“Yes, clear!” Skye called back, and the ship’s engines rumbled under them as Nic kicked it into a higher gear.

Mitzi was propped upright against the wall, and someone—Mir, she thought—pressed the buttons on her glove to open the suit. The helmet was pulled off her head, and she drew a deeper breath, relieved to taste clear air again.

“I’m fine,” she mumbled as someone tried to give her a towel. She looked about the cabin. The others were climbing out of their suits. In proper lighting, the amount of damage the exoskeletons had sustained was obvious. The beautiful polished metal had been scorched, scratched, and dented. Her crew, as they stepped out, didn’t look much better. They were all sweaty, dishevelled, and bruised. Fresh blood ran down Adam’s face from the head wound that must have reopened.

Well, at least we don’t have to worry about him being a Cymic.

“Ellen,” Mitzi said, trying to inject some strength into her voice, “show me you can bleed.”

“What?” The girl blinked at her then gasped as she realised what Mitzi meant. “Oh, yes, of course! Hang on!”

She fumbled for the knife in her suit’s pouch then pressed it to her finger, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain. A bead of blood appeared at the site, and Mitzi nodded, satisfied.

“Okay. How’re you all doing? Anyone seriously hurt? Hands up if you’re gonna need a lifetime of therapy.”

Adam ignored her. He was bouncing around the ship’s hull, beaming and flushed with success. “That was awesome! I bet you thought we’d be useless, huh, Cap? We sure showed you, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Mitzi said drily. “You certainly showed me a predisposition to insanity. How did you manage that, anyway?”

“Nic was directing us towards the place he was hoping to pick you up from, which wasn’t far from the reactor. You couldn’t hear us, but we could hear you, and it sounded like things weren’t going according to plan. Collapsing the roof was Ellen’s idea.”

Ellen, clearly terrified by being associated with the plan, shook her head quickly. “No, no, all I said was—”

“She said, ‘I wish we could get down to them somehow.’ And that made me think of how you’d used grenades to break through the floor and get to a lower level, and I thought it might just work. So I got Nic to give us the coordinates to the top of the reactor, which was a big strip of concrete, and we threw our entire collection of grenades around to blast our way down.”

“Creative,” Mitzi said, cringing at how insane the idea had been. Then she remembered that she herself had come up with the plan to use the Cymic’s propulsion to throw them into the ship. “Thank you, anyway. And you’re right—that was pretty awesome.”

That was apparently what Adam had been waiting to hear. He crossed his arms and rocked on the balls of his feet, looking smugly thrilled.

The door at the back of the room opened, and Nic came out. His face looked five shades lighter than it had the last time Mitzi had seen him. He took quick stock of the room then held out his hand to Mitzi, who took it with a grateful sigh and let herself be pulled up.