Page 48 of Consume
Guns boomed at rapid-fire pace. Half-empty trays of food that had been left behind exploded all over the floor. I scooted back between the metal bars of the tables, away from Ellison and Pop. And toward where I didn’t trust myself to go.
Captain Glenn used the chaos as a distraction and smashed his elbow into the guy’s face, snatched the man’s gun from its holster, and shot him dead within seconds.
Poh was murder personified. The man who’d held her lay on the ground with her titanium knee smashed between his legs. She knelt over him pressing, pressing harder so his howl sounded above the din. Her yellow eyes flashed. Her fangs gleamed. Then she brought down her fist like thunder into his throat. In the next instant, two knives blurred into her hands, and the man’s blood arced through the air.
Mase had pressed himself flat, belly down, to a table bench firing shot after shot at Parker.
Still, Parker hunted me. Bullets flew, kicking up parts of the tile floor and sparking against the table legs. He flung tables out of his way as if they were made of aluminum, cornering me toward the back of the room and the one exit.
No, not just me. Franco, Moon, and Jezebel too. They were already huddled by the door. Moon’s eyes were squeezed shut, her mouth moving in silent prayer. Jezebel had completely disappeared inside Moon’s backpack, her threshold for loud noises likely reached.
Franco waved a frantic hand toward me.
I didn’t want to go that way. More than that, I didn’t wantthemto go that way. That way meant heading directly toward the Saelises.
But what choice did I have? I crawled forward as fast as I could, and as soon as Franco opened the door, the gunfire stopped.
“She’s leaving you here, Mase,” Parker bellowed. “You sure she loves you as much as you think she does?”
“You’re damn right she does,” Mase shouted.
I crushed my back teeth together and did the only thing I could do—I left Mase. The one sure thing I knew about Parker was that he wouldn’t kill him.
“Fucking hell, that man.” I slammed the door behind us, quickly taking stock of where we were. Two over-bright hallways branched off from the cafeteria, one stretching ahead and the other to the left.
“He’s hardly a man,” Franco muttered, leaning against the wall to catch his breath. “Real men know when someone’s not interested, and Mase definitely isn’t.”
Moon, slumped over with her hands on her knees, gazed up at him. “I fucking love you.”
He grinned. “I fucking love you too.”
Despite our situation, my chest warmed for them. I allowed them one more second of bliss in their mutual realizations before asking, “Show me the nearest way out.”
“Yep. On it.” Moon fired up her Mind-I and pointed it at the closed door. A screen popped up, and after a few clicks, a map with a red dot declaring You Are Here blinked from the middle of the waste treatment plant map. “The transporter tubes are on the top floor. We crashed into the third.”
“Security’s on the first,” Franco said. “They likely scrambled to safety when they saw us crashing toward them, but I’m sure they’re coming.”
I shook my head. “I said show me the nearest way out. Thenearestexit, Moon. You’re not going to the top floor.”
Her dark eyes narrowed. “I’m not letting you do this al—”
Footsteps. Coming from the other side of a door down the hallway straight ahead.
We swung to the left at top speed, our steps as quiet as we could make them. Closed doors blurred past, and at the end, a stairwell. Heavy boots thudded up from below, so we headed up, exactly where I didn’t want any of us to go. Up and up we went, our breaths ragged and too loud. The footsteps pounding after us intensified. At the top floor, we burst out into another too-bright hallway.
“You can find it from here,” Moon said between pants, skidding to a halt.
“What?” I hissed as I whirled around.
She pressed her Mind-I into my palm. “The Saelises’ ship’s coordinates are on there. I’ll buy you some time.”
“With what?”
She shrugged off her backpack and hefted Jezebel out. An innocent smile curled the slothcat’s blood-stained lips. “With her.”
“Moon,” I protested, but her name caught in my throat.
Franco stepped to her side. “I’ll go—”
