Fair enough.

Gathering everything I have, everything I am, I focus on the door in the far horizon, the door that isn’t a door—that beckons yet I dare not answer—and the tethers holding me to my body give way. I sail out of the cockpit and into the crimson sea; it blazes through me, but there is no pain. Instead of letting the current carry me all the way out, I leap to the beacon and pass through it in my entirety.

Everything changes. I sense the new pattern echoing outward from ground zero, changing each in turn, and it fills me with elation. Because it’s based on my energies, I’ll be able to navigate these beacons, but nobody else will—until I train them. Which means I must get back, or not only will I have crippled the Morgut fleet, but countless human ships will be lost out here. I have to show all our allied jumpers how to read the new beacons. But the red current pulls at me, tugging me toward my final exit.

And I’m swimming against the tide.