We tussle our way across the floor, banging into toppled furniture and crates, clawing and punching at each other. Any semblance of a real fight is gone. This is a pure mess of a brawl, both of us waning and desperate. His nails dig gouges in my cheek, a thumb digging into one of my eyes—but a second later I secure a grip on the side of his head and slam it into the nearby wall. I move blindly, banging him into it again and again until he falls off me.

And then we’re floating again. I curse under my breath, knowing what comes next and how badly it’s going to hurt, and push off from the ceiling as hard as I can. For a moment I dangle in suspension—and crash to the floor along with everything else in the bay. I hit with a thump that knocks the wind out of me, but a sickening thud of flesh on the other side of the room tells me Captain Murdock landed even harder. As we both lay still, the emergency lights shut off. The green dye fades from the room, and all I see is red, red, red, smeared across the floor and splattered all over the ceiling. Too much of it is my own blood.

My first attempt to push myself off the cold metal floor fails. So does the second. My body is weak. Dying. But I’m not done yet. I can’t be.

“Get up,” I rasp, hauling my face up and grabbing a nearby crate for support. “Come on.” Agonizingly slowly, I drag myself to my feet. I’m dizzy and breathless from the effort, my injured leg barely holding my weight. I limp across the room to grab my fallen blaster, and then over to Captain Murdock. He still hasn’t moved. His face is bloody and swollen, his breath comes in wheezes, and one of his legs is bent at an unnatural angle, but he’s still conscious.

He smiles at me, his teeth red, his face triumphant despite the fact that I have him at my mercy.

“You hear that?” he wheezes, tilting his head. Against my better judgment, I pause to listen. There’s only one thing to be heard: silence. Captain Murdock’s grin widens at the confusion on my face. “So fast,” he says. “Battles aren’t so quickly won by underdogs.”

As much as I want to deny them, his words ring true. This silence is wrong, just like the shift back to normal gravity. The battle should still be raging on. We knew that winning this fight would be a long, bloody process. My siblings should be finding ways to fight, however they can. They should be buying me time, buying Lyre time. But if the gravity already swapped back, and the fighting is over, then…

Cold splinters throughout my chest, making it hard to breathe. No. It can’t be.