I threw myself to the side, taking cover behind the large console. Wheezing and choking down air, the Overseer rolled in the other direction.
Merrick lifted a huge table and threw it at the incoming soldiers. Sanaa grabbed me and carried me under her arm as she dodged bullets. Merrick spun and followed.
I screamed. I wasn’t done! Was there an antidote?
We barreled into the living quarters. Sanaa swung around and closed the doors. She blew the lock with a punch that went halfway through the wall, but I doubted even that would stop super soldiers.
She tossed me to my feet. I landed running, and we crossed rooms that hadn’t changed in decades. Despite the overall drabness, I could see Mom’s touch everywhere, making plain things special. That was my mother. Subversive. A survivor. She’d walked the same bridge as my father.
We reached the master bedroom. Shade stood at the door to the air lock, tense, armed, and looking ready to come back for me. His eyes widened, relief flaring in them. “Come on!” He waved us toward the tunnel.
“You got it open.” I pushed him ahead of me and followed him down the accordion-like passageway. It was a long one, twenty-five feet maybe. I’d thought I’d need my lock magic, but someone had guessed the password.
“It wasn’t hard. ‘Caitrin’ was the code. The man’s obsessed. The others are already on board. Jax is powering up the ship. It turned on to ‘Caitrin’ also.”
I shuddered. My poor mother.
Shouts reached us from somewhere in the living quarters. Goons were catching up to us. We raced onto the escape cruiser. It wasn’t the one I remembered, although it was similar and could probably house a dozen people. We entered through an antechamber stocked with weapons, several of which I recognized.
“Jax!” Shade hollered into the main body of the ship. “They’re on!”
The ship hummed as Jax kicked up the power. Sanaa raced down the hallway and disappeared, but Merrick stumbled. Shade grabbed him. A fat bead of blood fell toward the metal floor between them. My eyes tracked it, seeing details that seemed impossible. Too red. Too slow. Too shattered on impact. The globule hit the floor like a thunderclap, and I stumbled backward.
My heart pounded. I squeezed the sore spot on my thigh where the Overseer injected me, shook my head, and forced away the tunnel vision. My senses widened, and I whipped back into action.
Shelves. Loaded with weapons. I bypassed the guns, pulled a Keeler hand bomb from the rack on the wall, and flicked on the detonator. I turned back to the passageway, counting down the seconds before the weapon exploded.
As the first goons stepped into view, I launched the bomb down the air-lock tunnel. This wasn’t a blinding flash and concussive blast designed for crowd control. This was deadly fire. This was holes in walls with only the vacuum of space outside. This was body parts to pick up, not bodies.
With ice in my veins, I slapped my palm down on the door control. The panels whooshed shut, cutting us off just before the bomb detonated.
We rattled, and I flattened my hand against the wall for balance. Jax would know the second I sealed the ship. The information would flash across the pilot’s console.
We moved almost instantly, banking hard to the side. I scrambled to stay upright. Shade and Merrick slammed into a rack of weapons. Shade winced. Merrick hissed, his pain obvious. Even from inside the ship, the rip of metal was deafening as we tore ourselves from the vacuum seal instead of closing off the tunnel and releasing it. Jax accelerated fast, zooming away from the starbase. He’d jump as soon as he set the coordinates.
Sanaa rounded the corner again at a sprint, looking a little wild until she spotted Merrick. She took him from Shade, lifting him in her arms as though the biggest man I’d ever seen weighed nothing. Merrick looked at her, sheer incredulity flashing across his face before his head lolled, and he lost consciousness.
Next to them, Shade straightened and pulled off the Bridgebane mask, his temporarily blue eyes guarded as he watched me from across the antechamber of the getaway ship. Sanaa did the same, her dark gaze questioning.
I’d just crossed a line. We could have escaped without those deaths. I could have closed the air lock.
Whatever twisted in my chest wasn’t exactly regret. It felt more like loss, mourning for a part of myself I could never get back.
Daraja, Sanaa had called me from the day we met. My bridge was different from hers, from Nathaniel Bridgebane’s, and Caitrin Bishop’s. I didn’t play two sides or pretend, but I had one foot in murder now and one foot in my own good reasons for it. The name fit.
I’d just left a hole in Starbase 12.
The vacuum of space was claiming goons, alive and dead.
Would tomorrow dawn better for it? I hope so.
I lifted my chin and looked back at Shade and Sanaa. “With any luck, the Dark is sucking out the Galactic Overseer right now and turning him into a chunk of frozen space trash.”
Because he was garbage. I was done letting that man have power over me. I refused to take the blame any longer for the things he’d pinned on me, or the things I’d pinned on myself because of him. I didn’t make that psychopath hunt down A1 blood, or start the GIN Project, or obliterate the Fold. I didn’t help him find a way to destroy life as we know it, or maybe get a second chance to destroy Mom’s.
I did, however, try to shoot him, strangle him, and hopefully end his life with that Keeler blast. And I was fine with that.
Epilogue
SHADE
I stood behind Tess, holding her around the waist and watching the rocky peaks get closer through the clear panel as Jax steered the Overseer’s escape cruiser toward New Denver. She’d finally stopped shaking. The long jump to Earth without sitting down or strapping in was an experience neither of us wanted to repeat. We’d both collapsed in the antechamber, our hands clasped. When we came out of warp speed, we picked ourselves up and joined the others, finding Mwende still wrapped protectively around Merrick.
Now, Merrick lay on the floor of the bridge, Shiori, Mwende, and Ahern each applying pressure to a different gunshot wound. Despite three bullet holes, he was holding up okay. He kept saying he’d been through worse, but when Mwende finally rolled her eyes, said, “Fine, then,” and got up to leave him, he groaned low and long, getting her to come back to him with a worried frown.
“It’s a shame we can’t stay.” I breathed against the back of Tess’s head, soaking in her scent, her solidness, her. She was still with me. Terror had a new face for me—Tess in a battle for her life without me. It would never happen again, no matter what she wanted or thought was best.
“Hmm?” She sounded tired. The adrenaline drop was hard on everyone.
“Now that we’re here, I kind of want to explore Earth.” These mountains looked like they held secrets. We’d passed lakes the size of oceans. There was so much nothing, but instead of feeling lonely and intimidating, it burst with potential. A clean slate. New Denver was tiny, hardly a speck on the horizon. Staying and helping to build it up held sudden appeal. Maybe it was the engineer in me. Or maybe it was just the man who wanted to make something.