“Sorry, sorry,” Scorpia says, a leg hooked around Drom’s knee to prevent her from standing, one hand smashed against her face while the other presses into her stomach. “I’m trying to—I just—My leg is—” She looks up and notices me standing. A moment later, she scrambles to her feet without any apparent effort, brushing herself off and leaving Drom winded and confused on the ground. “Well, that’s done with,” she says. But when she looks at Pol, pushing himself up from the ground with one hand pressed to his bloodied nose, her expression shifts to shock. She looks at me. I drop my gaze and wipe blood off my lips.

My comm beeps again. Fort Sketa has fallen.

I shut my eyes for a brief moment and think of Sverre, who never turned his back on me. Daniil asking me to save him. Magda. Magda smiling with the wind in her hair, with her lips on my neck. Magda before everything crumbled. I make a silent promise to remember her like that.

This time, when I walk into the tunnel, the rest of my family follows.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Loss

Scorpia

We reach Fortuna without trouble, but Momma isn’t there.

Everyone scours the ship, clinging to the same hope that she could be hiding somewhere—except Corvus, that is. He stays near the ramp, right next to the pressure pad that will close it. His knuckles are still stained with our brother’s blood, and I can barely bring myself to look at him.

At least it’s solidified something I was already suspecting: This man is not the same one who left me. The brother I knew would never raise a hand against any of us. He was always the anchor, the safe house, the one who would let the little ones scream and hit him all they wanted and still kiss their foreheads and tuck them into bed that night.

Pol, even with his face a mess, searches the hardest for Momma. And when he doesn’t find any trace of her on board, he storms right out onto the surface again, ignoring everybody’s protests. Though I hang back in the cargo bay, I can hear him shouting for her at the mouth of the cave outside, his voice carried by the wind.

Drom hovers on the edge of the ramp, looking toward her twin. One moment she takes a small step forward as if to join him; the next, she shrinks back as if to flee. After a few moments of teetering indecision, she lets out a frustrated growl and turns to the rest of us clustered in the cargo bay.

“What the hell are we going to do?” she asks, her gaze ping-ponging between Corvus and me.