But what worried him more was the look Rake now regarded him with as she cleaned off the blade of her knife: discerning and a bit … concerned.
He couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t sure how to feel about the two apparent faces of his battle instincts: turn and run the fuck away as he’d wanted to the first time the Drudgers boarded, or now, to just blanket it all with wanton destruction.
Throat tight, he plastered on a smile. “A long-term plan. That’s good thinking. Guess that’s why you’re the boss.”
“Leave your rifle,” she instructed. “It’ll be too narrow.”
He wanted to ask what’s too narrow, but instead, he fumbled his rifle off his back and set it aside, then confirmed his own plasma pistol and the heavy combat knife still rested in the weapons belt on his hip.
Rake marched over to one of the couches. Her Imprints flickered as she easily pushed it aside. She knelt, ripped a black panel off the floor, then swung her legs down into the opening and disappeared.
Cavalon scurried across the room, following Rake into the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Cavalon shouldered through the narrow shaft after Rake. She apparently knew the layout of this ship very well. He supposed memorizing the design of enemy vessels would have been part of her training. Infiltration, covert ops, advanced weapons—all the crap that made a Titan a thousand times scarier than an average soldier.
Rake’s boots—or what he could see of them in the practically nonexistent light—suddenly stopped, then disappeared upward. By the time Cavalon shimmied forward and craned his neck to look up, she’d already cleared the vertical shaft. She looked down over the edge at him from five meters up, loose strands of hair swinging in her face.
He gaped at her. How in the void did she expect him to get up there?
“Use your Imprints,” she whispered. He just stared dumbly back at her, and she added, “For grip.”
“I don’t think mine work like that,” he mumbled. He turned over, looking up into the dark vent toward Rake’s annoyed grimace.
“Should I have brought the winch?” she asked. It took his brain a couple of seconds to register the dry snark in her tone. He scowled, but said nothing.
He summoned his Imprints and they rushed down his arms and into his hands, coating his palms and fingers with gold and bronze squares. He reached up and pawed at the vent, but his hands slid right over it, slick like metal on metal.
“See?” he hissed.
“You have to think about it,” she insisted. “Imagine you just, I don’t know, stuck your hands in a vat of glue. That’s something you’d do.”
He rolled his eyes, but couldn’t precisely disagree. Seeing no other way out of this than to listen or get left behind, he decided to try her advice. He imagined his hands were sticky, willed them to adhere, believed them to be grippy enough to claw his way five meters up a metal tunnel.
When he ran his hand over the metal again, to his total shock, his fingers gave a dull squeak and caught immediately. He gaped at them, then stuck his fingers to the bare skin on his cheek. The Imprints had taken on a dense, tacky quality. They pulled painfully at the stubble on his jaw as he dragged his fingers over his skin.
“Ow,” he grumbled.
Rake sighed.
He turned his arms over in wonder, staring at the Imprints he’d clearly been using wrong the last nine years. He could have gotten up to so much more shit if he’d known that trick. He wondered what else Rake knew about them that he didn’t.
“Come on, Mercer,” Rake prompted. “These Drudgers aren’t going to kill themselves.”
He shook off his awe and set aside the catalog of questions he planned to interrogate Rake with once they weren’t skulking through the bowels of an enemy ship.