He turns, but by the time he does it's too late. Laura slams into him and knocks him down. His gloved hand releases my hair. His rifle clatters to the floor, and he follows it with a shout of surprise. Laura lands on top of him, and she's hitting him with her cuffed hands, hard. The man tries to throw her off, but she just keeps hitting him and hitting him. His head snaps to the side and blood spatters onto the floor. Laura's sobbing and screaming. She leaps off him, stumbles, grabs the rifle up off the floor. She can't hold it properly with her hands still cuffed, but she pulls it tight against her side and points it down at him. The man twitches on the floor like a broken insect. He's clearly unconscious.
"Laura!" I yell. With a sob she drops the rifle and comes stumbling over to me.
"Lynch . . . oh, God, your ear . . ." Her hands flutter over the place where Ingleman cut me. It looks like she wants to help me, but she doesn't know how.
"It's okay," I lie. "Get me untied." Laura nods and starts working at the braces that hold my arms. She gets one undone, and then I use my free arm to undo the other while she unclips my legs. As I stand a rush of blood flows to my head and I stumble, dizzy. Laura catches me. I feel the blood still running down the side of my neck. It's all happened so fast that I can't take it in.
The room shakes again. I hear the sound of a dull and distant explosion. An alarm starts to sound, rising and falling somewhere in the depths of the ship.
"What's going on?" says Laura. "What's happening?"
I shake my head. "Doesn't matter. We've got to get away. We might not get another chance. Come on. Get the gun."
Laura picks up the rifle and passes it to me, and we make our way to the door. I hold the gun up, brace it against my shoulder and put my finger over the trigger.
"Open it," I say. Laura lets me stand by myself and hauls the heavy handle of the door up. It swings open. I duck out, checking left and right. Nobody there. We're in a windowless corridor that stretches off dimly in either direction.
"This way," I say to Laura, picking a direction at random. We start to run, Laura hiccupping and gasping softly behind me. My head throbs heavily and adrenaline courses through my body. I feel like any second I'm about to burn up, explode like a star gone supernova.
At the end of the corridor is another door, and on the other side a staircase. We hurry up, feet hammering on the metal steps. Two floors, then three. How far down can we be? Just as we set foot on the next flight of stairs the door at the top bursts open, and two Academy wardens come barrelling through. Instinctively me and Laura fling ourselves back against the wall, but there's no need. The wardens don't even notice us as they sprint away up the stairs.
The door they came through is still swinging shut when we reach it. We head through and find ourselves running along a kind of balcony that looks out over a cargo bay. It's huge, big enough to hold a street of houses with room left over. Down there are stacks of metal boxes and Academy equipment, as well as half a dozen big black jeeps. A few Academy personnel are scurrying about in a panic, but they're too busy to notice us.
"Here," cries Laura, "Through here." She grabs my arm and hauls me through an open door into a short, darkened corridor on the other side. At the far end there's a metal door with a porthole set in the middle, through which I can see a tiny disc of the night time sky. Me and Laura fling ourselves against the door, haul up the handle and fling it open.
A gust of cool air rushes in and over us. Out there on the deck of the ship, everything is chaos.
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