“We need to lose them,” Sam says.
Even if they don’t catch us, if we can’t get rid of them before we reach the Pipeline, they’ll follow us underground. We’ll lead them straight to the lower sectors. The underground cities didn’t exist the last time we faced the Mardenites in combat, so those sectors are our biggest advantage right now, our strongest defense. We need to hold that advantage as long as possible; we need to keep the raiders from discovering the tunnel entrance.
Up in the cockpit, a look passes between Beechy and Skylar, a silent, uneasy conversation.
“Should we?” Skylar asks.
“Might as well give it a shot,” Beechy says, unbuckling.
The two of them quickly switch seats, and Skylar takes over the main flight controls. She inhales a deep breath and focuses, switching on her ear-comm speaker again. “Pilots, do you copy?”
The static is getting worse. We’re losing the radio signal again; there’s too much interference with the raiders closing in. But the pilots’ voices still come through, one after another, saying they copy.
“We’re gonna pull a Mad Jack and lose these bastards,” Skylar says. “Birds one and two, on my left. Three, four, five, stay on my right. On my mark.” She grabs hold of the control clutch.
I double-check my seat belt is secure around my waist and shoulders. I have no idea what a “Mad Jack” is, but it sounds like the flight could get rough. My gun is digging into my stomach, so I tuck it into the actual holster.
“Now!” Skylar says.
I barely have time to grab my armrests again before the hovercraft swerves to the left. The force of gravity presses me back against my seat. Out the window, a mountain peak comes into view through the snow and the fog. Skylar rolls our ship farther to the left, taking us around the other side of the peak. For an instant I see one of the X-wings with a red light flashing on its right wing, but then it falls behind us again.
As we speed past the peak, Skylar abruptly turns the hovercraft in the other direction. My right arm bangs against my seat, and a sharp pain shoots through the muscle beneath the bandage. I clench my teeth, trying to ignore it.
Bright moonlight peeks through the falling snow. I can glimpse the full moon beyond a mountain ahead of us, rising higher in the sky. Before it, the acid shield shimmers in the darkness. But I don’t see any of the Mardenite battle stations; they must’ve passed out of sight in their orbit.
Skylar tilts the nose of our hovercraft toward the ground, and we speed for a low pass between the mountains ahead of us. I think we’re circling back in the direction we came from. I wish I could see more of the flight panels up in the cockpit, particularly the radar screen. Then I’d have a better idea where the raider swarm is in relation to our ships, and whether or not we’re losing them.
This maneuver needs to work. Right now they only have seven ships to take on our five, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have more nearby. There were at least twenty in the swarm we saw heading for these mountains earlier tonight. And we have no way to call for backup, no one close by to save us.
I’m not ready to die tonight. I wouldn’t have a chance to tell Logan how sorry I am for hurting him while I was under the serum’s control. I’d never be able to hug him again, or kiss him again, or tell him I love him.
Maybe I should feel lucky we found our way back to each other for a short time. Months ago, after I was picked for Extraction, I never expected to see him again. I feared he’d be replaced long before I could find a way back to the Surface. But we beat the odds, and we had a week in the safe confines of the Alliance compound to wake up beside each other every morning and know the comfort of a life that had only ever been a dream. Still, it wasn’t enough. We deserve more days; we deserve more weeks; we deserve more years than we’ve had.
The hovercraft evens out again and I catch my breath. Though I can’t forgive Skylar for betraying the Alliance, I can’t deny she can fly the hell out of a ship.
“How are we looking?” she asks, out of breath.
“They’re still on our tail,” Beechy says heavily. “And more are coming. They must’ve signaled the rest of the swarm.”
Skylar curses loudly.
I squeeze my eyes shut. It’s going to be okay. We’ll fight them if we have to. We’ll find a way to take them down.
“Lieutenant Sam, what are your orders?” Beechy asks.
Sam has stopped pacing in the cockpit. He stands completely immobile, paralyzed with fear. I’ve never seen his face so pale.
“Sir?” Skylar says.
“They’re going to catch us,” Sam murmurs. “We’re all going to die.”
Dean makes a low grunt of annoyance and pushes past Sam to get closer to the control screens, swiftly taking over command. “How far is it to the Pipeline?”
“Thirty miles,” Skylar says.
“So all we need to do is outrun them a few more minutes. Can you make us go any faster?”
“I’m giving her all I’ve got,” Skylar says through clenched teeth. “I can’t do anything more from the cockpit.”
“Fiona,” Beechy says. He swivels his head in our direction.
Fiona jerks her head up. “Yes?”
“I need you to go down to the engine room and boost our power to full velocity.” His jaw is hard, his voice breathless with worry.
“I’m on it.” Fiona gets to her feet. “Clementine, come with me.”
I glance back at Beechy, who nods. “Go.”
I unbuckle and hurry after her, glad I can finally do something to help. Hoping we haven’t already run out of time.
* * *
We access the engine room through a door in the cargo bay, near the infirmary. Down a short set of steps, we move through another door and the loud hiss of the ventilation system fills my ears.
I’ve been in an engine room before, on the spaceship Beechy and I flew to the moon the day we destroyed the generator that used to bleed acid into Kiel’s atmosphere. But this room is much bigger. A rail separates us from the fuel tanks and a huge cylindrical shape that must be the engine, surrounded by a mess of metal tubing and parts I can’t identify. The wall to our right is covered in pressure gauges, buttons, and panels, while the left-hand side of the room has two passenger seats and a cabinet full of mechanical tools.
Fiona hurries over to the cabinet and rummages inside for the tools we need. A tremor runs through the floor, and I grab on to the engine rail. Hopefully that was just turbulence, not a blast hitting the hovercraft.
“How can I help?” I ask.
“We need to cut the hydraulics,” she says. “Open the red panel on the wall, beneath the fuel-pressure gauge.”
Finding the pressure gauge and the red panel is easy enough. But when I lift the panel cover, I’m faced with a tangle of wires—blacks and reds and yellows crisscrossing each other. Nothing I can make sense of, since I know hardly anything about engineering.
“What now?”
Fiona appears beside me and shoves a pair of wire cutters into my hand. “Cut the thickest black wire where it connects to a red one.”
She leaves me, slipping under the rail and disappearing around the far side of the engine. I bite my lip, leaning into the tangle of wires to find what she’s referring to. There, a black wire that’s definitely thicker than the rest, and it merges with a red one before it runs into the wall.
Before I can second-guess myself, I snip the end of the wire with the cutters. Nothing seems to happen. Only the hum of the vents grows louder.
“Good,” Fiona says, reappearing at my side. “Now we just need to—”
Another tremor runs through the ship, and a loud beeping sound comes from the wall next to me. One of the bigger screens flashes the bright red words:
HULL DAMAGE
Almost immediately, the walls shudder from another hit. Every inch of my body stiffens with terror. The raiders have caught up to us.
There’s a crackle in my ear-comm. The static is getting worse again—something aboard the raiders must be causing more interference. Beechy’s voice cuts in and out, sounding frantic: “Clem—we’re taking fire—get out of there.”
“We’re almost finished,” Fiona says, her voice shaky. “We need two more minutes.”
If Beechy heard us, his answer doesn’t come through; there’s too much static. I switch off the ear-comm so I won’t go crazy.
“What’s left to do?” I ask.
Fiona tosses me a wrench. “Unscrew the panel on the engine cover and press the red button underneath.”
I spin around, find the panel on the engine, and work the wrench on the screws as quickly as I can. Come on, come on. We have to finish this, or we’re dead.
The hovercraft shakes again as I lift open the panel and press the red button. “Done.”
“Okay,” Fiona says, frantically tapping something into one of the wall screens. “One last thing.”
Before she can give me any more instructions, there’s a horrible grinding sound like a huge chunk of metal is splitting in two. I barely have time to inhale before the wall behind the engine blasts apart.
The force of the explosion sends me crashing back into the opposite wall. Smoke and bits of tubing and metal parts fly in the same direction. Shards catch in the fabric of my safety suit, and something hard slams into my helmet.
I don’t black out, not all the way. But it takes several moments for everything to come back into focus.
My ears are ringing, and I can feel blood trickling out of my left one. A trail of smoke rises from the engine cover. Hail swirls into the room through the small hole in the wall behind the engine, where the hovercraft was hit. Beyond the icy rain, trees on the side of a mountain below us rush past in a blur. We’re losing altitude fast and picking up speed when we should be decelerating. Skylar must’ve lost control of the ship. We were hit too hard.
The hovercraft is going to crash.
A few feet away from me, Fiona staggers to her feet, wind whipping at her safety suit. She’s steadying herself on the rail with one hand, while using her other to turn a lever on the wall. There’s another set of words flashing on the beeping screen above her head:
ENGINE DAMAGE
As if we couldn’t already tell.
“We need to strap ourselves in,” I say.
“Hold on,” Fiona says.
I don’t know what she’s doing, but I don’t have time to argue with her. I need to get to one of the passenger seats on the other side of the room.
I push myself off the floor, wincing from the tendrils of pain shooting through my body. I lose my balance and stumble into the engine rail. The floor is shaking, and the wind blowing through the hole in the wall threatens to drag me outside.
Somehow, I make it across the room. I heave myself onto one of the passenger seats and click the safety strap into place. Through the hole in the wall, I can see a forest-covered hillside growing bigger ahead of the ship. And we aren’t veering out of its way.
“Fiona!” I cry.
She turns and looks at me, across the room. “I was trying to slow us down. I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
The hillside is straight ahead of us. Fiona doesn’t have time to strap in.
I open my mouth to scream at her to hold on to something. But it’s too late.
The hillside rises toward us through the blur of rain and darkness. There’s a vicious bump as we slam into the ground, and my head jerks back against my seat. I’d be flying if not for my seat belt.
There’s a shrieking sound of metal, of more machinery being ripped apart. My scream is lost amid the noise. It feels like we’re still moving, skidding across the hilltop. I don’t know how long it goes on—could be seconds or hours. I’m bracing myself in my seat as hard as I can and begging it all to be over.
At last, the quaking stops and the engine room goes dark.