Kyon’s roar from above has my eyes on the ceiling once more. He’s having a hard time cutting through the thick metal. His frustration is clear as he shouts, “Kricket! If you make me chase you again, I will kill him!”
The blood drains from my face. My eyes look to Trey.
“Please come here,” Trey asks, holding his hand out to me.
I take it and he tugs me to him. Turning me around to face away from him, a blue glowing belt of the jet pack wraps around my waist and shoulders, securing me in front of him.
In my ear, Trey murmurs, “According to my guidance systems, the detention center is fifty stories below us in the arc of the ship. Are you ready?” He powers up the jet pack on his back. My feet leave the ground as we hover for a moment in the air. “Do you still want to do this?”
“Yes,” I state without a hint of doubt.
His whispering voice is soft upon the shell of my ear, “If this doesn’t work out for us, Kricket, know that I’ve loved you from the moment I held you in my arms on Ethar, and every moment in between. I will love you even after my final breath.”
Warmth travels through my veins until I realize he’s making sure to say good-bye to me. My heart recoils with a savage ache. Lifting my hand, I cup Trey’s cheek, feeling the light stubble on it. As I turn my lips to his ear, I murmur, “Know that if this doesn’t work out, your job is to stay alive until I can bend time and manipulate the future to bring you back to me.”
My fingers feel his smile as he murmurs, “And just when I thought I couldn’t love you more . . .” Taking my fingers from his cheek, he kisses them before wrapping his arm around my waist.
We rocket from between the doors of the lift, entering into an open area several stories high. There are tiers of every type of hover vehicle here, waiting to be claimed. Trey takes a winding tunnel supported by concrete columns; my hair flies behind me and I lose my stomach. Every sound is muted except the beat of my heart. Terrified that we’ll crash into something—that we won’t make it—I soon forget my nervousness about jet-pack travel when the greater threat, in the form of another bomb, hits the Ship of Skye. Around me, the walls tremble; pieces of the ceiling crumble away, covering my hair with a fine powder as the hovercars shift.
From behind us, a laser shot obliterates a support column in front of us. Rock dust spews out at us, choking our air. Avoiding a falling pillar shattered by the pursuing Alameeda, we swipe the wall flanking us. We ricochet. Twisting, Trey maneuvers us so that the jet pack skims the ground. As we fly upside down on our backs, Kyon is able to fly above us. He dives down, trying to release the belt of my harness. I kick up at him to make it harder for him to get me, but my bare feet don’t make much of an impression on him.
Trey waits until the last possible moment to make a sharp turn, leaving Kyon raging in the wrong direction. We branch off into a different corridor. The severe angle of our turn causes us to bounce against the wall. Ricocheting, he fights to keeps us from crashing into the adjacent wall. We flip around once more so that I’m again beneath him. When we pass the next rows of columns in the tunnel, Trey aims his stolen Alameeda weapon, shooting at the stone supports. The ceiling above us begins to collapse, bringing down debris and mortar, blocking the path behind us—cutting off the Alameeda Strikers following us. We take several more turns in an attempt to lose Kyon and the Alameeda soldiers for good, angling toward an enormous pillar in the parking garage that’s wreathed by guardrails.
“Clutch yourself,” Trey growls in my ear.
While I try to figure out what he means by that, I look for something to hang on to, but there’s nothing but air between my fingers. We swoop over the guardrail so fast it seems inevitable that we’ll hit the vertical support column rapidly approaching. I put up my hands to shield my face, even though I know it’ll do no good.
At the last possible second, a warning signal on the jet pack beeps loudly: dee dee dee, dee dee dee. It activates some sort of preservation protocol in the engine, cutting the power to the forward thruster. The jet-pack engine flips the thruster from forward to reverse. We slow up. Trey kills the power completely and we drop, abruptly changing direction. Falling headfirst through the open-air gap between where the floor ends and the support column begins, I do, indeed, clutch myself; my arms crisscross in front of me, circling my waist. The power to the pack is reengaged, and we plummet toward the belly of the ship at a breakneck pace.
We plunge several stories, and the light dims the farther down we fly. When we reach a junction illuminated by white fluorescent lights, we turn like gulls in the wind, soaring through a long tunnel. We travel until our shadows settle on large chamber doors ahead of us; thick and steel, they scream all of the reasons to stay away.
Touching down on a platform in front of the dull-hued doors, the jet-pack engine ceases firing. The whine of sirens is muffled here, several stories below the surface of the ship. The flashing of amber lights is all too apparent, though, turning our pale faces from ghostly to sickly in intermittent intervals. A fem-bot voice advises, “All nonessential Detention Center personnel are ordered to Code Amber stations at the surface of Skye. Defensive protocol: Vector Six. All nonessential Detention Center personnel—”
Trey releases me from the harness; it disappears into the jet pack along with his restraint. He shrugs off the jet pack, and it clatters to the deck with a loud noise. “Most of the Detention Center personnel are being ordered to battle stations,” he whispers as he clutches my upper arms to steady me. “They’ll be operating with a skeleton crew.”
“That’s good for us,” I murmur.
A wary scowl crosses his lips. “You’re my prisoner. Do you think you can sell it?” He subtly nods his head in the direction of the imposing doors, and then he shakes me roughly. It’s not painful, only disorienting, as I lose my feet and stumble while he holds me up.
When he pulls me almost nose to nose to him with his hand balled in the front of my jacket, I glare at him in mock anger and murmur, “We don’t even need a pencil to draw them in, honey.”
“I love you,” he says under his breath.
He yanks me into the pools of spotlights in front of the edifice. The light becomes brighter, causing me to shield my eyes. The portal in front of us becomes translucent, revealing a checkpoint with mounted guns and an admissions area manned by only two worried-looking Brigadets. “State your business,” a voice pipes through the communicator located above the trigger of the doors. A heavily armed Brigadet approaches the barrier between us. Trey lets go of the front of my jacket. He straightens his Brigadet uniform shirt.
“Let us in. I’ve located your escaped prisoner.” He gestures to me, swiping my hair farther away from the already fallen cowl of my red cloak. Pale strands of it spill forward to drape my shoulders, exposing my Alameeda heritage to them. “I’m being pursued by Alameeda Strikers.” He points his thumb over his shoulder at the empty tunnel behind us. “They’re attempting to recover their spy. I’ve been charged to remand her back to your custody,” he lies, trying to hide the strain in his voice from them.