Pain lanced through his skull, and the last thing Valen saw, before the darkness swallowed him whole, was Darai.

Standing over him, watching with those otherworldly Exonian eyes.

CHAPTER 30

ANDI

Andi wasn’t sure where she was going.

She simply needed to move, to get away from that room, that crackling fire where she’d watched Lira die.

Not dead, Andi told herself. She refused to believe it.

And yet with each step she took, winding her way through the undercity, the truth began to sink in more and more.

Lon was gone, having sacrificed himself so Andi could get to Lira and set her free. So that she could rescue the girls, and together, they could all live.

But if Lira was gone, too, then Andi had failed him. Lon had died in vain, and Lira, her beautiful Adhiran pilot, so full of talent and passion and loyalty and dreams...

Lira was gone.

Tears filled Andi’s vision as she walked, blurring her path. She let them fall, lifting her hand to her ear to touch the place where her com still remained.

If only she could reach the girls, she might be able to discover if Lira was truly gone. She might find them all together, alive and well and free.

But she knew that was another lie, another impossible dream. She’d seen them bowing to Nor, looking as if they praised her with every breath. It wasn’t really them on that holo, Andi knew.

But would they ever be themselves again?

Andi walked faster, desperate to find someplace to be alone in her misery.

She had no ship. No crew.

And Dex had chosen Klaren’s side, stopping Andi from accepting Nor’s offer. She’d give herself over in a heartbeat if it meant that Breck and Gilly, who still lived, could walk free.

As she walked, Andi passed by a set of siblings, a brother and a sister, forging armor by a crackling fire, their dark ringlet curls glimmering in the firelight as they hammered the bulletproof armor to their own cadence.

“I dare the queen’s silver bullets to get through this,” the girl said, using heavily gloved hands to dip the armor into a bucket of fresh Soleran water.

“I’d like to see her try,” the boy challenged, pounding his own set of armor with a wicked grin.

Looking at them reminded Andi of Lon and Lira, and it shattered her heart.

Lira would have loved the sounds, the smells, the feel of this entire place.

Here, beneath the surface of the world, every man, woman and child, no matter their age, no matter where they hailed from, had come together as one. They’d created an army of the galaxy’s outcasts, of those who had nowhere else to turn.