The white corridors turned a screaming red, with giant arrows hosting a digital display that read ZERO-G ACTIVE—the entrance to the main gym. The door, itself, was more modest than the hallway leading to it. Standard door. No lock.
Course not. This was an amusement park, not a top-secret research facility.
Myka opened the door and ran through with me on her tail. We lost gravity over the threshold, and Myka flailed in the air. She waved her arms as if that would affect anything and reached back for a handhold even as her momentum assured she’d keep traveling across the gym.
Some maintenance could only be done in space, so I’d learned to work in zero-g conditions during the war. I wasn’t a zero-g acrobat, by any stretch, but I definitely had more experience than Myka, who was panicking like a bad engineer during a fusion meltdown.
Without thinking, I wrapped my arms around her from behind. “Myka, calm down a sec,” I whispered into her ear.
The gym was cavernous, packed with people zooming around on different courses. The decibel level had to be on par with a Bredfeld 52G engine. I could fit a small passenger ship in here and still have room for the acrobats twirling at the center. A graceful couple wearing leotards swanned perpendicular to us, eyes on each other. As they passed, the man twirled the woman around like an old-fashioned, colonial ballerina.
Myka had stilled, stiff in my arms. And yeah, it hadn’t escaped my notice that I was embracing Myka Benton. It was necessary for our escape. It meant absolutely nothing. I didn’t enjoy the feeling of her warm, soft body pressed against mine. Not at all.
A kid floated past with a grav board. Thinking fast, I snatched it from him like an asshole. He squawked as he fell in the opposite direction.
Also necessary. The grav boards had some magnetic thing going on. It made them cautiously pull you to the closest wall. Helpful for beginners to be able to retreat to the hand supports. It would get us oriented.
I turned the grav board on, still holding Myka as we were tugged back to the wall. Two mercs poked their heads out of the employee entrance and tried to get a visual on us, but their focus was at the center of the gym, not the edges.
At the wall, Myka clutched onto the hand support as if it were a rope dangling over a cliff. I turned the grav board off.
“First time?”
Her mouth was tight, eyes wide. She was transitioning from panic to embarrassment. We didn’t have time for that.
I ignored her embarrassment. “Show me where we need to be.”
With a heavy breath she pointed upwards at roughly a seventy-five degree angle from where we were. A red-bordered door dotted the wall. Another employee entrance. I resisted the urge to ask how she knew this. Myka knew shit. That’s just what she did.
I snaked an arm around her waist. “Okay, hold on and don’t move, okay?”
She didn’t say anything. Just nodded and clutched me without hesitation, breathe shuddering and soft hands curling around my neck.
I eyeballed it as I pushed us away from the wall in the direction of the employee entrance. We floated towards the center. The Sev Tech goons would probably see us soon, and I could only hope they were as useless in zero-g as Myka. Which, yeah, she was clinging onto me, and fine. I liked it. It was a good feeling, having her snuggled up against me like that. I’d mentioned she was pretty, right? And her body was…a good body. It was a good body.
I spotted a problem as we approached the center. A crowd of people—all wearing bright pink shirts—floated in a dense cloud, drifting in unison on a trajectory that would definitely intersect ours. Like a big cluster of mines. Or slow-moving grenades.
“Don’t let go of me,” I warned Myka. Only way out was through. Her fingers tightened at the back of my neck.
The straggly edges of the cloud engulfed us. A woman’s voice, location unknown, hollered through the swarm. “Come on! We’re supposed to be forming a Y, folks! Simon, you’re the vertex, remember?”
We passed a woman rolling her eyes, her arms crossed to cover her bright pink shirt. A giant Y marked the front to brand them as Yexy Corp employees. Some team-building exercise, then.
The formless voice rose to a shrieking pitch. “Do we not want to show our Yexy Corp pride?” A few pink-shirted people half-heartedly tried to navigate themselves to position. “Team! Janez is waiting for our Y at the bottom! ARE YOU GOING TO DISAPPOINT JANEZ?”
I’d been distracted by the pinkshirts and only saw the collision coming moments before it happened. A gloomy-looking guy with an inside-out Yexy shirt lagged his peers. The opening theme to Core Bores squeaked from his handset. Myka and I bowled right into him, knocking the handset away. I struggled to keep my arm around Myka, but the guy whipped his arms back and forth while yelling in one of those annoying business dialects.
Myka and I lurched in different directions, remaining attached only by our handcuffs. Our trajectory skewed off course as we whirled to a spin. Gloomy handset guy drifted back the way he’d come.
“Simon! That’s the wrong direction!” A valiant effort from the supervisor, though ultimately futile.
Centrifugal force spun Myka and me like a rogue top. The gym twirled around us, and Myka squeezed her eyes tight. Spinning out was fucking brutal on the inner ear. But someone had to get us back on course, and that had to be me.
I narrowed my focus to take stock of bodies and trajectories. Concentrating on objects kept my stomach steady. First order of business: Stop the damn spin before Myka puked on me. I
