“Isaac?” Sadina added when he didn’t respond, gawking at his new talisman.

“I . . . I don’t really know. Orange just told me to be ready and that we’d know.”

“Know what?” Trish asked.

“I don’t know.” This made him laugh, though it sounded slightly hysterical to his ears. “But they must be planning on a bumpy ride because she wants us to stay locked up until . . . Until whatever.”

“Well put it in your pocket,” Sadina said, pointing at his raggedy pants as if he didn’t know what a pocket was. “We don’t wanna lose it.”

“Ya think?” he responded.

“More than you do, usually.” She sighed then, a weighty one that he’d heard from her before, usually before she was about to say something serious. “I love you, Isaac. I hope you know that. Trish and I both do. Somehow we’re gonna get through this and we’re going to do it together.”

He found the strength to say, “I love you guys, too. Cheesy, aren’t we?”

“Cheesy is the only way to go,” Trish said.

Isaac finally slipped the key into his front pocket. The thing was a large solid piece of metal, like something from an old castle. “It’s hard to believe what we were up to just a couple of months ago. I mean, did we ever really live on an island and not worry who was gonna kill us or hurt us every hour of every day?”

“It was kinda boring if you think about it,” Sadina said.

Trish scoffed. “I miss being bored.”

“Yeah, me—”

The world around them jolted, a hard bounce that threw Isaac to the limit of his chains—his head bounced off the wall. Sadina shrieked; Trish yelled something that was drowned out by another jolt and bounce, accompanied by a terribly grating sound of metal scraping across metal. Isaac reached for the railing of the bed, dazed in the sudden movement and noise. His fingers had just brushed the cool steel when the room tilted, jumped, tilted some more. He was thrown against the resistance of the chains again, pain biting into his arms and legs.

And then the ship was falling, his body floating up from the bed as if gravity had disappeared from the earth.

“Hold on!” Sadina screamed.

Noise. Spinning. Nothing else.

Minho had just left the containment cell, had just told Jackie and her friends to hold on and get ready, had just gathered his courage to ignite another explosive and charge the cockpit of the Berg—when he found himself flying through the hallway as if left and right had become up and down. He slammed into a wall that moments before had been in front of him, not beneath him. He crumpled his legs and rolled as he’d been trained, then grabbed onto a railing and made his arms rigid, waiting to see if the ship righted itself.