Chapter 7 · Whoever Holds the Switch

The spark caught my wrist before it caught the tray, and I heard my own voice crack out of my throat before I even decided to make a sound.

"Hands off the door!" Knox's shout rattled off the steel, but he wasn't talking to the crew. He was talking to himself, because his hand had already left the tray, closed around my forearm, and yanked me sideways into his chest a half-second before the next shower of orange sparked through the gap in the frame.

Metal hissed. My sleeve smoked at the cuff, a thin black curl rising off cheap poly-blend, and Knox's palm slapped it out against his own thigh like it cost him nothing.

"You're burning your hand for a lab coat," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded like somebody standing too close to a house fire, trying to be normal about it.

"Shut up." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the door, at the seam where the cutting torch outside had chewed a two-inch gap through weld and steel that wasn't supposed to give for another forty hours. "That's not supposed to be through yet.