Running through a ship under attack is like running through someone else’s nightmare. Every corner could be teeth. Every door could be a throat closing.

  Silver Gull shuddered under my boots as Kirana and I sprinted toward the systems spine. The lights had settled into a sickly emergency glow—too dim to be comforting, too bright to hide in. The air tasted of ozone and human fear.

  I felt the ship in layers: metal, wiring, pressure, and under all that, the boiling mess of thousands of minds. Panic. Anger. Confusion. A thin band of determination where crew tried to do their jobs. And somewhere in the middle, the cold, sharp lines of the infiltrators who’d stopped pretending to be miners.

  We turned a corner hard enough that my shoulder clipped the bulkhead. It hurt. I didn’t slow.

  The systems spine was a narrow access corridor that ran along the central axis of the ship, lined with conduits and control trunks. It was supposed to be boring. The kind of place only techs and engineers cared about. Today, it felt like a heart valve.

  Kirana punched in the override code for the access hatch. The panel flickered, spit static, and went dark.

  She stared at it for a second.

  “That’s not a good sign,” I said.

  “You think?” she replied.

  She jammed her fingers into the small manual release slot and hauled the cover off. Inside, someone had cut three of the control lines and twisted them together in the wrong order. It wasn’t elegant sabotage. It was the functional kind.

  Kirana hissed through her teeth. “They’ve locked out the main controls.”

  “From where?” I asked.

  “Cargo deck,” she said. “Environmental substation. If I were trying to take the ship without blowing it up, that’s where I’d start.”

  The Force flexed around her words like it agreed.

  I closed my eyes for half a breath, stretching my senses downward. The cargo deck sat like a hollow basin near the bottom of the ship, full of crates and machinery and people’s hastily packed new lives. Right now, it also held a cluster of very focused minds moving toward the environmental panels.

  Fear chimed around them like tin, but their cores were cold.

  “What do they want with the cargo deck?” I asked.

  “Space,” Kirana said. “Volume. Airflow. If you wanted to disseminate something through the ship —gas, for example— that’s your launch point.”

  My stomach clenched. “Knockout gas?”

  “If we’re lucky,” she said. “If we’re not, something worse.”

  Somewhere above us, I felt Toran flinch. The bond between us spiked with the sound of blasterfire echoing down a long corridor — not in my ears, but in his. Kyle’s presence flared beside him, grounding. Toran’s anger snapped like a live wire and then folded inward, contained by force of will and someone’s hand on his shoulder.

  Engineering. Heavy firefights. Of course.

  Meral was quieter, but I sensed her too, picking her way through something sharp and broken on the bridge of her ship. Behind her, Kyp glowed like a contained explosion, trying not to come apart.

  We were all busy.

  We were all out of position.

  Kirana shoved the ruined access panel aside. “Cargo deck,” she said. “Now.”

  “Is anyone monitoring the gas systems from the bridge?” I asked.

  “The bridge is compromised,” she said. “Didn’t you feel it?”

  I had. I just hadn’t wanted to name it.

  Another shudder rolled through the ship. The deck pitched under our feet. A few seconds later, a faint hiss whispered through the air ducts—too soft for ordinary ears, loud as a scream in the Force.

  “Now,” Kirana repeated.

  We ran.

  ? ? ?

  The route to the cargo deck took us through parts of the ship that had already tasted the mutiny. We passed a security station with its door hanging off one hinge, a pair of unconscious guards sprawled on the floor with their wrists bound together by their own cuffs. A maintenance alcove with its tool drawers ransacked and a smear of blood on the wall where someone’s head had bounced. A cluster of miners pressed against a locked hatch, pounding and crying and demanding to be let through.

  “Stay clear of the doors,” I shouted without slowing. “They’re sealed for a reason.”

  “What reason?” one of them yelled after me, voice cracking. “To kill us?”

  “Not yet,” I muttered.

  Kirana heard. Her mouth tightened. “Don’t start borrowing fear you haven’t earned,” she said. “We’re not that far gone.”

  Not yet.

  We reached the stairwell that led down toward the cargo deck. The door was locked. The panel above it showed a cycling pattern I recognized from the systems course Luke had insisted I take. Emergency quarantine.

  “They’re isolating it,” I said.

  “Or pretending to,” Kirana replied.

  She stepped back, drew in a slow breath, and drove the heel of her boot into the manual release housing. The casing crumpled with a metallic crack. The door juddered. She hit it again, harder.

  On the third kick, the mechanism gave, stuttering open by half a meter.

  One problem solved.

  We slipped through the gap into dimness.

  ? ? ?

  The cargo deck smelled of metal, old fuel, and the faint sourness of too many people’s belongings jammed into too little space. The overhead lights were cycling in a bad rhythm—on, off, low, bright—like someone was playing with the power for fun. Ranks of cargo containers stacked three and four high formed canyons of shadow.

  And somewhere in that maze, someone was trying to turn the whole place into a sleeping trap.

  I tasted it in the air before I saw anything.

  Something chemical. Not strong yet. But gathering.

  “Do you smell that?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” Kirana said. “Far side, toward the environmental station.”

  She moved faster, keeping low, flowing between the crates with the ease of someone who’d navigated ambushes in worse places. I followed a step behind, my hand brushing the cool sides of containers labeled with traces of other lives: hand-painted initials, rough chalk markings, the scuffed remnants of security seals.

  We turned the last corner and saw them.

  Six figures clustered around the environmental control console—a large, waist-high unit set into the bulkhead. Four stood guard, weapons ready, watching the approaches. Two worked the panel, their hands swift and practiced on the manual override dials.

  They weren’t crew.

  They were miners by clothes, by posture. But they moved with the clean efficiency of trained operatives. Beside the console sat a stack of pressurized canisters, hoses already hooked to the intake vent.

  Tranquilizer gas, I hoped.

  Something nastier, if we were unlucky.

  Either way, if they succeeded, the gas would pump in here first and then pull through the circulation system, reaching every deck, every corridor, every fragile pocket of order. The crew would go down. The Jedi would follow. Anyone loyal would be unconscious or dead. The Zann Consortium would take three ships full of assets intact.

  A neat plan.

  I hated how neat it was.

  Kirana held up a hand, stopping me behind the cover of a tall crate. She peered around the edge, then slid back, her features carved into something almost wolfish.

  “Four guarding, two working the panel,” she murmured. “We take the guards first. Fast. Quiet as possible.”

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  “And the gas?” I asked.

  “We shut it down before it hits pressure.”

  “Any idea how long we’ve got?”

  She tilted her head, listening to the hiss building inside the canisters. “Not as long as I’d like.”

  Silence stretched between us for a heartbeat.

  “You take the two on the left,” she said. “I’ll take the right. When I move, you move.”

  There were a dozen reasons to hesitate. We couldn’t show ourselves too early. We couldn’t risk damaging the console beyond use; we might need it later. We couldn’t afford to kill miners who might still be redeemable.

  We also couldn’t let the gas release.

  The Force didn’t care about my lists. It pressed at the back of my skull, impatient.

  Kirana’s hand touched my shoulder once—a tiny grounding weight. “Remember,” she said, “we’re not here to perform. We’re here to end this.”

  “Ending things is starting to sound like a theme,” I said.

  “Then be thorough,” she replied, lips tight.

  She moved.

  ? ? ?

  I moved with her.

  We slipped out from behind the crate in a sudden, synchronized surge, sabers flashing to life mid-stride with that rough, unstable hum that always made me flinch inside. The nearest guard barely had time to turn his head before Kirana’s hilt cracked against his temple, dropping him like a stone.

  I reached the next man as he brought his weapon up. I didn’t give him the chance. My blade sliced his shock-baton in half; my knee slammed into his thigh. He collapsed sideways with a grunt.

  The third guard reacted faster. He swung a heavy wrench at my head. I ducked; the wind of it brushed my hair. I stepped in close, catching his arm and twisting, using the motion of an old Voras-Nheh pattern—not quite correct, not fully remembered, but enough. He spun past me, momentum stolen, crashing into one of the canisters.

  The gas hissed louder.

  “Careful!” I snapped.

  “I noticed,” Kirana said.

  The fourth man sprang at her with a knife. For a second, the cargo deck shrank to four moving bodies and two Jedi, all muscle and reflex and breath.

  One of the men by the panel swore and slammed his palm onto a lever.

  The hiss of gas jumped from a whisper to a sharp, rising roar.

  Kirana cursed for real this time.

  “Control first!” she shouted.

  She kicked her attacker square in the chest, sending him flying into a stack of crates, then pivoted toward the console. I backed up fast, deflecting a wild swing from the stunned guard who still refused to stay down.

  The two saboteurs at the panel bolted the moment they saw us coming. One ran straight for Kirana with a desperate yell; the other dashed toward the far end of the cargo deck, vanishing between containers.

  Coward. Survivor. Both.

  Kirana drove her shoulder into the first saboteur, knocking him away from the controls. He went down hard. She slammed her hand down on the main cutoff switch.

  Nothing happened.

  The gas hissed on.

  She growled, flipped open the panel with a flick of her saber, exposing a tangle of rerouted lines and a bypassed safety lock.

  “They’ve locked it open,” she said.

  I sliced the guard’s weapon in half again for good measure and backed toward the console, eyes already watering from the faint chemical sting sneaking into the air.

  “How long until it fills the deck?” I asked.

  “Not long,” she said. “Help me.”

  ? ? ?

  Between us, we ripped out the override lines with bare hands and saber-assisted precision, burning out connectors that sparked angrily. The hiss of pressure wavered.

  The nearest canister shuddered, then went quiet.

  Two more followed.

  The last one, the one the man had collided with, wheezed stubbornly.

  Kirana swore in a language I didn’t know and drove her saber into the feed line just above the valve, sealing it with a glowing, molten scar of fused metal. The smell of scorched alloy hit like a slap.

  The gas hiss faded. Stopped.

  The deck fell silent except for our breathing.

  I coughed, blinking away tears. My throat felt raw, but my limbs still worked.

  “Nonlethal,” Kirana said between breaths. “Tranquilizer. Light dose. We’re lucky they hadn’t built up full pressure yet.”

  “Lucky,” I echoed, my voice hoarse.

  I glanced toward the stacked crates. A few had labels indicating personal goods. A few had no labels at all. Whoever had prepared the gas had hidden it well.

  The three men we hadn’t knocked completely unconscious groaned on the deck, dazed. Their eyes, when they focused, held no sign of regret. Only fury at being interrupted.

  I looked down at them and felt something unfamiliar twist inside my chest. Not anger. Not pity. Something raw and ugly that wanted a cleaner solution than wrestling people into submission and hoping they stayed down.

  “We can’t just leave them,” I said. “If they wake up…”

  “They won’t,” Kirana said. “Not soon. And when they do, we’ll have other plans for them.”

  “What if there are more?” I asked. “More gas setups in other sections?”

  “Then we’ll stop those too,” she said. “Or someone else will. We’re not alone in this.”

  As if summoned by her words, Meral’s presence surged through the Force—sharp as broken glass, bright as a welding torch.

  For a second, I wasn’t on Silver Gull’s cargo deck anymore.

  I was on the bridge of another ship, looking through Meral’s eyes as she knelt beside a fallen body. Not mine. A human man in a ship officer’s uniform, his chest burned through by a blaster bolt, his eyes staring at nothing. The bridge around her was a wreck — panels shattered, consoles dark, the air stinking of ozone and charred fabric.

  Kyp stood a few meters away, his saber still humming, his face twisted in a way that made my heart clench. Rage and horror, layered thick. He’d arrived just in time to stop the slaughter. Almost.

  Meral reached for the dead man’s belt, fingers brushing a metal cylinder clipped there — a tool, or something that wanted to be one. The instant she touched it, the Force yanked her inward.

  I saw it with her.

  ? ? ?

  A memory —sharp and fast— of that same belt being passed from one conspirator to another in a narrow maintenance corridor. A whispered exchange. Coordinates muttered. The image of a hyperdrive control panel, digits flashing not the planned route to safety but a different set of numbers entirely. A staging point. A dense cluster of ships lurking in shadow.

  Hutt ships.

  Zann Consortium ships.

  Together.

  An ambush point.

  Not where we were supposed to be going at all.

  And then, another memory layered under it, more recent.

  Hands working in the hyperdrive chamber. Panels open. Cables rerouted. A failsafe installed that wasn’t a failsafe at all: once the ships arrived at the ambush point, their drives would shut down and lock out. No escape. No second jump. All three transports immobilized ducks in a shooting gallery.

  Meral jerked her hand back from the belt like she’d grabbed a live wire. Her breath came rough. The image hung between us in the Force, drifting like smoke.

  Kae’rin, she whispered, not with her mouth but with her mind. Did you see that?

  “Yes,” I whispered, aloud and inside. “I saw.”

  Toran flared into the connection a moment later, bringing the smell and sound of blasterfire with him, the echo of another firefight in another engine room. “What happened?” he demanded. “Meral—?”

  They rigged the hyperdrives, she said, her mental voice shaking. All three ships. We’re not jumping where we think we are. We’re going into a trap, and then the drives will die.

  Kyp’s presence loomed behind her like a storm that refused to break. He hadn’t heard the thought the way we had. But he would.

  My stomach dropped, even though my feet stayed on the deck.

  Kirana felt it too. Her head snapped up sharply.

  “Hyperdrives?” she asked, sensing the echo rather than the words.

  I nodded, throat suddenly dry. “Sabotaged,” I said. “They’re not taking us to safety. They’re taking us to a kill-zone. And then they’ll shut us down.”

  “Of course they are,” Kirana muttered. She closed her eyes for the briefest fraction of a second, then opened them again, sharper. “Can they fix it?”

  “Kyle will try,” I said. “Kyp too. Meral saw the how of it. That’s something.”

  “That’s everything,” Kirana said. “If we know what they did, we can undo it. Or at least break it enough to change the outcome.”

  Outside our little pocket of the cargo deck, the ship continued to shudder and groan, its hull ringing with the distant impacts of other fights. Somewhere above, someone screamed. Somewhere else, someone sang an old miner’s hymn under their breath because that was the only thing left to do.

  I looked at the saboteurs on the floor and the half-disarmed gas setup and the environmental console we’d torn apart with our bare hands and cheap sabers.

  We’d stopped one plan.

  The larger one still waited.

  ? ? ?

  “We have to get to the hyperdrive section,” I said. “All of us. Kyp, Kyle, Toran, Meral. Everyone.”

  Kirana nodded. “We will. That’s next.”

  She deactivated her saber and tucked it back into her jumpsuit, the weight of it pulling the fabric down slightly. It looked wrong there. But it had done the job.

  “For now,” she said, “we’ve kept this ship breathing. That’s what matters.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was true. I wasn’t sure if anything we did would be enough. But doubt didn’t change reality. Action might.

  “We’re not going to where we thought,” I said softly, more to myself than anyone. “We’re not leaving the danger behind. We’re flying straight into it.”

  Kirana’s gaze found mine. There was no comfort in it. Only honesty.

  “Then,” she said, “we’ll just have to bring our own.”

  Somewhere deep in the distance, I felt Kyle’s awareness sharpen as Meral pushed the memory of the sabotaged hyperdrive into his mind as well. He understood in an instant. His response was a steady, flint-edged resolve.

  If one ship’s drives were compromised, all three were.

  The exit point from hyperspace wasn’t going to be what the navigational charts promised.

  The Zann Consortium had stacked the board.

  We’d just watched them do it.

  I felt Toran’s anger flare again, hotter than before, directed now not at a single saboteur but at the whole invisible hand behind this. Kyle was there immediately, the steadying presence that had pulled him back once and would do it again.

  Not that way, Kyle said through the Force — firm, unyielding. Not this time.

  On our ship, I closed my eyes and took one slow breath.

  No one was coming to save us.

  We were it.

  Kirana tapped my shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “The hyperdrives won’t unrig themselves.”

  We left the cargo deck behind—the lingering smell of near-missed gas, the unconscious saboteurs, the maze of crates hiding lives in transition — and headed toward the engines.

  The mutiny was no longer just in the corridors.

  It was in our course.

  In our destination.

  In the very way the ship meant to move.

  The void ahead waited, patient.

  We ran toward it anyway.