The faintly glowing image stream on the Servitor’s curved body went dead and then cycled at impossible speed through all the available cameras on the ship. Darkened room after darkened room flew by. When the cycle ended, JAX tilted his narrow head to the side.

“Unavailable.”

Misato blew out a frustrated breath and then glanced at Rosalyn. “He’s somewhere. Keep monitoring the feeds, JAX. We need to know if Rayan turns up. The second he turns up.”

“He’s probably hunting us,” Rosalyn offered. “They know you, right? They know how capable you are.”

“How capable we are. I told you, Rosalyn, you’re a survivor, which is why we need to change course. Piero will kill our chance of getting a warning signal out. He’s already sent his SOS; he doesn’t need to do anything more but sit and wait for more ships to arrive at these coordinates,” Misato said, taking off briskly down the corridor.

Rosalyn leapt to keep up, forcing down the exhaustion, a bone-deep brittleness that felt as threatening as the man tearing open the ship to rip at its guts.

“No, no,” she quickly said, putting a light hand on the shorter woman’s shoulder. “What about Edison? You can still sense him, right? That means he isn’t a lost cause yet.”

Dogs, jazz, single malt

Rosalyn blinked. Was this just sentiment talking? The lack of sleep could be compromising her ability to think straight, but it seemed wrong to just leave Edison there and potentially lose another friend. Ally. She meant ally.

“We’ll be totally outnumbered if Edison goes,” she hurried to say, watching Misato’s eyes flick back and forth as she no doubt made her own calculations. “We have to protect the comms, that’s priority one, right? I need to get a message out to HQ and stop them from coming here. If we go to the cockpit now, that means I have to put in my credentials, and if we go down, then the Foxfire has free rein of the ship. We’re not outnumbered, not yet, but that could change. And fast.”

“Our chances of success greatly decrease against three opponents,” JAX chirped. “Crewmate Yasin is approximately one hundred and sixty pounds, suffers from asthma, and possesses no military or martial arts training. Crewmate Endrizzi is approximately two hundred pounds, with extensive experience in Krav Maga, judo—”

“Yes, we get it.” Misato waved him off impatiently. “Then we stick together and go straight for Piero. He probably sent Rayan to ambush us if we tried for the cockpit.” The engineer set off back down the passage, and Rosalyn tried to keep pace. “I don’t like the idea of fighting Rayan, anyway. I’d rather put it off. He’s a good kid . . . What a waste.”