The Gray ship was closing now, so fast that Cade threw up his arms, thinking they would collide. Instead, the ship stopped abruptly.

There was a hiss, and Cade turned to see the back of his ship opening. There was no sound at all, for sound did not travel in a vacuum. All he heard was the hoarse sounds of his breathing.

He took a few more gulps of air. All good. The suit was working fine.

Cade stood, only to find himself floating up to the ceiling. He pushed himself back down and dry heaved, fighting a bout of nausea. He hadn’t got his sea legs yet. Or his space legs.

Wary of the time, he gathered the Gray figurine and the remote, shoving them into his backpack and slinging it front ways across his chest for easy access. It wouldn’t do to lose the figurine in space—let it float off into the night.

Still, it had only one instruction left. The bomb.

He decided to look at the pantheon’s ship itself. He edged by the bomb, which was gently twisting a few inches in the air, and looked down, to see he was directly beneath a hatch.

A hatch that was open.

“Okay, Cade,” he said. “Time to kill a god.”

CHAPTER

66

Cade had not considered how he would carry the bomb into the ship, so trusting had he been of Song’s plan. Now he realized it would be a piece of cake. Without gravity, the enormous thing was weightless.

All he had to do was maneuver it into position above the hole … and pull it in with him.

The hatch was wide as a semitruck and had no lid—perhaps it was an exhaust or served some other futuristic function. Whatever its purpose, it was so deep and dark Cade could hardly see.

The inside of the hatch was a long, circular corridor, one that seemed to stretch for miles, straight down into the ship. He might have been blind entirely when he got in were it not for the lights that had come on automatically on either side of his helmet.

Now it was time to figure out how to get the bomb down with him.

It was a brute of a thing to maneuver, and once it moved it was hard to stop. Only after a lot of wrangling—and a few heart-stopping collisions with the Gray ship’s back end—did he manage to get it floating in roughly the right position.

Cade wrapped two hands around the tip of the nuclear missile, nestling it in the soft outside of his backpack on his chest. Then, he placed two feet upon either side of the hatch, where a convenient rim was, and pushed off with all his might.

He flew. Grazing along walls, bumping them. He was lucky they were so smooth, a virtual borehole into the ship, almost as if some bullet or missile was supposed to be traveling out of it.

His vision soon became an endless blur, staring into the dark pupil of the tunnel, with the gray wall the iris surrounding it.