He flipped through the manual start buttons. Normally, they would have started on their own. With them dead, he had to plug them into the batteries to ignite them.

  The lift engines fired up first, quickly followed by the rest. Clare cackled when she exited the panels holding a small remote marker. “Perfect little kill switch, this. An interrupter that cut the power to the engines, which forced the computers into a restart at the same time. One or the other is supposed to be on all the time, and—shit, what are you doing?”

  “It’ll take too long for the lift engines to warm up and push to stop the descent.” He shoved the controls forward. “The best I can do is force us into a glide that will make crashing survivable. Hopefully.”

  “Hopefully?”

  “Do you have any better ideas? Because I’d like to hear them! If you’d gotten me control ten seconds earlier, I could have pulled us out of the dive. Now it’s only mitigating the bad news.”

  “What, so this is my fault?”

  “No, but keep screeching in my ear, and that’s what I’ll say in my report!”

  He didn’t mean to snark. If the genius had any ideas on how to spark the gravitium engines into heating up faster, he would have been glad to hear them.

  She didn’t. Clare pushed back into her chair and strapped in as well as she could manage. He’d angled their descent, and the automated systems kicked in. More flaps opened to slow them, and he pushed power into the front thrusters, which angled the shuttle up.

  He didn’t remember much from the one class they’d had on emergency landings, but he recalled it was best to angle the shuttle, so the back touched the ground first. A full physics lesson demonstrated how that would allow pieces to tear off, slowing them down while they descended and thus lessening the strain or shit like that.

  It didn’t matter. They were near the ground. A major highway passed beneath them, then a small town. The road would have been a perfect spot to land. Flat surfaces reduced the number of variables to account for. As it was, the ground scanners gave him an idea of what they sped toward.

  They had to be somewhere outside New Houston and San Antonio. They were out in the desert, and the highway would have been the road between them. Smaller roads between towns were questionable, but they would have been preferable to landing out in the open.

  Not like they had a choice. He angled and held for as long as he could. Then he assumed the crash position as the first bump hammered into the back end of the shuttle, and the whole thing shuddered.

  CHAPTER TEN

  To his credit, they had survived. That was the most important thing. Gravitium cells were supposed to go off like tons of TNT per gram if they were involved in a crash. She’d spotted fifteen gravitium engines attached to the shuttle.

  She didn’t know how many grams powered each one, but it should have been enough to turn them into many, many pieces spread out across the Small Dog Desert. Instead, they were drenched in aches and pains, moans, and annoyances, but they were alive. Also, the safety features that kicked in kept them from breaking bones and suffering the life-threatening injuries they should have received.

  Clare clocked their speed the moment they crashed. They had been moving at over a hundred kilometers an hour. Anselm had managed to extend the crash over half a kilometer, though, so it distributed the energy across the territory while slowing them down. Quick thinking contained what should have been a disaster to minor injuries. Not to mention millions of credits of damage, which she sure as fuck wasn’t picking up the tab for.

  “How are you feeling?” She held the scanner closer to his head.

  “I hope that’s a rhetorical question.”

  “It’s fucking not. If you have a concussion, I need to check you for symptoms. Don’t exactly have an MRI machine around here.”

  “I’m fine.” Anselm pushed up from his seat. The belts had broken in the crash, but they’d done their job in keeping him alive.

  “How the fuck would you know that?”

  “High-tech bullshit. That’s how I know.”

  “What?”

  “Nanobots in my bloodstream. They have an automated system in case of injury that picks up on damage and reports it. They can’t do much beyond stopping heavy bleeding, but they sure as fuck can generate reports.”

  That was unfair. Also genius, not to mention dangerous. If the wrong person picked up on the wavelengths those nanobots transmitted, they could order them to kill their host, and that would be the end of it. It was probably for the best this tech hadn’t been introduced to the medical system on the ground.

  “What are your nanobots telling you?” Clare asked.

  “Contusions all over the place. My ribs are more cracked, and the cut on my cheek opened back up. Otherwise, I’m fine. Let’s focus on you.”

  “What? Why?” She narrowed her eyes.

  “Because you’re the one who has to get up to Summerland alive. If I die, they’ll send another adjudicator to get you. You’re the one who’s going to save thousands of lives.” He patted her shoulder. “Give me that device thing, and I’ll hit you with a scan.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that. Certainly not coming from him. Clare never considered herself anything beyond a member of the pack, and she hated it when they treated her like she was made of glass. Hearing she was important and needed other people to protect her to the point of endangering themselves sounded worse.

  “Mild concussion. No broken bones. Bruises and whiplash, but I don’t see any spinal injuries. You have something that can help?”

  “Yeah.” Clare pressed a button on the side of her scanner. “It’s a portable version of Florence. Actually comes as part of Florence, so you don’t need to ferry a bot around. It’s got all the fun stuff she had.”

  A few seconds after she hit the button, a panel opened to hand her a round of medication.

  “Okay. We should get moving.”

  “Where?” Clare pushed from her seat and swallowed all the pills at once. She felt a hint of vertigo, but it passed quickly, and she joined him at what remained of the door. “Nothing but desert out there, and there’s plenty of danger in the desert. People will have seen the crash. They’ll be sending emergency services to help.”

  “Right.” They were back on the ground, so Anselm would have to listen to her. “There will also be scavengers coming to pick the ship clean who won’t want anyone to see them get away with gravitium cells. And the possibility the people who want us dead followed the crash and are on their way to finish the job. How would you match them up against New Houston’s emergency services?”

  She brushed her fingers through her hair, giving herself a second to answer. It didn’t matter, because he was right. As badly as she wanted to settle in and rest for a minute, they were in as much danger inside the remains of the shuttle as outside it.

  Maybe more, considering the people who lived in the desert would be drawn to the crash. The only reason nobody had reached their location yet was the wreckage spreading out across the desert, all of it great salvage.

  “Come on, asshole.” She hissed and pushed the door open. “No need to look so smug about it.”

  He rolled his neck and growled. “I’m not smug. I’m annoyed.”

  “Already come to the conclusion that your embed was probably the one who sabotaged the shuttle?”

  He finger-combed his short brown hair and scratched the stubble on his chin. Anselm seemed the sort who was only comfortable clean-shaven with perfect hair, but she appreciated the rugged look more.

  Not that he was assembled for her viewing pleasure, but it was nice. Even if the bright desert sunlight made him look closer to blond than brown-haired.

  “What are you looking at?” Anselm turned and watched the horizon. A few rain clouds hung in view, but they were too far away to cause concern.

  “Nothing. We need to get as far away from the wreckage as we can while still watching it. I see rock overhangs up there where we’ll be out of immediate view, and there’ll be shade. Hopefully.”

  It was relatively early in the morning, but the day was already a scorcher. She didn’t mind it much since she hated cold more than heat. Plus, this was a dry heat, which could be kept off with a few tweaks to the coat she wore.

  Anselm either had similar tech, or he was an inhuman person who never felt hot or cold. Maybe it had something to do with the nanobots in his blood, which she would have to discuss with him later.

  The march out to the rock formations didn’t take long. They found a small cave that kept the sun off their backs.

  “You don’t think there’s any way for us to put the shuttle back together?” Anselm asked.

  Clare glared at him from under her hoodie. “I guess we could if you can gather the thousand or so pieces. I’m a good mechanic and decent at putting shit together, but that would be pushing the limit.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “Sorry.”

  Clare smirked and sat cross-legged on the ground. “You couldn’t have done much better. You saved our lives, even if we’re stranded. I assume people know what happened to us, so it’s not like we’re here on our own. It would have helped if you could actually read minds and pick up on what that bitch was planning, but that’s closer to science fiction.”

  “She was nervous and unsettled.” He leaned against the rocks and crossed his arms. “That’s not uncommon. I assumed it was one of her first times doing this. People tend to be nervous near an adjudicator. Besides, if she’d wanted to kill us, she might have informed the people who wanted us dead where we were.

  “Doesn’t matter. First thing we need to do is get back to New Houston. Someone else can run that investigation. We have to return to a safehouse, then get someone I trust down here to pick us up.”

  It was her turn to cross her arms. That was how he thought. It was his job and his personality. Adjudicators were detectives. They figured everything out before they stepped into a room with their suspect. He must have never considered a faithful embed would betray them, so his list of people he could trust had probably been shaken.

  “What are you thinking, then?”

  Anselm tilted his head. “If anyone knew I was down here, they’d want me dead. But there would be a lot more reaction to my presence here. Nobody up there wanted to kill me.”

  “So you’re saying it’s likely a mute had something to do with this?” Clare raised an eyebrow. “A mute who wanted us to crash to the point of hacking the autopilot and fitting it with a failsafe in case we thought quickly enough to disable that?”

  “What do you mean, ‘we thought?’” He shook his head. “That was all you.”

  “Are you saying that’s a bad thing?”

  “Of course not. You probably saved our lives.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I’m having a hard time reading your tone. You sound like you’re accusing me of saving our lives.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Well, it’s a solid accusation, then.” He grinned and nudged her shoulder.

  He’d been trying to lift her spirits. Clare sighed and shook her head.

  “Sorry. That was a joke.” Anselm shrugged. “I’m not great at those.”

  “I think it’s because you haven’t had enough practice.” Clare fought a smile and failed. “You had the beginnings of a joke there. You were pulling my leg. You only need to tone the intensity down.”

  “The problem is that I’m an adjudicator. When I accuse people of stuff, they usually go to prison.”

  She tilted her head. “Right. You approached the joke wrong because people need to take you seriously when you accuse them of something.”

  “Hmm. I’ll need to work on it.”

  “You do that and get back to me.”

  In fairness, his approach had worked. She felt better. They had her supplies, although she would have to check to see if they’d been damaged in the fall. They had food and water. If the water ran out, they had a hydrator that would pull water from the air to keep them alive for a few days until help arrived.

  It soon seemed it would arrive a great deal faster.

  “Dust clouds.” Anselm was the first to spot them. He pointed them out for her. “Multiple. Someone’s coming this way. Fast, from the looks of it.”

  Clare leaned on one of the rocks to observe. “They’re too far away. I can almost see the vehicles, but no details.”

  Anselm raised a hand and retrieved a small device from his pocket. It looked like a monocle without a chain, with pieces of tech attached to it.

  He handed it to her. She pressed it to her eye, and it sealed itself to her skin. “How the fuck do I—”

  “Squint to zoom in, raise your eyebrow to zoom out,” he instructed smoothly. “If you have the right weapons, you can pair them to the device, and it’ll give you crosshair targets. Special Forces use them all over the NAC. You can outfit them with night vision, friend-or-foe identification, and other neat tricks.”

  “Huh. You’ve got something cool here.” Clare squinted, and the device zoomed in on the vehicles. Too quickly. She lost them. After some fine-tuning, she managed to zoom in on the lead vehicle as it stopped at the cockpit they’d left behind.

  “Let me guess. We’re not looking at the New Houston emergency services out there.”

  “Well, break out your own little lookie device and see for yourself.”

  “That’s the only one I have. I gave it to you because you’ll have better luck identifying exactly who the fuck we’re dealing with.”

  The news was worse than they thought. The trucks were rough-and-tumble, built to operate in rough conditions, and modified to last longer. They had rams at the front and spikes extending from the wheels to engage in road warfare she’d only heard about. They were all marked with a symbol she’d seen before. Usually carved into the flesh of people Curtis and her pack had negotiated with for safe passage through the desert.

  More to the point, the Amazonian women who jumped out of the trucks were branded with the same marks.

  “Down!” she hissed under her breath. “Down, now!”

  He did as he was told and ducked behind the rocks. “What do you see?”

  “If I’m reading the sigils right, it looks like we crashed in the middle of the Maneaters’ territory. They’re fine with people negotiating and paying for passage, but they will fuck us up if they find us here without having paid first. They’re not shy about eating other sentients, either.”

  Anselm tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “That sounds terrifying. Wouldn’t want to tangle with a bunch of werewolves who eat people.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “All werewolves eat people. It comes with the name, doesn’t it?”

  Clare shook her head. “Weres will use their teeth to tear your throat out, but humans are lean and stringy. Including the fatter ones. Besides, it’s in very bad taste to eat humans or vampires. The Maneaters don’t care about social niceties, though.”

  “Huh.” He plucked the device from her and plugged it onto his eye before peeking out over the rock ledge. “I’ve seen those markings before. I thought they belonged to the…ah, what were they called again?”

  “Sons of Skol.” Clare didn’t like to brag, but she was a veritable encyclopedia on werewolf packs. She was an encyclopedia on a lot of crap, most but not all of it quite useful. “No, there was a change in that. The Sons claimed that the weak, meaning anyone who wasn’t them, were fair game for consumption. They elevated the people they killed and ate by adding them to the greater whole or some shit like that. They went on a decades-long tear, like a lupine Mongol horde.”

  “Right.” He peered closer as if he was picking out individuals and trying to read them with his adjudicator abilities, or whatever the fuck he did. “There was a big scare about it back when I was a candidate. A massive werewolf pack tearing through everything. Then it fizzled out because they fractured.”

  “Yeah.” It was odd to think of the people up there being worried about what happened on the ground. It was where they dug up their gravitium but nothing more. She knew better now, since she was the one they called to help. “I forget the reason they broke up. The story goes that a group of the female weres got sick of being passed around by the pack males and tore away in a bloody rebellion.”

  “What story?” Anselm returned his attention to her. His right eye was ridiculously magnified, making it look like a big black pupil in the glass. “I never heard any intel like that.”

  “Of course not. You never heard of the Maneaters, either. Anyway, shut up. It’s my story. They said people hoped the newly liberated Amazons would help against their former oppressors, and sometimes they did. For the right price. They turned out to be a mercenary pack whose loyalties and services were uncomfortable to negotiate. They kept the ideology from the Sons. They only broke away because they were stronger and therefore the top were predators, eating whatever and whoever they wanted.”

  It was an interesting story, one she’d listened to with rapt attention on her first trip to the dumps. One of the Maneaters had joined them to show the way and make sure everyone knew they’d paid for passage. She’d liked the idea of having a little one, even a human, to share her wisdom and knowledge with. They’d spent most of that first night talking around the fire.

  Although Clare eventually discovered that most of what the Amazon shared was bullshit, it was one of her fondest memories. What little sleep she’d gotten that night had been filled with dreams of wandering the desert with her pack sisters, killing, raiding, and living life as free as she’d ever felt. It wasn’t for her, though. Not unless she agreed to take the bite, which came with all sorts of implications. First and foremost being that she would likely die or be permanently disabled.

  Silly dreams were part of childhood. She’d left the memory intact and preserved forever outside the ugly reality that had intruded in the days afterward. A violent battle with another Sons of Skol offshoot had sparked when they reached the dump. She’d been told to hide in one of the cars and stay there until Curtis came to get her. They’d lost a dozen pack members that day. The Maneaters lost more, but it was the last time any other pack tried to interfere with their dump runs.