Roar rubbed his jaw, giving a small shrug. “Maybe that’s how it should have been. I doubt you could have helped him.”

“But I would have tried,” Perry said. “I’d have done all I could.”

Soren poked at the fire with a stick. “From where I’m sitting, you did.”

It was a decent thing to say. Perry nodded in thanks.

He leaned his back on the raft—the raft that had saved his life—and wove his fingers together on his stomach. He wanted to rush to Aria but he was too weak. He had to replenish the water his body desperately needed. Hour by hour, his muscle cramps and his headache faded and he felt more like himself.

He saw the scars on his hand, scars Cinder had given him, and his throat tightened. The feeling he had of incompletion—of wishing he could have done more, or differently, or better—wasn’t new. But he was tired of bashing his head against the past. He tried to do right—in every situation. Sometimes that wasn’t enough, but it was all he could do. The only thing he truly had power over. He was learning to accept that.

He watched the ashes from the fire flicker upward into the darkness. To the stars. The lid had come off the sky, and now they were connected, earth with everything. Him to Cinder. To Liv and his brother and his father.

He was so close to feeling peace. Only one thing stood in his way now.

“Per, how did you know that thing was on the Hover?” Roar asked, tipping his chin to the raft.

Perry’s eyes moved to Soren, remembering the Dweller’s comment when they’d been preparing to go after Cinder in the Komodo.

That’s an inflatable boat, Outsider. And if that’s what you’re wearing, I’m out of this operation.

Soren grinned. “Go on, admit it. I saved your life.”

His tone was friendly. He had changed in the past week, Perry thought. The way he looked and the way he spoke.

“You helped,” Perry said. When Sable had left him for dead, Perry had shot right to the storage lockers, Soren’s wisecrack loud in his mind. He had hoped the Dragonwing, a smaller craft than the Belswan, also carried the raft. Luck had been on his side. He’d immediately located the inflatable boat, which had assembled with just the press of a button. He could say one thing about the Dwellers: they built good ships.

Perry had escaped the Dragonwing with only seconds to spare. He’d watched the Hover sink behind him and then he’d come through the barrier of Aether, the last of the Hovers in the fleet soaring above him.

They’d pulled ahead quickly then. The fleet had probably made the journey there in hours, where he had spent a day battling rough seas, and then two more in calmer water.