As the other Messier fired a shot.

He drew up his obsidian cuff to shield his face and charged at the Messier. A second bullet glanced off his wrist with the impact of a punch, a third ricocheting off his space suit’s breastplate.

Then he was on the Messier and grabbing the pistol, pushing it away so he couldn’t be shot at again. He twisted his fingers under the automaton’s chin slats and pulled. Wires popped out, short-circuiting its optics. The Messier stumbled sideways as Jax twisted the pistol out of its grip at last and fired two shots into its chest, shattering the memory core inside.

The Messier slumped, bits of its blue core slipping out between the bullet holes, and died.

Goddess forgive me for that, he thought, knowing that he shouldn’t have aimed for its core, but he didn’t want to die yet either.

Jax shoved the gun onto his belt and winced when his arm spiked with pain. He inspected it. Goddess, seriously? A bullet had skimmed his biceps, the only unprotected part of his arm, leaving a bleeding gash. Lucky shot, but nothing he’d die from.

Still, it’d leave a scar.

Not that he was worried about that anymore.

He couldn’t change the stars this time, not like he had with Ana on her coronation day, because what he hadn’t known then was that the stars took other things instead. Where Ana had been saved, someone else had not. Viera Carnelian—the Royal Guard Captain—or her brother Vermion, or Lady Valerio . . . but Jax knew, deep down, that in saving Ana he had damned Di.

Of all the things he regretted, he regretted that the most.

That he couldn’t have saved them both.

He swiped his fingers across the console to wake it up out of emergency power saving, disabled the ship’s defenses, and sent a hail to the Dossier. “This is Jax—come in, Dossier.”

There was static across the comms for a moment, and then it crackled, and the voice of his captain came through like dawn breaking over the horizon. “Reading you loud and clear. We are ETA three minutes and forty-three seconds. Are you safe?”

“As safe as I can be, sir,” he replied.

“Have you found Ana yet?”

“No, but trust me—Robb will find her. She’ll be fine. Just be at these coordinates as quickly as possible. Robb and Ana will leave in a skysailer from the docking bay.”

There was a pause, and for a moment Jax worried that he’d lost her, but then she said, “Jax, you come back with them—”

He exited out of the comm-link, his hands shaking. There wasn’t time for regret. He pushed the Metal off the operations console and sat down. He had to open the docking bay doors or Robb and Ana weren’t getting out of here alive. They would be down there in five minutes and seven seconds, so he set a timer for then, hoping he wasn’t misremembering from his vision. They would be in a skysailer by the time the doors opened.