Was his power shifting? Was mine? If it shifted enough, I might learn to communicate with the aliens. On Sanctuary, I’d tried to understand them and caught glimmers of meaning, and on their ship, I’d come to understand their written language with limited capacity. I imagined having the ability to talk to those things, to understand their thoughts as they flew out of the darkness and slashed us with their claws and—

Cage nudged me. “Relax,” he murmured, and I realized I was breathing in short, sharp gasps, my muscles so tense they ached.

I blinked at him in the shadows. “How are you so calm?” It wasn’t just what we were doing. Ever since Sanctuary, aliens snapped from the corners of my imagination.

“Experience.” He shrugged, then squeezed my arm. “You’ll be fine. You’ve got this.”

His confidence gave me a burst of renewed hope. As much as I’d always tried for self-reliance, it was so good to have someone else believe in me. “Thanks,” I whispered, knowing the word didn’t convey the depth of my appreciation.

He leaned in so close his lips almost touched my ear. “Kenzie, I . . . about what you said earlier. About Matt. I never meant to order you around, to tell you what to do. I only—”

As if on cue, my wrist comm gave three short buzzes against my skin, the signal I’d prearranged with Jasper. “That’s it,” I announced, cursing everyone’s timing. Talking with Cage would have to wait. “West wall.”

We split into two groups: me, Cage, and Reed to the left, Alexei, Imani, and Rune to the right. We were going with a quick and sloppy version of our original plan, and I had no idea if it would work.

I expected the wall to blow open in shards of metal, but instead it was more of a controlled disintegration. The material collapsed softly, scraps curling and floating away like paper caught in a flame. The resulting hole in the wall revealed Mia and Jasper, posed like action movie stars around the crumpled bodies of three Mars Mining guards. “Did you kill them?” I demanded.

I earned myself two identically dirty looks. “They’re unconscious,” snapped Mia. “Come on. Let’s move before more of them show up.”

This early in the morning, Mars Mining was virtually deserted, but red lights and blaring alarms warned that Jasper’s reorganization of the wall had not gone unnoticed. Rune dove for the nearest panel and jammed her hands inside. The alarms stilled, and nearby doors sprang open. “Should be clear,” she announced.

We ran through several hallways, following Rune, who had memorized the headquarters layout from a computer printout earlier that night. Before long, we reached familiar territory, returning to the landing pad. We were banking on the ship being too large to move and impossible for anyone but Rune and me to pilot. I had no idea what we’d do if it wasn’t where we’d left it.