We watch, from behind the veil between worlds, piecing together what the others have found. The children are growing older, each choice they make drawing them closer together, binding their fates.

Our kin on the gray world cannot hear us, but we can hear them. They are torn between despair and hope, bringing us no closer to understanding these creatures. The others, held captive in the place where the thin spot first appeared, grow weak and tired. No one has come, either to end them or to release them, in many years.

There is one we can no longer see, no longer hear—the blue-eyed man has locked it away so tightly we feel only the dimmest sense that it still exists.

Perhaps it will find us the answers we seek.

THE FLOOR SHUDDERS BENEATH MY feet, and I stumble back from Sofia, still shouting her name. As she sways, dazed, I grab for her good hand to pull her upright.

Cormac looks back as he, Merendsen, and Jubilee run past us, and I wave him on, pointing at the corner where I’m praying the shuttles are docked. He dodges a falling banister that hits the deck in a shower of sparks, then shouts something unintelligible to the others.

With a shove I get Sofia moving, but she’s cradling her injured hand against her body, face deathly white. We tear across the open space of the engineering department, as I desperately try to keep watch for falling debris, and just as desperately try to pick a clear path through the twisted workstations, balconies, and gantries that litter our path. For a frantic moment I wonder if the hull’s even intact—but if it wasn’t, we’d know it. We’d be a little short of breath.

Flynn and Jubilee haul Tarver along ahead of us, and I’m clutching Sofia’s good hand in mine, trying to block out her cries of pain as I drag her around the smoking ruins of a console. At the last instant I spot the sparking wires snaking along the ground in our path, and I swing her away by the hand I’m holding, sending her stumbling once more.

She’s still barefoot, I realize—she had her shoes off to play the rumpled party guest if we were caught, and she must have dropped them during the shooting. Blood paints her right foot red, but I can’t stop to check if it’s serious. As we correct course and head for the docking corner once more the whole ship quivers, a shock wave running along the floor toward us. Sofia stumbles again, and I twist to catch her, but as her arms wrap around me I lose my footing, and next thing we’re down, slamming into the ground hard enough to drive the air from my lungs.

Is this what it was like for the fifty thousand who died on the Icarus?

I push to my elbows, dragging in a breath. The door to the docking port emerges from the gloom, the others nearly there, and just a few meters ahead of us.

Flynn looks back again, and his arm goes flying up, his mouth open in horror. I tip my head back in time to see one of the huge claws built to hold part of the engine in place coming straight at us. I scream my own warning, and Sofia and I work as one—she tucks in against me as I wrap my arms around her, rolling hard to my left so we slam against a fallen desk, lying on its side. The claw slams into it an instant later, but though it crumples, it’s just high enough that its edge protects us. The desk’s displays short-circuit, spewing sparks down on top of us.

As I glance up, the desk starts to bend in half, and I throw myself over Sofia, pressing her into the ground as the wreckage pins us into the gap between it and the floor, as if we’re in a tiny metal tent. She cries out, and I realize her injured hand is trapped between us—the whites of her eyes are showing, and I brace against the metal grille of the floor, shoving as hard as I can to try and shift the weight off of us.

Then two strong hands are grabbing me under my arms, and Jubilee’s there, gritting her teeth as she pulls us free of the pile. I keep Sofia pinned against me, and we scramble the last few meters on hands and knees, falling through the open shuttle door, where Flynn’s waiting to help us through it. Chase is running back to Merendsen’s side now, holding him back as the shuttle doors close—she’s talking in his ear, but I can’t hear what she’s saying over the noise of the Daedalus falling apart around us.

“Jubilee,” Flynn shouts from up by the cockpit, “unless you want me flying this thing, you’d better get up here!”

Jubilee spares one more agonized look for Merendsen, and then she’s scrambling free to run for the pilot’s seat. “Right.”

Sofia and I lie tangled together on the floor as the engine pitch rises, and with a soft rumble, the shuttle breaks free of the Daedalus. Sofia’s breath is coming in soft moans, but slowly she’s falling silent, and I’m pretty sure that’s not a good sign. When I force my eyes open, the first thing I see is her hand—blistered red from where her plas-pistol exploded, wounds weeping a glistening fluid.

When I lift my head to look past her, Merendsen’s bracing himself against a chair, eyes closed as Flynn works to pop his shoulder back in with a grunt of effort. Somehow, Cormac looks as put-together as he did at the start of the evening, tux still perfect, one curl falling down over his forehead. By contrast, Merendsen’s missing the jacket he tore up for Lilac, his white shirt bloodstained.

“Brace,” Jubilee shouts from the pilot’s seat, and Merendsen doesn’t even react—Flynn shoves him back against the wall, ignoring his wince of pain, and straps him into the seat. He grabs at another chair to steady himself, and I hunker down next to Sofia. I brace my feet against the bottom of a row of seats as the shuttle banks sharp left, tilting at a forty-five-degree angle, engine screaming a protest.

“There’re shuttles all over the place, and debris coming free,” Jubilee warns us. “Keep hold of something, I’m getting clear of the field.”

We all hold our places as she does, and I curl my arm over Sofia where we lie together, closing my eyes. I start to count silently, trying to distract myself as we swoop and dive, my stomach surging up into my throat, the frame of the shuttle itself quivering under the tension. I reach one hundred and twenty-seven before we level out, and Jubilee punches the autopilot commands, peeling out of her chair. “Should be safe to move,” she says, eyes going first to Flynn and then to Tarver, who’s staring now out his window, his whole body sagging in his harness.

“Please,” he’s whispering. “Please, no.”

As one we’re scrambling from our seats to the windows lining one side of the shuttle.

I can think of a dozen things he might have been pleading for, but one glance is enough to tell me that none of them are coming true.

The Daedalus is falling.

Sheering in on an angle, she’s disintegrating in the sky, sections the size of skyscrapers wrenching away from her hull to plummet toward the city below. She’s impossibly huge, and yet my mind keeps seeing a model ship breaking into pieces, as if the enormity of what’s happening can’t be real.

The first chunks of debris are hitting the city below, now, and all the breath leaves my body as I watch one cut a swath four blocks wide through the suburbs of Corinth, cartwheeling in to land and cutting through apartment complexes like a knife through butter. Flames bloom far below us, black clouds of smoke obscuring the ruins. The next piece falls, metal gleaming in the light for an instant before it’s buried in flame and smoke.

I’m watching thousands of people die, and when the bulk of the Daedalus hits, I’m going to watch hundreds of thousands of people die. I can say the words to myself, but though they circle in my head in a horrified chant, I can’t understand it. Corinth is invincible. Corinth is always there. Corinth will always be there.