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He hurried to pull on the suit that protected him from oxygen and double-checked its seals. He could afford no more burns. He pulled on old robes, then hid knives in his boots, ammonia bombs—lethal to oxygen breathers—up his sleeves. He strapped a fully charged blaster at his side, in full view. Then he started for the hatch. He heard 4-LOM already walking toward it.

Zuckuss walked easier now. He breathed without pain. His stride soon carried him with all the seeming confidence and strength he had ever had, and for a moment he almost forgot the weakness he worked so hard to conceal.

He realized, then, walking toward the hatch and a meeting with Darth Vader, that he worked hard to hide his injuries and their implications from one other person.

He realized that, when he could, he hid them from himself.

When Toryn Farr regained consciousness, the transport was cold. Very cold.

But there was still air. They could still breathe.

For now.

Some of them would live, for a time.

Toryn pushed herself up off the deck and looked around. Dim emergency lights glowed from the ceiling above her, but stopped maybe three meters up the aisle from where she sat. It was dark past that point. The readouts of instrument panels glowed and blinked in that blackness. Out the viewport, she saw stars roll by. What was left of the Bright Hope was spinning out of control and heading for who knew what.

And there would be no rescue.

No one from the Rebellion could come back for them.

When the Empire realized there were survivors on this ship and came for them, they would be interrogated, tortured, and executed. The Empire would pull in every ship to take prisoners, access remaining computer systems to steal information: but especially to capture intact droids to download their databases. The Rebels did not have much time to find a way to save themselves, if they could, and to erase all computer systems and surviving droids if they could not.

Samoc moaned. She was still alive. A cupboard had broken away from the wall just ahead of them and smashed into the deck, spilling brown bantha-wool blankets and white pillows. Toryn took a blanket and wrapped Samoc in it. Samoc’s burns still had not been treated. She was shaking.

Shock, Toryn realized. Samoc was in shock.

“Hang on, Samoc,” Toryn said.

“This goes on and on,” Samoc whispered.

“What do you mean?” Toryn asked. She leaned closer to hear Samoc’s answer.

“We’re still alive. The Imperials are having a hard time killing us.”

They had downed Samoc’s snowspeeder, but she had lived. They barely missed shooting them in the hangar—then they blew up most of the transport, but still they were alive.

“I’m wondering how the Imperials will finally do it,” Samoc said.

Toryn stood up. She did not want to think about that. Soldiers in a war often die. Every Rebel knew that when he or she joined the Rebellion. Still, you always expected someone else to die: not your friends, not your sister—not you, yourself. Toryn and Samoc, for all their battles, had never been this close to death.

Toryn reached down to pull the blanket a little tighter around Samoc. “I’ll go look for something to put on your burns,” she said. “And I’ll look for something we might do to save ourselves. Who knows?”

Samoc tried to smile.

Other people moaned around them. The ship had been so crowded. There were probably many survivors on it, Toryn thought. She took blankets to two other people, then hurried to the instruments she saw blinking in the darkness ahead of her. One was an old-model hacker droid, adapted to record freight shipped or unloaded. Now, though, it was connected to the central computer, if that still existed in any coherent state, and from the central computer she could get information she needed.

“Droid,” she addressed it, “access the central computer and determine whether we are in danger of further attack.”

“Access restricted. Prepare for retinal scan preauthorization,” the droid said.

Toryn stared into a bright light that shone out of the hacker droid’s face. She hoped