“The pollen,” I gasp, reaching across to try and cover her wound with both my hands, her blood slicking my silver gloves in seconds.
“The pollen will not matter if we do not prevent bleeding,” Zila says simply as a shaking Fin hands her a spray, and she leans down to apply it to the wound.
“Overhead!”
It’s Kal, rising from the chimpanzee’s body, pointing to a white shuttle cutting a quick arc across the sky. Whether or not the Bellerophon is still in orbit I don’t know, but it’s obvious someone has survived the clash between the TDF and Bianchi’s ships. Even as I watch, they wheel around toward the trail of destruction from our crash landing on the beach, the signpost we left behind.
And they start to descend.
Cat groans as Zila seals her suit with some kind of sticky plastic patch, precious seconds slipping away. Tyler watches Cat, a frozen statue crouching by her side, running the odds in his head.
“Zila,” he says quietly. “She needs more than just first aid, yes?”
“Yes sir.” She nods. “She needs serious attention.”
“Well, we can’t go back to the Longbow.” Ty stares in the direction of that descending TDF shuttle, then to the colony in the valley below. “Auri, suggestions?”
I close my eyes, reaching for what I know about Butler settlement, trying to picture the maps I’ve studied a thousand times. My exhausted, overloaded brain glitches for a long moment before I remember.
“There’s a med center,” I say. “On the west side of the settlement.”
Tyler rises to his feet, peering down to the settlement’s eerie layer of green-gray foliage. “I think I see it. Fin, can you walk?”
“Yessir,” Fin says simply. He straightens with a wince, his exosuit spitting out a low, hissing whine. His eyes are narrowed in pain. But he doesn’t complain.
“Okay,” Tyler says. “Scar, Zila, we take Cat to the med center. Kal, you get Fin to the colony spaceport and look for a replacement reactor core.”
“I know the way,” I say, sounding braver than I feel.
Ty nods. “Keep Auri with you, and comms open at all times. When you find what you need, call it into me immediately.”
Kal stands in one graceful movement, nodding at me. I rub my hands against the mossy grass to rid them of some of Cat’s blood, and my stomach turns as the color shifts—green blue to a deeper purple. There’s a warning screaming in my head. I can feel it in my bones. I can feel it under my feet, and in the skies full of dancing spores above me.
Something here is completely, horribly, unnaturally wrong.
I hear a whisper inside my mind. An echo of my own voice in my head.
Beware.
Ra’haam.
Cat’s jaw is clenched, and the fact that she doesn’t fight the splitting of the party, doesn’t try to join the conversation, tells me just how badly she’s hurt. I let Kal pull me to my feet, and we stand side by side for a moment, looking down at the wounded girl, her friends around her.
I brought them all here.
This is because of me.
“Go,” Tyler says, without looking up. “Good hunting.”
Kal retrieves his disruptor rifle from the ashes. As the two of us set off after the already-limping Fin, I can’t resist one last glance back.
I can’t escape the feeling I won’t see Cat again.
•••••
It’s a lot more than twenty minutes to the flat expanse of the spaceport now, with Fin moving slowly and painfully, concentrating on walking and carrying the containment unit for our new reactor core. Even though I can’t see it under his biohazard gear, I can hear the protests from his exosuit from a few meters away. Kal and I both keep guns at the ready, even though I’m really not sure how to shoot mine. All three of us are trying not to jump at imaginary sounds.
We skirt the edge of the ruined colony—it would be faster through the middle, but Kal says the terrain is too good for an ambush. His voice is steady and his movements are sure, and I find myself drifting a little closer to him.
My mind’s whirling—jumping from the shuttle that’s now vanished from overhead, to Cat’s pale face and bloodied side, back to hazy memories aboard the World Ship, to another monster I destroyed without even touching it. I told the others I didn’t remember doing it, but that was a lie. Like I confessed to Kal in the sickbay, I can see it in