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The wall of the shower block caves outward. A window opens to space.

Time stands still.

Colossal metal towers with glowing windows whip past. Inside the windows, tiny forms stare out at us, so close we can almost see the color of their eyes as the Pandora races along the shoulder of Phobos. The city moon glows in the darkness, and then she is gone.

Time resumes.

The shower block becomes a drain out into space.

The intruders are whipped out of sight.

We’re pushed down the hall by the decompressing ship.

I ricochet against the wall. My head slams into something rigid. My ribs bend around metal, pushing the air from my lungs. The whole world is spinning.

I grab for anything. Nails shearing off until I find a jagged lip of metal to grip my fingers around at the inner edge of the breach. My legs dangle down a funnel of bent metal leading to empty space. Cold grips my bones. The water on my tongue boils off.

I feel more than see something white drifting to my left. I snatch at it and look back as my shoulder joint pops. Pain stabs through the rotator cuff. I’ve got a handful of Volga’s hair in my hand. Is it my hand? It’s expanding. Volga stares up at me, her eyes beginning to swell in her head. My grip is all that’s keeping her and us from spinning into the void. She uses me as a ladder to climb back into the ship. Hand over hand.

Bitch is going to leave me. I consider letting go, but I’m distracted by a glowing shape in the ruins of the shower block.

Figment.

Somehow she survived the blast to crawl on the wall like a salamander. Her fingers secure her to the metal. I shout at her, but nothing comes out. She glances over her shoulder at us, and then continues along the ceiling into the hallway to make her own escape. Eager to catch her, Volga crawls more quickly. I lose my grip, and we lurch toward space before she somehow stops herself and grabs me by my hair this time.

My vision warps. Blood boils in my eyeballs. Intense pressure pushes at everything. But I can see the outside of the ship. The hull stretches for kilometers.

There’s more of them.

Shadows float against the Pandora’s jade-green hull, attached by cables, sawing their way in. They look like insects from the distance. They have no ships, no metal space suits. There’s hundreds. Maybe more. One by one they disappear into the Pandora.

I’m going to die.

I don’t want to die.

I can’t leave Liam without anyone.

Has it been ten seconds or thirty? Pressure pushes my urine out. Bile rushes up my esophagus and gushes out my mouth. Something moves outside the hull, large panels of metal moving like puzzle pieces to cover the breach. Volga sees them and jerks on my arm, pulling me forward. The flow of pressure from the ship has stopped, it seems. And I fly back in through the hole just before the scale armor seals the breach. Volga flies in just behind me.

Thunka­thunka­thunka.

The breach seals.

Emergency lights bathe us red. There’s still no pressure, still no oxygen. Darkness is melting the world away. Volga gestures at one of the Sol Guards. The captain still impaled on the wall—the only one not to get sucked out. She pushes her way to him, and then goes limp before she reaches him. She collides violently with the hull, unconscious.

I wait for her to wake up.

She’s not going to.

If we die, it’s on me.

If Liam is an orphan, it’s on me.

I kick off the wall for the corpse and feel the world dimming.

VOLGA PANTS LIKE A bear in the null G. Oxygen finally fills the room. There in the emergency lighting of the destroyed locker room, she looks almost as monstrous as the intruders did. Her pale calves are thicker than my thighs and corded with muscle and thin white hair. They flex as she pushes herself up to the level of the impaled captain. His limbs float around him like a child making a dust angel.

Volga is not as gentle as in her letters as she scavenges weapons from the dead.