Defiance by Beth D. Carter Read Free Book Online Page A

to do this, but she was going to have to go back
and grovel to David and Laith … and possibly never
see her mother again. “We’re going to get you out of here and back to your
parents. Okay?”
    Rell looked so small and fragile, probably how Jordan herself had looked when she
and her mother had been uprooted from Berlin .
She’d only been a little older than this girl when she’d gone to live in the
camp and had assumed her boy persona. No child should have to endure situations
like theirs.
    “So … how would Mr. Meier get out
of this room?”
    Jordan sat for a long time,
thinking of different strategies and discarding them, until it became obvious the men standing guard were drunk, if their slurred
speech and carousing was anything to go by. And that she could work with.
    She studied the equipment littered around
the room. Although she didn’t know what most of it did, she did recognize an
air compressor. The one for the camp refrigeration kept breaking, and Mr. Meier
was forever fixing it. This one looked like it was attached to an air
suppression stream for cleaning filters. An idea formed.
    She told Rell to lie in the corner of the room and not move. Then she scoured the machinery
until she found a few broken pieces. A screw had worked once before, so why not
use several this time around?
    It didn’t take much effort to take
the filtration canister off the compressor. Then she grabbed a hose off something
else and used a seal to affix it before angling the machine in front of the
door. The last thing she did was put a clamp on the hose.
    Once she flipped the compressor on,
there’d be no hiding the sound so she had to make sure everything was lined up
perfectly. She looked at Rell and gave an encouraging
nod before grabbing the hose and dropping her collection of screws into it. They
fell to the clamped off section. She braced her legs, held the hose, and hit
the on button.
    The compressor rumbled to life,
loudly. A second later, a Xyran came rushing into the
room. She aimed the hose and let go of the clamp, and the compressed air
blasted the screws forward with a loud pop. They found their mark, on his face,
and blood erupted. He dropped, lifeless, to the floor.
    “Come on, Rell ,”
she said, tossing the hose aside. The Alphan girl got
up and ran up to her. “I need you to stay right next to me, okay, sweetie?”
    Rell nodded.
    Jordan leaned down and picked up
the blasters. But just as her hand reached for it, another Xyran beat her to it. With a growl, he picked her up and threw her against the wall. She
screamed as her body connected with the hard, unyielding surface. He loomed
over her, his face snarling. Behind him she saw Rell in the arms of another Xyran , and for the first time,
she felt terrified. It wasn’t just about her now. She was responsible for that
little girl.
    Just as the Xyran aimed his blaster at her, dual whooshing sounds erupted. Not only did her
captor lurch and fall at her feel, but so did the Xyran holding Rell . Right before her eyes their skin began
to change colors, fading to sickly grey.
    When she looked up, she saw David
and Laith . And she’d never been happier to see two
people in her whole life.

Chapter Seven
     
    “ Jordan has delivered us a better
opportunity,” David said as they worked their way deeper into the belly of the
station. “Without her antics, we wouldn’t have stopped at this station. We
wouldn’t have known about Kath not recruiting.”
    “Enough, David,” Laith said as he eased around a corner. “If we find Kath I
get to deliver the death blow.”
    “Of course, although I wouldn’t
mind making him bleed before you tear his heart out.”
    That brought a grim smile to Laith’s mouth. They were about to enter the engineering
section when movement up ahead had him grabbing Laith’s arm. They heard drunken laughter ahead and moved cautiously forward. Then there
was a loud rumble and a high pitched scream. They activated their armor
clothing,