Cage folded his arms, frowning. As usual, his mind processed information at the speed of light, calculating and planning while everyone else struggled to absorb what they’d heard. “Could we send a response?” he suggested. “Fake coordinates, maybe? Buy ourselves some time?”

I shook my head. “I’m nowhere near comfortable enough with the language to risk that. The second they got my message, if I could even figure out how to send it, they’d double their speed. Rune’s already attempted to disable the signal with no success. We have to get off this ship.”

“We have to destroy this ship,” said Alexei in his soft, barely accented English, so at odds with his massive bulk. “Otherwise they will track it no matter what we do and head straight here.”

“They’re already coming,” I said bluntly. A chill raced down my spine. Cage moved as if to take my hand but must have thought better of it. Because the others were watching? Or . . . ? I shook my head and pressed on. “Rune’s picked up two more messages since then. The aliens are getting closer with each one. We have some time, but . . .”

“But we have to decide what to do,” Cage agreed. The others regarded him with a deference they never showed me, and I stifled a wave of annoyance. He’d led them for a long time, after all. It made sense that they trusted a fellow prisoner more than a guard who’d oppressed them, even if I had turned out to be more like them than I’d ever guessed—or been willing to admit. Still, I’d saved everyone’s lives on Sanctuary. The least they could do was give me the same attention they offered Cage. “Alexei’s right,” he continued. “The only way to throw them off our trail is to destroy this ship, and we don’t have the means to do that, do we?” He turned to Rune, clearly addressing his question to her, but she folded her arms and glared at the wall.

I sighed internally. The last thing I needed right now was to referee a game of chicken between angry siblings. “Rune?” I demanded.

She addressed her response to me, not Cage. “I checked for any kind of self-destruct mechanism as soon as I got us moving. I couldn’t find anything. Even if all the aliens die, the ship continues. As soon as it goes a few days without manual input, it veers off and returns to wherever the aliens came from. And it carries a full record of everything that’s happened to it.”

Once again, I closed my eyes. Everyone knew what Rune’s words meant, but no one wanted to admit it. I pictured the other kids on this ship. Some of them were your basic teenagers. One was barely more than a child. But some of them, more than enough, were unpredictable. They were criminals before their arrest, and years of imprisonment on Sanctuary had done nothing to improve their self-control or social skills. The alien attack, and the following weeks of what was essentially another prison, hadn’t helped either. When they learned about this, I had no idea what they’d do or if we could control them.