Grayson slammed the car door shut, then rolled his shoulders back to get rid of an ache between his shoulder blades. So what if some rich jerk bought so much uranium he could reduce the entire Earth to rubble with it? Grayson didn’t care. He couldn’t care, because if he cared about all the stuff he had done in the past years, he would go insane.

Zoey tried to scream but the sound failed to leave her throat, cutting at her insides. There was a reason why her brain blocked most part of this memory, leaving her the bare bones. She couldn’t take it. She couldn’t take the pain that threatened to consume her, eat her alive.

One of the fighters, hit by Seraphina’s precise shots, was falling in the abyss, bouncing off the walls in a column of fire and smoke. The second one spiraled down chaotically before hitting a wall and exploding in turn. But a third and fourth fighters emerged behind the fallen ones, moving irrevocably upwards and indifferent to the catastrophes.

Elmever took the crystal out of the pocket of his new warm jacket and put the device on the dashboard, between the steering wheel and the windshield. The crystal started emitting pale blue glow, like a projector casting an image on the windshield — a 3D image of a gray-haired man with a beard, probably in his fifties.

A bright spot of light lifted off from one of the green spots. It stayed immobile above the surface of the planet, then, taking on a shape of a huge bird of prey — a falcon, Isabelle figured — it trembled, burst aflame and took flight. The golden Falcon was cutting through the darkness of space, leaving behind a burning trail — a plexus of golden threads that solidified, bit by bit taking on a more complex shape.