“This is the most pinheaded idea of your existence,” Cassia snapped a few hours later as she stood beside him, seething at his reflection in the washroom mirror. “And that includes the time you licked a neutron battery to see if it had a charge.”
He smiled at the memory. The battery had had a charge, something he’d discovered when it sent a surge of power through him and stopped his heart. Luckily, one of Cassia’s tutors had already taught her cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
“This isn’t funny, you idiot canker knob!”
“Who’s laughing?” he asked, and turned his head from side to side in the mirror. The ancient bottle of black dye he’d scrounged from the depths of the storage closet had done its job better than he’d expected. Now if he could score a pair of cosmetic lenses, his own mother wouldn’t recognize him, let alone Fleece. “Maybe I don’t need the lenses,” he mused.
Cassia growled and slugged his upper arm. He rubbed the spot while giving himself another once-over, and then decided he looked fine the way he was.
“Listen to me,” she demanded. “You can’t do this. It’s too risky.”
He shifted her a sideways glance. “Riskier than handing yourself over to Marius? What’ll that solve? He’ll just kill you and use his father’s poison to control the whole planet. We have to find an antidote. There’s no solution without it.”
She glared at him while releasing a long breath through her nose. She had to know he was right. “Fine. Then I’m going with you.”
Kane hid a smile. Sharp as the demand was, it hinted at progress between them. “Does that mean you trust me now?”
“To pull this off on your own? Hell no.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Don’t change the subject. I’m going, and that’s final.”
He didn’t try to talk her out of it, partly because it was easier to change the weather than Cassia’s mind, and in part because he needed her help. Someone would have to pilot the shuttle and pick him up after he snatched an inhaler from Fleece and made a run for it. But he couldn’t tell her that. If she knew his whole “pinheaded idea” hinged on her involvement, she might not come with him.
“I’ll let you come on one condition,” he said, holding an index finger in front of her nose. “You have to promise—”
She cut him off by grabbing that finger and bending it backward, forcing him to his knees. It was a move she’d used a dozen times on him when they were kids, back before he’d learned better than to wave his finger in her face.
“You won’t let me do anything.” She released him and strode toward the exit. “I’ll be waiting for you in the shuttle.”
Cassia couldn’t believe it had come to this.
“There’s stupid, and then there’s stupid,” she told Kane as he landed the shuttle near the outskirts of a settlement so new she couldn’t remember its name. “We’re operating three levels below that. What’s this place called again?”
“Batavion. They mine fuel ore here.” He cut the engine and pulled a tarp from behind his seat. “And if you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”
There was no plan B, and they both knew it. Batavion was the site of the only active outbreak they could find, which meant infiltrating the settlement was the most likely way to secure an inhaler. So while she helped Kane cover the shuttle, she mentally reviewed the details of his idiot scheme, making sure they hadn’t overlooked any snags beyond the obvious.
The Batavion mine workers had recently begun to show symptoms. According to the pattern, that meant they would grow worse and disappear in about a week—plenty of time for Kane to join them and catch a potentially deadly lab-engineered disease that might or might not have a permanent cure. Meanwhile she would lie low in a town full of outcasts and convicts who’d probably never seen a lady outside of a brothel. Then, assuming Necktie Fleece actually showed up with the cure, Kane would pocket an inhaler, and in his weakened state, escape on foot from the galaxy’s most infamous assassin. At which point Cassia would pick him up in the shuttle, and they’d evade a heavily armed ship and reunite with Renny somewhere in the void of space.
What could possibly go wrong?
“Did you bring the tracker?” Kane asked. “And the glue?”
She pulled them from her pocket and scanned his body for the right place to stick the pea-size beacon so it would stay put. Belly button, she decided. “Lift your shirt.”
He chuckled, but for the first time since they’d left the ship, he seemed to lose some of his confidence. It showed in the wall that went up in his gaze. “While you feast your eyes, are we going to talk about our fight? Or are we still avoiding the subject?”
She hadn’t expected him to bring that up. Glancing at his boots, she rolled the tracker between her fingers. “I think your navel’s the best place for this. If anyone sees it, they’ll assume it’s a piercing.”