I didn’t respond, instead doing a count of our team. Seven ships, including mine. We’d all made it. We were sweaty, rattled, and solemn—almost nobody said anything as we met up with Riptide Flight for the return to base. But we were alive.

Coward.

Nedd’s voice echoed inside my brain, more distracting than the heat from the sensors in my helmet, or the surreal place my thoughts had gone as we flew out. Had I really thought I’d heard voices?

I wasn’t a coward. Sometimes you had to retreat. The entire DDF had pulled back from this fight. I wasn’t less of a soldier because I had convinced Nedd to escape. Right?

It was growing dark by the time we landed at the launchpad. I stripped off my helmet and climbed from the cockpit, exhausted. Jorgen met me at the bottom of the ladder.

“You still haven’t answered me,” he snapped. “I left you alone during the flight back, as I’m sure you’re rattled, but you are going to explain yourself.” He grabbed me by the arm and held on to it tightly. “You nearly got Nedd killed with that stunt.”

I sighed, then looked at his hand.

He carefully let go. “The question remains,” he said. “That was crazy, even for you. I can’t believe you’d—”

“As much as I like being the crazy one, Jerkface, I’m too tired to listen to you right now.” I nodded toward Nedd’s ship in the dim light. “He flew in. I followed. You’d rather I let him go alone?”

“Nedd?” Jorgen said. “He’s too levelheaded for something like that.”

“Maybe the rest of us are getting to him. All I know is there were a couple of Sigos from Nightstorm Flight who picked up some enemy tails, and Nedd would not let go.”

“Nightstorm Flight?” Jorgen asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

Jorgen fell silent, then turned and walked toward Nedd’s ship. I followed, feeling wrung out, my head starting to ache in a strange way—like needles behind my eyes. Nedd’s ship was empty, and he wasn’t with the others, who were gathering at the rooms near the launchpad to change out of their pressure suits. They were laughing together now that the stress of the battle had faded.

Jorgen took off down the path between launchpads, and I followed, confused, until we reached a line of seven Sigo-class starfighters branded with the Nightstorm Flight logo. They’d gotten back before us, and their pilots had already gone, leaving the ships to the maintenance crews.

Nedd knelt on the pavement near two empty spots in the line of ships.

“What?” I asked Jorgen.

“His brothers, Spin. They’re wingmates, Nightstorm Six and Seven.”

The pilots we’d been following. The ones who, it now became obvious, had both died in those dark tunnels.

27

Nedd didn’t come to class the next day.

Or the day after that. Or all that week.

Cobb kept us busy running chase exercises. We swooped, dodged, and tagged one another, like real pilots.