I grit my teeth, resisting the urge to say something I’ll regret. A glance around confirms that I’m not the only one who’s noticing Momma’s neglect. Both Lyre and Pol stare at her in shock, and Drom is shaking in pain. But, as much as I hope for support from them, nobody speaks up.

“Get her to the med bay and strap in,” I tell them, and reach down to squeeze Drom’s shoulder before I head for the stairs.

We’re lucky that we all made it out. For now, this is the way things have to be. But after today, maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll get a chance to make sure fights like these go a lot differently.

For a moment I’m caught in the daydream, but the sound of something pounding against the cargo bay yanks me back to the present. I clamber up the stairs to get us the hell out of here.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Of Traitors and Cowards

Corvus

Part of me is tempted to spend the night in solitude and leave in the morning without another glance back. Maybe it would be easier to do so, for me and my team. They’ll still have each other. And soon enough they’ll forget my face, like all the others who came and went.

But these past few years have taught me the consequences of leaving without saying goodbye. When I was drafted, Momma encouraged me to leave a message for my siblings to help them cope with my departure. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, or to beg for something to remember them by, and I’ve spent three years regretting both of those things. I’ve wished for a reminder of Scorpia a thousand times over in moments when I desperately needed something to keep me afloat.

And as eager as I am to leave this war behind, as much as I never fit in with my team in the way they wished I could, they’ve been as close to a second family as I could ever find. We have fought and bled and killed together. They’ve followed my orders without question or hesitation, even knowing that I’m an off-worlder who could never truly understand their ways.

I stop in the medical wing to apply a healing salve to my injured ribs, along with a pure Sanita paste to numb the area. While Titans are certainly good at blowing one another up, they’re also good at patching themselves together again, with medical technology far beyond most of the other worlds. By the time I leave, my breathing is already coming easier, and when I wake up tomorrow, my ribs will be knit back together already. Just another day in the war. The part that comes next will be much harder.