Whiplash. Tumbling. Tumbling, burning, turning . . . agony. It felt like Rayan’s spine had cracked in half from the force of the sudden gust that pulled him out the doors and into the rover bay. What was once an orderly garage with rows of well-kept vehicles and drones was now caught up in a funnel, as if the entire ship were being drained out and into space.

Space. He had one fast glimpse of it and then he was somersaulting, reaching out for anything and everything. His hands found purchase on a rubbery stump, no, a leg. Rosalyn’s leg. He was holding her by the ankles, feet kicked out behind him as the doors beyond her closed. No more of the glowing blue matter was sucked out the vortex behind them, but the rovers and drones banged hard against the sealed locks keeping them in place. A few stray crates that hadn’t been secured disappeared so quickly it was like they simply ceased to exist. It wasn’t wind pulling on them but the terrible inward breath of a hundred gods, sucking them away, ripping at them as a burning iciness crept over his body.

His body. Rayan felt the insurrection inside as he held on with all his strength, the Foxfire not quiet, not at all. It rioted. He closed his eyes against the howling windy gusts and cried out, dry, frozen and feeling his fingers slip. He imagined a million little seeds inside him scattering, or a thousand spiders scuttling for shadowy holes. A place to hide. Respite. But there was no respite. The outer ship doors were open, and space would vacuum them up unless someone pulled the lock.

A shape tumbled by, big and unwieldy, and then he felt a painful jerk on his left calf and glanced down in a panic, his hair whipping, his vision growing duller as everything in the rover bay was swept away. He was being pulled apart. Loose, grainy crumbles came free from the wound on his head, one boot going with them.

Piero. Piero had fallen out of the Brigantine in the tumult, latching onto his leg but only just, his mangled arm and its hand the only connection to Rayan, to life. To salvation.

Why did he have to come back into his body now? Coward, he thought, wishing he could summon the Foxfire back to shame it. Cowards. Cowards. Abandoned at the moment of greatest peril, of death.

No, he heard a soft, drowning voice say, I saved you once, dear one. Mother resurrected you from certain death. Here is a human’s ungrateful heart laid bare.

“Go!” he screamed. Tears dried and froze and crackled instantly on his cheeks.