Blood Will Tell by Christine Pope Read Free Book Online Page B

good with mechs?”
    Miala dropped his hand, wishing she had the courage to tell him to go to hell then and there. “We couldn’t afford any,” she snapped. “But I guess you’d better hope I am, since I doubt I’d be any better at fixing you if that gets infected because I couldn’t get the mech back together.”
    “You might surprise yourself.”
    And you might get stuffed , she thought, but said only, “Do you think they’ll come back?”
    He looked over at the viewscreens, head cocked slightly. “Probably. But we’ve earned some breathing room. I don’t think they were expecting to meet quite this much resistance. So now they’ll go back and plan and regroup.”
    Hopefully we’ll be out of here before they get to that stage , was Miala’s next thought, but she only nodded. “Then we’d better get some rest—and we’d better do what we can with your hands.”
    Thorn seemed to be in agreement, for he stood and left the security station after a final quick glance at the perimeter. She followed him back up to the med unit, where indeed the hapless mech had been knocked into a corner, its head askew and one arm completely broken off.
    Miala wondered where she would ever find the time to fix the machine and continue hacking the security on Mast’s vault. Oh, well, sleep is highly overrated, I hear , she thought wryly, moving to the cupboards and pulling out a disinfectant wash and several unopened bandage packs.
    “Get back into bed,” she instructed, and to her surprise Thorn did as he was told, climbing under the covers and laying his head back down on the pillow. Perhaps even he had had enough by this point. She couldn’t begin to imagine how painful it must have been for him to continue firing those cannons as the skin on his hands broke and bled.
    So it was with more gentleness than she had first intended that she swabbed at his abraded palms, feeling herself tense as the antiseptic surely stung on the open wounds. Of course Thorn made no sound throughout these operations, but she thought he looked a little pale, and once or twice he shut his eyes as if to better cope with the pain.
    Finally she was done, Thorn’s hands newly covered in clean bandages. Miala hoped that she’d gotten the wounds clean enough, since she shuddered to think what kind of microbes could have been left behind by the last person to grip the handles of the cannons’ firing mechanisms. Mast’s personal security contingent weren’t generally known for their hygiene. Still, without the assistance of the mech, she was left with only the rough first aid she had learned growing up, tending her father’s occasional cuts and bruises as well as her own. Until her father’s heart attack, neither one of them had ever been ill enough to require the services of the local clinic.
    She gathered up the empty packaging and was dropping it into the waste receptacle when Thorn spoke.
    “You did well down there.”
    She looked over at him, startled. Was that actually a compliment? “Excuse me?”
    He looked at her steadily, expressionless as usual. “You do well in a crisis. Better than I had thought.”
    Trust Thorn to neatly undercut any words of praise in such a fashion. Miala felt the color flood to her cheeks. “Well, I know I’m just a girl,” she replied, her tone mocking. Better than he had thought? Nice to know that his expectations had been so low!
    “Precisely,” he said, completely ignoring her jab. “How old are you?”
    “Twenty standard,” she said. “As if that should make any difference!”
    Thorn moved his head on the pillow so he looked directly up at the ceiling and then shut his eyes before replying. “I don’t know many twenty-year-olds who could have handled themselves as well. So don’t argue with me, Miala,” he added.
    It was the first time he had ever called her by her given name. There was something oddly intimate about hearing “Miala” on his lips—as if this were the first time he had