Jubilee exhales audibly, raking her fingers through her hair. “We’ll signal Mori—an ally—as soon as we find a working radio. She and her guys will come get you.”

“I won’t be going anywhere,” Sanjana replies, with a shaky smile. “Just make sure you get there in time. Make it count.”

“We will.”

“And then?” There’s an apology in her gaze for asking the question, but she doesn’t waver. “When you reach the rift—when you reach Lilac—what then?”

Jubilee’s gaze creeps across toward Flynn, and the air fills with the words no one wants to say aloud. Eventually, I’m the one who draws breath. “We’ve got a day to figure out some other way. If by the time we reach the Daedalus we still don’t…” I let that breath out, shaky. “Then we destroy the conduit.”

The gray world is full of anger and pain, the two sides of this war both so colored by hatred that each is the same shade of darkness as the other. They are so similar, longing for peace, for justice, for quiet, and yet they kill each other as though they seek death, not life.

As our keeper forces us to greater and greater acts of destruction, we…I…do what little I can to find balance. I cannot stop a father from strapping explosives to his chest, but I can reach inside the green-eyed boy and plant the idea to move just far away enough that the blast will not kill him. I cannot shield the girl with the dimpled smile from the grief of losing her father, but I can help her sleep, help her decide to keep breathing each day.

And I cannot save the girl with the beautiful dreams, the girl I once knew on another world, in another life, from all that is to come. But I can keep her safe from the others. And I can find faith in her dreams.

I GRAB THE BROKEN LIP of a chunk of concrete, overtired muscles protesting all the way from my knuckles to my shoulders as I haul myself up, scrambling for purchase before I hook a leg over the edge and begin the controlled slide down.

I’ve seen disasters on the lower levels before, building collapses or fires threatening to spread through a whole quarter, but those times always brought out the best in people: whole families banding together to rescue trapped strangers, neighbors forming bucket chains to fight the fires. This is a different world, desolation as far as the eye can see, whole sectors of brightly lit, bustling Corinth simply wiped from existence. This world isn’t safe, and somewhere out there in it, Tarver’s alone.

He can’t have had much of a head start, no more than an hour, before I saw he was gone, plus the extra quarter hour it took me to rig my lapscreen to emit the shield frequency to protect me from Lilac. I’m not even sure how long it’ll work. I have to catch up with him, and fast.

I can guess at which direction he’s moving—most of my options are blocked, so I’m hoping he’s taking the path of least resistance, the one that will get him to LaRoux Headquarters as quickly as possible. My surroundings are mostly silent; emergency sirens occasionally wail in the distance, but no more firefighting drones zip overhead. Every so often, sections of buildings collapse with no warning, the crashes earsplitting, the echoes rumbling across the landscape.

Huge chunks of debris ripped through this block and the next when the ship fell, shearing straight through the buildings, turning everything above head height to rubble—on the ground floors, some of the doorways are still intact, offering glimpses inside, their upper stories spilling out into the street. They were apartments and offices, mostly, and clothes lie strewn across broken tables and chairs, electronics turned to so much recyc and wiring. Then there are the bundles I thought at first were clothes—the crumpled bodies, silent where they fell.

I pause to adjust my pack, then make my way through the broken lower level of a law firm, reception desks and ornamental plants crushed beneath piles of rubble. It’s half-dark in here, and I place my feet carefully to keep my footfalls silent, avoid the telltale crunch of debris. I can see light on the far side, and I’m hoping there’s an open section of road if I can get across there.

I climb over a fallen girder blocking a doorway, easing my head through the gap to check what’s on the other side. In a blur of movement, something comes swinging toward me. I duck, my torso hitting the girder and knocking the wind out of me. The iron bar—because that’s what it is—smashes against the doorframe with a clang. I throw myself back into the room I came from, scrambling across the rubble with no thought for the noise, my blood roaring in my ears, my body alive with electricity.

There’s a figure in the doorway, vaulting the girder to come after me in one smooth movement, lifting the bar again. I roll to the side, jamming myself under a broken desk that will give me a moment’s shelter, kicking at the far side of it to smash an exit point. I’m too broad for it, but I drive one boot into the splintered desk over and over, desperately trying to escape before the iron bar comes swinging down again.

Except it doesn’t.

“Gideon?” Tarver’s crouching beside the desk, the bar in one hand. “What the hell are you doing? I nearly killed you.”

“I noticed,” I murmur, letting my head drop back to hit the rubble beneath me with a thump.

“Quick, we made too much noise.” He’s instantly businesslike, offering me a hand to haul me out from under the desk. “They’ll be here in a minute.”

I don’t have to ask who. Instead, I follow him as he climbs up another girder, grabbing for a beam across the ceiling and almost silently scrambling until he’s above eye level, sitting on a broken ledge. I climb onto his perch, and he lifts a finger to his lips, turning his gaze down. Just a few seconds later, the first of the husks come moving through the space we left, slowly searching for whatever made the noise.

We sit jammed in place, side by side, for a full ten minutes as they move through the building. There must be a hundred of them, methodically combing through wreckage and climbing past each other. They’re not efficient or particularly creative, but they’re relentless. And as if I need a reminder of the fragility of our situation, my temporary lapscreen shield dies as we sit there, leaving me dependent on Tarver’s once more. Only once the last has been gone for a couple of minutes does Tarver speak in a low voice. “What are you doing here?”

“What the hell do you think I’m doing here, Merendsen? I heard there was a sudden drop in property prices in this area, I wanted to check out some places I saw advertised.” I snort. “I’m here to help.”

“You’re here to help me.” His look is flat, disbelieving. Face smudged with dirt, gaze tired, he couldn’t be further from the guy I saw climb onto the dais alongside Lilac in the ballroom of the Daedalus. I have to find a way in, and quickly, or I’ll lose him all over again. What would Sofia do?

And in the instant I ask the question, I know the answer. She’d tell the truth. Why is it that I’m so sure of that, yet I can’t trust that she’s ever told me the truth? I draw a slow breath. “It’s not for you. I’m here to help Lilac. And Simon. This is what he would have wanted for her, and I’ve realized that she never changed at all from the girl I knew as a kid. I needed people to blame, and she was one of them, but we should have been grieving for Simon together. This is what he would have wanted, and I’m the one that’s left to do it.”