“Look around you. There must be something.”
“There’s nothing! Zila, there’s nothing!”
The shuttle rocks around me again, the energies pulsing outside threatening to tear us apart. The utter blackness brightens to a deep somber mauve as a burst of dark energy crackles through the storm around us, and glancing at it through the viewshield, the scope of it, the power of it, I realize I’d be terrified for myself if I wasn’t already so terrified for Fin.
We’re still too far from the sail. He’s going to die before we reach it, he’s going to die right here in my arms.
We’ve come so far. Fought so hard. Lost so much.
A story hundreds of years in the making.
And this is how the final chapter gets written?
And then it comes to me. Like a flash of that awful energy. I shove my hand into the breast pocket on Finian’s suit, fumbling, desperate, and my fingers finally close around it.
The pen.
“Zila, the damn PEN!”
“Hmm.” I hear her say. “Interesting.”
“He bitched about this damn thing every chance he got,” I mutter as I frantically unscrew it, Fin lying motionless as I shout in his face. “Not such a crappy gift now, huh?”
His chest isn’t moving.
His eyes are swollen shut.
I let all the pen’s parts clatter to the floor of the shuttle until I’m holding just the casing. Stainless steel. Bright and heavy. The storm roils around us. Dark energy arcs across the black. “What next?”
“Run your fingertips down his throat,” she says, and she’s still so calm, and I’m clinging to her like a rock. “You will feel two bumps. Between them, make an incision, and insert the pen.”
I force my hand into stillness with pure willpower, fingertips trailing down his skin, once, twice, making sure I’ve got the spot. The storm shakes the shuttle in its rivets, and I tell myself to be still.
To be calm.
To breathe.
And then it’s just me, holding a screwdriver, and Finian’s throat, and oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Why couldn’t this have been anyone on the squad except me?
“You can do this, Scarlett,” Zila says quietly. “You can do anything.”
I take a breath. I mark the spot.
I can do this.
Zila—two minutes remaining
“He’s breathing! Zila, oh Maker, he’s—”
Scarlett’s words vanish into a sea of static as she and Finian near the storm and communications are cut.
I know those are the last words I will ever hear from them.
Nari and I are in our escape pod, watching through the porthole, our faces side by side. The dark of the void around us is lit with hundreds of tiny lights, red and green—other pods blasting from the ruins of the Glass Slipper Station. Beyond, we can see the storm, Scarlett and Finian’s little shuttle hurtling through the inky dark toward its rendezvous with the quantum sail.
In less than two minutes, if all goes well, the pulse will strike them. The last of Squad 312 will be two centuries away, forever beyond my reach.
Except that is not true. Everything I do will reach them, eventually.
We watch the shuttle soar into the tempest.
Nari presses her hand to the glass.
“Godspeed,” she whispers as the ship is obscured by the storm. “And good hunting.”
One minute.
I turn toward her, studying the features that have become so familiar as we lived this day together over and over again. I know so much about her, and yet so little. I have the rest of my life to learn.
“I know they’ve left you behind,” Nari whispers, her eyes locked on mine. “But they haven’t left you alone.”
There are sparks in her words, and they jump between us like static electricity, like tiny quantum lightning strikes. And as they hit, I am like the shuttle, and I am transformed and transported, I am somewhere new, and …
I lift my hand, and so slowly, so carefully, I brush my fingertips down her cheek, curve them around the back of her neck.
Her skin is warm.
She is so brave, and so fierce, this hawk.
So full of life, tied by a thousand bonds to her friends, her family, her world.
And she is beautiful, the lines of her face, the curve of her mouth. I can hear Scarlett’s voice in my mind, rich and amused. She is not tall.
And I am not alone.
I am with her.
It takes only the faintest pressure of my fingertips against the back of her neck, and she is leaning in, and her lips are brushing mine, and in a few moments the pulse will strike outside, but here, I am already afire.