And then footsteps raced along the hall. My head shot up, and I jerked to my feet, shaking off my lethargy just as Rune charged through the door and straight into me. We collapsed in a tangle of limbs and Mandarin cursing. Her elbow jammed into my ribs, sending pain spiking into my lungs. “Rune!” I exclaimed, rolling over and clutching my arm. “What the hell?”

“Sorry!” Rune caught my hand and yanked me to my feet with surprising strength, then pulled me toward the console. “Take a look at something.”

“What’s going on?”

“That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me.” A muscle in Rune’s jaw twitched. “I sensed something wrong in the system, and it’s only getting worse. But the computer won’t talk to me, it won’t . . . you haven’t noticed anything, have you?” She turned her wide eyes on me, frantic and imploring, and with a guilty start, I remembered the strange blip I’d noticed a few moments ago.

“Let me take a look,” I said.

“Wait.” Rune closed her eyes, frowning. She ran her fingers over the console, dipping them in and out of the surface, a quirk of her power that had terrified me at first but now seemed as normal as breathing. “It’s clearer here, in the control room. Kenzie, I think . . . it’s a communication!”

“A communication from outside? Like from another ship?” My brain caught up, and Rune’s urgency infected me. If that was true, this was the first signal we’d had from anyone in three weeks.

I swallowed hard, forcing myself to be calm. But no communication from outside could be good. It might be Omnistellar on our tails. At best, it was a merchant vessel wanting to know what the hell we were, and that was a question we’d have trouble answering. At worst, it was someone out for blood: an Omnistellar bounty hunter, maybe, someone who’d figured out that we’d survived Sanctuary, who’d come after us to track us down and drag us home.

Still, a tiny part of me hoped that maybe, just maybe, my dad was on the other end of that comm. When he didn’t hear from me, would he have gone to the lengths of hunting me down? Did Dad love me enough to go against Omnistellar for me? Or . . . my fingers trembled on the edge of the console. What if it was Dad, but instead of setting out to find me for my own sake, he’d done it for Omnistellar?

But one look at the actual language dispelled any such illusion. Words washed over me, or not words, precisely, but meaning, and that meaning made my blood run cold. All at once it came rushing back, every second on Sanctuary: the aliens stalking us through the corridors, their unseeing eyes milky and ghastly as their claws ripped into people I cared about; Tyler, my friend, floating into space; Rita, closer than a sister, soaked in her own blood; and of course, Mom, her lifeless body cradled in my arms.