“Okay, Skits, we get the point,” Baz interrupted. “So . . . I’m human. Shoot me.”

“I can name at least five entire civilizations that would like to,” Kat countered. “Some of them have even tried.”

“And failed.”

Kat pointed to the captain’s mangled ear.

“Hardly counts. You know what? I don’t need this from you. I’m still your captain. Just bring us out of the jump at the coordinates I gave you. You’ll see I’m right.”

“First time for everything,” Kat quipped, but Leo knew she was just giving him a hard time like she always did. There was no one Kat trusted more than Bastian Black. When she was at her lowest point, a one-armed pickpocket trapped in a mining colony, scrabbling and scraping for her very existence, Black had been the one to come along and rescue her. To take her in. To give her a family.

Leo knew a little bit about Black’s history too. He’d gotten a glimpse of it secured in a box stowed beneath the captain’s cot. The man who had defected from the Coalition. Turned his back on the Aykari. Stolen from his own kind. Though maybe he wouldn’t see these as missteps. Just decisions with consequences. Or maybe just the only way to get by.

His latest adventure, though—busting into a Djarik research facility to rescue a high-profile prisoner—that had turned out to be a failure, though Leo couldn’t blame Black for not saving his father. Not when he had the man himself to blame.

At least his father had apologized. I’m sorry. I have to see this through. This. Whatever the Djarik had captured him for. Whatever was on the chip Leo’s father had slipped him. A way to end the war, Leo was told.

At the cost of whole planets.

“All right, ship rat. Time to buckle up,” Kat said.

“And try not to blow chunks all over the cockpit again,” Skits scolded.

Leo found the seat beside Boo, closing his eyes and willing himself not to throw up this time. He couldn’t imagine how it could even be possible: the last thing he could remember eating was a crème-filled sponge cake that was somewhere between three and thirty years old. That, and some fake chicken he’d split with his brother, Gareth, the last time the two of them were together. What felt like eons ago, though it had only been a matter of days.

“Here we go,” Kat said.

A flick of a few switches and the Icarus shuddered. The whole ship seemed to shrink and then expand like an accordion, and Leo felt his body doing the same, every cell seemingly turned upside down and inside out before recombobulating itself, all in less than a second. A sharp pain stabbed at the backs of his eyeballs and he felt his stomach lurch, but there really was nothing inside worth getting out. He heard his father’s voice inside his head. It’s normal, Leo. No living being was meant to hurtle through space and time like this. Ventasium-based space travel breaks just about every law of physics known to humankind. It’s bound to give anyone a tummy ache.