I didn't dare speak while I half-carried Wyatt through the hotel and back to my room. Mine, because it was closer than his and he seemed on the verge of losing consciousness.

I wrestled the door open with one hand and directed him to the couch, where he dropped down and proceeded to bleed all over the place.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!" For good measure, I punched the bedroom door hard enough to crack the veneer.

"Got an S10?" he rasped from the couch. His words slurred as if he'd drunk an entire bottle of Millroe.

I muttered a few more fucks while I got him four S10s and a glass of water.

He tried to sit up to take them but ended up sucking air through his teeth and falling back against the pillows. "Fuck," he whispered.

Indeed.

With his battered fingers, he traced the line of my jaw.

My vision blurred behind a vale of tears. "I'm so sorry." A sob broke out of me, and I choked it down. Crying was for children. There was no time for such nonsense.

A tear trickled from the corner of his swollen eye. "I fought."

"You were a fucking beast, Wyatt. You fought them all."

I cried then. I'd turned the best of them, the most pure, into a beast who fought them all.

He held my hand and waited it out.

When I reined myself in to no more than sniffles, he said, "So, Mars, eh?"

"I'm sorry." What a stupid, pathetic word.

"I'm having a little trouble focusing, babe."

Babe?

His eyelids fluttered and closed.

I slapped his cheeks gently with both hands. "Wyatt? Come on. Stay awake. You can't sleep right now."

"Mmkay," he mumbled.

"Wyatt!"

After a moment of struggle, he focused on me.

"You've got to stay awake. You can't sleep right now."

"How long do we have?"

He was aware of what was going on, aware of the passage of time. That was something, at least.

"Forty-five minutes, maybe."

"Call Shalaine. Tell her to bring..." he faded off. His gaze drifted toward something behind me.

"Wyatt!"

He focused again. "Tell Shalaine to bring Roz."

"Who's Roz?"

"The others, too. We need them."

"We can't involve them in this," I said.

Sharp light came into his eyes then. For the first time since we left the shuttle bay, he was truly with me. "They're in it, Willow. We're all in it together. We need to be together."

Fuck.

All I wanted in the world was to give myself over to the hysteria that threatened, but forty-five minutes was probably a generous estimate. There was no time for dramatics. A tablet lay on the end table. I tapped the screen. "Computer, request Shalaine, Ram, Yichen, Feng, Jed, Mya, Sophia, Dipou, and Roz."

"Coordinator Roz is not available for requests," the computer said.

"Send a message."

Wyatt blinked hard, visibly fighting to remain conscious.

"Urgent. Wyatt needs you in his room right away. Request the others. Urgent, in Wyatt's room, right away."

Jed and Sophia arrived first, together. They rushed to Wyatt's side and in seconds, Sophia was cleaning his face with a soft cloth and Jed was pressing Wyatt's hand into a bowl of ice. Neither asked what happened or spoke to me at all while they worked.

Another knock sounded at the door, and I opened it to find Shalaine. She took in the scene and turned on me. "What the fuck did you do?"

I shook my head. "Not me. I swear."

A female Earthborn I didn't know strode down the hallway toward us. "Shalaine?"

"Roz, right? Come in, please. Both of you. Wyatt asked for you," I said.

They rushed to his side and by the time the others arrived, they'd explained the situation to Roz.

Her chin shook, but she gritted her teeth and cleared her throat. "You're fools. Every one of you," she said.

Wyatt's wandering gaze fell on her, and his split lips twitched upward. "Jeanie said I needed to take nourishment."

His voice was so quiet, we all leaned in to hear.

"You wouldn't have believed it," he whispered. "I've never had such a feast."

I met their angry glares. "We've got maybe thirty minutes. The Peacekeepers know Wyatt and I are married. They say we can't stay on Earth. He earned a spot in the Martian Academy. That's what he was fighting for."

"You can't go," Shalaine said. "How long is training?"

A lifetime. That's how long I'd trained. From the time I was an infant, I was trained to be a Peacekeeper. It was in the food we ate and the supplements we were given in our milk. It was in the way we were held as babies and the hard, cold beds we slept in. "I don't know," I said.

"It could be years," she said. "We can't split up like that. Our strength lies in our numbers. We need Wyatt. We need you."

Roz stepped back from the group. "What do you need them for? Why the urgency?"

The Earthborn exchanged a look and Shalaine rose. "There's an alien threat to the solar system. The Peacekeepers have brokered a deal with them—"

"I think it was the Administrators," I said. "The Peacekeepers are just enforcing it."

Shalaine went on as if it didn't matter. "They're offering the Earthborn as some kind of pacifying sacrifice."

"But we're going to fight," Sophia said.

Roz laughed, a hard, bitter sound. "Fight? Like Wyatt fought?"

Wyatt wheezed. "I won, didn't I?"

Shalaine rolled her eyes. "No. We can't fight like Peacekeepers, but we can fight like Earthborn."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Roz asked.

"We'll control them with their pleasure," Feng said. "We'll make them our puppets and direct them right off of our planet."

The blood drained from Roz's face, leaving her pale as a corpse. "You can't."

"You know we can," Yichen said in her soft tones.

The door burst open and two dozen Peacekeepers poured through. They yanked the Earthborn to their feet and shackled their hands behind their backs. The colonel stood at the back of the group. He met my gaze.

"They never should have let a natural-born freak live. I will find out who was behind that. I will make sure they shoulder their portion of the responsibility for this clusterfuck." He gestured to a woman near me. "Disarm her. Put them all on the shuttle." Once we were in cuffs, he sauntered over and pulled a com from the pocket of my pants. "I had a feeling there was more going on than we realized. Now I have proof."