Somehow the silence was thicker in the hallway, almost as corporeal as the darkness, but the quiet broke with the blood thundering through my ears. We stepped out with the captain in the lead, hugging the wall to the right by touch alone, away from the Vicious room. Away from Ellison and Randolph. I hoped that doppelganger thing didn’t have sharp hearing because our footsteps, as soft as they were, crashed against the titanium.

Captain Glenn soon angled us left around the corner. A shuffling noise, somewhere in the hallway, stiffened Mase’s hand in mine and hesitated all our steps. But we pushed on as fast as possible through the dark, even though the thing likely hunted our every move.

Another left. One more and we’d be in the same hallway as the dining room and Ellison and Randolph. I hoped they somehow knew we were coming.

More shuffling up ahead. Or was it behind us? Everything echoed so much in the metal ship, it was hard to tell.

When we rounded the next corner, the sliver of light underneath the dining room door shined like a beacon. We rushed toward it. Something farther down the hallway banged. I jumped and inhaled a shaky breath. Mase’s hand twitched in mine.

A pair of legs blocked out some of the light from the door. Captain Glenn, I realized, hopefully searching for the lever. He knocked, barely a whisper of his knuckle.

Farther down the hallway, glass crunched in a steady rhythm. As if something were walking out of the Vicious room and over what was left of the hanging light. Maybe it wouldn’t see us in the dark. But it would if we opened the door. We didn’t exactly have a choice, though.

“Keep Absidy alive,” the captain murmured into the door.

I blinked. The job. The job Ellison was paying them for. To keep me alive.

The lock clicked behind the door, a cannon blast down the hallway.

Something roared. Footsteps hurtled toward us.

“Go!” Poh yelled and shoved in front of me.

The dining room door flew open. Several hands at my back barreled me through first. Keep Absidy alive.

I whirled around, my gaze not registering anything else but who—or what—came through the door next. Mase fired one shot past the open door, his face pale, but the gun clicked empty. Captain Glenn grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and threw him into the dining room. Poh stood next to the captain, her steak knife gripped tight and her expression lethal.

Thud. Thud. The footsteps sounded from just outside the door. The doppelganger fired Poh’s laser gun.

Poh lurched backward and cried out. The captain, though massive, had light feet and dodged left into Poh, dragging her to him. They lunged into the dining room, then he shoved the door closed and locked it.

The thing wailed again, so loud I slapped my hands to my ears. Poh stumbled back into the gurney, gripping her arm, her face twisted in agony.

Captain Glenn grabbed the edge of the gurney and doubled over, breathing hard, while sweat leaked down his face. “Give us a visual on it, Poh.”

With a hiss of pain, she fished out the Mind-I and pointed it at the wall. A lone red dot drifted inside the Vicious room.

“Let us know if it comes near here.” He ticked his dark gaze up at the open double doors, and the terror etched on his face faded into something that clenched around my heart.

Mase crossed toward the kitchen and gripped the doorway with white-tipped knuckles as he swallowed hard at what he saw.

A sinking feeling stitched itself into my soul. I shuffled closer, my mind reeling, and peered inside. Ellison with her back turned, on her knees. Her braid swinging back and forth across her back as if marking time while she counted.

“One, two, three.”

Randolph lay out on the floor in front of her. She bent over his face, then leaned back on her knees and pressed her clasped hands against his chest once more.

“One, two, three.”

A strange ticking sounded at the back of my throat, not quite a whimper, but something more guttural. I’d seen her do this before when I hid in the infirmary cupboards aboard the Nebulous on an old man dying. But not here. Not Randolph. I tried to swallow, but ended up choking back a moan.

Captain Glenn stepped cautiously past me, his eyes wide as he neared the impossible scene. “Ellison?”

She shook her head fiercely, and strands loosened themselves from her braid. “No.” That was all she said, her voice coated with tears, as if that one word could change everything.

No.

He knelt next to Randolph’s head, his eyes shining bright as he moved his gaze from him to her. “I need you to tell me what happened.”

She stopped pushing at his chest and hung her head, her shoulders hitching. I wished I could go to her, but I wouldn’t be able to cross that distance without imploding.

“He said he wanted to cook something or he’d go mad. Like a dessert. He tried one of the heatherberries to see if it was ripe.” She glanced behind her, likely searching for me, with tears tracking down her face.

The sorrow behind her gaze buckled the truth into place with a painful click. I shook my head while my heart snapped open.

“And he dropped dead,” she continued.

“Jesus.” Mase stepped closer and took my hand.

“Poison?” Captain Glenn stood quickly, wiping his hand over his jaw as he gazed at the stasis pantry door at the back of the kitchen.

“It looks that way.” Ellison stood to face me and squeezed her eyes shut. “If it had been someone else who ate it… If it had been all of us… I’m sorry, Absidy. I know how much he meant to you.”

I nodded, the movement jerky and unnatural. I couldn’t rip my gaze away from Randolph’s two left shoes, one beige and one black.

“I’m sure you did all you could, Ellison.” Captain Glenn gazed at us standing in the doorway. “We have to assume our whole food supply was poisoned.”

A deep, bone-chilling silence penetrated the room as we all were likely thinking the same thing. We couldn’t land anywhere with Parker so close on our tail, we weren’t allowed through the rings, our outside communications were jammed, and we had no edible food. One of these things had to give.

Mase slid around me and treaded slowly into the kitchen, his head bowed. “Captain, we need to move the—” He glanced over his shoulder at me and winced. “We need to move Randolph somewhere safe.”

Captain Glenn nodded. “The stasis pantry.”

They covered him up with an old burlap sack from head to both left shoes, and once Mase gently guided Ellison away, they hefted him up and walked him into the weird blue light in the pantry as if it were a gateway into the next life.

He didn’t need me for that, not that this came as a surprise or a disappointment. But I would miss his need for me, period. I would miss him.

I hoped they settled him next to his wine, next to the very thing he’d finally found an escape from in death. If I’d been able to speak around the knot in my throat, I would’ve made sure of it.

A light touch skimmed over my elbow. “Sit with me,” Mase said, his voice gentle.

I followed him into the dining room, only because I didn’t know what else to do, and sat on his lap while he held me close. The others drifted in quietly, their shared gloom constricting my chest even tighter. Half the crew had seen more death on this ship lately than we cared to. If we didn’t warn the rest of humanity about the Saelis, we would see a lot more.

Ellison started around Mase’s chair to her usual spot at the gurney, and as soon as she sat, I reached for her hand, unable to look at her grief-stricken face, but needing her reassuring touch anyway. She gripped my hand tightly, but her concerned gaze aimed behind her at Poh by the hallway door.

“I can look at that for you,” Ellison said.

“No.” Poh gripped her wounded arm tighter and glanced at the ship’s map on the wall. The red dot seemed to be hovering between the second and third floors. “It’s just a graze. It’s fine.”

“Do you know Randolph’s family, Absidy?” Captain Glenn asked, checking the map before he lowered himself into his chair.

Moon Dragon. She’d said he was her uncle, but not really her uncle, which I still didn’t fully understand. I would have to tell her. Somehow.

I nodded at the captain since Moon would know the rest of his family. I just needed to get ahold of her.

Mase touched his lips gently to my tears. “I’m sorry, Absidy.”

I twitched my hand over his, grateful for his comfort but too numb to do much else.

“We’re going to head back to Orin,” Captain Glenn said. “We’re only about five days out. We need to get off this ship.”

“Will we make it that long?” Poh asked.

Her question hung in the air. No one seemed brave enough to answer that honestly or to voice the next question—what about Parker? If we landed on Orin, he would feed Mase He. And the next question—how would I protect Moon and Pop from the Saelis if I was on Orin? Sure, I could try to send them a warning, but it wasn’t just them who needed a heads-up. It was all of humanity.

Eventually, Ellison nodded off at the gurney, and Mase and I sagged to the floor with his head in my lap. The captain sat against the opposite wall and blinked at the holographic pictures of his family. One of his beautiful wife, the other of his adorable, gap-toothed daughter switched back and forth in the display that rose from the black cuff at his wrist. Poh stood vigil against the door with her eyes closed, somehow seeming even more alert than when they were open.

“Poh,” I whispered.

Her yellow eyes snapped open.

“Can I see the Mind-I?”

The map of the ship over the captain’s head blinked out as she tossed the Mind-I to me.

I snatched it out of the air and gazed down at the piece of plastic in my palm with no idea what to do next. “How do I use it?”

“I rigged it so there’s a switch on the side. Just hit that and point it at a wall.”

I did as she said. Our seventh—our sixth—passenger blinked its red dot near the engine room. The rest of the dots clustered in here. Along the bottom of the projection was a thin black line with a variety of icons, one of which was an envelope. Underneath the black line in flashing letters pulsed the word ALERT again and again.

“What’s this alert?” I asked.

“I don’t know anything about an alert,” Poh said and closed her eyes again. “Point at what you want and hit the switch. I designed it to do that since it’s not thought-controlled.”

“Was that before or after Ellison magically found it?” I hissed.

Her mouth pinched into a thin line, though that discussion was far from over. But I had something more important to do right then, something that wouldn’t likely raise my voice to a sleep-wrecking volume.

I did what she said. The envelope took over the screen, and a keyboard popped up from the bottom.

The To: field blinked empty, but the From: field read Nesbit. I guessed the SAIL nursery where he was made didn’t need to give him a last name. I pointed and clicked at the keyboard on the bottom half of the screen until Moon Dragon’s name appeared in the To: field, then Franco Beatrix, her latest sexual conquest, since he knew my predicament, as well. Most of it. Fingers crossed they were still together since I’d always liked Franco.

In the message space, I stopped. I had so many things I wanted to tell Moon, but most of it didn’t need to be sent over Mind-I in case it was intercepted by the police or the Ringers or the Saelis or Parker or… That might’ve been everyone who would be interested. Still, that was quite a list. Plus, Moon wouldn’t know who Nesbit was, so I had to somehow let her know it was me without really telling her anything. I ran my fingers through Mase’s silky hair absently, thinking. Nothing about Jezebel. Nothing about Smixton College. I glanced at the kitchen doors, my chest clenching at what lay beyond.

Heatherberries. That one word said so much and yet nothing at all. It was perfect. I’d asked Moon for a heatherberry shortcake recipe almost as soon as I’d boarded this ship. It was also what had killed Randolph. I would eventually need to go in that direction with her, and heatherberries would pave the way one word at a time.

I typed it, sent it, and totally expected an instant reply back from one of them. When that didn’t happen, I clicked on the flashing ALERT at the bottom of the screen. It lit up in advertisements for penis enlargements and rows of clickbait article titles with the word share next to them. I blinked at this new digitized world, feeling more lost than I’d ever felt in my life.

But buried near the center under a popup window featuring a Download Now! link for bunny dust was a picture of my face on my wanted poster. At the top, it listed the bounty on my head, a number with an unholy amount of zeroes behind it. I clicked on the picture, curious about what I’d been up to. The article’s headline read “Wanted Fugitive Look-Alike Goes Missing After Wild Party on Space Station.” I sure hadn’t been to any wild parties lately. Or ever. The article stated that the victim was thought to be nineteen-year-old Absidy Jones, wanted fugitive from Mayvel, but close friends stated otherwise. Daphne Otecea was her name, a waitress from Wix who ran away into deep space years ago to flee her controlling parents. A quick scan of the rest of the article revealed evidence of foul play had been found, the police said, and this was the third Absidy Jones look-alike to have gone missing in the last week.

The third look-alike. I never found out how many Captain Glenn had hired, but one by one, they were being picked off. Because they’d been hired to look like me, chains and corset and all. Picked off by who though? How did anyone else know what I knew? Oh my Feozva, that question didn’t even make sense inside my own head.

I knew just enough about both the Saelis and the Ringers to be considered dangerous. So, I needed to use that to my advantage. I’d wanted to blackmail the Ringers into letting us back through their rings, but because of my lack of evidence, I didn’t think it would work. Now, though, I had a cargo room full of consumectalons and a slice of Randolph’s genius I would carry with me always. He’d said to look closer at the ghosts’ memories they’d flashed as they’d passed through me, and I might have seen a doozy of all memories, especially if I could show everyone that memory. It could be enough.

“Poh.” When she didn’t answer, I whispered, “I know you can hear me.” Even if she chose not to because I’d made it clear I didn’t trust her. Which I didn’t. But right now, I needed help. We all did.

“I’m sleeping,” she said with her eyes closed.

I cradled Mase’s head and squirmed out from underneath him. “You can sleep in the kitchen while I talk to you about something.”

She opened her eyes slowly and narrowed them at me. “About what?”

I grazed my fingertips over Mase’s scar as I laid his head back down on the floor. He looked even more perfect in sleep, scars and all, and for once, peaceful. I wanted to keep him that way. “In the kitchen.”

She shoved off the door and followed me through the double doors.

While walking back there, I half expected to see Randolph at the stove, tipping his silver flask over his mouth while he stirred something into a boiling pot or grumbling about one thing or another. The absence of him gnawed at my soul, taking bites I would never get back. I doubted Poh felt the same way, but she gave me a moment to collect myself nevertheless.

When the double doors stopped flapping and all was quiet, I took a deep breath and kept my voice low. “If I gave you a serial number to a Mind-I, do you think you could somehow hack into it to see the last few days of that person’s life?”

She crossed her arms and sized me up and down, testing to see what kind of grit I was made of. The dirty, vicious kind, and I suspected she was starting to become aware of that. Or she would soon enough.

“Why?” she asked.

“1215005. That’s the serial number of Doctor Daryl’s Mind-I. He used to be the—”

“Doctor?” She winged up an eyebrow.

I nodded. “Before he tried to kill me. He was a Saelis/human hybrid. We need his memories as proof for blackmail, because the Ringers will let us through their rings.”

She strode to the small table in the center of the kitchen and leaned her hip against it. “And what if they don’t? Is there a plan C in the works?” At my questioning look, she said, “Plan A is continuing on to Orin. Plan B is blackmail the Ringers, and Plan C?”

“Yes, there’s a plan C.” Though no matter how I spun the rest of the scenarios through my head, none of them would be as effective as plan B. Continuing on to Orin was moving away from the threat, and because Moon Dragon still hadn’t messaged me back, she still didn’t know what was coming.

“What if the Ringers do let you through?” Poh asked. “Then what? You warn everyone about the Saelis so the humans take them out first, and all of you are saved?”

“Basically. Yeah.”

She shook her head. “You better tell me what plan C is.”

I sighed at the level of confidence in her tone. It wasn’t much. If the Ringers wouldn’t let us through the rings after we blackmailed them, then… I sawed my teeth across my bottom lip, considering.

“How would you feel about creating some engine trouble?” I finally asked.

“I would feel like I wasn’t a very good engineer,” she said with a frown. “But feelings can be ignored. What did you have in mind?”

“Something that will stall us so Parker and his men will be able to board our ship.”

Her yellow eyes widened as she dipped her chin, seemingly impressed. “And how will that end for your pretty boy?”

I winced as doubt pounded steel fists into my heart. It wouldn’t end well, which was yet another reason why plan B for blackmail had to work. “Captain Glenn will be with him. He’ll help. He always does.”

“And the doppelganger? Will he be helping too?”

“Damn it, Poh,” I hissed. “This plan has gaping holes in it. I already know that. But something has to give in this situation, or more people will die.” My voice wobbled on the last word, and I gripped the table, battling my tears unsuccessfully.

Poh waited, silent.

When I thought I had control again, I said, “We’ll handle the doppelganger. Are you going to help me or not?”

She studied me for a long moment. “Why do you want Parker and his men to come here?”

“Because.” I swiped at my cheeks, shrugging. “I want to steal his ship. Once a thief, always a thief.”

Poh’s eyebrows skyrocketed up her forehead. “You have impressive balls on you.”

“That’s…” I shook my head. “Not helping. Are you in or what?”

“Maybe. But then what?” she asked. “Do you even know how to fly?”

“No, but I bet their pilot does. He’ll have to stay aboard to keep both of our ships from drifting toward the magnestar.”

She nodded slowly. “So you’ll steal the ship, threaten the pilot with his likely less impressive balls, I suppose, and go…where?”

“To the closest Ring Guild space station. I’ll force them to let us through the rings. Maybe kidnap one of them. And you’re coming with me.”

“I am, huh?” A glint of excitement sharpened her yellow eyes. “Why would I do that?”

“Because on top of what my sister is paying you to keep me alive, you can collect the bounty on my head.” I sent up a quick prayer to Feozva that Plan B for blackmail would work and Plan C would never actually happen. Plan C was shaping up to be much too dangerous for everyone on this ship. Especially for Mase. And especially for me. “If Plan B doesn’t work, you’re going to turn me in.”