Chapter 31
I blink into the blackness.
The commotion is far-off at first, too distant to really make out what’s happening. I just have this impression of voices, footfalls, the sound of people shouting. Their words meld together, fuzzy and indistinguishable. Almost like white noise.
Then things get louder.
I hear a cry, the blast of gunfire. There’s a whiff of a ray beam, metallic and electric and so fucking familiar, followed by the distinct sound of a body (definitely closer now, right outside the prison door) thumping to the ground. Someone yells, “Stand back!”
I fling an arm across Master Ira and brace for impact.
The exterior door flies off its hinges, skidding across the floor in a shrieking shower of sparks.
Three people dash into the room. Avi comes first, her face covered in soot, her whites stained black, eyebrows singed clean off.
She’s smiling, brilliant and sun-bright, like she’s just opened a present.
A Youvu Hum appears next, holding a holographic map (it looks like Jester’s heat map imprinted with body signals) and appearing distinctly less enthusiastic. And then, behind them both, is Lament.
Lament, stalking through the ruined doorway. Lament, illuminated by the intermittent flash of the wall-mounted alarm lights. He looks … I’ve never seen him look like this. Viscous and live-wire. Combustible. Like wildfire in a jar.
I’m stunned by the manner of his appearance—awestruck, even—so it takes me a second to understand what he’s doing as he approaches the bars of our cell, holds his hand out to Avi and says, “Give it to me.”
She passes him a bottle of inky liquid. He tips the contents onto the cell’s metal lock, which dissolves in a stream of smoke.
And then he’s pushing open the broken cell door and striding forward and getting right in front of me, cupping my face in his hands, looking desperately between my eyes. “Are you hurt?”
My head is reeling. I feel like I’ve lost track of the edges of the world. The gentleness of his touch is so at odds with the raw emotion in his expression that it steals the breath right out of me. “No,” I rasp.
“Lament,” Youvu Hum warns from behind, checking the hallway beyond the blasted door, “we have to go.”
Lament releases me. My heart is ringing, my skin alive where his palms held my face. I can feel it still, the place each of his fingers pressed into my skin. My lifestone hangs around his neck, giving off its own faint light.
“Hartman—” That’s Youvu Hum again. “Catch.”
I look over Lament’s shoulder just in time to see my ray gun flying through the air. I reach out and snag it. “But how—?”
“One of the guards tried shooting me with it. His mistake, obviously.”
“Obviously,” I reply faintly, recalling that Youvu Hum is the most skilled hand-to-hand fighter in all Romothrida, aside from Youvu Hum.
“We blew a path from here to the west quadrant,” Lament tells me.
His voice is urgent, low, like he’s still struggling to rein in that earlier feeling (what was that feeling?) but isn’t quite succeeding.
“Avi managed to buy us a few minutes with her Time Stopper. All the guards on this side of The Parallax are currently frozen, but we’ll need to hurry.
” Then, as if only just noticing the man behind me: “Is that who I think it is?”
“Master Ira,” the Master says with a small bow. “At your service, Mr.—?”
“Introductions later,” Youvu Hum barks. “Let’s move.”
I exchange a look with Master Ira. He’s been stuck in this cell for three years.
He’s underweight, clearly weakened. I’m worried whatever escape the others have planned might be too much for him to manage, but the Master straightens and places his hands together in a Venthrothian sign of readiness. “I will follow your lead.”
The alarm bells are still blaring as we dart out of the prison, up a hallway, and through a …
well, what used to be a door. When Lament says they blew a path, he means, like, literally blew a path.
There’s a gaping hole in the first wall, and the second, and the third, like a giant punched its fist straight through the spaceship, and to hell with any obstacles.
“I thought you said The Parallax was indestructible,” I comment as we run.
“It would have been,” Avi replies, keeping pace easily despite her short legs, “until Lament threatened to spoil the season eight finale of Hippie Days if I didn’t get him onto this ship.
Which—rude,” she hisses at him. Lament throws her a flat look without breaking stride.
She smirks. “I combined muster juice with supernova nitrate.”
I duck under a tangle of broken wires hanging from yet another blasted wall, glancing back at Master Ira (he’s breathing like it hurts, but nonetheless keeping up) as we follow Lament around a corner. “I don’t know what that means.”
“They’re Class X explosives.” We pass a frozen guard—Avi leapfrogs over his back. “They can’t be combined, or the force of the ensuing detonation will create a black hole.”
“But”—around another corner, past a trio of more paralyzed guards—“I don’t see any black holes?”
Avi’s smile is just a tad too enthused. “Yet.”
“What do you—?”
“The Time Stopper,” Youvu Hum offers, her sleek braid bouncing against her back, “is currently working in more ways than one.”
I blink. “The fuck?”
“We have about ten minutes,” Avi says merrily, “before the Time Stopper wears off, the explosion finishes exploding, and this place is sucked into oblivion.”
I turn panicked eyes on Lament. “Is she serious?”
But all Lament says is, “Prepare to jump.”
I look down the hallway. Hovering outside a final hole in the exterior wall of The Parallax is Moon Dancer.
Beside her, I see both Vera’s split-wing and The Bargainer, each ready and waiting for us to launch inside.
We must still be within the protective bounds of The Parallax’s pressure bubble, which explains how we’re not all currently being sucked through that opening into space.
Not that it really brings any relief. We’re in so much shit, I can’t even feel afraid.
Like my brain doesn’t have the bandwidth to process any more terror.
It doesn’t seem possible that there is a literal black hole waiting to devour us in …
How many minutes did Avi say?
I see it then. The korathamite wall of The Parallax looks kind of … warped. And it’s … well, it’s not glowing, exactly, but the space around the blasted opening has a distinctive shimmer, like heat over a fire.
Like two combustible elements, frozen midway through a detonation.
Toph thrusts open a side door on The Bargainer, using his substantial size to bridge the gap between the two ships.
He reaches an unquestioning hand to haul Master Ira in first, then Youvu Hum.
Avi throws herself into Vera’s Sky Runner while I scramble for Moon Dancer, glancing back to see a throng of guards appearing at the mouth of the corridor.
Lament notices them, too, and freezes.
“Lament,” I snap.
He comes back to himself, jumping after me into Moon Dancer’s cockpit, clicking buttons so fast his hands are a blur. His eyes lock on mine. “Ready?”
Through the jagged opening in The Parallax, I watch the guards pulling out a mix of weapons (ray guns, stunners, shifters) as they swarm closer.
I raise my own gun, shooting over their heads to make them duck.
Vera splits off first in the Sky Runner, followed closely by The Bargainer.
I let off another blast of my ray gun and tell Lament, “Just go.”
He goes, sealing the cockpit and blasting Moon Dancer into space with enough acceleration to jolt my esophagus into my stomach.
I cough, squeezing the muscles in my legs to stop the blood from draining out of my head.
The nausea recedes just in time for me to see both the Sky Runner and The Bargainer switch into hyperspeed.
They vanish simultaneously in a burst of white light, jetting out of range of the impending black hole, the guards, and Doc Min.
There’s barely any time for me to feel relieved, because now it’s our turn. I brace—hands on my harness, legs still squeezed, one deep inhale—for Lament to throw us into hyperspeed and follow their lead.
Only, he doesn’t.
“Lament?”
I turn around in my seat. Lament’s face is blank. Perfectly expressionless. He says, “Moon Dancer’s hyperspeed isn’t working.”
My lungs shrink. “Um.”
“I don’t understand.” He’s pressing a flat yellow button on his control panel, first in steady, even attempts, then faster, more frantically. “This doesn’t—it worked fine yesterday. I checked. The systems, the controls, I checked—”
“I believe you,” I assure him, even as adrenaline hits my system. If Moon Dancer’s hyperspeed doesn’t work, we’ll never make it out of range before Avi’s explosives detonate and we’re sucked into a black hole. I take a deep inhale. “Okay, look, I’m sure it’s just…” I trail off.
Lament’s attention is still on the broken hyperspeed button. “What?”
I clear my throat. “I think we may have a slight complication.”
“What kind of—?” He looks up. Sees what I’m seeing. “Oh.”
Behind us, emerging from The Parallax like a band of angry hornets, are six enemy fighter craft. They’re all identically silver, with wings that circle halo-like around their bodies and guns affixed to their fronts.
I wonder if this is divine punishment. Maybe I was a villain in a past life. Stole candy from innocent children.
“Boys?” Vera’s voice rings from my headset, which has fallen into the footwell. I pull the set over my ears and hear her ask, “Where are you? I thought you were right behind us.”
“Hyperspeed is broken,” Lament answers shortly, “and we have a flock of Buzzards heading our way.”
Vera’s reply is immediate. “I’ll come back.”
“No.” Lament closes his eyes. Opens them. “That won’t help. Your Sky Runner isn’t equipped for battle, and the Time Stopper…” He doesn’t finish the thought. Just swallows hard and meets my eye.