Atlas looked sideways at Houston, and quirked his lips when he met her eyes again.

She grinned, her heart swelling in her chest.

Knot 27 was together, and alive. And that was all that mattered.

Or . . . it used to be. Romy studied the man she had alternately trusted and distrusted for weeks. She was glad it turned out she could do the former. Glad for him, but also for herself. Romy could trust in her instincts again.

It was all okay now.

Atlas was turning from the room. Romy attempted to untangle herself.

“Where are you going?” She stared after the towering man over Elara’s arm.

He turned in the doorway. “I need to contact the main base and have them send a force to retrieve us.”

She eyed her friends who stood as a barrier between her and Atlas, and sent him an exasperated smile. “I don’t think I’m going anywhere.”

And those were the last honest words she ever spoke to him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Pain shot through Romy as she was slammed against the Mandate vehicle.

It was only two hours ago that Atlas made the call for his organisation to collect Knot 27 from the bunker.

That was when Houston had turned the screens back from Romy’s brain to the security cameras at the bunker’s five exits.

All five cameras had shown Mandate soldiers. They were surrounded. Houston had raced for Atlas, who had already seen on another set of screens in the control room. For a while everything was chaos.

And all they could say was how they shouldn’t have been found.

. . . Until Atlas figured it out.

“They caught Tina,” he said.

Tina was part of the rebellion. She’d known everything about the bunker. About the knot. About Atlas. She’d tried to run, knowing with Lucas dead and the knot gone, she’d be targeted. Obviously, Tina didn’t make it far.

Romy cried out, her hands twisted behind her back and contained with a sharp binding. There was gunfire everywhere, all of it aimed at the object in the sky. The flying contraption containing all of her friends—her knot, Houston, and Atlas.

The man behind her gripped her neck and marched her to another vehicle. But she didn’t—couldn’t—take her eyes off her friends in the sky. They weren’t supposed to come back for her, she screamed inside. But she should have known they would. Being part of a knot was a life sentence.

The gunfire was lessening.

The Mandate was realising the flying machine was too far away to hit. Romy closed her eyes with a smile.

The vehicle door opened and Romy was shoved through it, hitting her head hard against the top of the car. The Mandate's hunters were yelling at her in a wall of noise.

But she couldn’t stop herself from smiling, even as a syringe plunged into her neck and black flooded her vision.

They got away.

* * *