Page 22 of Last of Her Name

He’s out of air.

Pol is suffocating right beside me.

Desperately, I unclasp my harness and rip off Pol’s oxygen tube, then yank out my own. Flipping back my visor, I suck down one deep breath, then shove the tube into the receptor on his helmet. The ship rattles harder, starting to gather speed.

One minute, Pol.

That’s all I can give you.

Pol sits up with a gasp as the caravel lurches forward. I redirect every last bit of power left in the ship to the thrusters, in an effort to control our plummet. The control board goes dark. The lights go off. We’re lit only by the ambient light of Sapphine’s sun.

“Stacia, what did youdo?” he shouts, his hand going to the O2line connecting my tank to his suit.

I can’t reply, because I don’t have a breath to spare. My mouth opens and I gasp, but there’s nothing to breathe.

It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever felt in my life.

Panic is an animal instinct, and it claws me from the inside out, as if my heart is trying to escape my body. I suck dryly for air that isn’t there, barely noticing Pol’s hands as he shoves me into my seat and buckles my harness around me. He’s trying to free the oxygen tube, but it’s too late. He’s out of air too.

The caravel begins to shake as we break into Sapphine’s atmo. Flames lick the hull, and with the coolant system down, the interior heat is already rising.

I’m starting to black out. My head nods, and I whip it up again. I can’t tell if Pol is conscious or not. I can’t turn my head to look at him for the force of the g’s pushing against me. I can barely reach the ship’s controls.

Just a few more seconds. I have to hang on that long.

I watch the atmospheric scanner, waiting to see even the faintest O2levels outside. Still nothing.

My head’s spinning, my vision shrinking to a point. I need airnow. Involuntarily I gasp, but my lungs find nothing. Frantically, I flip open my visor, and feel the heat of atmospheric entry wash over my face. My brain is shutting down, my consciousness like fingers gripping the edge of a cliff, slipping one by one …

There!

The scanner’s picked up an O2reading. It’s weak, but it’s there.

I reverse the vents and flood the life-support system with salty Sapphine sky just as my eyes go dark and my head pitches forward. My hands slip from the controls; the ship starts to tilt, leaning into that deadly spin.

Then oxygen fills my lungs.

With a long, straining gasp, I lift my head and grab the controls, my body coming alive again. I haul on the manual stick, pulling the caravel up before it can tumble out of control. And below, the blue surface of Sapphine appears beneath layers of thin white cloud. The sun is behind us, burning across the face of the ocean.

“Stacia!” Pol shouts. “Angle east! There’s a settlement—”

“I’ll try!”

There’s not much I can do with a dead ship except fall, but with the vents sucking in air that I can now reroute to the thrusters, I can at least nudge us a bit. The thrusters are useless against the planet’s gravity, so there’ll be no flying, no easy, soft touchdown. We’re still hurtling toward the planet at a lethal rate, but if I can strike at an angle, we might skim to a halt like a stone skipping across water. It’ll take a ridiculously perfect approach, though, and I never was much good at manual landings in the simulators. My mechanic training focused onfixingships, not flying them.

“There, there!” Pol shouts, pointing at something in the distance. There’s a smudge on the water, some sort of human settlement. But I’m too focused on controlling the ship to study it.

“Brace!” I shout. “Brace hard!”

I engage all the starboard thrusters, trying to slow our descent as much as possible while turning us horizontal to the surface. The altimeter drops at an alarming rate. A thousand feet, eight hundred, six, four, two—

We strike the ocean and the force snaps my head forward. Everything goes black.

The first thing I’m aware of is the stench of fish, so rotten it’s like a punch to the olfactory nerve.

I crack open my eyes to see nothing but darkness, gagging on the foul odor. For a moment, panic grips me. My body is immobile, locked in place, every frantic jerk of my limbs met with resistance.

Then I realize I’m still in my seat, and the spongy darkness around me is the ship’s emergency foam, sprung from the chair to expand around me, keeping me from feeling the brunt of the crash. I’m like a fragile vase packed inside a box.