Mir dropped the gun and threw herself at Mitzi, wrapping her arms around her torso in a hug.

“Gentle, gentle!” Mitzi gasped as the pain in her ribs flared, and Mir drew back and awkwardly patted the top of her head instead.

Skye stepped over Franc’s still body and held out a hand to pull Mitzi to her feet. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, if I was going to change, I’d know by now.” Mitzi glanced at Franc’s remains then looked away quickly. Her throat felt raw as the shock began to catch up to her. “How did you know?”

“Mir figured it out,” Skye said. “A few minutes after you’d left. You should have seen the look on her face.”

Mitzi chuckled. The sound seemed hollow. “Well done, Mir. I think I owe you a serious debt.”

The girl shrugged, looking awkward and slightly pleased at the same time, and turned back to the stairs. “Can we go now or what?”

“Yeah, I’ve just got to cut the cable. Hang on.”

As Mitzi sliced through the blue cable, she felt an ache develop in her chest that had nothing to do with the fractured ribs. She’d lost one of her team: quiet, dependable Franc, the accountant who’d come on the mission to ensure a world existed for his grandchildren.

Maybe he’s done that. He died leading the Cymics away from us. His sacrifice meant we could live long enough to get to the reactors.

She felt her throat tighten, but she pushed the emotions down as she stepped back into her suit and felt it tighten around her. The pain in her ribs dulled slightly as the suit supported her body. Later, she would grieve for Franc and run through all of her poor choices, picking apart the errors of judgement that had allowed one of her team members to die, but at that moment, she couldn’t afford the luxury of introspection. She had a planet to blow up.

“Nic, please tell me this is the last damn door I have to open,” she said as she jogged up the stairs, gritting her teeth against the pain.

“Last one, doll.” His voice was unusually soft. She wondered how much he’d heard of the scene in the maintenance room.

The stairs seemed even longer on the way up than they had on the way down. By the time Mitzi reached the brighter and more spacious passageway at the top, she would have been completely happy with never seeing another stair in her life. She turned right, towards the door. “What’s next, Nic?”

“The lock’s off, so you can pull the doors open. There’ll be a metal walkway going across the top of the reactor, which will look something like a giant bucket half-full of fuel. Throw your charge in, and then I’ll get you to the top and pick you up, and we can all go home.”

“Sounds good to me.” Mitzi dug her gloves into the crack in the door and began pulling. They ground open slowly and reluctantly, then a cold wind, accompanied by the heady metallic smell of fuel, crept through the helmet’s seal.