The communications console on the Light Blade lit up suddenly. Anna jumped up from her chair. Ravi’s voice filled the speakers. “Hey. We’re almost done. Heading back to the ship now.”

“Excellent,” Anna said. “Everything go okay?”

“Well as can be expected,” Ravi reported. “Considering a brief run-in with the Alphas. Pretty sure they’re still stuck down there.”

Anna grinned. Her crew would be back first, Stingers and spores in hand. Take that, Alphas, she thought. She ended the call with Ravi and opened up a call with the Cloud Leopard.

“What is it?” Dash snapped. “Ready to send Piper home?”

“My team is on their way back,” Anna informed him. “We’ll be ready for the Gamma jump soon. I’m just letting you know.”

“We won’t jump without Piper. Not in a million years,” Dash insisted, his angry face filling the screen. “We’ll live on Infinity. We’ll die on Infinity. And so will you.”

Anna laughed. “Never take up poker, Conroy. You’re no good at bluffing.”

She punched the button to end the call.

Now the monitor screen showed Piper, tied in the storage room belowdecks. Anna clicked it off entirely. The rest of the Omegas might have to know Piper was with them eventually, but for the moment, she’d keep the information to herself.

—

Chris ran into the Sawtooth den, dodging the small Saws. He ran straight toward Colonel Ramos, unstoppable. Chris shouted something to the colonel, who answered, “No, leave me!” over and over. Chris grabbed the reins and started leading Storm out of the chamber.

Thunder swiftly carried Carly and Gabriel across the cavern threshold, then flew in very tight circles overhead.

“Who’s got the crazy now?” Gabriel commented, watching Chris slice his way back toward the exit.

“We can’t stay in here,” Carly said, suddenly alarmed. “We have nothing to fight with.” Without swords, it would be insane to dismount. And there was really no place to fly. Thunder hovered in a holding pattern, softly whinnying in frustration.

Gabriel surveyed the scene from above, with a navigator’s eye. “Chris needs a path to the exit. We can’t do much, but we can keep the doorway clear.”

Carly nudged Thunder downward. He used his hooves to pound the head of a mother Saw, confusing her until she went inert.

“Now, Chris!” Gabriel called while Carly was busy at the reins.

Chris boarded Storm behind the colonel. The elder Weaver stirred, as if waking to the fact that his work was not yet done. He unfurled his wings and carried both aliens through the cavern exit.

Carly and Gabriel’s Weavers swooped down after Storm, escaping the den.

“What are you doing?” Colonel Ramos shouted. “Why? Why?”

“Gabriel, take the lead,” Chris called over the colonel’s wailing laments.

Gabriel examined his MTB for Saw activity. He could take charge. He should take charge. He was the navigator after all. He knew he had left a good trail this time, and the special flashlight was at the ready. In fact, Carly was already nudging Thunder into the lead position, ready to follow Gabriel’s commands.

Gabriel fought down the sudden hunger that arose inside him. This was his moment. Dash wasn’t here to be the boss of him. He could lead the crew out of Infinity, and everyone would be grateful. He could already feel what a thrill it would be to take credit for saving the day. In the Cloud Cat, he never hesitated to switch off autopilot because he knew he could do it as well—or better—on his own.

But sometimes, teamwork meant not taking charge. Not hogging the glory unnecessarily.

“We should follow Storm,” Gabriel decided, clicking the flashlight off. “Colonel Ramos says he always finds his way home.”

It was the right choice.

Given free rein, Storm and Thunder, with their Weaver sixth sense, swooped through the tunnels as if they could clearly see the way ahead. The pair of Weavers found the Jackal compound without any further confusion or delays. Coming home, it seemed, came quite naturally to the creatures.

They swept into Storm’s private cavern and landed gracefully, shaking out their wings.

Colonel Ramos dismounted in a huff. “You mad humans!” he screamed. “I gave you a way out. I gave you victory!”

“We all survived, Colonel,” Carly said.

“That’s the real victory.” Gabriel was confused by Ramos’s anger.

“Fools!” The colonel stalked furiously toward his chambers. Carly and Gabriel rushed to follow.

Chris untied the Simu Suit from Thunder’s haunches and freed the Weaver of his saddle. The Simu Suit had dried somewhat, but it was still a heavy mess. Chris dragged it into the Jackal residence.

He caught up with the others in time to see Colonel Ramos throw himself into his tall armchair.

The colonel hung his head. “Why did you return for me?” he lamented. His jowls shook.

“We couldn’t leave you to die,” Gabriel said.

“Of course you could! The warrior’s way out is always painful.”

“You’re a scientist first,” Carly said. “What about your experiments? What about returning to your planet one day?”

Colonel Ramos blotted his forehead with his sleeve. “Small humans. You do not listen. I shall never return.”

“You don’t know that. What if you change your mind?”

The colonel regarded them coldly. “There is much you do not understand about the universe.”

Carly supposed that was true. “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” she offered. “That might help you feel better.” She retrieved a bag of hibiscus tea from their gift box, which was resting on the coffee table. Chris pointed her toward a spigot in the food preparation area. Gabriel tore into one package of chocolate-chip cookies and gave two to the colonel. “Try this too.”

The colonel grudgingly accepted the offerings. He stuck his long gray tongue into the teacup, then sniffed the edges of a cookie. He scowled deeply over his first bite, and downed the boiling beverage in a single gulp. Then he sniffed the cookie again.

“If you really don’t want to go home, you could come with us,” Carly said.

Gabriel nodded. “Yeah, come with us. We could use a great scientist like you back on Earth.”

“Small humans,” the colonel repeated before the remainder of the cookie disappeared into his mouth.

Carly and Gabriel glanced at each other. It was a good idea, they thought. The colonel wouldn’t have to return to his planet, but he also wouldn’t have to be alone.

“You should have left me in the Saw den. It would have been the best way to go out,” Colonel Ramos said quietly. “In a blaze of glory, defending the innocent. It would have been a worthy end to a life like mine.”

There was silence in the room for a moment. The silence of abandoned labs, of empty caves and tunnels. The silence of long, long lonely years.

“We’re sorry,” Gabriel said finally. “We didn’t know.”

“You’re saving us a great deal of sadness,” Carly told him. She laid a hand on the Jackal’s shoulder. “It would have been awful for us to leave knowing you had sacrificed yourself.”

Gabriel agreed. “Or worse, wondering for the rest of our lives whether you had survived,” he added. “So really, you’re doing us a favor. By, you know, still being alive.”

Colonel Ramos listened intently to their words. Ultimately he turned to Chris. “This human race,” he observed. “They are full of feelings.”

Chris smiled. “It is one of their defining features.”

“Very well,” the colonel said. “Leave me be for a time. I will be done in a minute.” With that, he turned toward the wall and sunk himself deeper in the chair, loudly lamenting still being alive.

Carly and Gabriel sat on the carpet, painstakingly tweezing out the spores. They plunked them into the jar one by one as Chris counted them. When they were done, Ramos had fallen quiet.

“The total is nine hundred and ninety.” Chris reported the number in a matter-of-fact tone.

Carly hung her head.

Gabriel slapped himself in the forehead. “Noooooo. So close and yet so far.”

It would be awful to return to the Cloud Leopard with fewer than a thousand spores. They needed the full thousand, or the whole mission had been pointless. But the very thought of going back into those tunnels, back to the lake cavern…

Wait!

Carly perked up. “Hang on, what happened to that jar of spores we found in the lab? There were more than twenty in there.”

“But they were old,” Chris reminded her.

Gabriel dug into his backpack. “I’ve got them right here.” He shook the jar. You could hear the difference the age made—their dry husky sound versus the full, damp, meaty feeling of the fresh spores.

Colonel Ramos gradually removed the arm that was draped over his eyes. He stuck out his hand. “Here. Let me see them.” He straightened up and examined the jar of dried spores.

“They are not so old, really,” he determined. “I can measure their potency, if you like.”

Ramos brought out some strange-looking tools—the apparatus vaguely resembled a miniature oil rig. He measured the potency of the old spores. “Roughly fifty percent,” he reported. “So, fifty micro-units of the Stinger toxin. Per spore.”

Carly quickly did the math. “It’s enough!” she cried. The dried spores were going to save them. “We did it!”

She bounded toward the colonel and hugged him tight. “And your measurements let us know for sure. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

He patted her back awkwardly. “Well, I suppose I am good for something every century or two.”

“See,” she said, slugging his arm good-naturedly. “You’ve still got game.”

The corner of the colonel’s mouth twitched upward. “I do not know what this means, to have ‘got game.’ ”

“Yeah, you do,” Gabriel said. He grinned, delighted to see the colonel finally fighting off a smile.

“Won’t you come with us, Colonel?” Carly offered again.

“We have plenty of room on the ship,” Gabriel reminded him.

“This is my home,” Colonel Ramos said, returning to his usual stiffness. “And the life I have chosen.”

“Please?”

“Leave me be,” Colonel Ramos said. His expression had barely changed, overall, but Carly believed he was gazing at them more fondly. “There are many experiments still to be done. For instance, next I shall try to master the chocolate-chip cookie.”