Under Dark Sky Law by Tamara Boyens

you’re doing, and I’ll be in contact with you again as
soon as possible,” she said.
    “Roger that. Thanks boss, stay safe out
there,” he said and they signed off.
    Fuck. The fact that the recon team hadn’t
found any sign of Argon’s body, but no one had heard from him yet
was not good. It could have meant several things, including that he
might have illegally snuck into the dome to escape an attack, but
it also meant that he could be gravely injured and in need of help,
or it could mean that he had been taken hostage. Knowledge was
power, and Xero didn’t like blind spots in her information
field.
    Her stomach rumbled and a painful cramp
rocked her abdomen. She grabbed at her belly and grunted. She
hadn’t had any solid food the whole time she’d been in the
hospital, so it would follow that she would be starving. Whatever
liquid nutrition they’d pumped her full of while her gut wounds
were healing had worn off, leaving her insides twisted in knots.
She rummaged through the rest of the bag given to her by Avery and
Stone, but there were unfortunately no nutrition bars or gel packs
stashed in there. Couldn’t expect them to have brought her
everything, and they probably figured that she had the whole hotel
at her disposal.
    There was an old fashioned phone and a
booklet by the bed, and her hopes were realized when she saw that
it was in fact a list of hotel services, including their room
service menu. There was a lot of real food on the menu—actual
vegetables and fruits, and even some real meat. Most of what the
rest of the dome population ate was lab manufactured. Dome space
was too limited to grow uncontaminated plants or raise
uncontaminated animals. Most of the lab grown food still tasted
pretty good, but there was nothing like real food. Out in the pits
they still had fairly decent access to actual foods. Since they
were resistant to the environmental toxins, they could stand to
chow down on vegetables that were soaked in dioxin. After the
climate collapse, things had been hard, but many regions were
slowly but surely building up renewed agriculture using the
modified plant seeds that were showing up. Just like people, some
strains of animals and fish adapted to the contaminants and were
learning to live again. It wasn’t anything like the selection
they’d had in the old world, but you got used to it.
    She figured that hotel lobby would know what
her room was allowed to request and what was forbidden. It turned
out that she had been given clearance to order food at her leisure
and without limits. As a smuggler, exotic foods weren’t quite the
treat that they would be for the average person, but it was still
nice to look forward to a really extravagant meal. She ordered
steak and chocolate cake. She also remembered to stash all of the
contraband items back in her luggage in the off chance that hotel
staff or military personnel attempted to enter her room while
delivering the meal. You never could be too careful.
    While waiting for the food to arrive, she
took the chance to find a solution for the last thing she was
missing: weapons. Obviously handing over an unauthorized assault
weapon would have gotten them in even more trouble than anything
else in that suitcase, but Xero still wished they’d at least
slipped her a pocket knife or something like that. Be that as it
may, she’d learned from many hard experiences that you could make a
weapon out of anything in the right circumstances. The posh room
was far too clean and modern, leaving her with little in the way of
options for weapons. Even the lights were welded into the wall
sconces, leaving no lamps or other handy projectiles. She had a few
screwdrivers from the toolkit in the bag, but they were mostly
small screwdrivers meant for taking apart delicate computer
hardware. Rats.
    In the huge bathroom, she found that the
towel racks felt flimsy enough to be jerked down and might be used
as a potential weapon. Using the little screwdrivers in