With an embarrassing yelp he spun around to see the guard with the orange hair. She was battered, bloodied, her suit ripped in a couple of places. It seemed as if she’d been thrown down a mountain and dragged through a river of rocks.

“Skinny screwed up,” she said. “He screwed up bad.”

“What happened?” Sadina asked.

Orange shook her head. “No time—we gotta get out of this trash heap. We’re all gonna die from the fumes if the thing doesn’t blow up and kill us a lot faster.”

“What about the others?” Trish asked. “Our friends?”

She shook her head again. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’m not sure they made it. Come on!” She yanked Isaac so hard that he almost fell down. He righted himself, nodding his head to let her know he was coming.

“My mom!” Sadina yelled from behind. “What about my mom!”

Orange stopped and screamed back at her. “Just shut up! A lot of them were on the other Berg so I don’t know. Maybe they’re okay. But we have to get off this stupid ship or it won’t matter, will it?”

Sadina, shaken and pale, muttered assent.

They followed Orange through the wreckage.

Roxy. Where was Roxy? He had to find Roxy.

He looked through the gashed wound in the hull. He was shocked to see that one of the other Bergs had crashed as well, only two hundred meters or so away, the trees between them completely flattened and splintered. Skinny, now a mangled corpse, had been on that ship, but now lay enmeshed against the wall behind him, like a grisly decoration.

What could possibly have happened to cause both ships to fail? Minho knew the answer before he completed the thought. Ugh. His idiot friend had completely botched the use of his artillery suit, probably underestimating its power and the subtlety of the guidance mechanisms. Minho tried to picture it in his head—Skinny’s body exploding like a missile, catapulting through the hulls of two separate Bergs, causing them to fail. The suit must’ve ejected other explosives during that short and fatal trip to cause so much damage, or maybe the ships had collided in mid-air.

“Minho!”

He turned around, saw Jackie standing in the doorway to which he’d been clinging for his life mere minutes earlier. She looked distraught, breathing heavily, several of her friends standing behind her.

“When I told you to hold on,” he said, “this is not what I meant. We’re lucky to be alive, any of us.”

“Not everyone made it,” she whispered, almost talking to herself.

He nodded, feeling a little ashamed that he’d only thought of Roxy. “I know. How many of your friends made it? Any signs from the other ship?”