Leo looked at the container with the sudden surety that he was going to eat the whole thing. He’d already crossed the line, after all, the taste lingering on his tongue making him long for more. No point turning back now.

“Oh, and Leo, one more thing.”

Leo looked back at the captain, who was sucking the last of the peanut butter from between his teeth.

“I’ve handled a lot of the stuff, so I know what four cores of ventasium feels like. The next time I say to take all of them, I mean take all of them. Not all but one of them. Understood?”

Leo’s face flushed. The captain hadn’t even looked in the bag. But it didn’t matter: he knew what Leo had done. He probably even knew why. But to Bastian Black it didn’t make a difference. As far as he was concerned, the Darkashi could—maybe even should—be left stranded out here.

In Baz’s world, it was us versus them, and the “us” didn’t extend beyond the hull of his ship.

Meaning it was really just him and his crew against the rest of the universe.

Leo, for one, didn’t like those odds.

But he wasn’t sure what he could do to change them either.

Leo never wanted to fight, even after all that had happened.

His brother felt differently.

At least that’s what Gareth said. Not immediately, when the whole world was still reeling, every human being paralyzed with shock at the horrors they’d just endured. But soon after that, when staying out of the way became all but impossible. Once the decision had been made to join the Coalition, and the governments of nearly every nation officially declared war on an entire alien species. When the factories stopped churning out cheap tablets and solar-powered hover cars and started manufacturing artificial gravity generators and incendiary grenades. Gareth had no doubt seen the posters—the same ones Leo saw on his way to school—calling out from every street corner, pointing from every digital billboard, an updated version of Uncle Sam, now a citizen of the world, begging for new recruits. Your Planet Needs YOU!

And the footage. You couldn’t avoid the footage. Smoldering buildings. Plumes of smoke, white at first, then charcoal, like dark tentacles lashing the sky. Skyscrapers reduced to rubble. Bridges caved in, streets broken into jagged junks, toothlike hunks of pavement jutting up like stalagmites. Whole city blocks decimated, metal cars melted down to unidentifiable lumps. The carnage ran on a loop, twenty-four seven images of first-responders and volunteers sifting through the debris, looking for any sign of the living. Dozens of cities, scattered all across the globe. Everyone knew at least one person killed by the Djarik that day. The names would be etched into stone monuments and steel plaques in the weeks to come. So of course Gareth wanted to fight.

The problem was, he was only thirteen. And his father wouldn’t hear of it.

There was a lot of talk in the months that followed, all of the when-I’m-old-enough variety. When I’m old enough to join, I’m going to fly straight to Djar and drop the biggest bomb you’ve ever seen right on top of them, big enough to wipe out every last one of those scale-faced freaks.