Steam and soil had formed a thin layer of mud on the floor, causing her ballet flats to skid past the chute doorway. After righting herself, she took two backward steps, then two more, unsure of how large a blast to expect from the cube. Finally she raised the staff and brought it down, focusing on the door’s fleshy membrane as she aimed.
She wasn’t prepared for the surge of energy that passed through her. Before she could brace herself, she landed hard on the floor. She stood and rubbed her tailbone, then limped toward the elevator to find she hadn’t simply scorched the doorway. She’d obliterated the entire chute and three walls behind it she hadn’t even known were there.
“Bad news,” she shouted to Elle and Larish as she ran, slipping, toward them. “Instead of sealing the doorway, I blew it wide open.”
Syrine didn’t look up. She was still bent over Troy. Aelyx was out cold, and Larish had disappeared to somewhere behind the boiler vats. Only Elle answered, talking to Cara while studying the holographic map she’d displayed in midair.
“I scanned the ship for traces of radiation and found this.” Elle pointed to a dot on the map that pulsed like a beating heart. “It has to be the fuel core.”
Cara traced a finger along the path from their current position to the core and noticed they were on the same level. She turned and studied the walls she’d opened behind the elevator shaft. The fleshy membrane had begun to repair itself. “We can travel between walls. If we’re quiet, no one will catch us.”
Elle charged forward and pocketed her sphere. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” Syrine called, still peering into Troy’s eyes. “I’ve almost reached him.”
“There’s no time,” Cara told her, following to the wall Elle had just opened. “We’ll check in once we make it to the core. If no one’s found a solution by then …” She didn’t finish the sentence, but the slowness of Syrine’s nod said she understood.
The time for evacuation was over.
Aelyx awoke abruptly from the deepest sleep of his existence. One moment he was all but dead, and then his eyes snapped open and he was fully alert, as if someone had switched him from off to on.
He sat bolt upright and registered his surroundings. He was still inside the boiler room, but someone had moved him in between the wall and a floor-level air duct. He heard male voices, Troy’s and Larish’s, though he couldn’t see them. Then Syrine touched his shoulder and asked if he was all right, and all his memories returned in a jolt.
“What happened?” he asked, pushing himself onto all fours. “Where is everyone?”
Syrine helped him stand. “Larish is looking for a way to shut down the boiler.” A grunt echoed in the distance, and pain sliced through Aelyx’s skull. Syrine winced, indicating she’d felt it, too. “Troy is holding off the Aribol reinforcements with what’s left of his soil. Every time one of them dies, we all feel it.”
Aelyx shook off the pain and glanced around for the Nova Staff. He needed to find the fuel core so the others could escape. “Where’s the staff?”
Syrine avoided his gaze.
“Where is it?” he repeated.
“Cara and Elle have it.”
His brows hitched, and on instinct his thighs tensed to run after them. “No! I drew the short slip.”
“None of that matters. It’s too late. Either we neutralize the Aribol so they can’t pilot the fleet, or Cara and Elle will detonate the fuel cell—whichever comes first.”
Aelyx forced himself to clear his mind. “Point me to Larish.”
He found the scholar on his hands and knees, peering beneath a cylindrical tank. Larish sat back on his heels with a pained expression that told Aelyx he hadn’t liked what he’d found. “Nothing,” Larish said when he noticed Aelyx approaching. “I can’t find a single way to compromise the system.”
Aelyx crouched down. “Explain to me how it works. Maybe I’ll see something you missed.”
“Well.” Larish pointed at the ductwork near the elevator. “Their humidity system operates similar to our body’s circulatory system. The intake ducts are like blue veins, pumping deoxygenated blood to the heart. They channel recycled air here”—pointing at the series of connected vats—“where the vapor is infused with fresh oxygen and steam, and then sent through these ducts, which are like red veins, feeding all the vents inside the ship.”
“Okay,” Aelyx said. That made sense. “How do we figuratively slit its wrists?”
“We can’t. There are too many failsafe seals. If we destroy the connection between one tank, the system is designed to reroute to the next, and so on.”
“So we’d have to destroy everything on this level.” And because the pressurized steam would kill them all in the process, that plan was no better than detonating the fuel cell. “Or poison the bloodstream.”
A mass summons issued on their com-spheres. Cara’s image appeared alongside Elle’s, both of them huddled in the dark. “We’re here,” Cara said. “The fuel cell’s on the other side of this wall.” She paused for a pregnant beat before asking, “Any luck on your end?”
Troy and Syrine hadn’t answered the summons, likely because they were engaged in battle on the opposite end of the room. Larish cocked his head and began muttering gibberish to himself, which left Aelyx to deliver the bad news. “So far, no.”
Darkness concealed the fear in Cara’s gaze, but she couldn’t hide the tremble in her reply. “We can’t let them launch the fleet …”
“How far away are you?” he asked, and used his eyes to say the rest. He’d promised to face death by her side, and that was what he wanted. When the universe reclaimed their bodies, they would go together as one.
The subtle shake of Elle’s head said too far.
He fought against the fresh ache in his chest, determined not to let his voice waiver. “I love you,” he said, strong and sure. “Both of you. And I regret nothing.”
“I love you, too,” Cara said. “I’m glad we went down swinging. You were right. What we have is worth fighting for.”
Aelyx didn’t know what more to say. They were out of time. “No goodbyes?”
“No goodbyes,” Cara agreed, and the transmission ended.
Aelyx’s shoulders rounded. This was happening too fast.
Larish continued muttering under his breath until he abruptly shouted, “Poison the bloodstream!” and grabbed Aelyx’s wrist hard enough to wrench it from his hand. Larish took off like a comet, towing Aelyx toward the elevator shaft. “I have an idea,” he yelled. “Tell her to wait!”
Cara stepped through the wall’s opening into a small compartment that reminded her of her late grandmother’s storm cellar. The ceiling here was so low she had to stoop over to avoid hitting her head, and the only source of light was the faint glow leaking through the seams of a boxy fuel tank in the center of the room. Unlike the rest of the ship, this area was bone dry, but still blisteringly hot.
It was about to get a lot hotter.
Elle approached from behind and laced her long, slim fingers between Cara’s. It might’ve been the first time Elle had ever initiated touch, and it made Cara smile. They shared a watery glance that overflowed with all the things they didn’t have time to say. With one last squeeze, Cara released Elle’s hand and strode toward the fuel cell.
Her pulse was pounding and her breaths turned raspy, but she eased her fear by thinking of her parents, safe on the ground. They would survive, and that was enough. She issued a quick prayer and raised the staff as high as she could in the squat room.
She was ready.
Her com-sphere buzzed, but she ignored the summons. There wasn’t a moment to waste, and she might lose her nerve if she didn’t do this now. So she rotated her arm to send the ship into oblivion.
Suddenly, a blinding pain sliced through her skull, and she lost all scope. She couldn’t be sure whether she’d detonated the cell or not. Her body seemed to vanish, and all that was left was the panic and agony of a thousand deaths. She felt herself sinking into
a cloud of collective suffering, and only then did she know she had succeeded.
With a lifted heart, she followed those souls into the light.
Chapter Twenty
Elire.
The word was soft and distant, like a melody floating on a breeze.
Elire.
Closer now, it came as a whisper of breath that stirred inside her ear. The tickle puckered her skin into goose bumps and made her shiver, but in a good way. She wanted to feel the warm breath again, so she turned her ear toward it for another caress. Only silence followed.
Frowning, she cracked open one eyelid, then the other, and found Aelyx peering down at her, his silver gaze shining as brightly as the moon.
“Elire.”
He said it aloud this time, curving his full lips into a smile. As he bent over her, his hair began to escape his ponytail one lock at a time until it spilled out and framed the strong angles of his jaw. She grinned in return. She loved seeing him this way, rugged and disheveled, his hair forming a curtain of privacy around them.
Her tummy quivered. Maybe this was heaven.
But any illusions she had of an otherworldly paradise vanished when Elle appeared out of nowhere and jabbed a hypodermic needle in her arm. Cara flinched, sucking in a breath as fluid bloomed beneath her skin.
Unpleasant as it was, the burn helped restore her senses, and by the time the needle pulled free, she realized several key facts. Chief among them, she was not dead. And judging by the hard press of metal beneath her back and the high ceiling above, someone had dragged her into one of the ship’s corridors.
Elle lifted the empty syringe. “Not the gentlest way to wake up, but we absorbed a lot of radiation when we were passed out in the fuel chamber. This will isolate the radioactive particles and flush them from your system.”
Cara rubbed her arm and tried to sit up. Her stiff muscles didn’t want to cooperate, so Aelyx helped her. She opened her mouth to ask how long she’d been asleep, but then she remembered she’d been two seconds from blowing the ship to kingdom come, and she snapped her gaze to Aelyx’s while her heart lurched.
“It’s all right,” he assured her, brushing back her hair. “You blacked out before detonating the core. The ships never launched.”
“The Aribol …”
“Are dead. We killed them before they could man the fleet.”
Cara wrinkled her forehead and glanced at her surroundings. The air smelled different, slightly musky, but otherwise nothing had changed. “How?”
With a click, Elle closed her medical kit and stood up, her movements as brisk and efficient as ever. If Cara didn’t know better, she might think the entire night had been a dream. “I’ll let you take it from here,” Elle told Aelyx. “I want to give Troy an injection, too, since he’s the one who pulled us from the chamber.”
She strode away, and Cara raised a questioning brow at Aelyx.
One corner of his mouth hitched up. “It’s probably best if I show you.”
After situating himself more closely beside her, he cupped her chin and leveled their gazes for Silent Speech. His eyes softened, and as she opened to him, she felt his presence glide inside her mind, sweet and familiar, like a finger of warm honey. At first she sensed his emotions—the euphoria of having cheated death and the anticipation of new beginnings—but he soon gained control and replayed the events leading up to her awakening.
She was in the boiler room, looking through his eyes. Larish was yelling, “Poison the bloodstream!” and running like a madman to the ductwork near the elevator, where Troy and Syrine had just pitched another handful of soil down the chute. The two of them looked weary, their sweat-slicked faces streaked with dirt.
“Stop her,” Larish shouted while opening his satchel. “Tell Cara to wait!”
Aelyx issued the summons while watching Larish throw one handful of soil after another into a slit in the ductwork. He thought Larish had come unhinged. Then he looked closely at the dry soil, which disappeared inside the duct as if sucked into a vacuum, and he understood. The slit was some sort of intake vent none of them had noticed before. They’d had it all wrong. Instead of eliminating the steam—a conduit to every living creature on board—they needed to taint it.
Aelyx grabbed the heavy satchel and raised it above his head. His biceps burned as he shook its contents into the vent. Once the bag was empty, he shouted to Troy and Elle, “Give me everything in your pockets.” He didn’t know if it would be enough.
Just then he realized Cara hadn’t answered the summons, and his stomach dropped. What if she detonated the fuel cell before he could reach her?
Aelyx averted his eyes to close the connection. “You nearly gave me an aneurysm when you didn’t answer,” he said. “I thought it was too late.”
She huffed a dry laugh, marveling at what he’d shown her. Now she understood the musty scent in the air. “It’s a good thing I blacked out.” She recalled the torrent of pain that had crippled her senses. “That must’ve been when they started dying. I could feel them—it was horrible. I thought I was dying, too.”
“We all did, I think.” He stroked her cheek with his thumb, his gaze drifting as if replaying the memory. “Except for Syrine. She stayed conscious and kept a clear head the whole time. When I came to, she was conferring with Alona, explaining how to defeat the Aribol.”
Cara’s breath caught. “Are the L’eihrs going back to fight?”
“They were already on their way when Syrine called.”
A thread of hope wound itself around Cara’s heart and gave a mighty tug. Everything might be okay. And in large part, they had Syrine to thank for it. Cara checked over her shoulder. “Where is she?”
Something dark settled over Aelyx’s features. He dropped his gaze to his hands. “She said she was going to sweep the ship for survivors. It made sense, so I didn’t question her at the time.” He glanced up. “But right before she left the boiler room, she started fidgeting with her pear-seed pendant, and I knew what she was really going to look for.”
“Oh.” Cara brought a hand to her chest. “The elixir Aisly promised her.”
He gave a slow nod. “I don’t think it exists.”
Honestly, neither did Cara. But that wouldn’t stop her from tearing apart every inch of this ship looking for it. Maybe she would find a second chance for Syrine and David. Maybe not. Either way Cara would be there to lift Syrine up, because they were friends, and that’s what friends were for.
She extended a hand to Aelyx. “Come on. Let’s prove ourselves wrong.”
“Elire, it’s time. If you don’t hurry, they’ll start without you.”
“Okay, coming,” she called.
On her hands and knees, Cara backed out of the dark, narrow service shaft and clicked off her flashlight. The shaft was another bust. She hadn’t expected to find any medical marvels in there among the layers of mold growing on the passageway walls, but after three days of fruitless searching, desperation had set in, and she’d broadened her scope to include the ship’s dank nooks and grimy crannies. She knew she was grasping at straws, but she didn’t care. She would leave no stone unturned.
She stood up and brushed the mildew from her pants, then handed the flashlight to Aelyx. “We can mark that one off the list.”
He pulled up a holographic map and tapped their location to darken it, indicating the area had been searched. Of the ship’s massive interior, only a few scattered blocks remained unchecked.
Though not for lack of trying.
Two days ago they’d donated their shuttles to the Earth Council because the planet was still under a blackout. The Council had made good use of the crafts, ferrying aboard hundreds of dignitaries, soldiers, and scientists. Since then, the corridors had been teeming with people scavenging for useful bits of technology to take home before the ship’s impending demolition, which was scheduled to take place tomorrow at zero six hundred hours. That didn’t leave much time to look for the elixir, but Cara agreed with world leaders th
at the ship and its fleet had to be destroyed before it fell into the wrong hands.
“Take this with you.” Aelyx extended a protein packet. When she wrinkled her nose at it, he added, “I know you skipped breakfast again.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I …” But her stomach growled and made her a liar.
He pressed the packet into her palm. “Eat it on the way there. You’re already late.” He pointed the flashlight to the next section on the map. “I’ll clear this area, and we’ll finish the rest tonight.”
She stood on tiptoe for a brief kiss and then set off down the corridor toward the nearest elevator tube, cramming a handful of protein cubes into her mouth as she walked. She nearly spat out the first bite when the chute plummeted toward the lower level, where the Council had staged an impromptu command center in a room near the hangar.
As Cara jogged to her meeting, she passed a pair of men in biohazard suits carrying a stiff Aribol body between them, either en route to the airlock for its disposal or to an isolated lab for its dissection. She caught a whiff of death and quickly lost her appetite. Shoving the rest of her lunch into her pocket, she turned aside and gave the men in the hallway a wide berth before continuing to the command center.
The meeting was already in session when she entered the room, which was sparsely furnished with four rows of folding chairs facing a sheet music stand that served as a lectern. Colonel Rutter stood behind the makeshift podium, debriefing the council on the status of blackout repairs. He told them Larish had shuttled to the ground to join the collective think tank in Washington DC, and he was confident they’d have the power grid up and running within the week. He glanced up from his notes and spotted Cara, then waved her over to an empty seat in the second row.
“Now I’ll turn it over to the L’eihrs for their report,” he said, and shifted the angle of his com-sphere so Alona’s hologram moved to the area beside him.
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