“Holy fuck.” I back away from the carnage, staring at the hurricane of destruction “Lucky” has just unleashed. I beat Dalton halfway into the afterlife. He would have been dead of head trauma in minutes. But the hound….

Dalton’s throat is shredded. The other guard’s chest has caved in from the weight of the metal beast.

For a second, I can only stare, thinking back to how I met Maci. How she was running from two of those tin bastards. She would have been less than a snack for either one of them. Yet this one now follows her commands more loyally than any flesh-and-blood dog ever would.

Despite that fact, I turn to find her staring, just as shocked as I am. “You told him to do that?”

She shakes her head. “It’s his base command. Kill enemies. That’s what he would have done to us, if I hadn’t inverted the parameters defining enemy.”

“So, the only reason he didn’t attack Dalton earlier is…”

“Because you were on top of him. He won’t go through a ‘friend’ to get to an ‘enemy.’”

“What took him so long?”

“He was waterlogged from the stream.” She’s shivering again, and I can’t tell whether that’s from the cold or from shock. “I was trying to stall while his system dried out.”

“Holy fuck,” I whisper as my gaze is drawn back to the slaughter.

“You already said that.”

“It’s worth repeating.” I finally tear my focus from the two dead guards and scan what I can see of the sky for either of the patrol shuttles. “We need to get going. When the shuttles don’t find us between here and the northern wall, they’ll come back. And there are probably more guards nearby.”

“Just a minute.” Maci stares down at the corpse with the crushed chest. “He’s kind of small for a guard. Think his pants would fit me?”

“No.”

She frowns. “Even with the belt cinched?”

“Still no. But it’s worth a shot. Help me get them off.”

Together, we wrestle the pants from the corpse. They are pretty small, and by some miracle, they’ve escaped blood splatter.

Though I couldn’t fit one thigh into them, they fall right off of Maci until she folds the material in at her hips and cinches the belt. She rolls up the cuffs and tries on the guard’s boots, but those are way too big for her to run in, so with a disappointed look, she slips back into the thin rubber shoes.

“What are you smiling about?” she asks when she catches me staring.

“You look hot in a uniform.” I shrug. “Of course, you also look hot out of a uniform.”

“You too. I’m going refill the bottles in the stream. Will you search their pockets?”

“Yeah.” As I kneel in the dirt, she drops a purification tablet into each of three bottles, and Lucky follows her toward the water, blood still dripping from his gory metal muzzle.

The guards don’t have supply packs, which tells me they’re either not planning to be out here for long, or that somewhere there’s a vehicle or another guard carrying supplies for the group. But there are several pockets in their uniforms, and they’re a virtual treasure trove of things I haven’t had access to since before I was arrested.

Dalton’s pants hold a lighter, a pocket knife, a small flashlight, an actual fucking chocolate bar, and a container of breath mints. There’s a full canteen of water clipped to his belt loop—and another one clipped to the pants Maci’s wearing—as well as an emergency flare in a case clipped to the other side of his belt.

Dalton’s shirt pockets hold a peanut-butter-flavored protein bar and half of a vending machine sandwich.

And, of course, both guards are wearing wrist coms.

“Would it do me any good to take this?” I hold up Dalton’s arm to show her the com. “Could you make it work with my fingerprints?”

“Not without accessing the system again and showing them where we are. Oh!” Her eyes light up. “Are his fingers still warm?”

I grab the corpse’s hand. “Yes.

“Great. Let’s see what he’s got access to…” She plops down on the ground next to him, careful to avoid the puddle of blood still soaking into the dirt beneath his neck, and uses the index finger of his right hand to tap on the com strapped to his left wrist. “Dalton using his own com won’t set off any alarms as long as they don’t know he’s dead.”

“Which means we can find another shelter?”

“Yes! I hadn’t thought of that, but we could both definitely use some rest. And what I was actually going to try might give us a little more time to spend there.”

Curious, I watch her tap out a message using a corpse’s finger, a technique she’s getting disturbingly good at. “What are you doing?”

“I’m telling the rest of the guards and the shuttle pilots that Dalton and his partner, whose name is evidently R. Nellis, have captured us and are bringing us in. And that they should all rendezvous back at the main gate. Which is the one that leads back into the Resort.”

“You’re sending them home?” Damn. My hellkitten is smart.

“Yes. And even if they figure out these guys are dead before they get all the way there, it’s nearly a full day’s hike back to the gate from here, according to Dalton’s map. At the pace they were keeping, anyway. This should give us several hours of rest. At the least.”

Assuming they don’t decide to drop more guards in via shuttle. But I’m not going to mention that possibility, because neither of us has had more than a few hours sleep at a time since this whole ordeal started, and we won’t make it to the northern gate without rest. And her idea is our best shot at that.

“What’s all that?” I ask as messages pop up one after another on Dalton’s screen. In her language.

“They’re all confirming receipt of my message. And…celebrating. With rather explicit descriptions of what they’d like to do to us, for making them trek out here.” She taps through to the map, then selects a filter that shows several vaguely house-shaped symbols. “The nearest cabin is still the one northwest of here. Can you read that heading?”

“Yeah.” Map reading in her language is pretty much the same as in mine. I orient Dalton’s wrist com so that the directions on the map line up with the actual directions. Then I point to the northwest. “That way.”

“Okay. We’re going to have to be careful not to veer from that heading, because we can’t access the system again to check the direction without revealing that we’re still free.”

“That cabin doesn’t look very close to the northern gate,” I say as I study the map.

“It’s not. The farther north we go, the fewer cabins and ration stations there are. I’m assuming that’s because most inmates don’t make it this far in, which means most hunters don’t need to either. Regardless, we’re still well more than a day’s hike from the northern gate, if we were to head straight there. We’ll be veering off course significantly by going to the cabin. But I don’t think we have much choice. We need rest.”

She’s right.

It takes us nearly three hours to find the cabin, and during most of the hike, I’m fairly certain we’ve veered off course. Her sigh of relief when it finally comes into sight tells me she was worried about the same thing.

“This is the last one before the northern gate,” she whispers as we scout out the area around the cabin. It’s all clear, and the camera mounted near the top of the door is dark. Dead. “After this, I guess it’s do-or-die.”

“Maci, it’s been do-or-die since the moment I met you.”

“But not until then? You were out here before you met me.”

“Before I saw you running through the woods, half dressed and terrified, I wasn’t really expecting to get out of here alive. Don’t get me wrong; I fully intended to take Scott Hansen down first, live and on camera, to show those bastards that they’re not invincible out here, with their guns and their tech. But I assumed after that I’d be gunned down in short order by a whole squad of guards. And I probably would have been, if not for you and your particular brand of skills.” I hold up her arm to show her the wrist com. “Which is not to be confused with your other, more newly acquired, yet no less impressive skills…”

“Are we talking about oral sex now?” Her flush makes me want to say dirty things to her, just to watch her reaction.

“I wasn’t going to narrow it down that specifically. But yes.”

She laughs as she pushes the cabin door open and I follow her in. We leave Lucky outside, and through the window I see him go into stand-guard mode.

We’re both too tired to eat and still fairly clean after our dunk in the stream. So, Maci takes off her ill-fitting stolen pants and collapses on the bed. I drop my gear, then I strip down to my underwear and join her. “So, based on what happened at the stream, I’m guessing Lucky will come in pretty handy with whatever guards are posted at the northern gate.”

“Yeah. I feel a little guilty about that, though,” she says. “I mean, those guards probably haven’t been hunting us. And they didn’t lock me in the room with a rapist. Or strip you down to your underwear and send you out here unarmed.”

“Maci.” I roll onto my side so I can look at her. “If they’re stationed in zone two, on the ground, then they know what’s going on at the Resort. Continuing to work here makes them complicit in everything that’s happening.”

Her brow furrows in a frown that would be adorable, if it weren’t so frustrating. “Does it though?”

“Yes. Because tomorrow, they could be assigned to the death row cages in the basement. That’s where I saw Dalton kill some poor kid who’d only been here a few hours. The day after that, those gate guards could be assigned to deliver some other woman like you to one of those rooms. They might have to hold her down for some rich bastard to rape. They might be in charge of sending out the hounds to rip apart the next inmate who doesn’t play by the rules out here. All of the guards here are just as guilty as any of the inmates. So, if you’re going to feel sorry for anyone, feel sorry for the poor bastards still lined up in cages in the basement. My friend Graham is still down there. In fact, he’s up next, after me.”

“You had a friend on death row?”

“I made a friend on death row. Talking to him was the only thing that kept me sane, sitting there for months on end, eating the same gruel. Staring at the same bars and walls, knowing that the first time any of that changed would be the day they sent me out here to die.” My chest feels tight just thinking about that. “We’re going to get out of here, but Graham’s going to die as soon as we’ve made space for him in the enclosure.”

“Like Danna.” Maci frowns. “Well, hopefully she won’t die, but she’ll still be stuck here.”

“Who’s Danna?”

“She’s the first woman I met at the Resort, when I woke up in the dorm. She got me showered and dressed. Oh, god.” Maci’s eyes widen with a memory. “She told me that I had to play by the rules, because when one of the ladies messes up, the others all pay. And she was only talking about inadequate personal grooming.” She sits up, her voice rising with every word, until she sounds near panic. What do you think they did to all those women after I killed Steven Hansen?”

“We don’t know that they did anything. Maybe they only tell the women that to keep them in line.” But I’m lying.

“Even if that were true.” And she clearly knows it isn’t. “I’m just leaving them behind. We’re going to get out of here, but the guards are going to keep stripping women and handing them over to rich fuckers like the Hansens. They’re going to keep sending men out here to be hunted. Callum, we can’t just let that happen!”

“Hellkitten, there’s nothing we can do about it. And the truth is that those women are probably better off at the Resort than in the open population. You got lucky, but most of them would be in the same situation they’re in now, only without good food and hygiene. And each other’s company.”

“That’s not true!” Her eyes flash with passion. “I mean, it’s true for some. But there was a women’s settlement in zone four, and the men left it alone. Well, mostly. They had this deal where the women would give some of us to the men, to keep them from raiding. But even the women like Audra and me, who got sent to the men’s settlement, we had choices. They were bad choices, but they were our choices. And it was temporary. At some point, it would all have been over, and Audra and I would have gone back to the women’s settlement to live in peace. Relative peace, anyway.

“But the women in the Resort…they don’t have any choice. They don’t have any time limits. If they fight back, like I did, they get executed. And if they don’t, I assume they’ll be stuck sleeping with strangers until they’re too old to be desirable, and then what? They’ll be thrown out into the open population as defenseless older women, without a community to protect them?”

“Maci, it sucks,” I admit. Yet that’s a hell of an understatement. “It’s unfair. Unjust. Unacceptable. But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“There has to be.”

“We’re only two people. Don’t get me wrong. We’re totally badass,” I say, but that doesn’t even get a hint of a smile out of her. “But there’s only so much we can do against several squads of guards, armed with laser rifles. Maybe if there were more of us. Or fewer of them.”

“Or if they didn’t have rifles…”

“Maci…” I know that look. “Whatever you’re thinking, it won’t work.”

She frowns at me. “You haven’t even heard it.”

True. And what I don’t want to admit is that even if her idea might work—even if it’s the most brilliant, justifiably violent idea anyone’s ever had on a prison planet—I don’t want to do it.

“Hellkitten, we’re almost out. And I may not know what you’re thinking, but I know it’s dangerous. We’ve nearly been killed a dozen times in the past few days, and the last thing I want is to give someone else a chance to get near you with a gun, or a knife, or a fucking nasty thought. I want to get you out of here. I want to get us out of here.”

“I want that too. But we both know they’re not just going to let us walk out. Even if we kill the guards at the north gate, they’ll just hunt us down in the buffer zone. And we have no reason to believe that Lucky’s permissions extend to the gate into the next zone. There are no robo-dogs in the open population. Not that I’ve ever seen.”

“We’ll find a way to open—”

“What if I have a way? What if I know how to free the women in the dorm, and the men on death row, and give you and me a chance to slip out with them in the chaos?” She grabs my hand, and her gaze holds mine with just as fierce a grip as she has on my fingers. “Callum, I might know of a way to shut this place down.”

For a moment, I can only stare at her. She’s tiny, and fierce, and beautiful, my hellkitten. But she’s also fragile and defenseless.

“I can see what you’re thinking,” she says. “But I can’t leave and let this keep happening to someone else. I’m pretty sure that when Audra and I escaped zone four, we destroyed the treaty for all those other women. I think we made their lives worse by trying to make ours better, and I can’t do that again. I won’t. You don’t have to help me, but I have to do this. I have to at least try.”

She’s serious.

Fuck.

I’m not going to be able to stop Maci from throwing herself into danger unless I knock her out and carry her over my shoulder all the way to the north gate. And as perfectly willing as I am to go caveman on her, if it’ll save her life, I don’t think I can get either of us out of here without her awake to tap on that screen, as necessary.

But what if she’s right? What if she actually has a better idea?

I groan as I meet her gaze. “Okay, hellkitten. I’m assuming that all your ‘what ifs’ aren’t truly hypothetical…?”