“Still.”
This time her smile lingers, her gaze meeting mine. We watch each other, illuminated by the stars and the glow of Avon’s atmosphere. I want to cling to this moment, a tiny shard of peace in the middle of the oncoming storm.
The communications console crackles to life, splitting the quiet. “Eight-one-nine, this is base. Come in, over.”
I jump, staring at the dashboard. “I thought you turned off the comms.”
Jubilee swallows, her eyes fixed on the headset still floating above the controls. “I did. This isn’t background chatter—they’re hailing us directly.”
“What does that mean?”
The voice, female and sharp, repeats its hail while Jubilee abruptly starts flipping switches, turning on scanners monitoring readouts. “It means they found us.”
I lean forward, looking down at the scanner as she jabs a finger at five blips on the screen, approaching the center. Though I’ve never seen this technology before, it doesn’t take training to know what it means. There are ships coming at us on an intercept course.
Jubilee reaches for her headset and pulls it back on with shaking hands. “Base, this is eight-one-nine. We are unarmed—tell your fighters to stand down.”
“Captain,” says the voice on the radio, “is that you?”
“Commander,” Jubilee replies. Her face has gone ashy in the planet’s glow, and I recall what she told me about her last encounter with the base commander. That Jubilee watched something take over her mind, right there in her office. “Yes, this is Lee Chase.”
“Captain, we don’t want any further bloodshed.” The commander’s voice crackles and blurs with static, the interference from Avon’s atmosphere wreaking havoc with the signal from the base. “I don’t believe you have criminal intentions. Surrender now and be escorted back to base, and we can talk.”
Jubilee’s eyes are on mine, her face unreadable except for the depth of mixed emotions there.
I know what she’s asking. If she goes back, I’ll be arrested. I trust you, I mouth silently. I know what this second chance means to her. I know what it would mean to me, if my people offered me a way back.
“Surrender now,” the commander says again, “and give up the rebel you’ve been harboring. He will be taken into custody, but he will not be executed without a fair trial. We can still discuss this, Captain.”
Jubilee doesn’t hesitate any longer. She reaches up and pulls the headset off like it’s burned her. She shakes her head, slamming her palm down on the communications kill switch. “That’s not Commander Towers,” she says, closing her eyes. “It’s not real, what they’re offering.”
I look out, finding the stars again, knowing I might not get to see them again in this lifetime.
Jubilee’s eyes are on the scanner, watching the five ships flying in formation, approaching us from behind. “Flynn?” she says, dragging my attention back away from the endless panorama outside the viewport.
“Yes?”
She curls her hands around the controls, taking a deep breath. “Put your harness back on.”
She’s having the drowning dream again. She gasps and gasps, but all she breathes is darkness, rushing into her lungs like water, hollowing her out, leaving her empty. She tries to scream, but the vacuum of space is quiet, and still, and black….
Until a gentle, greenish light makes her open her eyes. The green-eyed boy is there, and he reaches out to take her hand and pull her close—and suddenly, she can breathe the darkness. Like the underwater dreams she had as a child, the girl can feel the darkness in her lungs, but it hurts her no more than air does.
He speaks, and though she can’t hear him, the vibrations of his voice travel through their joined hands and she can understand him anyway. “Trust what you feel,” he says.
THE DASHBOARD LIGHTS UP with warnings, alarms screaming at me from overhead; I’m coming in too hot, my angle through the atmosphere dangerously close to free fall. But that’s what I’m counting on. The ships in pursuit are fighters, and there’s no way for a simple transport shuttle to outmaneuver them in open space. So I’m going to have to out-dare them.
The viewport shields slam closed as we hit the mesosphere, shielding us from the white-hot temperatures generated by our descent. The second we hit the denser air the whole shuttle starts shaking, its lockers and seats not designed for this kind of stress. I can hear the empty harnesses behind me clanging and slamming against each other.
The shaking of the shuttle threatens to wrench the controls from my hands, and I clench my fists around them as tightly as I can. My harness is cutting into me as momentum crushes us down against our seats, making my whole body ache. I wish I could check on Flynn; this would be enough to make a seasoned veteran start praying to any gods who’d listen, and it’s Flynn’s first time up. But I can’t, because if I make one wrong move, if I misjudge this maneuver, the shuttle will break apart and we’ll both be dead in an instant.
Without the viewport, I’m forced to rely on the digital imaging screen on the dash. I’m looking for the lines to shift, indicating we’ve reached the cloud layer; I’ve never been so glad to be on Avon, where there are clouds everywhere. The clouds are where I’m going to lose our pursuers.
The second we’re in, I jerk back on the stick. The shuttle screams a protest, and I’m slammed down into my seat so hard by the g-forces that my vision blurs, my peripheral sight going dark. I struggle for air, easing up on the stick enough that I can breathe. With any luck, the fighters, unable to track us in the clouds, have zoomed right on past toward Avon’s surface. We level out, my vision returning and my temples pounding with light-headedness, and I immediately roll off to the right until I’m headed east. No rebels out there, no military patrols; only the island where Flynn’s secret facility used to be. That’s where I’m aiming.