“On my way,” she said, and Amos saw her running across the hangar for the stairs. Stokes was watching her with alarm. Amos waved him over.

“Mr. Burton?” the man said.

“That girl going after her old man? Yeah, she might need to rethink that.”

Stokes went pale and searchlights brighter than the sun flooded through the hangar windows. A voice echoed through bullhorns, barking syllables too muddled by the echo to be words. It didn’t matter. They all got the gist. By the time Amos got to the front doors, there were figures in the lights. Men in riot gear approaching the hangar with assault rifles in their hands that looked a little more heavy-duty than crowd control demanded. The servants were lined up on the stairs to the ship’s airlock, but they weren’t moving fast. One of Erich’s men – maybe twenty years old with a red scarf at his neck – handed Amos a rifle and grinned.

“Aim for the lights?”

“Any plan’s better than no plan,” Amos said, and broke the windowpane out with the butt of the rifle. The gunfire started before he could flip the barrel around to take aim. It roared like a storm, no gap between one report and the next. Somewhere people were screaming, but Erich and Peaches were in the ship and Holden and Alex and Naomi were somewhere off-planet and Lydia was safely dead. There was only so much to worry about. The guy next to him was screaming a wordless war cry. Amos took aim, breathed out, squeezed. The rifle kicked, and one of the glaring lights went out. Then someone else got another one. One of the Pinkwater soldiers pulled back an arm to throw something, and Amos shot them in the hip. A second after they went down, the grenade they dropped flashed and a plume of tear gas rose up through the falling rain.

Someone – Butch, it sounded like – yelled “Push ’em back!” and Amos crouched down, squinting back at the Zhang Guo. The civilians were almost all on, Stokes at the back waving his arms and yelling to hurry them. Something detonated, blowing the glass out of the remaining windows. The shock wave thudded through Amos’ chest like the explosion had kicked him. He stood up, glanced through the window, and shot the nearest figure in the face. The deeper rattle came from outside, and stuttering muzzle flash brighter than the remaining lights. Holes appeared in the wall, beams of light shining through into the vast cathedral space of the hangar.

“We got to get out of here!” Scarf Boy shouted.