Safety Zone (Lunar Colony VI #1)

kit in my bag. It has a bunch of bottles in it.”

  He did as he was asked, pulling it open as he moved toward them.

  The bottles spun out of their bands and he scrambled to gather up those that tried to roll away. Nala snatched up the non-conductive liquid from where it lay beside Ethan’s foot. She prayed her idiotic plan would work as she handed it to Angela.

  Discarding the cap, Angela poured a stream of the clear liquid onto the ignition point, squeezing three more times after the bottle was empty.

  As the numbers on the front of the bomb counted down, Nala took Boudri’s hand and pushed her tongue between her teeth to keep from clenching her jaw.

  “What is that going to do?” Ethan asked.

  “Hopefully,” Nala said, her voice wavering, “The insulation soaked in non-conductive fluid should terminate the connection.”

  Angela nodded, but she did not sound hopeful either as she said, “If it works, the detonator will fry its own circuitry instead of blowing us up.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  Nala exchanged a glance with Angela, but neither said a word.

  “At least it’ll be a quick death.” He smiled at them and Nala winced.

  Angela laughed mirthlessly. “It’s a waiting game now.”

  They sat, backs to the cold bulkhead, eyes trained on the slowly descending numbers.

  When they reached ten seconds, Nala held her breath.

  At five, she squeezed Ethan’s hand tighter.

  One, she closed her eyes.

  A pop echoed off the bulkheads around them.

  She opened them again.

  Boudri pulled her into a rib-crushing bear hug. “I honestly thought we were dead when you said it wasn’t yours.”

  Together they let out a hesitant breath and slumped against the bulkhead.

  “You know you don’t have a job anymore, right?” Nala said to Ethan. “You put the colony at risk… just to take a chance on saving me.”

  Angela let out a choked laugh. “Oh yeah; he’s so shit canned after they get my report.”

  He shrugged and kicked at the carpeting. “I’ve already got a new job lined up on Lunar Twelve. I was actually in the middle of giving notice when the alarms went off.”

  “Think they’d hire an ex-bomb builder? I have a feeling that report is going to put me in a very awkward position.”

  “I won’t tell them who you are.” Angela watched her, studying her face. “Not as long as you tell me why you etched ‘verity’ on you bombs.”

  “It stood for a truth of feeling, and my belief that what I was doing was right.”

  “It’s also her real first name,” Ethan added, giving her the side eye. “She changed it when she ditched that profession.”

  “I like Nala better anyway.”

  The safety protocols normalized and the pressure door to Nala’s right opened. It was time to face the proverbial music.

  Thank You!

  Thanks for reading SAFETY ZONE. I hope you liked it.

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  Safety Zone is the first book in this series. The rest of the Lunar Colony VI series is available for purchase now.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from Gravity Darkening.

  Exerpt: Gravity Darkening

  Lunar Colony VI Book 2

  Nala Klef was in big trouble.

  Someone had tried to blow up one of the colony’s sky walks with a bomb she’d made. She doubted the Colony Partners would care that her bomb making days were far behind her. The most she could hope for was that they never found out. And as the only two people who knew were seated on either side of her, in the same disciplinary hearing, she had to hope they never would.

  Massaging the bridge of her nose, she imagined the softness of her bed, much like a woman in the desert would dream of rain.

  Ethan Boudri sat on her right, calm and collected. He had nothing to worry about. He was mere hours from a transfer to Lunar Colony Twelve and when he left, nothing he’d done here would follow him. At least that’s what was supposed to happen. They both knew her past had managed to follow her from Earth.

  To her left, the station’s incendiary specialist picked at the corner seam of her cargo pants’ pocket. Angela had more at stake than either she or Ethan did. Having a daughter – currently being watched by a friend – she was at higher risk for removal back to the planet’s surface. An idea few found appealing.

  The door to the Partner’s chambers opened and she stifled a yawn. Now was not the time to look as though she was bored.

  Partner Dendrond was the first to emerge from the room. The woman was tall, lithe, and drew on heavy black eyeliner to accentuate the upward slant of her gorgeous brown eyes. Her black hair was cut short and hung straight against her chin. She looked over the three of them with a sternly puckered mouth as the others filed out behind her.

  Each of the partners represented their individual country’s interests as well as their own, and the entirety of the colony – at least that was what they were supposed to do.

  Lunar Colony Six, like most of the other colonies, had slowly shifted to an entirely female governing body. It had happened in such an organic matter that no one had noticed until Lunar Three made a fuss about it.

  “You violated directives from this council,” Partner Chadha began. Her bindi glittered in the light from the ceiling over her head. From the brightly embroidered sari the woman wore, Nala knew the bomb scare had interrupted her biweekly fete. “You should be removed from the colony entirely.”

  Swallowing heavily, Nala waited for the rest of the verdict, casting a glance to a bored-looking woman. Despite her French name, Partner Elodie – like Nala, Angela and Boudri – was originally a citizen of the DRC. She returned the glance, looking them over with altered green eyes and a pitiless air of apathy.

  Only Partner Turan seemed truly sympathetic, but she said nothing.

  “After much discussion, we put your deportment to vote – excluding you, of course,” Chadha said, nodding toward Boudri. “While we find your … methods … unfortunate, the outcome was not disastrous. You will be allowed to remain on the station in your current positions. However, we will discuss further punitive measures, tomorrow.”

  For the first time, Nala noticed that Chadha looked as tired as she felt.

  Dismissing them with a toss of her hand, the partners left them again. Only Dendrond looked back over her shoulder, a question in her raised eyebrows.

  Nala hadn’t forgotten her job. As maintenance chief for the colony, it was Partner Dendrond’s service requests that had spurred her last minute course change through the sky walk. Dendrond’s leak was still on her to-do list, but she was going to have to live with it a while longer – if it existed at all.

  Boudri held the door open and ushered them out of the chamber’s annex room.

  In the hallway, Angela let out a long, heavy breath as she fell back against the bulkhead wall. “That could have been awful – what if they find out where the bombs came from?”

  Nala’s mind was too fuzzy to engage. She stifled a yawn, and before she could respond to Angela’s worries, Boudri had placed a consoling hand on the incendiary specialist’s shoulder.

  “We’re the only ones who know, Angela. It will be fine,” Boudri said.

  Her face remained a mask of worry, “Unless whoever set the bombs knows.”

  “The Face is long gone. Like I told the partners in our farce of a trial, it was likely a leftover remnant from the defunct cell.”

  “What if it wasn’t?”

  Nala paused, her jaw slack, and considered a hundred different ways
to answer that question. She finally settled on an exhausted sigh and said, “I’ll think about that in the morning, when I have more than three firing brain cells.”

  Leaving them both, she wound through the station corridors, finding her way home on autopilot.

  She’d deal with the potential for expanding consequences in the morning.

  Her door opened when she tapped in her code, and she walked through the kitchen compartment. She stopped abruptly when the heady smell of lilies accosted her nose. A bouquet sat on her kitchen counter, neatly arranged in a drinking glass.

  Rolling her eyes, she left them where they were and added a sharp reprimand to her list of to-dos in the morning. Partner Dendrond didn’t know when to quit.

  Continue reading Gravity Darkening

  Excerpt: Enemies of a Sort

  Flynn Monroe Book 0.5

  There are three sides to every coin.

  Flynn Monroe absentmindedly flipped the small, round piece of defunct currency between his fingers. He studied it as he waited for the lights above his seat to turn from amber to green.

  Interplanetary travel laws were the most asinine series of hoops ever invented. Commercial space travel was more of a headache than dealing with a caffeine-deprived window jockey at the Department of Fusion-Engine Vehicles. If you ignored the DFV, it was the biggest irritation in the universe.

  Flynn dropped the coin to the palm of his hand… three sides, not two, like most people errantly thought.

  On the face of it, a king’s portrait immortalized in tarnished metal, chubby cheeks under an ornate crown.

  On the face of it, Flynn’s nervous aggravation could easily be explained.