I have to think like Wen.
It’s terrifyingly easy to slip into her mind-set. To imagine where her head was when we blew the skipship and jacked the wiretram and scrambled across the rooftops of Isla. It’s the animal instinct of flying a Viper and jumping from the Ruttin’ Hell and clawing through postwar Trost. It’s everywhere I’ve been before.
There’s a trade-off between silence and speed. I choose the latter. The crawl space fills with muffled thuds as I scramble along the support as fast as I can, my boots slipping in the dust. Go until I hit a wall. Go until I hit a corner. Ignore any other noise but my desperate breathing and the hammer of my heart. If I thought about this right, I should be exactly where I intended to end up. I brace against the support, stick my leg out, and bring the heel of my boot down hard.
The ceiling tile beneath it cracks neatly in half, and this time I remember to close my eyes against the cloud of dust and particleboard chunks that rises in its wake. I fight back my hesitation, swat once to clear the air, and roll sideways, trying not to take the rest of the ceiling with me as I drop through the rectangular hole.
I land hard on my feet right in front of the door to the stairwell. Checking over my shoulder would only slow me down—I grab the handle of the door and dive through. My legs pump furiously as I thunder down the stairs. I think I’m bleeding in a few places where I must have cut myself in the crawl space. My toes still throb from kicking the table.
All things I can deal with later. I spill out onto the first floor and kick through the emergency door, bursting into the open air.
The base is in an uproar. Cadets and officers scramble every which way, and the hangars are abuzz with ships jockeying for precious runway space. I flatten against the wall as a Beamer—not the Ruttin’ Hell, not our Beamer—swoops overhead, rotary thrusters screaming to lift the stubborn transport into the sky with every bit of urgency it possesses. Berr sys-Tosa’s sounded the retreat, and everyone’s rushing to get the hell off this forsaken planet.
Think like Wen. Think like Wen. I keep myself braced against the wall, trying to pick out the noise inside the detention center over the evacuation’s bedlam. There’s no way I don’t have pursuit on my tail. Footsteps sound in the stairwell. I tense, watching the door’s seams.
When it swings outward, I duck out from behind it and loop my arm around the soldier’s neck. He flails for his gun. I beat him to it, snatching the blaster off his belt. No time to check the settings—I flick the safety off, fire a shot into his hamstring, and hope for the best. He immediately slumps, and I leap back from him, pulling a face as the bolt’s charge tries to bridge into my body.
The door slams shut. I switch the gun’s settings and shoot the latch, melting it into place.
The soldier’s blaster goes in my belt. His hat on my head. His badge and identification in one of my jacket’s inner pockets. I slip out of Wen’s mentality long enough to mutter a quick apology and prop him up against the detention center’s wall. He’ll come around in a few minutes. He won’t be stranded.
At least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I take off running across the quad.
The loudspeakers on every building blast orders, but my flight-mode brain takes an extra second to translate them. I hear familiar locations, familiar designations, things that should be ingrained after two and a half years of training here, but my mind is sluggish, my thoughts scattered. I pause in the shadow of one of the main hangars, giving my head time to catch up to the rapid pounding of my heart.
If everything went right with the academy head, I was supposed to rendezvous with Gal and Wen on the south side of Trost once Wen had ditched the Umber pursuit. We said “once.” We probably should have accounted for “if.”
Now I have no idea where Gal and Wen have ended up. I fried the comm that could have contacted them, and even if I hadn’t, the patrol took it on the prairie. We never anticipated the governor’s surrender. Not when we were so certain we had gift-wrapped the Archon forces. Gal thought he could outmaneuver Berr sys-Tosa.
Now our plan is ashes at the system governor’s cowardly feet. Now Gal’s caught in the middle of a war I was supposed to end before it started. Now I don’t know how to reach him.
Get to Trost. Get to the rendezvous. Go where you’re expected and let the rest fall into place. Pretend like everything is going your way and don’t stop until the second someone tells you otherwise.
I pull my stolen cap low on my head, gritting my teeth. It’s easy to blend into the chaos of the base evacuation, but easier still to get lost in it. Somehow I need to pull a ticket off the base out of this mess. As a group of soldiers runs past me, I catch a familiar silhouette. It’s Rhodes—I’m sure of it, but he disappears around the corner before I can catch his eye.
My panic fizzles. Maybe there’s nothing that can help me in my pockets, but I’m back on my home turf. My resources are all around me. I have a gun on my belt and strength in my legs. I’m going to make it to the city. I’m going to find Gal. And gods of all systems, I’ll fly him out of this mess like I always do.
I straighten my spine and plunge headfirst into the academy’s turmoil.
* * *
—
Hanji cackles when she sees me lurking in the shadow of a skipship’s wing. “Nassun, you slippery son of a bitch,” she hisses, ducking under the ship’s hull as she drops the munitions crate she was supposed to be loading. “What the rut’re you doing back here? You picked a hell of a time. Haven’t you heard?”
“World’s ending,” I agree. “Listen, I need a favor.”
“And I need a hot bath and an explanation, but neither of us is getting what we want today, are we?”
I grimace, then jump when a hand slaps me squarely between the shoulder blades. “Ettian Nassun, you slippery—”
“Already said that, Rin,” Hanji snaps, cocking an eyebrow at the smaller cadet.
Rin glares up at me like I owe her an apology. I probably do. “Officers are going to notice we’ve skipped off,” she mutters, glancing around the skipship’s hull. “Kinda an all-hands-on-deck moment here. No thanks to you, I’m assuming?”
I shrug. “Been a busy couple of weeks. Look, about that favor—”
“Favor?” Rin asks, eyes narrowing. “What makes you think you get to waltz back in here and ask for favors?”
Unwittingly, my hand slips around the hilt of my stolen blaster. “I’m on a mission, okay? Things have gone sideways faster than Ollins on two shots of polish, and I need all the help I can get.”
Hanji smirks. “You float, Ettian. What’s your leverage?”