Forsaken Realms (Bounty Hunters United Book 1) by Katalina Leon Read Free Book Online Page A

of the ship and even wipe clean and upgrade Rudra’s main brain, which she’d wanted to do for a long time.
    Gemmina glanced at Syan. “Ready?” With a firm grip she wrapped her hand around the throttle and pulled. The ship lifted off the beach and hovered blowing whirls of silica beads into the air. “I’m going to punch it. I don’t want that stuff getting sucked into the intake.” Her arm straightened and pushed the throttle down with hammer force. The ship took off across an expanse of jungle like a high-strung racehorse released from the gate.
    “Get vertical!” he cried out in his mind.
    “Don’t tell me how to fly.” The skimmer shot above the jungle at such a low altitude it clipped the treetops. The resulting shockwave sent a flock of startled birds bursting into the sky in a fluttering swirl of vermillion. “I didn’t get the opportunity to stretch my legs and hunt. At least let me enjoy a quick tour of the planetoid. I want a glimpse of what I can’t have. All my hunts take place in the cities these days, and mostly the underground at that. I’m so sick of stalking people in sewers. Look at this— trees, ocean—this is paradise. You have no idea how badly I needed this.”
    “It’s a stolen paradise.”
    “ What do you mean?”
    “I mean this was stolen. Everything you see once belonged to Sarna.”
    “I don’t think this was stolen in the literal sense. Do you mean genetically copied? This is terra-engineering.”
    “No, this is stealing. Jason Naveen stole all these living things without permission or compensation.”
      The skimmerhit a fierce patch of turbulence that made the ship shudder.
    “You better start climbing. Naveen’s atmosphere is dense but narrow. There are magnetic buckles in the atmosphere as well. We hit one on the way in.”
    “I know what I’m doing. I fly through turbulence all the time.”
    “Not like this. The terrain looks familiar, but it’s merely a veneer stretched over an unstable matrix. The atmosphere will react differently from what you might expect.”
    “I don’t need to be told this.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “You’re determined to ruin this for me, aren’t you? I can’t take a peek at the jungle? What good is a fucking collar of silence when the head chatter never stops? I really don’t want to communicate with you. I want some peace and internal quiet.”
    As she spoke, she made the grave mistake of looking at him. Syan appeared stung by her words, and then she felt it. He was worried for her and thought she was senselessly stubborn and rude. As best she could tell, he seemed to be trying to figure her out, discover what had damaged her so badly that she behaved defensively at every turn. He wasn’t being the least bit judgmental either. Phrases like, “Be patient with her. This is false confidence.” “Betrayal is part of her past. Her trust does not come easily,” and “I hope we don’t die,” played in a revolving cycle. He genuinely wanted to understand her…. The experience was arresting. Having anyone care what she thought felt so foreign to her, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.
    “All right. Have it your way. The island tour is over. We’ll be on our way and reach X57 that much sooner. Will that make you happy?” She pointed the nose of the skimmer skyward and punched the trust engines. The skimmer swooped in a wide arc and climbed at an almost vertical pitch. They roared away from the rolling blanket of green jungle and ascended through wispy layers of high cloud. The entire time she struggled to tune out his thoughts, but he was always there, right in the middle of her mind, looking around and sorting things out. Even worse she sensed he felt sorry for her. Damn him.
    As the atmosphere thinned, they climbed fast, and, at the same moment, the first star appeared against a field of inky blue—it happened.
    One of the thrust engines blew apart with a deafening rumble. The explosion was so violent the rear of the