“Two minutes to self-destruct.”

And we were out of time.

“Kenzie,” shouted Mia suddenly. “You have to open a door!”

“What?” I yelped. My voice cut off as Cage yanked me twenty feet across the room, avoiding another alien attack. We landed by Mia, all of us clumped together. Priya and Hallam continued shooting, but their laser blasts didn’t seem to have any effect anymore. The same went for Alexei’s fire. Reed, Rune, and Imani weren’t even attempting to use their weapons, simply cringing on the floor, despair in their expressions. Jasper waved his hands and pieces of engineering flew toward us, building a sort of circular wall. It wasn’t much, but it might protect us for a minute.

Of course, we didn’t have much more than that to live, anyway.

“Open a door,” Mia repeated, twisting from one direction to another as if she could anticipate the next attack and somehow stop it.

“A door to where? This time there really is a good chance I’ll launch us into space! We have nowhere to go!”

“As far away as you can,” said Cage grimly, his hands firm on my arms. “It’s our only hope.”

“He’s right,” Alexei said. He crouched on the floor, very close to Mia, watching Jasper’s shield of rubble shake and tremble under the force of alien attacks. “It’s a chance, Kenzie. Not a good one. But even if you dump us into space somewhere, at least we’ll have tried. It’s better than being killed by those things or blown up with the ship.”

I looked from one face to another: Rune and Cage, Mia and Alexei, Priya, Hallam, Jasper, Imani, Reed, Matt. Somewhere beyond our protective shelter lay my dad’s body, dead and torn, and Liam. And I couldn’t help Liam now, even if I wanted to.

But maybe, just maybe, I could save the rest of us.

I swallowed a whimper. “I’ll probably kill us,” I whispered.

With impeccable timing, the computer replied, “One minute to self-destruct.”

No one answered. There was no answer. There was no choice.

I closed my eyes and focused on getting away from here, as far away as possible, somewhere we maybe even had a hope in hell of beating these things, of saving humanity. Why not get greedy, since I was already pushing my boundaries?

I didn’t know where in the system I could take us, but I fixed the idea firmly in my mind: someplace we could survive, someplace we could help, someplace we weren’t about to die.

And I opened the door.

FORTY-THREE

I CAME TO IN A blur of noise and motion.

Confusion surrounded me. I stared up a long tube, sounds echoing without meaning, everything a nonsensical swirl of light.

And then, as if a camera zoomed in on the action, the end of the tube rushed toward me. Everything came into sharp clarity. Sounds became almost too clear, piercing my brain like spikes. I howled, clamping my hands over my ears, closing my eyes against the onrush of images.