I unbuckle my harness, take my ray gun into my hand, and smash the hyperspeed button with the hilt.
The button shatters, but thezingfrom Moon Dancer’s engines indicate the system is connecting. I have about a half second to catch Lament’s stunned expression before Moon Dancer’s hyperspeed activates, and we’re blasted into space.
32
Everything is so quiet.Space, the cockpit. My thoughts. It’s like my ears have been stuffed with wax, like we were sucked into that black hole after all, trapped inside its timeless horizon. I try to shake myself, to process what just happened and what it means, but all I see is the reflection of Romothrida’s stars sliding across Moon Dancer’s window, the twinkle of passing moons. I think of a jar filled with fireflies. A blue-dusk field. Master Ira’s voice saying,But won’t they be more beautiful against the sky?
Lament eventually pulls Moon Dancer out of hyperspeed, throwing our surroundings sharply back into focus. The g-force meter on my gunner’s panel returns to zero, but my head’s still a blur, and the pressure in my chest doesn’t leave.
I glance at Lament, even though half my heart warns it might be better, at this moment, to not. He’s clicking buttons on his pilot’s panel, the small tick of each switch overloud in the otherwise silent cockpit. I see his face, his white-blond hair. Shoulders, wrists, fingers, all edges and angles, lines and shadows. Hard. Cold, sometimes. But alive.
He’s alive, we’re alive, and I could weep.
“Vera,” Lament says into his headset, adjusting the mouthpiece so it sits over the perfect center of his lips. “Caspen. Do you copy?”
“Lament?” Vera screeches. “You made it out? But I thought—but your ship—” She keeps scream-babbling into our earpieces, but it’s totally incoherent.
“Vera, yes, just—hey, come on, listen to me.” Lament’s eyes move from his controls to our surroundings as he pushes a lever, giving Moon Dancer a touch more speed. His tone is all business, which is more or less what I expected. The bigger the emotion, the quicker Lament shuts down, and I can already see it coming: a fucking cosmic shutdown.
“Moon Dancer is low on fuel,” Lament says, “and I’m sure your Sky Runner is as well. Right now, our priority is to find somewhere safe to land. Not Skyhub. The Legion has been compromised, and it’s not safe to return there, not until we understand what’s happening.” He pauses long enough for Vera to start yelling again, but he just talks over her. “Jester, do you still have access to the database? What can you tell us?”
“Jester says The Parallax is gone,” Avi replies on his behalf, presumably reading from his visor. “It was sucked into a stellar-mass black hole seven seconds after your escape.”
Lament’s hands tighten on his controls—the only sign that this news is affecting him. “The simulation?”
“There was no simulation,” Master Ira answers. His words ring clear through my earpiece; someone must have given him a headset. “Ran Doc Min has been lying about FPS all along, not only to the general public, but to most of his followers as well.”
There’s a silence. I hear someone cough, the thin sounds of breathing. Even Vera is quiet.
“All right.” Lament looks at me for the first time since our escape. Our eyes hold for one, two, three seconds before he shifts his gaze back out Moon Dancer’s windscreen, tracking the passing planets, a satellite, the streaming tail of a comet. “All right,” he says again. “If that’s true, it’s… a lot to process. But we’re going to take this one step at a time. Vera, Caspen, listen closely to my instructions.”
We fly to Purvuva. I understand the logic in this, even though there’sa corner of my heart that wants to go straight to Skyhub anyway, confront the Legion head-on, avoid these too-familiar feelings of turmoil and displacement. I’ve been uprooted so many times in my life. I don’t want it to happen again. But it’s like Lament said—we can’t return to Skyhub. The Legion has been infiltrated by Determinists, and we just assaulted their leader, attacked their soldiers, and destroyed their mothership. What if Ran Doc Min retaliates? What if he pulls one of his many Legion strings to have us removed from the detachment… or worse? Returning to Skyhub right now would be as good as walking blindly into a den of rabid cave raptors, and though I may be reckless, I don’t have a death wish.
Purvuva looks just like it did last time we were here: a lot of sand and a lot of wind and a whole lot of nothing else. Though we don’t touch down within sight of the caves, I can imagine them clearly, littered with decaying raptor carcasses and the lifeless mound of that sand cephalopod. The smell is surely rancid by now. Flies will be swarming.
I think of Ran Doc Min escaping The Parallax.
I think of the Venthrothians walking straight into his trap.
A part of me always suspected Doc Min might be playing some sort of bigger game here. Why else was he so secretive about the workings of FPS? Why else did he outright decline Legion help? What I didn’t guess—could never have guessed—was just how deep this plot would go. Ran Doc Min has tricked an entire galaxy into believing he’s a genius inventor who created a simulation to predict the future and save people from imminent doom. Does my mom realize her leader is a fraud? Do his Legion minions? How many people are in on the scheme, and what happens next?
Lament lands Moon Dancer neatly on a bluff overlooking a sea of reddish Purvuva sand. We’ve hardly spoken since I smashed the hyperspeed button and launched us to safety. (It’s impossible to speak while flying hyperspeed, which sounds like a solid excuse, except I’m certain we wouldn’t have spoken anyway on account of Lament closing up and me having no idea what to say.) I feel the same way now as I felt the first time we escaped this planet: like the foundation of our relationship has been irreparably cracked. Itmakes me want to blurt out every needy, shameful thought currently swirling in my head (I’m sorry you had to rescue me, I’m glad you’re still wearing the lifestone, can you please pull me into your arms and never let go?), so I save myself the embarrassment and keep my mouth shut.
Once Moon Dancer’s retractable legs have leveled us on the uneven earth, Lament powers down the ship’s systems and clips out of his harness. Through the front window on the other side of the bluff, I see Vera and the other Sixers emerging from their respective spaceships and heading our way.
I unclip my own harness and start to climb out of my seat, but as I reach for the windscreen release lever, Lament grabs my wrist.
He stares very hard at our interlocked limbs. “Are you okay?”
Gone is the businesslike tone from before. His voice is shaky. Wrung out. I get the sense that he’s holding himself together through sheer force of will. “Areyou?”
“I…” His gaze shifts from his fingers to his shoes. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“What happened back there is my fault,” he says tonelessly. “I should have been more thorough with the checklist. Double tested hyperspeed. Ensured every last one of Moon Dancer’s systems were in perfect working order.”
“You did everything you could.”
