The Berg stopped spinning, but now it was in a definite and steady dive, tilted at least forty-five degrees toward the ground below. The growl of air resistance—and engines trying to fight that resistance—drowned out everything else. Jackie and the others settled into awkward positions, still holding on but helped by being pressed against each other, adding support. The ship shook as it descended, rocked by a bounce every few seconds, just strong enough to make Jackie’s stomach swirl with butterflies.

“We can make it!” Frypan yelled up to her, his words almost lost in the avalanche rumble of it all. “These bastards are tough! As long as we don’t—”

Thump. Every person in the room vaulted three feet into the air and back down again as they hit a rough pocket of air. The floor tilted a few more degrees; Jackie winced—someone had fallen hard into her side with an elbow or knee. She groaned; it felt like half her organs had ruptured.

“What did you say?” she asked Frypan, shouting through the pain.

“Who the hell knows!” he yelled back. Jackie really liked this man.

She let out a scream of frustration, aching, trying to release her desperation and will to survive into the ether, into the air, into existence.

The Berg hit something with a violent crunch of metal against wood, the world now filled with the sounds of breaking tree trunks and limbs, their shattered parts scraping against the outside hull of the ship. Jackie and the others bucked and jiggled and screamed and held on. Their speed slowed even as the ferocity of the Berg’s rampage through the trees increased—it had to be trees, each one snapping like a small stick. Jackie felt as if her every tooth had come loose, all of them rattling against each other. Her brain seemed pulverized into mush from the savage turbulence of the crash.

Slower. Slower. Shaking and rattling and crunching.

The ship slammed into one final obstacle; Jackie lost her grip and flew across the small room and crashed into the opposite wall, then slid to the floor, landing on someone else. They’d come to a complete stop and the apocalyptic sounds had ceased along with it. Jackie groaned from the aches of her body, but she rolled to get off the person she’d slumped upon. A panel on the ceiling had jarred completely loose and a beam of sunlight shone from above. The room looked like a dumping ground for unwanted bodies, but the bodies she saw were squirming with movement.

“Thank you.”

It was a pathetic-sounding voice, coming from right below Jackie. She looked down to see Dominic, flat on the floor, staring up at her.

“Your butt was on my face,” he whispered, wincing from some unspoken pain of his own.

And then, somehow, amongst all that insanity, the two of them laughed.

The world had grown still. Miraculously, impossibly still.