gave out. I caught her before she hit the deck.

“Gina. Open your eyes.”

She did. Barely. “Little low on blood. Didn’t want to jump the triage line.”

“You should have told me.” My voice did not sound like mine. It had gone low and unsteady.

Her hand closed around my collar, weak and insistent.

“You're so cute when you're mad,” she whispered.

Her eyes drifted closed as I yelled for a medic.

14

Gina

* * *

They’d patched me up fast on the Resolution. I remembered almost none of it. A too-bright room. Someone cutting my flight suit away. Corvan’s voice arguing with a surgeon in a threatening tone I’d never heard him use. Then, once I was stable enough to move, Corvan brought me home to Arturri. Apparently, I’d slept through the entire transfer.

Sleeping on his lap was quickly becoming my new favorite hobby.

I woke up in a hospital bed. I hated it immediately. The pillow was wrong. The blanket was tucked too tightly. An IV line ran into my arm at an angle I wouldn’t have approved. I checked the monitor. Then I checked the chair beside the bed, and every objection in me went quiet at once.

Corvan was still there. Relief arrived, warm and stupid and impossible to argue with. The recovery ward smelled more sterile than any place had a right to after the trench, antiseptic scrubbing the last of the Ferros stink out of my sinuses. Cool gel tugged at the skin under my dressing, and a monitor ticked softly beside the bed, counting a heartbeat that had steadied the second I saw him in that chair.

He sat in the same flight suit. Dried blood stained one side of it. Mine, probably. Both of his hands swallowed my left one even in sleep, and his head rested against the mattress beside our joined fingers. He looked exhausted. He also looked beautiful. Not pretty — Corvan would never be pretty, too big, too scarred, too much jaw. But the sight of all that man folded down and bent over my hand did something to my heart I knew I'd never recover from.

I let myself stare at him as he slept. The blunt line of his jaw. The stubble he hadn’t shaved off. His thumb curled over my knuckles like he’d decided somewhere in the dark that he was not letting go.

I reached for the IV controls with my free hand. His eyes opened the instant I shifted — exhausted enough to sleep sitting up in a chair too small for him, and still he tracked me the moment I moved. “No.”

“The rate is too slow.” Oh, yes, I knew these controls from the game, too. The first few missions in the game had been spent wandering around hospital wards figuring out what all the equipment did, and how to keep dying patients alive.

I'd killed a lot of digital people before I figured it all out. But my memory was good, and this flow rate was too slow for a female with injuries like mine.

He moved so that he held both hands in his. "No, Gina."

I chose to be annoyed by his interference instead of crying, because I suspected crying would hurt. "It's not right."

“The medic set it.”

“The medic is wrong.”

“You attempted to change it twice while you were sedated.”

I stopped. “I did?” I had zero recollection of that. How fun. Maybe they gave me the good drugs.

“You also asked for every patient’s chart, attempted to change the dressing on your own wound, and tried to get out of bed.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Good grief. That did sound like something I would do if I was annoyed. They always said doctors made the worst patients. They were so wrong. Nurses were far, far worse.

“I held both your hands for several hours to keep you out of trouble."

“That sounds excessive.”