A ghostly chill penetrated the hallway outside the infirmary, drilling into my bones with needle points. The sick, twisted part of me welcomed the cold because I knew it, could stick a label on its familiarity, when days ago I hadn’t felt it at all, even though mine and everyone’s breaths had caught in the air.

I ran the glove on my broken hand along my itchy scales on the other. Maybe my theory about the ghosts still being inside me held weight. Maybe I was haunted, and the cold the rest of the crew had felt was because of me. Now, with the doppelganger’s ghost on the ship, I had to hope I would be fine. I had iron to repel it, and I had fresh, happy parasites to spark my addiction. Once again, I was dressed in my corset, leather pants, boots, and ice pick necklaces—thanks to Ellison’s help. And jammed down the front of my corset was the cylinder of consumectalons I’d filmed, only because I had nowhere else to currently put it. I was me again. Mostly.

Still, I worried about everyone else. When Poh and I left this ship for Parker’s, I would be leaving the crew vulnerable to both Parker and the ghost. Which meant I needed to cross one of those threats off the list permanently. But how to do that since I wasn’t sure I could invite any more ghosts inside me?

I flicked the iron cube from inside my lower lip out to my palm and strode toward the elevator at the end of the hall with the cube tight in my fist. The cubes that had vanished from my pants pocket after we’d come back from Orin must’ve gone to the same place as socks from the dryer.

Poh must’ve fixed the hanging light at the cross-section, but as soon as I drew closer, its glow sputtered. It pulsed onto the Vicious room door, which was open. The light was on inside, too. I rounded the corner toward it, the hallway light arcing wildly above my head.

“Hello?” I called, stepping to the doorway.

Nothing stirred except a waft of copper and cleaning chemical-tainted air. The light inside flickered.

I glanced down the hallway toward the dining room and kitchen, listening, breathing steam. All was quiet.

Inside the Vicious room, someone had covered the air vent with the metal cover. The room held an orange glow because of the red walls and the rusted orange flakes that had peeled off each of the two-inch Saelis marks scratching the entirety of the walls and floor.

Something bitterly sweet scraped at the back of my tongue. I froze, my nerves jolting, and my shuddery breath puffed from my lungs like an exhale of smoke. Like Red’s tobacco. From inside me. Maybe my theory about the ghosts not crossing to the other side was right.

I blinked around the room, and out of the corners of my eyes, the sharp claw marks that had scored titanium scattered and moved to form something different. When I shifted my gaze, all I caught were snatches of letters before they settled back to normal. F-C-A-N. The Vicious room, and maybe Red, too, was trying to tell me something.

The floor juddered under my feet, and the ship heaved a groan that I was pretty sure it shouldn’t make. Outside in the hallway, the elevator dinged and the doors opened.

Seconds later, Poh bounced inside the Vicious room, her white ponytail streaming behind. Her yellow gaze lit with excitement. “Plan C is in effect. Let’s move.”

“What?” I stood there, my drug-fueled mind like sludge.

The ship’s telecom fizzed with static, then Mase’s voice rumbled through, vibrating with rage. “Poh, get to a telecom. Now.”

She crossed to the one on the wall in the far corner and hit the button. “I’ve explained this already,” she snapped.

“Well, what are you doing to fix it?” he demanded.

"I told you. It needs a belt. Not much I can do about it if I don’t have a belt," she shouted.

“Then make it so we don’t need a belt,” he yelled back. “Parker’s trying to board us.”

“Now?” I asked.

The floor dropped out from under my feet and just as quickly slammed back into the soles of my boots with a jaw-cracking shudder.

Poh stalked toward me and pushed me from the room. “This is what you wanted. Plan C if Plan B didn’t work. Well, I’m here to tell you that it didn’t.” She guided me roughly by the shoulder under the swinging light in the hallway, then left.

I wrenched away from her, but she held tighter. “No, I’m not ready. I didn’t even get a chance to explain to Mase yet, and there’s still a ghost haunting this ship. If Parker’s boarding, I can’t just leave them like this. Can’t you give the engine more juice for a little longer?”

We neared the infirmary, its bright donut circle window like a hopeful beacon. I tightened the fist of my good hand. This wasn’t what I wanted. Plan B was supposed to get us through the rings. But if I’d had more time, I could’ve come up with a slightly better Plan C.

“If I give the engine more juice, it’s fixed,” Poh said.

Almost to the infirmary door.

“Elli—” I started to scream, but Poh lunged for my face, cutting off my cry while simultaneously binding my wrists behind me in her firm grip.

Captain Glenn’s tight voice carried over the ship’s telecom. “Ladies and…gentleman… Prepare to be boarded.”

“Fuck,” Mase shouted in the background, then the telecom crackled and died.

Poh swept me forward, faster now, dragging me along with one hand clenched over my mouth and the other painfully squeezing my wrists together.

I’d done this. I should’ve warned Mase a long time ago that this was what I had planned. I should’ve never been stupid enough to trust Poh. Whatever happened next was completely on my shoulders. I would be abandoning my pregnant sister—the sister I’d crossed several systems to rescue—to Parker’s company aboard a haunted ship. Parker would feed He to Mase, and I could very well lose him, the father of our child.

All so I could get us through the rings. I had no clue if it would even work. Or if I would even see it to fruition since Poh could really turn me in to the police.

But what choice did I have? It was too late to stop it since the wheels were already in motion, and I was literally being hauled off this ship. But I had to believe that Captain Glenn was more than capable of protecting everyone.

The ship trembled under my feet, mimicking the fear squirming through my gut. Poh and I rounded the corner to the hallway that contained the ship’s entryway. Loud footsteps clipped the floor behind us, and soon Captain Glenn rushed past without even glancing our way. Because Poh touched me, we must’ve both gone invisible.

He drew his gun and punched the button to the inner door. The door slid upward. Instead of the metal entryway bracketed by both the inner and outer doors, a long, hard-plastic tube stretched its length and connected us to Parker’s ship. Heated air wafted through and melted into this ship’s chill.

The captain leveled his gun as Parker and his men strode through, their long coats billowing around their ankles. A soft yellow light lit their backs and glinted off Parker’s bald, alabaster head.

He stopped in front of the captain, his cracked, blue eyes sweeping past him and skipping right over Poh and me. His men exited the entryway and circled the captain, their own guns drawn. She bolted across their eyes and below their noses in almost continuous pulses, as if they’d just had a fresh dose.

Parker held his hands out to his sides. “Is this any way to greet a guest?”

“Leave this ship, or I’ll kill you,” Captain Glenn said, his voice low and lethal.

“Maybe you don’t have to do that. Say I pay off your daughter’s and lovely wife’s medical bills if you give me my favorite pilot?”

Bile splashed at the back of my throat at the purr in his voice. I bit down on a whimper. The captain looked on, seemingly unaffected by the mention of the two people who mattered most to him.

Poh tightened her grip on my arm and nudged me along the wall, closer to Parker and the plastic-lined hallway behind him.

“He’s not mine to give,” Captain Glenn said, his aim steady. “Now go.”

“I have what he craves.” Parker narrowed his starburst eyes. “He’s most definitely mine.”

Poh pushed me closer, almost within kicking distance of Parker. Almost within the captain’s aim.

Another gun cocked behind me, and a voice floated over the blood thrashing between my ears.

“For the last time, Parker,” Mase said. “Take your hand, shove it up your ass, and fuck yourself.”

Light jumped across Parker’s eyes, this time dark blue and with jagged spikes, and I sensed Mase’s whole world dropping out from underneath him even though I couldn’t see him. It was He, ready to meet the She already sizzling through his veins and eating him alive.

Mase gasped and choked at the same time.

I wished I could run to him, help him. I dipped my chin to my chest as much as Poh allowed, my whole body hurting for what I’d done to the man I loved. He would never forgive me, if I ever saw him again.

Poh shoved me into the entryway and dragged me into a sprint toward the connecting ship.

“Watch out, Captain!” Mase yelled.

I whipped around in time to see one of Parker’s men clip the captain over the head with the butt of his gun. The captain lurched to the side, dropping his. Another of Parker’s men buried his fist into the captain’s temple.

Oh, Feozva, help him.

Almost to the other ship.

A gunshot fired.

All the remaining heat flew from my body. I jerked from Poh’s grip to sail back toward them, but she held tight and hauled me around the corner into Parker’s ship.

Half awareness flashed details of the ship while Poh dragged me away from the Vicious—warm air, gray-marbled flooring with a slight bounce to it, brown and cream walls that held the scent of fresh paint. No titanium in sight.

When Poh stopped at a cross-section and peered around a corner, her grip on my mouth loosened. I bared my teeth and chomped down. She released me and I whirled, breaking an ice pick from my necklace.

She snatched her gun from its holster and leveled it at my head. I froze and stared down the barrel, my insides souring.

“You—you found it,” I said. “Your gun.”

Determination set her features into hard planes. “I did.”

Or had the doppelganger just simply given it back to her. “You’re really turning me in, aren’t you?”

Heavy grunts and shouts echoed down the length of the ship’s entryway behind me and around the corner. My feet itched to run back to them.

“Let’s continue, shall we?” Poh gestured with the gun.

Her betrayal punched the air from my lungs. If I ventured farther into Parker’s ship, she would steal me away to the Ringers’ space station like a Feozva-damned criminal. The time to act was now. Or at least pretty soon.

Chewing my lip, I did as she asked, slowly as if I had defeat-ridden weights dangling off my feet. Anything to make her feel like she’d won, even though she wouldn’t. She followed me around the corner into another hallway, her gun still aimed at my midsection. I kept my steps slow, deliberate until she was close enough that I could feel her breath on the back of my arm.

With my stomach tightened into a hard knot, I abruptly stopped and squatted, swinging my leg out behind me and hitting her feet hard enough to make her stumble. I leaped to my feet and arced the tip of my ice pick down toward her neck. She jerked out of my reach, but she was too slow. I caught her in the shoulder, and an unexpected metal on metal clang sounded. What had that been?

She hissed. Distracted, she didn’t notice my other ice pick racing toward the twin lines of scales on her face. She wrenched back.

The butt of her gun crashed into my cheek. The floor tilted. I went down.

She walked toward me until she straddled my hips with her feet, then yanked my ice pick from her shoulder and tossed it away with an annoyed twist to her mouth. “Are you done?”

“What about keeping me alive, Poh?” I asked, my voice shaking. “How does that mesh with you being a fucking traitor?”

She doubled over to look me in the eye. “You go back there into the fray, you die. You, here, is keeping you alive.”

“Are you turning me in or not?” I demanded.

She stood straight again and glanced at the shoulder I’d stabbed through her brown duster. “Are you going to stab or hit me again?”

“If you deserve it, yes. Now, answer my question.”

Another gunshot sounded, muffled yet still close enough to jump me out of my skin. Panic ripped down my throat and scrambled my senses. I dug my fingers into the floor, desperation curling them into claws.

Poh ticked her gaze in the direction we’d just come. “Right now, I’m saving you.”

“I can’t leave them. My sister. Mase. None of them. Poh.” I swallowed, my throat ticking in time with my pounding heart. “I’m pregnant.”

Her gaze snapped to mine, drilling into my thoughts to see if it was true. She backed away, her pale lips curling back to reveal her fangs. Her shoulders heaved, and for a moment I thought I saw tears well in her yellow eyes.

“The truth, Poh,” I said. “I need the truth before I go one step farther.”

She blinked down at my legs sprawled on the floor and took an unsteady breath. “I was hired to assassinate you.”

The admission swept the air from my lungs, but I hissed through it. “Then why didn’t you?”

“I did,” she growled back. “I had Mind-I video confirmation and everything of me killing the doppelganger.”

Who had looked like me.

“Who hired you?” I demanded. “The same people who hired the doppelganger?”

She flicked her yellow gaze to my face. “The Saelis.”

Rusted balls, this was heavy. The Saelis had wiped out an entire planet. What made them think a nineteen year old with questionable kleptomaniacal morals and even more questionable headspace could prevent them from doing it again? What did they know that I didn’t? Why did I matter when they were going to slaughter the rest of humanity anyway?

“The Saelis knew they wouldn’t need to hire anyone else to get the job done, correctly, not like the messy deaths of your copies, which I can only assume was the Ringers’ doing,” she continued. “The Saelis told me you would likely be near a scarred, blond man coming from the direction of The Black. Turns out they were right.”

“Then why am I still alive?” I asked.

Poh glanced away, a wince rolling across her pale features. “Because my priorities shifted. You’ve been touched by a higher power, and keeping you alive seems more important. Your sister knew that. The entire Vicious crew knew that. And…I do too. If I kill you, I’ll be messing with something far greater than any of us, and I just won’t do it.”

Keep Absidy alive. But it wasn’t fair that my life was deemed more important than anyone else’s. Not Ellison with her well-deep love for her freaky little sister. Or Mase with his inner and outer beauty, scars and all. Not Captain Glenn with his dreams to see his family again. Why me and not them? But the answer boiled to the top, thick as poison.

I was other, a ghost magnet mutant with scales. And I couldn’t change that.

“How can I trust anything you say?” I asked.

“How can you not?” Poh bent over me and offered me her hand, her gaze sincere. “You come with me, I’ll get us through the rings. Or don’t. Your choice.”

I chomped down on the inside of my cheek to keep from crumbling into a useless mess. My choices sank terror into my soul far deeper than any ghost ever could—the people I loved with every piece of my heart or the future, however rickety it was.

Praying to Feozva for forgiveness, I took Poh’s outstretched hand, sealing my fate.