Shakedowners 4eva by Justin Woolley

Author:Justin Woolley [Woolley, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lonely Robot Books
Published: 2024-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen_

Some several hundred steps back up the other side of the building, it became abundantly clear that Iridius did not, in fact, have this. He was moving slowly, barely able to lift each foot up the next step. He didn’t so much ‘have this’ as he was barely hanging on with the nail of his pinky finger. When he was teetering on the edge of apparently falling back down the stairs and April had to reach out and grab him, she’d had enough.

“Let’s stop,” she said. “Iridius, sit down for a moment.”

Iridius began to object, but his body quickly objected to his objection and his legs gave out. He dropped heavily to sit on the edge of the landing. His mind might have wanted to continue, but his body was having none of it. “Sorry,” he said. “I know you’re all fitter than me, but I didn’t think I was this bad.”

“Iridius,” April said, “you were dead a couple of days ago. That’s not normally something people bounce back from.”

“It is likely you are still suffering some effects of the removal of your nanobots, too,” Aegix-Hal said. “For us it is a relief to be removed from you, but your body had adapted to our presence.”

“When we were back in time you were killing me, and now I’ve gotten rid of you that’s killing me,” Iridius said. “It really is damned if you do and damned if you don’t with you, isn’t it?”

“You are not dying,” Hal said. “Exaggeration as usual.”

Iridius took a moment to breathe.

“It looks like you were right about security losing us if we went this way, Iridius,” April said, “but I don’t know how long that will last. Can you keep moving?”

“Yeah,” Iridius said. “I can do it.”

They climbed the stairs in record time – the record slowest time, that is, at least for Iridius. Although to be fair, he’d never tried to climb this many stairs before. There was a time when he’d been at the Academy when their Physical Training instructor had made them run up and down the tiered seating at the nearby Zero G Football stadium. There had been almost as many stairs in that cruel endeavour as this but, as with most things of this nature, Iridius had found a very cunning plan to avoid the activity – he ran away and hid behind the rubbish bins.

But there were no large waste storage vessels here, and so it was up and up and up they climbed. The burst of energy Iridius had received from April’s over-enthusiastic pep talk wore off after just a few levels, but he continued pushing himself. About halfway up, he’d managed to convince himself that contacting Gentrix hadn’t given away their position after all.

“I don’t think they know where we are,” Iridius said, struggling to string together a sentence between gulping breaths and his thumping heart, which was apparently trying to slam its way out of his chest so it could commit suicide by jumping down the long stairwell to avoid any more climbing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.