But it didn’t. The ship was in a fast tumble, rotating three full times before he lost track and fought back the nausea surging up his throat. There were so many sounds of groaning steel and breaking glass and people screaming that it all became an unbearable noise, made him wish he could let go and cover his ears. But his body flopped around with the changes in direction and gravity and holding on became the only thing left to do.

What had happened? What had gone wrong?

The ship righted itself for a moment then fell into a steady dive, the roar of the engines now overpowering all the other sounds. His feet settled against the floor of the hallway, now tilted at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. The Berg shook violently, surely ready to rip apart at any second. The turbulence became too much and he lost his grip on the railing, sliding down the floor until he hit a door, which opened on impact.

He fell into a room filled with complete chaos; he grabbed the edges of the doorframe before he became a part of it. Wind rushed and roared, seemingly from all directions at once. Debris and boxes and scraps and ruins of all manner of things churned through the air, swirling in circles as if caught in a tornado. A gaping hole had been torn in the side of the Berg and with horror he saw the world outside, the slanted line of the horizon, objects and birds whipping by as the ship plummeted, moving ever closer to the ground.

The edges of the hole were jagged and sharp, the torn petals of steel bent inward as if a cannonball had been shot through the skin and frame of the craft. From the outside. Something had torn through solid metal from the outside.

Minho shot his gaze to the other side of the room, opposite the circular gash in the ship.

A badly mangled person was pressed against the wall, crumpled halfway into it as if the materials of the wall had been molded around the body. This person was wearing an artillery suit, just like the one he wore. The head was smashed, the arms and legs twisted at weird angles, blood everywhere. Several of the explosive packets within the suit had exploded, tiny scraps of cloth flapping in the wind along with the tiny wires of the obviously failed guidance devices.

Almost nothing of the victim was intact enough to be identified with ease. But the face, as mangled as it was, had a very familiar nose. And the body, even padded by the artillery suit, had belonged to a very thin human being.

Minho, his hands hurting from how tightly he gripped the doorframe, his leg muscles shaky from the effort of planting his feet against an angled floor, could only stare.

Is that . . .

It was. It definitely was.

It was his friend, Skinny.