He’s not dead, he told himself. He’s not dead.

The next few minutes were a blur. The ship tilted as the Dossier evaded the schooners, and the loose things in the cargo bay rolled and slid from one side to the other. The skysailers were tied down tight enough that they just groaned in their steel harnesses. An emergency wail let out in the solar core, and Viera quickly ducked into the engine room to fix it. The nuts and bolts in the walls rattled as a missile exploded too close to the ship, and the lights flickered.

Robb didn’t understand—Jax wasn’t bleeding, he wasn’t missing any limbs. He’d been out in space for only maybe five seconds. He knew boys from the Academy who’d accidentally spaced themselves for longer and walked away laughing.

But then why was Jax—why was he—

He’s not dying, he told himself. He’s not.

The hum of the solar core reverberated through the hull as the ship tilted back and dodged another onslaught of artillery fire. Everything in the ship shifted, sliding backward with the force of gravity. Robb’s metal arm shot out and quickly caught Jax before he rolled off the gurney. Jax’s head lolled to the side, his eyes almost open, gloriously plum-colored, like colliding red giants, staring past him, so far past he didn’t see anything.

Fearfully, Robb held the back of his metal hand just above Jax’s mouth.

But there was no breath to fog up the polished silver plating.

“I don’t think he’s breathing,” he said aloud, but he didn’t quite register his own words until Ana dove into one of the cabinets and took out an antiquated life support system—he’d seen them used before in practice, and in the Academy he’d taken a class on basic medicine, but this system was older than either of them. One centimeter off, and the life support would kill Jax instead of save his life.

He just stared at it, his mind blank.

“Robb,” Ana snapped, and it jerked him out of his stupor. She shoved the life support disk into his hands. “Either you do it, or I will.”

Either you take the gamble, or I will.

His fingers curled around the disk. “Help me open up his shirt.”

With a steel dagger Ana produced from her boot, they cut Jax’s coat and favorite silken shirt open, exposing his bare chest. There was an old starburst of a scar on his neck from where Robb had taken off the voxcollar at the palace, and a few other marks across his arms and torso. How did Jax get the one on his right arm? Or the slash down his left side? They belonged to stories he didn’t know—stories he would never know if he did this wrong.

The life support system was a disk about a hand’s width long. It was dusty and the edges were rusted, and he hoped it still worked. He tried to remember what to do from his medical class, but honestly he just took it to get an easy grade. It had not been easy—and neither was this. Every second gone was another second Jax was lost. He sucked in a breath through his teeth, trying to calm down, placed the circular piece on Jax’s sternum, hopefully above where his lungs were, and pressed the button in the center of it. A brilliant white light fed out from the center, rushing across the thin lines between the disk’s plating, and it gave a sharp hiss. Needles punctured Jax’s chest with a horrible snap, and his body twitched in response.