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He refocused on his friends.

He could see the effect of his words over the past hour or so starting to impact them.

He saw a faint excitement on their faces now.

It looked like a few of them were trying to suppress that excitement, or temper it, at least, but it shone in their eyes, like a spark of hope they couldn’t quite tamp down.

He even saw that excitement in Wynter now.

Nick was about to try and say something to all of them, maybe to temper their enthusiasm a bit, or remind them what he’d said about “the portals being unpredictable,” and how they still really had no idea if it was still there, or if they could find it if it was––

When Forrest Walker suddenly jerked in his seat.

He touched his ear, and his eyes went directly to Nick’s.

“Our ride’s here,” he said.

Nick nodded, then glanced around at everyone else. They looked, if anything, more nervous and excited and confused than they had even a few seconds ago.

Nick hoped like hell he wasn’t getting their hopes up for nothing again.

He wanted so badly for this all to turn out right for a change.

He wanted his friends to be safe, for Wynter to be safe, his family to be safe.

He knew “safe” would always be something of an illusion, no matter where they all ended up, but at the very least, he didn’t want them living in a world that considered them dangerous animals, where they lived with the constant specter of being murdered or tortured simply for living their lives.

He didn’t want to live through another racial war.

He didn’t want them to have to do it, either.

He didn’t want Wynter or Forrest living their lives in terror of being locked up and tortured. He didn’t want Malek and Tai to be forced to work as assassins, spies, killers, or oracles for human governments or defense contractors, or kept as quasi-prisoners in the houses of rich psychopaths who barely saw them as living, feeling beings.

He didn’t want Damon to have to live the way Nick had done as a Midnight.

He didn’t want him shipped off to a work camp on Madagascar, either.

Even just living a dehumanizing existence of constant surveillance and check-ins and blood tests and torture-like reprogramming and certified H.R.A. feeds was bad enough. The world the humans seemed to be envisioning now sounded like a doomed hellscape.

Even if Zoe won the war, Nick suspected it wouldn’t be to create a world he wanted to live in. It wouldn’t be a world he wanted his loved ones to live in, either.

He wanted them to have a shot at a normal life.

He wanted another chance at what he’d had with Dalejem.

He thought everyone should have that.

Everyone deserved a real life, at least once.

CHAPTER27

THE UNUSUAL SHIP

Their transport didn’t turnout to be what Nick expected.

He’d known it would likely bewatertransport, of course. They were right by the ocean, after all, near what had been Brighton Beach.

Nick thought it would be asmallboat, though, and that it would take them to the airport without leaving the domed waterways. He figured they’d go from Sheepshead Bay into Jamaica Bay, and eventually to the modern airport by what had previously been J.F.K.