He nods, watching the watermark image of the E-One on the windscreen. He points us directly at the fiery blaze billowing up from the base of the Ship of Skye, the result of one of their megaton bombs. Choking smoke pours around us as we fly through the destroyed and smoldering buildings. The E-One is on top of us again, ramming us from behind, making my teeth rattle. Trey slips between two buildings just before one topples into the other. The E-One has to veer up to avoid being crushed.
Trey’s jaw loosens its rigid line. “Giffen broke through to your cell when he awoke, pulling me through the shattered wall.”
“With his telekinesis?” I ask.
He nods in answer. “He demanded to know where you were.”
“What did you tell him?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“What did he do when you refused to talk?” I look him over; he’s full of scrapes and bruises. He’s wearing a Brigadet’s uniform shirt. I don’t want to know where he got it.
“I’m not sure. But when I regained consciousness, he was gone and there was a trail of dead Brigadets leading out of the detention center. I tried to free the other Cavars, but I was almost apprehended—I had to escape instead. I’ll have to go back for them.”
We’re rammed once more by the E-One behind us. The entire vehicle shakes, and it takes a Herculean effort by Trey with both his hands on the joystick to steady the troupedo once more.
“They’re going to kill us,” I whisper in fear.
Trey shakes his head. “They can blow us out of the sky whenever they want to, Kricket, but they won’t. Kyon’s obsessed with you. He can’t give you up.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
From behind us, an electro-pulse slams into our hovercar. All the readouts on the windscreen disappear along with the lights and everything else that was propelling the vehicle forward. We begin to free-fall because the vehicle is no longer operational.
“What just happened?” I whimper at Trey as the hovercar goes into a dive. I brace my hand against the door and ceiling, fear suffocating me.
“They just killed our power!” He scowls, pressing buttons and trying to get the engine to turn back on. The Ship of Skye’s landscape grows bigger and bigger with every second we plummet. I realize I’m in a coffin looking out as we sink toward the deck.
The back window of our hovercar explodes. Glass falls around me to the windscreen. Hooks lodge in the backseat, cutting the upholstery and embedding deep in the frame. Our descent is halted; we spin in a dizzying swing, dangling from the bottom of the E-One by grappling cables. As the hovercar pendulums, our image reflects in the glass of one of the buildings. If it were not for the harnesses holding me to the seat back, I’d be kissing the windshield as we face the ground below us.
We twist on the lines like caught fish. Trey looks around the cabin of the vehicle. “What do you want to risk to get away?” he asks.
I swallow past the bile corrupting my throat. “Everything,” I reply. “I’ll risk everything to stay with you.”
“I was hoping you were going to say that,” he breathes. He unhooks his seat belt. Holding the seat back, he leans over and kisses me. My heart contracts painfully in my chest. He grasps my hair, and rests his forehead to mine for just a moment. I want to wrap my arms around him, but he pulls away from me. Reaching behind his seat, he opens a console in the back. He extracts a canister from it the size and shape of a fire extinguisher and hands it to me. When he reaches back again, he retrieves another one from the console behind my seat. “Use that to break your window!” he orders me. I turn the canister around, butting it against the glass until the window shatters. He does the same with his. “Brace your snuffout between the arrowing and the bender,” he says.
“What?” I ask, giving him a beseeching look. “I don’t know what any of that is!”
“Here! Do this!” He demonstrates, lodging his canister between two car parts that look like a gill of a fish on the outside of the hovercar where I’d normally find an auxiliary mirror. “Make sure the nozzle is pointed out!” The urgency in his tone prompts me to turn my canister around as fast as I can.
The hooks holding our hovercar suspended above the ground retract, pulling us upward. The belly of the E-One opens, ready to swallow us up. Trey glances back through the rear window. “They’re pulling us in. We have to go now! When I tell you to, open the nozzle of the snuffout.” He indicates the control jet on the spout of the fire-extinguisher-like thing lodged on the side of the car. “Light the gas with this!” He digs in his pocket, coming out with something that looks like a lighter. He reaches back behind his seat again, finding someone’s gear. Rummaging around in the bag, he locates another lighterlike tool.
As he straightens in his seat, the lines suspending us in the air continue to retract, drawing us closer to the E-One. A bead of sweat rolls from Trey’s hairline and over the sharp angles of his cheek and jaw. He narrows his eyes in concentration. “On the count of two,” he says, his hand moves to the canister by its nozzle.
“Wait!” I gasp. “How do you light this?”
Trey moves his thumb away from the grip on his lighter, revealing a small groove in the side. “Press here,” he says.
I nod. “Got it,” I exhale, lighting mine for a moment before I let it extinguish. His hand moves to the canister outside his window once more. He waits for me to do the same with the one on my side of the hovercar. “On the count of two,” he says again, and I nod. “One . . .” The hovercar lurches upward closer to our enemy as we swing lazily in midair. “Two!” Trey shouts. I open the control jet; noxious gas spews out of the canisters in a steady stream. Lighting the gas, it erupts into flames that blast us sideways. He grabs my head and pulls me to him, covering me in the center of the hovercar.
Our hovercar rockets laterally; its roof crashes into the side of a building. The glass of the skyscape’s window rains around us. The hovercar lands on top of its roof, suspending us upside down in our seats. As the fireballs on either side of the hovercar continue to burn, it spins us around as if we’re on a flaming teacup ride in a traveling carnival.
The canisters finally run out of gas and the hovercar comes to a reluctant halt. Dizzily, I grasp the belts holding me in place upside down. From somewhere outside the vehicle, a fem-bot voice announces, “All active-duty personnel are ordered to report to assigned combat stations. Code Amber. Enemy infiltration is detected. All noncombat personnel are ordered to seek shelter in your designated areas—follow protocol Code Amber.”
CHAPTER 7
OVER THE EDGE
Trey is already out of his seat, reaching over to hit the release button on my seat belts. He catches me before I fall against the roof, and then he releases me to rest on it. Crawling out the side window, he pulls me with him just as the hovercar lurches backward, scraping across the shattered glass on the floor. The tension of the lines attached to the hovercar slacken for a moment, causing the car to pause. It sits idly, rocking back and forth before the lines attached to it lift upward once more, forcing them taut. Abruptly, the hovercar makes a horrific screeching sound; the metal rooftop drags over the floor as sparks fly everywhere. The vehicle lifts up, careening backward through the smashed window by the twisted lines from the E-One. It dangles outside for a moment before it floats upward and out of our line of sight.