Amber brought up her arms and hugged her back. If it wasn’t for the mild throbbing of her nose—Nicci was no better at hitting than Amber at dodging—she’d wonder if it had really happened at all. Nicci didn’t hit people and Nicci would never hit her. They were sisters. They were all either of them had left.

‘She’s in shock,’ Amber decided. ‘People in shock do weird things.’ “Come on, Nicci,” she said out loud. “Get your bag.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Get it anyway. We have to go.”

Nicci allowed herself to be pulled from the Sleeper and put on her feet, but she made no effort to do more than that. Amber had to pull down her duffel bag and put it in Nicci’s arms, and then had to take her sister by the hand and physically lead her through the door. Nicci moaned when she saw what was waiting outside and refused to step out onto the broken ledge, but Amber didn’t try to force her yet. She didn’t know where to go either. Following the green line back through the ship to the boarding bay was the only thing she could think of; it seemed that the ship had broken cleanly off at the perimeter wall of Mod A, suggesting that the rest of the ship was still there. That it might be a very bad idea to go any deeper into the burning ship did not yet occur to her. She let go of Nicci, who promptly began to cry harder, and eased carefully out along the ledge until she could reach the keypad beside the sealed door that separated the women’s dorms from the rest of the ship. The ship was slanted so that gravity pulled her into the wall, which was lucky because she was not the most coordinated person under the best of conditions. When the door didn’t open at her touch, Amber turned around and put her back to it, utterly lost. Where was she supposed to go now?

Down.

She looked down through shifting walls of smoke and saw Mod A and the rest of the Pioneer about five meters below her, all three levels—crew civilian and ship’s functions thank god for all those informative seminars i learned so much—pancaked together in a rumpled ruin, like a burnt blanket someone had tossed on the floor. Beyond it, the blackened scar of the ship’s landing reached out for miles, lifeless.

But someone was alive. The screaming/sobbing/hysteria had never stopped, never even slackened. People were alive and they weren’t in Mod A, that was for sure.

Amber crept back along the wall to Nicci. “We have to get down from here,” she said firmly. She felt better, having a goal, a plan. “So we’re going to drop down—”

“No! No, we can’t! We’ll fall!”

“It’s not that far, Nicci. We can do this.”

“We have to stay here, okay? Someone will come and get us, okay?”

“Maybe,” said Amber, looking doubtfully back at the sealed door that led deeper into the ship and where she knew (in the shocky state she didn’t realize she was in) the crew and the Fleet were mobilizing to meet this emergency. “But it could be a long time before they get to us and the ship is on fire. I’m not waiting. We’re going down.”

Nicci shook her head frantically, even as her tears subsided. She had to be tugged out onto the ledge, but after that she moved on her own. Giving orders made Amber feel better; taking them had the same effect on Nicci.

“Right there.” Amber pointed to the little jut that was left in front of the mod door. “That’ll be the shortest drop. Send your bag down first and try to land on it.”

“You go first, okay?”

Amber shook her head. “I’ve got to check the other rooms.”

“No! Don’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”

“I’m not leaving, I’m just—”

“No!”

“Damn it, Nicci, just do it!” Amber shouted. “This is serious, so stop acting like a fucking baby and go!”

Nicci stared at her, tears sliding sideways on her face in the wind.

Amber stared back, as stunned or more than she’d been after Nicci’s attack. She and Nicci fought now and then, but she didn’t think she’d ever raised her voice before. At Mama, sure…but not at Nicci. She wondered if the crash had made her go crazy, the way that things sometimes did in the movies. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said. “Okay?”

Nicci nodded, silent. She looked down, hugging her duffel bag to her chest, then slowly got to her knees. Her lips moved, but the wind took away her words.

“You can do it,” said Amber, backing away. “I’ll be right back.”

Nicci did not react. She might not have heard, the way Amber hadn’t heard whatever she’d said. It was the wind…and the screaming.

Amber turned around, groping her way along the wall past Nicci’s room and her own to the next room, WA-0005. The door opened when she slapped the pad and the woman pacing inside immediately turned on her in the kind of calm, accusatory fury that meant she was probably on the verge of some pretty impressive hysterics. “It’s about goddamn time! What the hell is going on? Who are you? Are you one of the crew?”

“No, I’m from next door. We crashed. Get your things.”

“Figures. This is all the military’s fault,” she spat, yanking ineffectively at her duffel bag until Amber came over and opened the restraints. “The Director had billions and billions of dollars, but oh no, he had to let the military take over and what did they do? They contracted out to the lowest bidder. Over eighty percent of this ship was built in Uruguay, do you believe that?”

“Uh…”

“It’s a fact,” the woman insisted, shrugging the duffel onto her shoulder. “You can look it up. Or at least, you can look it up when we get back to Earth and you better believe that’s where I’m going right now. Right now! And if they don’t have a lifeboat on this goddamn thing that can get me there…” She faltered, some of the fire in her eyes fading behind a shine of watery panic, but only for a moment. She shored herself up, her shaking hands clenching into fists around her duffel bag’s strap. “Where are we going?”

Amber moved aside. The woman’s eyes flicked past her to the smoky sky where the other half of the hallway should have been. Her brows knit. She took one step forward and looked down, at the top of the Pioneer. Her lips parted, then pressed firmly together.

“I am going to sue their precious little Director to death,” she announced. “I’m going to start a class-action suit and just…just kill him with it. Where do we go?”

Amber pointed down the ledge to the place where Nicci still huddled, hugging her duffel bag. “Drop down from there. Make sure she gets down too, okay?”

The woman nodded and went, keeping one hand on the wall and the other in a firm grip on her duffel’s strap. Amber watched until she saw the woman talking and Nicci listening, or at least looking up, and then worked her way back to room WA-0007, but when the door opened, it showed her only half a room. The hallway wall might continue on for two more doors, but the ship itself stopped here. There was no Sleeper, no angry occupant ranting about lawsuits and Uruguay, no floor. There was only smoke, broken framework, spitting cables, and the ruin of the ship below her. Of the four thousand people who shared this mod of the women’s dorms, she’d saved everyone there was to save.

All three of them.

The shock she hadn’t known she was in suddenly welled huge inside her and popped, soundless, like a soap bubble. Amber staggered back, feeling the slant in the floor and the distance between her and the ground for the first time to real, disorienting effect. Smoke filled the gasping breath she took; she bent, coughing, and saw the world darken around her.

‘If you faint up here, you’ll fall and die,’ she thought, but she wasn’t fainting. The world really was darker. The clouds overhead were thickening; the heavy wind didn’t seem to be blowing them away, but rather pulling them down. She’d never seen clouds do that before. It wasn’t even raining.

But it was cold. It was cold and the wind was brutal and the only shelter Amber could see was a burning ship.