They raced back into the outer corridors, leading the pack of Dwellers. Black smoke poured from air ducts, and the red emergency lights pulsed slowly, stuttering on for a second, off for a few more. Perry kept track of Talon and Clara, but Aria worried him more. She held her arm close and was struggling to keep up.

They reached the transport hangar and darted inside. It looked abandoned, nothing like the teeming hub Perry had seen earlier. He didn’t see any soldiers, and only a handful of Hovers remained.

“Can you pilot any of these?” Aria asked Soren. The color had drained from her face.

“I can in the Realms,” Soren said. “These are real.”

People streamed in around them. Through the vast opening at the other end, the desert still flashed with the full power of the storm.

“Do it,” Perry said. He and Aria had barely survived the journey there. He saw no way of leading dozens of scared people—Dwellers who’d never set foot outside—into the wrath of an Aether storm.

Soren wheeled on him. “I don’t take orders from you!”

“Then take them from me!” Aria yelled. “Move, Soren! There’s no time!”

“There’s no way this works,” Soren said, but he ran to one of the Hovers.

The ship was immense up close, the material of the body seamless and pale blue, with the shimmer of a pearl. Perry grabbed Talon’s and Clara’s hands, pulling them up the ramp.

The cabin inside was a wide, windowless tube. To one side, through a small doorway, he saw the cockpit. The other end was packed with metal crates. A supply craft, he realized, though one that had only been partially loaded. The middle of the hold where he stood was empty, but quickly filling with people.

“Move all the way back and sit down,” Aria instructed them. “Hold on to something, if you can.”

He noticed the Dwellers wore the same gray clothes Aria had when he’d first seen her that night in Ag 6. They were fair-skinned and wide-eyed, and though he couldn’t scent their tempers through the smoke, their reactions to him were blatant, plain on their stunned faces.

He looked down at himself. He had blood and soot covering his battered clothes, and a gun in his hand. Besides that, he knew he’d look hard and feral in their eyes, just as they looked soft and terrified to him.

He wasn’t helping anything by being there.

“In here,” he told Talon and Clara, ushering them into the cockpit.