of the controls—luckily nothing newfangled or fancy—and been ready to take off when Jax had looked out the huge window panels and seen a pair of inmates running across the cargo-level docks. He’d yelled for me to wait, thinking they could make it to us. But then we’d watched as the man was gunned down by the chasing guards, hit in the head. The woman got hit, too—in the leg. She’d fallen, sliding through her companion’s blood.
Even though we hadn’t known them, Jax had run back out, picked her up, and brought her on board the ship with us, somehow escaping the hail of bullets himself. The woman was Fiona. Just like us, she and her partner had run up from the mines, making a break for it as half the prison had dissolved into chaos and flames.
We’d taken off, bullets pinging against the cargo cruiser’s outer armor, and I’d jumped us all the way to the Outer Zones, somehow bumbling through the coordinates math with Jax’s help, even though I’d been terrified of ramming us into a moon.
Everyone was still alive when I slowed us down in 17, and Jax and I did our best to clean and bind Fiona’s wound and doctor the blunt stump of Miko’s arm. Miko had been in shock, in and out of consciousness, and Shiori had been murmuring soft words and holding her close.
There’d been blood everywhere—so much that I was surprised it hadn’t permanently stained the bridge. Something from the explosion had sliced my hand. I had no idea what, but it had throbbed like crazy, and I’d been bleeding, too.
Fiona had seemed like she had a decent chance of making it, but I was sure Miko would die of infection. We’d found the ship’s medical supplies in a severely understocked state. No antibiotics. Some saline. Hardly enough sterile gauze.
Getting help had been out of the question. We’d have endangered any doctor or clinic that chose to assist us, and I was sure someone would see us and turn us in, even in a rebel-friendly zone. That was when Jax first told me about the Fold—a place where we could get medical treatment and disappear. He had friends there. It turned out that Fiona did, too, and that was when they discovered they had more in common than any of us could have possibly known, including a birth planet. We eventually found the rebel hideout, but it had taken days and days of searching, even for people in the know.
And in that time, Miko hadn’t died. She never got even a hint of infection. Neither did Fiona. Nor did I.
I understood why now. I’d bled on their wounds from my own cut hand, which had been the last thing to get cleaned and bandaged. Digging for a bullet. Unsteady stitches. Blood-soaked bindings over a stump that had made me want to vomit. I’d been their antibiotic.
I turned back to our botanist—who was capable with a lot more than just plants. Unsurprisingly, plant genetics had been her specialty, although the force of things had set her on the path to biological warfare. Somehow, I couldn’t feel sorry for those goons who’d breathed in her poisoned spores. Incinerate a planet, and you got what you deserved.
“It can’t be ingested, right? The kids would need to have shots?” I asked.
“Shots, yes,” Fiona confirmed. “But a small dose should be enough. I can keep preparing the injections while we get ready to take off. I’ve already done a whole batch, and I remember seeing a few big cases of needles and syringes in the lab attachment. Can you get them for me along with more bags of blood?”
I smiled, but it felt weak. Triumph never came without sacrifice. “How many?” I asked.
There was no real surprise for me in her immediate question back. “How many do we have?”
I hesitated. “Four.” I hated the answer I had to give her, but Shade would be done soon, and I couldn’t risk taking more than that in the time before we left.
Fiona recoiled in shock. “That’s not enough. There are thousands of kids.”
Yes, but I was only one body. “Knowing Mareeka and Surral, they’ve already imposed a quarantine of their own to try to minimize contagion. Not everyone will be infected.” I hoped.
“Yeah, true,” Fiona said. “Still, keep looking. Maybe more bags will turn up.”
I nodded, my already minimally appetizing lunch turning over in my stomach and making it cramp. I ate my noodles anyway. I needed to keep