Cranks swarmed outside the Grief Walker, especially energetic after being freed from their shackles. Minho heard them banging on the hull. He saw them through the viewports on the bottom of the rounded control center. Scratches of fingernails against metal sounded from above. All of it was enough to encourage Griever Glane to assist Minho in getting the giant machine up and running. Of course, the man didn’t have much choice now that Roxy and Miyoko possessed the discarded rifles. But Glane actually knew very little—the real expert, the priestess, was on the floor, knocked out cold from Roxy’s devastating blow.

Jackie and Isaac had just appeared, looking like Cranks, themselves. Sweaty, dirty, bloody, traumatized—evidently they’d been dragged away, forced to fight their way out of it. Minho was ashamed to admit that he didn’t even know they’d been missing. Other matters had taken precedence.

Initially, his hope had been to barricade themselves, utilize the food supplies, maybe get enough power to use whatever weapons were available. But the Grief Walker was intact, and the Grief Walker was functional. Based on the scattered knowledge he had of the machines, they could very well break through the wreckage of the Berg and escape the invading Cranks.

As he frantically worked with the petulant Glane to figure things out, Jackie came up to him.

“What happened?” he asked her. She must have been in horrified awe of his capacity to remain detached, to repress emotion—one of the many skills he’d learned as an Orphan of the Remnant Nation. Roxy was the only weakness in the armor he’d felt in a long time.

“Minho, it’s not just Cranks we have to worry about,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. “There’s . . . others, people who look like them but aren’t as . . . I don’t know. They were smarter, talked to us, almost killed us. Maybe they’re just early on in the disease.”

Isaac had joined them, looking even worse than Jackie. “They said something about being in-between. They were just as creepy as those guys.” He pointed down at the closest viewport, where a Crank was bashing its head against the glass. Thump, thump, thump. A small crack had actually formed.

“Did you kill them?” Minho asked.

It took a moment for Jackie to answer. “Yes, Minho, we killed them.”

“Good.”

Engines hummed and growled; gears cranked and scraped; grinding echoes of machine parts rubbing against other machine parts made the entire vessel tremble and rumble. The controls were mechanical and straightforward, even labeled in most cases.

“Minho!” Jackie shouted.

He jerked his attention away for a moment and looked at her—she was pissed at him for no reason he could think of.

“What?”

“You look like you’re having a grand old time with this thing but I’m telling you there was something strange about those people who tried to drag us away.”