Abel warns her, “You should tell as much of the truth as you know to the authorities. But that’s the only action you should take against us. Do not attempt to prevent our departure.”
Virginia gestures around the smoldering wreckage that, ten minutes ago, was her hideout. “Are you kidding? How would I even do that?”
After a moment, Abel nods. “A fair point.”
Noemi pauses long enough to put one hand on Virginia’s shoulder. “Thank you. For everything. I’m sorry we caused you so much trouble.”
For one fleeting instant, a smile appears on Virginia’s face, and she looks like herself again. “Hey, at least it’s not boring.”
Abel reaches back for Noemi. “We have to go now.”
She answers by taking his hand.
Returning by the route they came would be far more difficult—traveling upstream—not to mention futile, given that the Queen already discovered it and may have transmitted that information to the Charlie. But during his diagnostic with Virginia, Abel was able to download a complete diagram of this entire sector. So he takes the most direct path through this maze of stone, and runs as fast as he can without leaving Noemi behind.
Every few twists and turns they run into one of the inhabitants awake at this hour of Cray’s artificial night, shoving people to the side or making them back up against the walls to avoid being knocked down. It doesn’t matter any longer whether he and Noemi are seen by other inhabitants, by security cameras, by any of the bureaucratic Georges. They’ve been exposed. They’re being pursued. At this point, nothing matters but getting off this planet as soon as possible.
After that—he has a new plan.
“Our ship,” Noemi pants. “The Charlie has to have found our ship by now.”
“Undoubtedly.” They’ll deal with that when they reach it—if they reach it.
They finally dash back into the spaceport, which is deceptively bright, all but deserted. Their ship sits there, silvery and silent, and there’s no way to tell if it’s anchored or not. Worse, they hear running footsteps from behind, and Abel glances back to see the Charlie gaining on them. One of the Charlie’s hands is only the metal skeletal structure, jutting jarringly from his gray sleeve.
The door slides open for them and Noemi leaps in first, turning to hit the emergency lock so fast that Abel hardly makes it in after her. There’s only a second to see the Charlie’s face, very near, before the metal closes him off.
Noemi’s already gone, running upward. Abel races through the spiral corridor after her, and this time he runs at full mech speed.
They reach the bridge at the same moment. As Abel shrugs off the backpack and dives for the pilot’s chair, Noemi runs to an auxiliary station. “Emergency beacons,” she gasps. “This ship has them, right? I could target them from here?”
“Yes,” Abel says shortly as he powers up the ship. But who, exactly, is supposed to respond to this emergency beacon? What good will it do them if the ship turns out to be anchored? None.
Humans act irrationally at times of stress. It’s Abel’s job to stay calm and get them out of this, if he can.
All systems are go. Abel readies the engines to take off, the ship rises from the platform—
—about twenty meters, and no farther. They’ve been anchored after all.
He looks back at Noemi, wondering whether he’ll have to explain that they’ve been captured, or whether she’ll put this together for herself. She’s working busily at her station, which suggests the former. But as he opens his mouth, she punches a control and says, “Emergency beacon launched.”
With that, the Daedalus spits out a meter-wide, forty-kilogram beacon directly beneath them. The beacon explodes, as does the platform they just took off from, and the magnetic anchor directly below it. As debris sprays through the landing bay, the ship lurches upward, free once more.
Human ingenuity, Abel thinks as he steers them into the dawning red sky, and he realizes he’s smiling.
Noemi hurries back to the ops station. “What do we do now? They’ll be looking for us back at Kismet, maybe at Stronghold, too—”
“Both options are suboptimal,” he agrees as they leave Cray’s atmosphere, reddish clouds before them shifting into starry black, and the mag engines flare to full power. A fiery trail streaks through space after them. “We must therefore take the third possibility.”
“What third possibility?”
“Did your teachers on Genesis ever tell you about the Blind Gate?”
She frowns. “Wait. The one that ended up leading nowhere?”
“Exactly.” Earth scientists believed they had found another habitable world, and a new portal was constructed at enormous cost, only for the planet to prove wholly unsuitable for settlement. “So far as I know, the Gate still exists.”
“But there’s no Gate at the other end! So that edge of the wormhole isn’t stable.”
“Stable, in these terms, means ‘unlikely to change location at any point in the next millennium,’” Abel points out. “Wormholes tend to be long-lived. Even if this one doesn’t lead to the same location it once did, it’s highly unlikely that the wormhole would shift enough to strand us within the next few days.”
Noemi grips the edge of her console as if she might otherwise slide onto the floor. “You’re telling me this is our best option?”
“No. I’m telling you this is our only option.”
She hesitates, and he wonders whether she’ll order him not to go. If she does, she’ll be captured—
—and he’ll be returned to Burton Mansfield. Shouldn’t he hope she orders him to stop? Probably. Yet he doesn’t. He wants her to get away.
She says, “Do it.”
Abel inputs the coordinates, and they speed toward the Blind Gate. She seems to need some time to pull herself together; Abel does not, but he understands the impulse. A brief silence after extreme exertion feels… pleasant, he decides.
After a few minutes, Noemi quietly asks, “Hey, Abel?”
“Yes?”
“When the Queen tried to set you free, and it didn’t work—what does that mean?”
Abel doesn’t answer right away. The Gate appears in the sky ahead of them, a silver ring leading to a place neither of them knows. Perhaps to nowhere. They’ll fly through it together. “I’m not sure.”
Her dark eyes gaze at him as if she could find the answer written on his skin. “Are you broken? Is that why you’re helping me?”
“It must be,” Abel says.
No other explanation makes sense.
23
THE BLIND GATE SWIMS IN SPACE BEFORE THEM, A MISTY mirror to nowhere. Noemi knows Abel isn’t wrong about the math, but sometimes probabilities don’t feel like a question of math alone. They’re flinging this ship into the absolute unknown.
Of course, if they do anything else, capture is certain. This is the only choice.