I grimaced. Of all the powers to wind up with . . . sure, it had come in handy on the ship, but it wasn’t much good in life-or-death situations, and lately, those seemed to occupy the bulk of my day. I’d never been the strongest or fastest in my classes, but I’d always been in the top five. With the other anomalies, I kept getting pushed out of the way. I remembered a gangly, sarcastic boy at a three-month training camp. He was always at the bottom of the class and just seemed to get angrier and angrier about it. At the time I’d scorned him, but now I was starting to empathize.

Cage eased the door open a crack, leaning to one side. He angled his head. “What do you see?” I asked, my voice barely loud enough to qualify as a whisper.

He held up a hand in my direction. An agonizing moment passed, every silent heartbeat an eternity. Finally, Cage turned back to me, shrugging—

And a bullet shot through the gap where he’d just been standing, cracking into the wall above the headboard.

I gaped at it in openmouthed disbelief. Cage, more accustomed to shootouts involving actual bullets, slammed the door and flew across the room, tackling me to the floor on the other side of the bed. From this vantage point, the bullet wedged in the wall jutted into my line of view. It was bigger than most bullets and had a familiar shape. “I think it’s a tranquilizer,” I said with some relief.

Cage’s face was grim and taut above me. “If they surrender us to Omnistellar and leave that ship’s signal functioning, they might as well put a bullet in our skulls. It’d be quicker.” He raked his hand through his hair, his body braced above mine. No more shots came from the other room, and no more noise. “They’re being quiet so they don’t wake the others.”

The others . . . of course. “Get off me,” I muttered, shoving him so he rolled aside. As Cage rose on his elbows to peek over the bed, I activated the comm link embedded in my wrist.

Jasper answered a moment later, voice only, and a voice thick with sleep. “I’m up,” he muttered in the least convincing lie I’d ever heard.

“Good,” I whispered, “because there are people with tranq guns in the main room.”

That got his attention. “What?”

“Shh! We need to get out of here. Can you give them something else to worry about?”

“You bet. Wait just a minute.”

Across the room, the door slid open. Cage dropped to his belly and growled, “We don’t have a minute!”

“Under the bed,” I whispered, pulling him after me as we slid beneath the massive frame. This bought us a couple of seconds at most. There weren’t a lot of hiding places in the room, and if these were security professionals, even if they weren’t Omnistellar, they were bound to find us. But maybe those seconds would be enough for Jasper to take action?