AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She crouched in the corner, clutching her wedding dress to her chest. Wild eyes focused on the man advancing on her with a knife glinting in his hand. Loran. His head jerked to the side, glancing at Orion behind him. The next moments were a blur of haphazard movement. Both Loran and Orion lunged forward at the same time, and Orion missed grabbing the fucker’s arm by barely an inch. Kaia was already screaming, and Loran was already twisting the knife in her ribs.
His chest constricted with those black claws that he had only just managed to banish. His vision blurred on the edges. Orion didn’t even feel himself doing it, but the next thing he knew, he was pummeling Loran’s face into the ground. He wasn’t sure if the red he was seeing was the fury in his vision, or Loran’s blood, or the blood of Kaia, who he saw slump to her knees, gripping the hilt of the knife in her chest.
It didn’t take long. Loran probably tried to fight back, but if so Orion didn’t feel it. He didn’t waste any time here, like he had with the prisoner. He grabbed Loran’s head in both hands, hoisting it up. When he slammed it back down, it collided against the floor with a satisfying crunch. To be sure, Orion twisted the bloodied head into an unnatural angle until he felt a snap deep in Loran’s neck.
When Orion turned to Kaia, she had collapsed to the ground in a heap of limbs and blood. He lifted her as carefully as his body would let him, being sure not to jostle the knife still protruding from her ribs. He ducked into a blood passage, leaving a trail of blood behind him as he rushed her up to the medbay.
Orion, the ship needs to be stabilized. We need you in the command center immediately.A subvoc came through from his mother’s… well, now his lead navigator.
Handle it without me.
We physically cannot. We need your auth.
Orion spat a string of expletives even as he barged into the medbay, yelling for staff. He was directed to lower Kaia onto a stretcher, following the throng of white-coated physicians who crowded around her and wheeled her into what the door claimed to be an operating room.
The ship jerked again with a series of violent shudders, sending equipment flying into walls. One of the doctors bent over Kaia’s body, shielding her from the debris.
“Can you stop it?” the doctor yelled at Orion.
And fuck it, he was the only one who could.
“If she’s not alive by the time I get back, I am going to murder every one of you.”
“Yes, but if… in the worst case…” a woman asked quietly.
“There is no goddamn worst case.”
“In the worst case, should we Upload, sir?” she pressed, a hint of agitation in her voice.
Orion’s blood ran cold. It was an idiotic question because she wouldn’t fucking die.
“Yes,” he barked, then raced to the command center.
CHAPTER62
KAIA
Orion was shaking her to death. Ahton was there, too, but he wasn’t grasping for her like he was in prior dreams over the years. He was just watching Orion shaking her so hard that her teeth rattled.
Kaia peeled her eyes open and saw nothing but lights and shadows moving in front of her, so she closed them again. At least the shaking had stopped, sort of. Someone screamed in the distance. Then there was another series of rough, full-body jerks. A shadow bent over her. Voices she couldn’t decipher drifted in and out before everything faded out.
When she next woke, Kaia looked around. She followed a thin tube from her arm to the plastic bag hanging at the side of the bed. Hushed voices reached her ears.
“We’re fucked,” a male voice was saying. “He’s there, but he’s notthere.”
“How many times has it been?”
“Twelve. In the last two hours. I don’t know how he’s meant to stabilize anything like this.”
Kaia groaned as the ship keeled, throwing her into a barrier locked at the bedside. Her shoulder collided with it, ripping a scream from her throat.
Footsteps approached.
* * *
Apparently Kaia had only been passed out for a few hours. The doctors filled her in on the gist of the situation as they prodded the IVs in her arms and skinsilks on her wounds. Mare Halena was dead. She jumped them before she died. Orion was the commander now, tasked with stabilizingColossalafter the jump. Except instead of doing that, he was spiraling, distracted with angrily checking if Kaia was dead yet.
“May have been easier if you’d died. At least then he’d know you were in Heaven,” the female doctor blurted out as the ship rattled again. She covered her mouth, wide eyes fixing on Kaia. “I… I’m so sorry.”
