It didn’t take long to cross the room. The ceiling was much higher than the room was wide. A door met them on the other side, this one armed with a keypad.

“Got the code?” Dex asked, eyeing the numbers.

Andi quirked a pale brow. “I may be good, but I’m not that good.”

She was right. When would she have had time to swipe access codes, since this whole plan had been configured in a blink of an eye?

“So what are we—” Dex stopped as Andi slipped a knife from her belt and slid the tip across the seam of the keypad. The front section popped off, revealing a mess of wiring, not unlike the crate he’d just passed.

She twiddled the colored strands between her fingers, following each wire to its source before picking the yellow one. She sliced it in half, and the door popped open.

Andi pumped her fist into the air as Dex whistled, impressed.

“We had similar keypads in Averia,” she told him. “I used to do this all the time to get into places I wasn’t allowed.”

“Naughty,” Dex teased.

Andi rolled her eyes. “Come on. We have to be quick.”

This time, Dex went first. Inside was an entire hangar of ships ripe for the taking, spread out like a display before them. There were older models scattered in with the new, all of them painted with the Solis crest on their sides and beneath their wings. To the left, Dex’s eye caught an old Ripper, a sleek white ship designed for the Solerans that he knew usually sounded, quite literally, like it was shredding the skies in which it soared. It had its bumps and bruises, and a wing that looked patched, but he’d never seen one before in person. Beside it was a newer model of a Scuttler, a ship that was razor-thin and lightweight, known for crumpling like a tin can if it was crashed, but marveled at for its capability to outsoar any ship even half its size.

Throughout the hangar, workers of all shapes and sizes marched around, droids and humans alike, busy as they hauled gear from ship to ship. Some of the ships were being torn apart entirely, reinforced with bits of metal from a massive pile at the end of the hangar. A graveyard of old ship parts, it seemed. Water dripped down from the top of the cavernous space, landing with a constant plink, plink, plink atop the ships.

“I miss my ship,” Andi murmured from beside him. Dex shuddered to think of what the Marauder looked like right now, out there, lifeless on the ice.

“You mean my ship,” he joked, trying to lighten her mood, even by just a fraction. She had enough heartbreak to handle as it was—no need to add more atop the pile, just to have it topple when she needed to keep it together the most.