“Not without you we can’t,” Jax had tried to point out, but it was no use. He knew that defiant set of her lips. He couldn’t dissuade her. Besides, he had already seen how this exact excursion was going to go. He had seen it months ago when he had kissed Robb in the quiet of the medical bay, after the fight that took Robb’s arm. He hadn’t even been thinking when he pressed his mouth to Robb’s, and the fates had swirled inside his head again. The images haunted his dreams, burned into the backs of his eyelids—

A building like a shard of black glass. A rusted cell. The Royal Captain. Di but not Di in a dimly lit control room. A skysailer too far away. A window of crackling glass. And then—

From the backseat, the girl with silver hair—Starbright? Who knew—said, “Ah, fellas, is that thing supposed to be blinking?”

A flashing red message sprang up on the windshield.

RETURN OR RESIST ARREST, it warned.

Oh, this was just becoming so much fun.

He swiped the warning away. “Robb, how did they ping us? We’re cloaked.”

“They’re not supposed to be able to.”

In the rearview mirror, a skysailer swirled down from the night sky to follow them. Its wings were a metallic blue. Jax tightened his grip on the helm. “Well, now they’re following.”

“They must’ve decoded our cloaking signal.” Robb bent forward underneath the dash and slammed his hand against a door. It popped open to reveal the skysailer’s onboard terminal. As he worked to input a new code into the keypad, three fingers on his mechanical hand suddenly went limp. “Goddess’s tits,” he swore.

“Less cursing, more cloaking, ma’alor.”

“I’d like to see you try when your arm isn’t cooperating—”

“And you’re doing it wrong anyway. Get out of my way!” added the girl, climbing into the front seat and diving for the onboard terminal underneath the dash.

The skysailer behind them crept closer. It was sleek and silver, its fanlike wings angled back to help the ship gain speed, with a Messier at the helm. Jax hated trying to outrun androids. They didn’t make nearly as many mistakes.

“Hey, Sparkles, can you buy us time?” the girl shouted at him from the floorboards.

Sparkles. There could be worse nicknames. “How long?”

“As much time as you can.”

“Do I have to keep steady or—”

She extracted herself from underneath the dash long enough to give him a dead-serious look. “I could work doing a barrel roll while riding bareback on a jetcycle. I am nothing if not a professional.”

Jax suddenly liked Starbright a little better. “Understood. Robb, buckle up.”

His partner began to pale. “Please no barrel r—”

He reached over and pulled Robb’s harness tight across his chest. “Hang on to her,” he said, and Robb clamped his arms around one of the hacker’s legs a moment before Jax cut the skysailer to the left. Everything in the ship—the loose change, repair tools, trash—went sliding across the floorboards.