“Try to steal a nap, guys,” she said as she walked toward the exit. “Life’s gonna be crazy pretty soon. Until then, don’t move.” She left and closed the door behind her.

  Isaac looked down at what lay in his hand.

  A very large key.

  The Orphan stood in a hallway near the back of the Berg, squeezed in a narrow spot between the bulbous back of the Grief Walker and the wall. He hoped he was isolated enough to inspect the bag of stuff he’d stolen from the commissary. Things weren’t as bad as he feared—the Grief Bearers, priestesses, and whoever else was on the ship had their hands full just trying to keep the Berg flying and functioning. It wasn’t like any of them had done something on this scale before. He also knew they’d taken it for granted that the prisoners had no choice but to wait in their chains until they arrived in Alaska.

  My name is Minho, he thought. Yes. From this point on, my name is Minho and always will be. No more going back. For Roxy and Kit.

  He pulled the awkward, bulky artillery suit from the bag, held it to his chest to size it up. It looked small but the things were supposed to fit tightly. The material was heavy with the two dozen inserts of explosives and guidance devices. What kind of person voluntarily wears something like this? he thought. Orphans do. Orphans and former Orphans named Minho.

  It took a while, with lots of yanking the crystal-flecked material and wiggling his every body part. But finally he was set, fully wrapped in the most dangerous suit in the world. He reached into the bag and pulled out a smaller bag—this one full of tiny capsules of explosive, each of them rigged with a simple, mechanical timing device.

  He took a breath. A deep one. Then another. Then another.

  He thought of the note left in his quarters by Orange and Skinny, explaining the plan and that Roxy was safe. It was a good plan. They had at least a fifty-fifty chance of surviving it.

  He reached for one of the explosive capsules and jammed it into a crevice at the bottom of the wall. He set the timer. It was on, it was really on.

  He stood up and headed for the confinement cell.

  Once again, they were all crammed into the tiny room like chopped wood in a stove. Just waiting for someone to throw in a match to ignite the whole bunch. They were all there as she had left them—Old Man Frypan, Ms. Cowan, Miyoko, Dominic, the two council members. They, of course, battered her with questions once she’d returned from the meeting with Minho, aka the Orphan.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” Ms. Cowan had asked, but not with much strength. Sadina’s mom was weak and tired, despite the food they had brought while Jackie was gone. Wilhelm and Alvarez stayed silent, probably ashamed that a young person had gone in their place.

  “I’m glad you’re safe,” Frypan had uttered several times. “I was worried sick.” Such a kindness from a man she’d barely known until the boat voyage.

  “Tell us what happened,” Miyoko said, finishing off a chunk of hard cheese. Each of them had been given a sack of dried meat, cheese, and bread.

  Dominic pestered her with an annoying ritual of saying one or two words between bites of food. “Who did . . . you . . . talk to?” Then, “What . . . did they . . . say?”

  Jackie had mostly been ignoring them, stuffing herself with the nourishment. She’d thought she had found strength in volunteering to be the representative, but now the food tripled it. Despite her own doubts and weakness from before, she felt strong enough to take on the world. And that chance might be coming, though Minho had given no details.

  “Jackie,” Miyoko intoned with annoyance. “What the hell happened out there? If you take one more bite I swear on Old Man Frypan I will punch you in the face.”

  “I will, too,” the man added with a chuckle. “But it won’t hurt much.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jackie replied. Most of her food was gone, anyway. “They took me to a room and I sat at a table with the guy named Minho. The one who climbed out of the river and smacked the lady . . . um, Letti . . . in the head. Somehow he’s involved with these people that captured us, but he seems to be rebelling for all I can tell. He said he and a couple others are going to—”

  An abrupt and terrifying thought closed her throat. What if they were listening? They probably were listening.

  “Jackie?” Dominic touched her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  She tried to recover. “I didn’t really understand much of what he said. Mostly he wanted to ask me questions, about you guys, about where we’re from, stuff like that.” She widened her eyes in a look of warning, then tapped her ear. She wanted to scream at herself. Idiot, you should’ve kept your mouth shut.

  Someone rapped on the door, a quick series of metallic knocks that made her heart ball up into a fist. Like clockwork, she thought. I said too much and now they’re here to take me away, throw me out of a flying machine.

  But when the door opened, Minho stuck his face in. He gave her a quick and reassuring nod that filled her with so much relief she almost fainted from the rush.

  “Jackie,” he said. “It’s a go, soon. Have everyone hold on to something. Tight.”

  He didn’t wait for a response. He closed the door and was gone.

  He hadn’t taken his eyes off the key since Orange had passed it over with a handshake. Some part of him worried the sliver of cut metal would magically disappear if he glanced away.

  “When are we supposed to unlock ourselves?” Trish asked. “What’s supposed to happen?”

  “Isaac?” Sadina added when he didn’t respond, gawking at his new talisman.

  “I . . . I don’t really know. Orange just told me to be ready and that we’d know.”

  “Know what?” Trish asked.

  “I don’t know.” This made him laugh, though it sounded slightly hysterical to his ears. “But they must be planning on a bumpy ride because she wants us to stay locked up until . . . Until whatever.”

  “Well put it in your pocket,” Sadina said, pointing at his raggedy pants as if he didn’t know what a pocket was. “We don’t wanna lose it.”

  “Ya think?” he responded.

  “More than you do, usually.” She sighed then, a weighty one that he’d heard from her before, usually before she was about to say something serious. “I love you, Isaac. I hope you know that. Trish and I both do. Somehow we’re gonna get through this and we’re going to do it together.”

  He found the strength to say, “I love you guys, too. Cheesy, aren’t we?”

  “Cheesy is the only way to go,” Trish said.

  Isaac finally slipped the key into his front pocket. The thing was a large solid piece of metal, like something from an old castle. “It’s hard to believe what we were up to just a couple of months ago. I mean, did we ever really live on an island and not worry who was gonna kill us or hurt us every hour of every day?”

  “It was kinda boring if you think about it,” Sadina said.

  Trish scoffed. “I miss being bored.”

  “Yeah, me—”

  The world around them jolted, a hard bounce that threw Isaac to the limit of his chains—his head bounced off the wall. Sadina shrieked; Trish yelled something that was drowned out by another jolt and bounce, accompanied by a terribly grating sound of metal scraping across metal. Isaac reached for the railing of the bed, dazed in the sudden movement and noise. His fingers had just brushed the cool steel when the room tilted, jumped, tilted some more. He was thrown against the resistance of the chains again, pain biting into his arms and legs.

  And then the ship was falling, his body floating up from the bed as if gravity had disappeared from the earth.

  “Hold on!” Sadina screamed.

  Noise. Spinning. Nothing else.

  Minho had just left the containment cell, had just told Jackie and her friends to hold on and get ready, had just gathered his courage to ignite another explosive and charge the cockpit of the Berg—when he found himself flying through the hallway as if left and right had become up and down. He slammed into a wall that moments before had been in front of him, not beneath him. He crumpled his legs and rolled as he’d been trained, then grabbed onto a railing and made his arms rigid, waiting to see if the ship righted itself.

  But it didn’t. The ship was in a fast tumble, rotating three full times before he lost track and fought back the nausea surging up his throat. There were so many sounds of groaning steel and breaking glass and people screaming that it all became an unbearable noise, made him wish he could let go and cover his ears. But his body flopped around with the changes in direction and gravity and holding on became the only thing left to do.

  What had happened? What had gone wrong?

  The ship righted itself for a moment then fell into a steady dive, the roar of the engines now overpowering all the other sounds. His feet settled against the floor of the hallway, now tilted at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. The Berg shook violently, surely ready to rip apart at any second. The turbulence became too much and he lost his grip on the railing, sliding down the floor until he hit a door, which opened on impact.

  He fell into a room filled with complete chaos; he grabbed the edges of the doorframe before he became a part of it. Wind rushed and roared, seemingly from all directions at once. Debris and boxes and scraps and ruins of all manner of things churned through the air, swirling in circles as if caught in a tornado. A gaping hole had been torn in the side of the Berg and with horror he saw the world outside, the slanted line of the horizon, objects and birds whipping by as the ship plummeted, moving ever closer to the ground.

  The edges of the hole were jagged and sharp, the torn petals of steel bent inward as if a cannonball had been shot through the skin and frame of the craft. From the outside. Something had torn through solid metal from the outside.

  Minho shot his gaze to the other side of the room, opposite the circular gash in the ship.

  A badly mangled person was pressed against the wall, crumpled halfway into it as if the materials of the wall had been molded around the body. This person was wearing an artillery suit, just like the one he wore. The head was smashed, the arms and legs twisted at weird angles, blood everywhere. Several of the explosive packets within the suit had exploded, tiny scraps of cloth flapping in the wind along with the tiny wires of the obviously failed guidance devices.

  Almost nothing of the victim was intact enough to be identified with ease. But the face, as mangled as it was, had a very familiar nose. And the body, even padded by the artillery suit, had belonged to a very thin human being.

  Minho, his hands hurting from how tightly he gripped the doorframe, his leg muscles shaky from the effort of planting his feet against an angled floor, could only stare.

  Is that . . .

  It was. It definitely was.

  It was his friend, Skinny.

  Her island had an earthquake when she was a little girl. She’d been in the closet, playing with the action heroes her grandpa had carved out of wood. She liked hiding in the small closet because no one could bug her, or make fun of the adventure stories she made up on the spot, every figurine playing its own part. When the earthquake hit, she’d been flung about, the wooden heroes scattering and clunking off each other and her head. It had seemed to her endless, and as if the tiny room in which she’d been playing had been lifted by a god and tossed across the ocean.

  That was exactly how she felt, now, and the childhood memory flashed across her mind as she and Miyoko and Dominic jostled and jounced, their bodies banging into one another just as her wooden figures had done. The others fared no better.

  If it hadn’t been for Minho’s warning, they might all be dead. Eyehole rivets, handles, railings—there were enough small things to hold on to that prevented the group from truly bouncing from one end of the room to the other, cracking skulls and breaking limbs. But even as each of them gripped whatever had been closest, they still flopped this way and that as the Berg rolled completely upside down then right again, three or four times. Jackie’s legs and torso slammed into Dominic’s and Miyoko’s in turn, feet flying up to the ceiling then slumping back to the floor. It took every last slice of her energy to maintain that grip on the railing of metal she’d found near her head.

  Screams and shouts filled the room. The piercing shriek and groans of crumpling, twisting metal, the roar and sputter of engines. The thumps of their bodies hitting this and hitting that. The lights had gone out almost immediately, so Jackie could barely see, adding to the terror. She squeezed her fingers around her lifeline of steel, prayed they’d survive. Somehow.

  Get me through this, she called out to the universe. Get me through this and I’ll get us back home.

  The ship jolted hard. Someone slammed into her then locked their arms around her legs. She made out just enough of his silhouette to know it was Old Man Frypan.

  “You okay?” she yelled.

  “Hell, no!”

  “Well don’t let go!”

  He squeezed harder, pinching her legs together, and she felt it as a comfort.

  The Berg stopped spinning, but now it was in a definite and steady dive, tilted at least forty-five degrees toward the ground below. The growl of air resistance—and engines trying to fight that resistance—drowned out everything else. Jackie and the others settled into awkward positions, still holding on but helped by being pressed against each other, adding support. The ship shook as it descended, rocked by a bounce every few seconds, just strong enough to make Jackie’s stomach swirl with butterflies.

  “We can make it!” Frypan yelled up to her, his words almost lost in the avalanche rumble of it all. “These bastards are tough! As long as we don’t—”

  Thump. Every person in the room vaulted three feet into the air and back down again as they hit a rough pocket of air. The floor tilted a few more degrees; Jackie winced—someone had fallen hard into her side with an elbow or knee. She groaned; it felt like half her organs had ruptured.

  “What did you say?” she asked Frypan, shouting through the pain.

  “Who the hell knows!” he yelled back. Jackie really liked this man.

  She let out a scream of frustration, aching, trying to release her desperation and will to survive into the ether, into the air, into existence.

  The Berg hit something with a violent crunch of metal against wood, the world now filled with the sounds of breaking tree trunks and limbs, their shattered parts scraping against the outside hull of the ship. Jackie and the others bucked and jiggled and screamed and held on. Their speed slowed even as the ferocity of the Berg’s rampage through the trees increased—it had to be trees, each one snapping like a small stick. Jackie felt as if her every tooth had come loose, all of them rattling against each other. Her brain seemed pulverized into mush from the savage turbulence of the crash.

  Slower. Slower. Shaking and rattling and crunching.

  The ship slammed into one final obstacle; Jackie lost her grip and flew across the small room and crashed into the opposite wall, then slid to the floor, landing on someone else. They’d come to a complete stop and the apocalyptic sounds had ceased along with it. Jackie groaned from the aches of her body, but she rolled to get off the person she’d slumped upon. A panel on the ceiling had jarred completely loose and a beam of sunlight shone from above. The room looked like a dumping ground for unwanted bodies, but the bodies she saw were squirming with movement.

  “Thank you.”

  It was a pathetic-sounding voice, coming from right below Jackie. She looked down to see Dominic, flat on the floor, staring up at her.

  “Your butt was on my face,” he whispered, wincing from some unspoken pain of his own.

  And then, somehow, amongst all that insanity, the two of them laughed.

  The world had grown still. Miraculously, impossibly still.

  Isaac lay curled into a ball, his body squeezed tightly against the corner where his bed met the conjoining walls. His every muscle ached from holding that position during the crash, the chains on his ankles having come loose somewhere along the way. His wrists remained shackled, the metal digging into the tendons that pressed taut against the skin. He tried to unwind his stiff torso and limbs but they wouldn’t move, stuck in place with trauma, as if he’d died and entered rigor mortis.

  “Isaac,” someone whispered. “Isaac.” He couldn’t tell if it was Trish or Sadina, his back to them, cinched up like a fetus as he was.

  “Hey, Isaac.” It was Trish. “How about that key, huh?”

  The fact that he hadn’t heard Sadina yet released a new wave of adrenaline, like an injection of oil through his system that loosened up the joints. He uncurled himself and turned to look at his friends.

  Both alive. Both with eyes open. Well, Sadina had only one eye open—her other was closed up from swelling.

  “You okay?” he asked, the relief at seeing them alive far greater than the worry about their injuries. “That is one nasty looking . . .”

  “Yeah, bashed my face against the bed railing. It hurt.”

  “I can’t believe we’re not dead,” he whispered. It sounded silly but it was his prevailing thought. He’d spent the last five or ten minutes thinking that his life was certainly over and done with, extinguished, gone. No grand reunion on the island. No more trips to the Forge for him. No more bragging about how he’d built his own yurt and once sailed across the ocean.

  “I can’t, either,” Trish agreed. “Let’s get that key of yours and unlock ourselves.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” Though every movement brought an ache or a jolt of pain, and his muscles groaned from stiffness, he retrieved the key from his pocket and set about unlocking himself, then Sadina, then Trish. The ship was at a slight angle, but not enough to prevent them from getting their balance when they stood up. Isaac put the key firmly back into his pocket then rubbed his wrists, feeling elated at the freedom from the shackles. And the freedom from death.