the night we spent together. And to hear them now …
“I love you,” it says. “So the Ra’haam loves you, too.”
Cold dread washes over me. My worst fears confirmed.
“I knew it,” I breathe. “That’s where you’re taking us. That’s why we’re still Folding. You … you want to …”
“We want you in here with us,” it says, tears spilling down its cheeks as it takes one step forward. “We want you to stay.”
I look out into the corridor again. And I can see her there. The girl who always backed me when I needed her. The girl who sat beside me in that tattoo parlor on shore leave and laughed as she poured me another shot in the bar afterward, who sighed my name as she dragged my shirt up over my head and sank with me down onto the bed. I can see her.
I can see her.
“Cat?” I whisper.
“Yes,” she breathes.
“You can … hear me?”
“Yes,” she whispers. “It’s me, Ty. It’s me.”
I thought she was gone. I thought I’d never have another chance to speak to her. To tell her everything I should have told her when she was alive. I know nobody gets a second chance like this. I know I should tell her how I felt about her, how I’d do things differently if I could, how I always loved her and always will. I know she’d want to hear it. I know she’d want to know. And my stomach is a knot and my pulse is hammering and I can’t deny what my heart is telling me. She is in there. Looking out at me with those strange new eyes.
But in the end, that just makes it worse.
“I’m sorry I failed you, Cat.”
Because she is in there.
“All I can do is promise not to fail you again.”
But she’s not in there alone.
And I raise the disruptor rifle in my arms. And I see her face twist, and I get a sense of something vast, something ancient, something awful behind the glow of her eyes. And I pull the trigger, spending the last of the rifle’s power, and the shot strikes the thing that’s Cat and the thing that isn’t, sending it sailing back in a spray of gray blood. And then I’m up and moving, running across the corridor and diving through the escape pod hatch. Slamming it shut on its screams.
“Tyler!”
I’m sorry.
“TYLER, DON’T GO!”
I’m so sorry.
And I slap on my safety harness.
And I hit the Eject button.
And I blast out into the burning Fold.
40
SCARLETT
Zila flies like a demon, but she’s no Cat Brannock.
Everything around us is chaos. Ships of every shape and size, little one-man fighters all the way up to the biggest that TerraFleet and Betraskan battle command can throw. The whole solar system seems on fire. But crazy as it sounds, I find myself thinking of my bestie. My roomie. My girl. If Cat were behind the stick of this junker, she could’ve made it dance. There’s not a pilot alive who could touch her.
But now she’s gone.
Tyler too. And Kal. And Auri.
Fin, Zila, and me are the last ones together.
Three of seven.
The engines are howling, pushed into the redline as we tear across the black toward the Weapon. Zila had to swing out wide, finally throwing off the two TDF fighters on our tail, weaving through a burning storm of bullets and missiles and I don’t know what else. Her fingers blurred as she calculated our trajectory, aiming us toward one of the thinner support pillars holding those massive crystal lenses in place. We’re flying right into its face now. One last doomed charge to save our world.
And maybe the entire galaxy.
“Forty-five seconds to impact,” Zila reports.
Honestly, I have no idea if this has any chance of working. I have no idea if we’re doing the right thing. But the medallion around my neck glints as I look down at it, red alert lights playing on the diamond surface as the alarms around me scream.
Go with Plan B.
I was never a believer. Never bought into the idea of the Maker, or the United Faith. Ty and I used to fight about it all the time—how silly it seemed to me, how obvious it seemed to him. But in the end, he believed hard enough for the both of us. And I don’t know exactly how we’re going to pull this off, but Aurora Command told us we were on the right path.
Know that we believe in you. And you must believe in