Wounds, Book 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

administrative types, and as they did a hard left for the OR and disappeared, Kahayn figured she’d just done a whole bunch of really good work for nothing.
    Death for breakfast. Death for dinner. She banged open the door to the stairwell. Yeah. Typical day.
    Chapter
5
    B ashir was screaming; there was blood everywhere, and there were flames. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get to him; he wouldn’t take her hand, damn him, and then it was too late because she was swept away by black water that was infinitely deep. So she hung there now, alone, just like a diver so far down the world above was a memory, or maybe a nightmare, a very bad dream…
    Lense’s eyes jammed open in panic. Her head hurt; there was blood in her mouth; her face was wet. And she couldn’t see. There was nothing. No light. No stars. No clouds. Nothing.
    Oh, God! God, no! I can’t be blind, I can’t!
    She thrashed and the blackness gave, and that’s when she realized that she was floating facedown and that this was water, or maybe oil because the stuff was dense and viscous and sucked at her limbs. Something was still screaming. But it wasn’t Bashir. It was her suit nagging that she’d better get a move on because her air was nearly gone.
    I made it. She remembered Bashir’s bloody face. She remembered churning clouds and a flash as the runabout blew apart and then her stabbing at controls, programming in a descent. Reverse thrusters must have engaged before I passed out. Must have landed in that water. She rolled, and then she was on her back and staring through gooey rivulets more like molten tar than water.
    Somehow she made it to shore. The sea was rimmed with brown sand hemmed by gray bluffs of bare rock. She was gasping by the time she pulled herself from the muck, every breath feeling as if she were sipping air through a straw. Then she cracked her helmet, twisted it, dragged it off and hoped like hell her sensors hadn’t been completely whacky. (But, really, she didn’t have much of a choice and there was no way she was suffocating in that suit, no damn way.) She sprawled, gasping like a hooked fish on a dock.
    Eventually, she pushed up to a sit. She didn’t exactly feel better, just less horrible. The air stank like rotten eggs, and tasted worse, like something had crawled into her mouth, defecated, and died. She worked her mouth, spat out a gob of rust-brown saliva. The air was loaded with sulfur dioxide; she remembered that from her sensor readings. What else? She tried to think past the roar in her head. Nuclear waste but not lethal in the short term. (Give it a year, two, then she was in trouble. But she sure as heck wasn’t going to be here by then.) Methane, copper arsenicals, crystalline silica, and ozone: all bad. Sensors had said there were mountains north of the sea, so she must’ve beached there. A lot of land around but mottled, almost moth-eaten. A patchwork of parched, dusty brown tracts alternating with barren stands of twisted, shriveled trunks. What looked like a broad, red-brown desert valley; brown and yellow-banded mesa west and east sprouting from the desert like flat-topped mushrooms.
    But there was a city to the south. She remembered that, too. An image flashed in her brain: crashing through clouds, rolling away from the fireball of the Missouri and looking south. Spying a dense carpet of metal, glass, and odd jumbles of remnants that had to be buildings. But they were haphazard and set at weird angles, like the blocks of a toy city kicked over by a kid sick of playing games. She remembered that there was one, very big structure, a central hub with four spokes that fed to a large outer ring. Maybe she could get there, blend in, figure what she was dealing with…
    Because I’m marooned here. The thought hit like a phaser blast in the chest: an explosion of pain and heat, and her innards scooped out all rolled into one. Her stomach lurched, and her forehead filmed with clammy sweat.
    They’re