“I don’t think I should,” Jules said. Their voice was strained, but curiously calm. Ava looked back over her shoulder. Jules’s muscles were quivering under their dark skin, shaking with the effort of holding the wheel.

“You go,” they said. “I’ll stay and hold them back as long as I can.”

It was as if Jules had said it in French, which Ava had never been able to understand. The words made no sense, not separately nor strung together. Stay where? Hold who?

“Shut up and stop being stupid,” Ava blurted. Not her finest or most mature comeback.

“You stop being stupid!” Jules replied. At least they were on the same wavelength.

“What the hell are you even saying?” Ava shouted.

“It’s bad enough that they followed us into this world!” Jules shouted back. “Can you imagine what would happen if we led them back to ours?”

Would they do that? The mother was dead, but what if one of the Marks or Danas was like, a hive queen-in-waiting? Was that possible? The only person who could tell them was unconscious and possibly bleeding out in Ava’s arms.

“Okay, but—” Ava started to say, though she had no idea what she was going to follow it with.

“I don’t have to hold them off forever,” Jules said. “The crew will come eventually. They can hear the alarm. Besides, even if they get through”—they nodded at Ava’s foot, where the curved blade of Captain Nouresh’s sword lay in a puddle of blood—“I can hold them back. They can only come through this door one at a time.”

“That sounds like suicide,” Ava pleaded.

“Would you just trust me this fucking once?” Jules screamed. “I promise that this is not a noble sacrifice! I can do this, so give me the damn sword!”

She wondered desperately if Jules even knew how to use it, or if this was just bluster to get Ava to leave.

But on the heels of that came another thought: could she, just this once, trust Jules to know what they were capable of?

Ava bent down and, grunting with effort, hauled Nouresh’s weight up over her shoulder. Then she kicked the sword over to Jules, so that they could reach down and grab it. Ava stared at them for a second. “You weren’t planning on coming back, were you?” she asked, needing to confirm it.

Jules shook their head. “Didn’t imagine it would be because I was holding back a swarm of violent sales associates, though.”

Her eyes started burning, and her face flushed. Ava felt a wave of impatience with herself. She had already promised that she was done crying over Jules, and her hands were too covered in blood to even wipe the tears starting to scald her cheeks. This was truly not the time.