Chapter 46: Escape from Paradise

Adora threaded her way through the lab, absently following the sound of voices talking in the distance, trying and failing to concentrate on where she was going. It'd take time for the message she had sent Catra to arrive, and more time for a response to come back, if one came back at all. That much she knew.

What concerned her now was how successful she'd be at concentrating on more pressing matters in the meantime. Ly had agreed to look at the Eye of Shukra, but that was no guarantee it contained the key to sealing the Barrier and trapping the Beast out of the galaxy for good like they hoped. If Ly couldn't decipher the Eye, or if it didn't contain what they needed, then what? The Beast would still be an ongoing threat, she still had an unreliable-at-best track record utilizing just a portion of She Ra's power, and she still had no idea what kind of shape Corynth was in after his stint with the Vestamid doctors.

Adora yelped when, in her distracted state, she crashed front-first into a block of wire-rack shelving full of lab equipment. Only her quick reflexes reaching out and suctioning her whole body to the shelving kept it from falling over, and she didn't dare let go of it until she was sure it was steady.

"I'd be careful if I were you."

It was a voice off to the side and Adora spun around, heart racing. Ly was eyeing her over the top of a set of computer monitors bolted to a desk, sitting in the center of an open space. What looked to be server racks that stood even taller than the labyrinth of shelves surrounded her. The Eye was floating in a gravity well generated by a bulky machine sitting on the same desk as all the other computer equipment. Corynth and Vasher were there too, along with a cadre of Vasher's blue-clad soldiers milling about.

Adora had made it to the others and hadn't even realized it.

"The Vestamid will narrow their sights on you and hound you to the ends of the galaxy for repayment of their property if you break anything." Ly blinked, as if hearing and considering her own words. "Actually, that might distract them from Vasher and I when we leave, so go right ahead."

"I could just order them not to chase after you." Corynth was lounging on a bulky piece of equipment nearby, his one leg swinging freely a few inches off the ground, booted foot hitting the side of his perch with a rhythmic thump. "They'd listen to me."

Vasher, leaning against another piece of bulky equipment, crossed his arms and snorted into a laugh. "They've made dogma of passing comments you've made on the Beast, twisting it out of fanaticism. I'm sure they'll find some way to turn 'leave Lysithea and Vasher alone' into 'capture them for a blood sacrifice, the World Eater demands it.'"

The words themselves, mixed with Vasher's gruff tone and accent, seemed severe, but there was an undercurrent of playfulness in their exchange Adora caught onto the same moment she noticed some of Vasher's men cracking smiles of their own.

Corynth snickered. His snickering snowballed into a belly laugh, and then he started coughing, doubling over and wincing in pain. A cold streak of fear ran down Adora's spine, then Ly started laughing too.

"The great Corynth, last Shaper of the Daiamid," she said, effecting an official tone, "brought to death's doorstep because of some gentle ribbing between friends."

"Technically it was the proto-Abomination, but we can go with your thing too."

Ly rolled her eyes with a smile still on her face. She still hadn't turned away from the monitors. "Vasher, stop antagonizing him." He shot her a look, mouth agape, like she had just slapped him and Adora suppressed a giggle. "And Corynth, as much as I know you enjoy sniping back and forth with your butt buddy, you need to focus on getting better. Stop playing into this game between the two of you if it's just going to cause problems."

"I'll stop when he pays up," Corynth said. He crossed his arms and tilted his nose up at Vasher, hints of a smile twitching at the corners of his lips. "I won the bet."

A flash of metal at Corynth's wrists caught Adora's attention: he was still wearing the manacles Ly had put on him—the same ones he had first cuffed her with at the Crystal Castle—except the chain linking them together had been broken. Now they looked—and likely functioned—like simple forearm bracers.

"What did you guys bet on?" She wanted to ask about the cuffs, but was afraid she already knew the answer, so that question came out instead.

Corynth's attention snapped to her, and the laser-sharp acuity with which he had leveled at Vasher moments before melted into something more delicate. Something gentler. Even his voice came out softer.

"We were trying to guess what you'd do after I left you alone in the hotel," he said.

Vasher stood up a little taller, a proud look on his face. "I bet him a hundred imperial credits that you would stay put in the room, exactly like he asked you to."

Adora's jaw hinged open. Any and all concern she had over Corynth's wellbeing melted away, replaced with disbelief.

"And you bet that I'd steal the Eye and steal your ship?" she said to Corynth. "You anticipated me doing that?" Adora didn't know whether to feel mildly insulted they'd make a betting game over something like that or feel completely see-through, like she were transparent and utterly devoid of cunning.

Corynth's gentle expression turned sheepish, as did his voice. "Well…I saw it as a good thing?" When that didn't seem to have the effect he was hoping for, he shrugged, a bit helplessly. "I mean, I told you to walk away back at your castle and you decided it was a better idea to try and punch me in the head. If you didn't listen to me back then, I seriously doubted you were going to just sit around the hotel room because I asked you to."

Adora put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes at him. She wasn't actually mad, but seeing Corynth fidget under her gaze was a refreshing change in the power dynamic. Seeing Ly and Vasher smirk out the corners of her vision told her she wasn't the only one enjoying it, either.

Corynth gestured with both hands at Ly. "She doesn't just suck up to authority either," he said. "It's a good thing in my books, Adora. I'm happy you thought trying to steal my ship was a better option than doing nothing." He paused. "That sounds kind of screwed up, all things considered."

He was likely going to keep talking, except by then Adora had closed the distance between them and engulfed him in such a strong and sudden embrace she nearly sent them both to the floor.

"I'm glad you're okay," she said, when he stiffened in her arms. "I'm really glad. Also, I'm so, so sorry for taking the Eye. And for trying to steal your ship. And also for trying to punch you in the head back on Etheria. Wow, that feels like forever ago, now."

She felt him relax after a moment, then return the hug. "It's okay. I'm glad you're okay, too."

Adora furrowed her brow at that. Why did he sound like he was suddenly in more pain? Then she remembered him coughing earlier and broke away from him so fast she nearly tripped over her own two feet attempting to retreat.

"Sorry! Shit, I completely forgot. Sorry."

Corynth winced but still smiled up at her. He flashed her a quick thumbs up, keeping his other hand pressed to his side like he was trying to keep some unseen stitches there from ripping. Adora was about to feel bad again when Vasher pointed a finger at Corynth and laughed.

"She apologized to you," he said. "I won the second bet." He looked at Adora. "He didn't think you were going to say sorry or be his friend anymore."

Now Adora was truly surprised, and the open-mouthed expression of shock she fixed Corynth was real. "Ok, I will fully admit and own the fact I am not an easy traveling companion, but I like to think that, deep down, I'm fundamentally a decentperson." She raised both her eyebrows and widened her eyes in disbelief. "You seriously thought I was going to try and get one over on you and not feel bad about it at all?"

To his credit, Corynth looked apologetic. "It's something I'm very glad to have been proven wrong about," he said to her, before turning to Vasher and saying, "and it's a bet I'm very glad to have lost. How about we just say our respective wins cancel each other out?"

Vasher shrugged. "Sure. I'll just have to win whatever we bet on next. We have a three-year hiatus we need to catch up on."

"You two are insane," Adora said, shaking her head.

Their dynamic, this obsession over betting on stupid things like this, it was so comical that Adora didn't think she could be mad about it even if she wanted to. Just flabbergasted. Two grown adults, one of them a textbook definition of a literal living god, behaving like teenagers after facing down a proto-Abomination and nearly dying. It was crazy.

Ly snorted off to the side. "Don't get too worked up about it," she said. "You can't reason them out of it, either. They bet on almost everything." She finally turned away from the computer monitors to look at Adora directly. "Corynth bet Vasher on whether or not him and I would get together, years ago. And Vasher took the bet."

"I got so much money," Corynth said. He sounded so proud of himself.

"And I got a fantastic relationship that's still going," Vasher said. "Who's the real winner?"

"Definitely not Corynth." Ly said, before winking at Adora, who felt like she was finally rediscovering what 'female camaraderie' meant, years after Glimmer had left home.

The machine twirling the Eye in its gravity well beeped and Ly turned back to the monitors. She studied it a moment, then let out a long sigh and shook her head.

"Bad news?" Corynth asked. He sat forward, and any trace of humor or lightheartedness was gone.

"Lukewarm news," Ly said. She tapped a cadence of commands on the keyboard and a holographic projection materialized in the space between them. It was a web of points and intersecting lines, creating a three-dimensional tangle of light so concentrated and complicated it hurt Adora's eyes just to look at it.

"This is the best approximation I could generate of what information is inside the Eye," Ly said. "What you see here is maybe five percent of the total data volume, and even still there are several levels missing from the model. It is simply too complex to display everything, even from just this one small slice."

"You can't analyze it for the barrier algorithm, then," Corynth said.

Ly shook her head. "I can't get it, no, but I can confirm it's in there." At Corynth's look of confusion, Ly tapped a few more commands into the computer and a portion of the model broke away and highlighted. "There are bits and pieces that I know for certain are part of the original formula—they match up almost exactly to the bootlegged version of the algorithm Evelyn and I put in years ago. It's just…"

"Too complex to get through," Corynth said, completing her thought with a pensive expression.

"We thought what we had come up with back then was massive and complex at the time, but this?" Ly gestured to the model. "This is insane. The Eye has what the Barrier needs to seal fully, but Pip is the only thing that could extract the algorithm and apply it to the nodes directly. Cutting edge software is like "baby's first plastic toolset" compared to this thing. We need Pip and whatever time-transcendent insanity Evelyn breathed into her when she made her in order to do it."

Corynth hmm'd and leaned in closer. "What are those?" he asked as he pointed to subtle patches of red coloring inside the web Adora hadn't noticed before.

"Those are traces of the Beast I found inside the Eye," Ly said.

"You're kidding me."

"That's what I sensed lurking there when I felt around inside?" Adora asked, surprised as well.

"I'm not kidding, and yes, that's probably what you both felt," Ly said. "The data in the Eye makes it so dense it's able to contain a sample of the Beast without an ounce of ignominite to pacify it. It must be a fragment of the same infestation the Eternians were coming across when building out their countermeasures so many millennia ago, before the Emperor came."

"Or it could be the sample they experimented on directly," Corynth said, before turning to Adora. "It's one of the first things Evie saw when she looked through the timestream—the Eternians discovering ignominite for the first time. She just replicated their findings for us to use now on Phoenix, after Taline got her what she needed."

"If they already had ignominite when they were crafting their barrier," Adora said, "then why didn't they use the same technology to contain this sample here? Why is the Beast inside the Eye?"

"It could be because they needed an 'unpacified' sample for their tests," Ly said. "Or they might have lost control of the sample they had and part of it got stuck inside the Eye when it ate their researchers, I have no clue. The important thing is I got it out."

"You can't analyze the data, but you were able to get all of the Beast out?" Adora asked.

Ly nodded and turned to a sealed case she had sitting nearby on the desk. It hissed and steam rose out when she undid the latches and opened the top.

"Running a basic diagnosis is a lot simpler than deriving insights from this thing, so I just had it comb through the whole structure with a basic extraction protocol. Still took an ass-load of time, though." From the case, Ly pulled out a thin, metallic-red crystal that seemed to shift in shades and hues depending on which angle a surrounding light source struck it at. "I put it in here, fully pacified, and confirmed the rest of the Eye is now clean. When Pip looks at it this time, she'll be able to get through the whole thing without getting corrupted."

"I'll take that," Corynth said, holding his hand out. "It's dangerous in the wrong hands."

Ly looked from the tainted crystal to him, as did everyone else. For a moment, Adora wondered whether they would fight over it, before Ly set her lips in a thin line and nodded.

"It's even more dangerous in the right ones," she said, placing it in his upturned palm. "Still, you're probably the best person to safekeep this kind of thing."

He stowed the crystal away and Ly turned back to the table to tap out new commands on the keyboard. A new visualization replaced the old hologram between them. It was the same neural net pattern Adora had seen several times before: Pip's source code, including the still-corrupted and entirely missing pockets of data as well.

"As for our favorite spritely AI," Ly said. "No change from what I told you back at the Garden. She's the only one who can read the Eye, and I can do nothing repair her. Her code is too far gone for me to piece back together. The gulfs between what remains intact are too wide."

"So…Pip can't come back?" Adora asked. She had only met her once, very briefly, and already felt sad. "Why are we talking about getting her to read the Eye if she's just…gone?"

"I can't do anything to fix her," Ly said, "but that doesn't mean she's gone." She stepped away from the table and circled the still-intact portions of Pip's code with a finger, outlining them with a shimmering red highlight in the hologram. "The damage to her code is extensive but targeted—she was able to partition off the most important parts. Her personality, her memories, Evie's module for decoding the Eternian language…it's all still here and untouched. The missing parts are just the core framework and boilerplate that holds it together. The 'glue', so to speak."

"If we replace the framework then she'll still be her?" Adora asked.

"Yes." It was good news, Adora thought, but the way Ly spoke and the way her gaze slid from the visual to Corynth betrayed her. "A master copy of her programming needs to be pulled and merged to get her functioning again."

Silence draped over them at that, heavy with a feeling of forboding Adora couldn't pinpoint or make sense of. Ly and Vasher looked morose, and Corynth wore a face of stone, seeming to stare unblinking straight through the visual without actually seeing it or anyone else. Vasher broke the silence with a small groan, putting his head in his hands.

Corynth finally blinked and made eye contact with Ly. Adora got the distinct feeling they exchanged a whole heated conversation between them with that one look than the entire exchange they all had since she almost knocked over that first piece of equipment.

"There's no other way," Ly said, quietly as if just to him. "I'm sorry."

Corynth grimaced and deflated with a deep sigh. He sat back, leaning into the equipment he was sitting on for support as he ran shaky fingers through his hair. It struck Adora as odd; even when weakened or upset he had never seemed out of his depth before, for lack of a better word. Now, though? He looked like he'd rather be anywhere but sitting there, having listened to what Ly just said.

"What's going on?" Adora asked. "This is good news, isn't it? We can go get Pip restored, have her read the Eye now that it's been scrubbed clean, and hopefully shore up the Barrier so the Beast can't seep through and attack any more worlds. Isn't that a good thing?"

"It would be a good thing, yeah," Ly said, rubbing at her temples, "if it weren't for where Pip's original backup copy is located."

Adora was about to ask where the backup was and why it was such a problem when all the lights in the lab shut off. Emergency lights snapped on a moment later, bathing them all in a blood-red hue. An alarm blared to life around them, screeching.

"What the hell is going on?" Adora asked, clapping both hands over her ears.

Vasher's men had already, on their own, surrounded them in a protective formation with weapons drawn and pointed outward. Ly typed furiously away at the console on the desk. The alarm stopped blaring, but the red emergency lights remained. She read from one of the screens as it spit out a stream of new information at her.

"Shit," she said, pausing for a moment to scrutinize the display before diving right back into another round of furious typing. "Those fucking Vestamid scum."

"What happened?" Corynth had stood and shuffled over to her with Adora's help.

"I made sure this workstation was completely disconnected from the network while it churned through the Eye," she said. "And I triple extra checked before I started having it run diagnostics on Pip's code. They must have put in a backdoor connection. Some kind of subroutine that made sure if any of this equipment was ever used, they'd be able to track it and what I did with it. Unfortunately, since Pip's code got on the network anyways, it tried to automatically contact the server hosting her backup to try and rebuild her."

She slammed two fists down on the table, making the equipment rattle. "That…fucking server sent back a booby-trapped file. It's gotten into the guts of Eden's entire infrastructure and is causing all sorts of problems."

An explosion sounded off in the distance, rattling not just the equipment on the desk, but all the equipment on the racks spaced around the whole lab. Dust fell in sheets from the ceiling and Adora tried not to breath it in.

Everyone froze and looked at each other in surprise, then. Everyone except Ly who stared wide-eyed in shock at the monitor as she read off new information, mouthing rapid-fire syllables under her breath, eyes darting across the screen.

"Ly?" Corynth asked. "What was that?"

"They've definitely been experimenting with more than that one Abomination." There was a quaver in Ly's voice when she spoke, now. "The emergency system is telling me there's a massive infection spreading rapidly throughout the entire station." She tapped another set of commands and another window popped up with a dense block of text scrolling down it. "An Imperial fleet within the system has been alerted to this as well. They must have picked up the infection on their scans. They'll be here within minutes."

"We have to leave," Corynth said. "Now."

Ly yanked the Eye from its gravity well and shoved it back in the same pack Adora and Corynth had it in previously, slinging it around her shoulder. Vasher barked a set of quick orders to his men and they pulled in closer, forming a tight, outward facing box around them. Adora anchored herself better under Corynth's arm just like Ly had done for her when she couldn't walk reliably on her own, and then all of them together moved as a cohesive group through the labyrinth of equipment racks and back toward the exit.

The blaring alarm siren wailed at them anew the moment the door leading out into the service corridor opened—Ly must have only shut off the thing inside the lab. Adora didn't have any hands free to cover her ears. If they started bleeding before they got to their escape, she wouldn't be surprised. At least Corynth kept up fine with her support. She was half afraid he'd be wholly unable to move.

When they hit the end of the service corridor that emptied back into the hangar terminals, Adora got a good sense of just how dire things had become.

People were in a panic, sprinting up and down the terminal, many crowding and pushing into and around the hangar bay entrances and trying to force their way through to their ships beyond. The Gorn doctors she had last seen in the clinic apparently had wings, since Adora saw more than a few of them buzzing around high above, trying to avoid the stampedes.

Adora only caught glimpses here and there of this—only the bits and pieces she could see through the tight gaps in the formation Vasher and his men maintained around them as they hurried down the terminal. With the alarms continuing to blare, the emergency lights, the shouting, the running, the creeping, snowballing feeling of existential dread that was slowly making itself know…it was overwhelming, all of it together. It was all Adora could to do focus on keeping Corynth supported and not tripping over herself in the process.

She ran straight into the back of one of the men when their whole group made a sudden stop. Their shouting commands to 'get out of the way' intensified, and two of them actually crouched down to grab at something.

A moment later, Adora realized what had happened: someone had tripped and fallen right in front of their group. She thought they might be leaning down to try and help. Then her blood ran cold in shock when she watched them grab the person in question and drag them out of the way. Two others filled in the gaps the first had left, and they continued forward as if nothing had stopped them in the first place.

She was about to say something when gunshots rang out somewhere off to the left. Every guard turned in unison to the sound, rifles already raised, and they fired back without waiting to see what had happened.

Adora screamed and turned away before she inadvertently caught sight of anything that'd feed her nightmares all over again. They hadn't even waited to look at who they were shooting at. They just turned and fired back, hurrying them along even faster after they were done. What if they killed a civilian? Just another person trying to escape, like them? What if it was a family?

Corynth nudged her to grab her attention. When she looked over, his eyes radiated sympathy.

"It will be okay," he said. "One foot in front of the other, just focus on that."

Adora sucked in a breath, blinked away the tears, and focused on that. One foot in front of the other.

They made it to bay thirteen again, and that was when Corynth stopped them all.

"You have to get out of here," he said to Ly and Vasher.

"But—"

"There's no time." Corynth cut Ly off with a shake of his head. "You go. We'll make it the rest of the way on our own."

"Just come with us," Adora said. "We're all going on the same ship, aren't we?"

"They're two of the most wanted people in the galaxy," Corynth said. "They can't go where we are. They'll light up every security checkpoint we try and cross."

Ly shot Vasher a glance before cursing and shrugging out of the backpack carrying the Eye. She handed it over to Adora, and pressed something else into her palm. It was a data disk.

"For when you get to your destination," she said. "The Dzivia is all fixed up, but you'll still need this."

They turned and hurried off, already beyond shouting distance before Adora could get her bearings enough to ask after what Ly had given her. Instead, she and Corynth continued through the bay doors.

Amid the chaos still raging and the sense of dread and doom that was so loud now it seemed to be trying to kick her in the head, metaphorically speaking, she wondered why no one was trying to push past them to take the ship. She had seen countless others literally fighting to get into bays that certainly didn't belong to them. Why wasn't anyone trying the same with bay thirteen?

She got her answer when they reached the security tower.

Dozens of bodies littered the hangar floor. Pools, smears, and footprints of blood coated the whole stretch from the first floor door of the security room to the Dzivia itself. People had tried to take the ship. It's just the auto turrets had taken care of them, and everyone else learned to steer clear.

"One foot in front of the other," Corynth said, bringing Adora back. She whimpered and breathed through her mouth to avoid smelling the blood and corpses.

One foot in front of the other. Just put one foot in front of the other.

She chanted it like a mantra in her head as they made their way down the stairs and across the hangar floor.

Ignore the bodies. It's not your fault. Just put one foot in front of the other.

Finally, they reached the ship, and Corynth keyed in the passcode to lower the ramp. Adora let him go and he beelined inside, disappearing from view. For her part, Adora remained at the foot of the ramp, hoping to dissuade anyone from coming at them if the pile of bodies didn't do enough to make them turn back on their own. The last thing she wanted was those turrets coming down and turning someone else to paste right in front of her.

Instead of people trying to force their way in, she saw what she initially assumed to be a trick of the eyes: what little she could still see of the terminal beyond the hangar seemed to darken, like the air there was growing thicker. Those panicked settlement-goers still running around outside grew fainter, like they were disappearing into a fog. When she could no longer make them out and that same dark fog seemed to be seeping into the hangar proper, Adora knew it wasn't a trick of the eyes. It was the Beast.

The ship's engines revved to life, buffeting Adora with strong winds. Corynth called to her from deep inside loud enough it startled her to action. She darted up the ramp into the ship and ran through the cramped interior tunnels until she reached the cockpit.

"Strap in," Corynth said, already in the pilot's seat and working at the controls.

Adora threw herself into the copilot chair and fumbled with the harness straps as the engines revved higher.

They lifted off, rotating and pointing toward the energy barrier separating the hangar bay from the vacuum of space. Corynth guided them through as steadily as he could and accelerated hard the moment they broke free.

Adora's body sunk into the seat cushioning as they rocketed away from the settlement and toward the star nearby. If seeing it take up almost the entire viewscreen still made her uneasy, the fact they were rocketing toward it at speed terrified her.

A warship, massive and ponderous, popped out of hyperspace and into existence right in front of them. Suddenly, instead of the star, all Adora could see was the Imperial Horde insignia emblazoned on the side of a hull.

Adora yelled and Corynth banked, just missing the ship by a hair as they ducked underneath. Twenty more ships warped in around them, appearing one after the other in a popcorn cascade around the first. The Dzivia's computer screeched warning after warning at them: proximity alert, gravity well alert, dozens of scanning alerts all in a row as the incoming Horde naval vessels targeted and identified them.

Corynth reached up and began to tap furiously at the controls under a screen embedded in the overhead control panel between them.

Course set, the computer said to them, voice deceptively calm amid the chaos. Please confirm.

"Hey, they even fixed the autopilot and plotting assistant for us," Corynth said. Adora thought the calm in his voice was completely out of place considering their situation. "Remember when you broke that trying to stow away in the first place?"

"Can you please just concentrate on flying the ship and not—"

A flurry of energy beams shot forth from each Horde warship and Adora screamed, holding onto the armchairs with a death grip. Corynth banked again, left and right, up, down and around to avoid them. It took Adora a moment to calm enough to realize the warships weren't aiming for them in the first place.

Still, she screamed again as another beam shot past, far closer than the others. Corynth pitched them sideways, g-forces pushing her further into the chair as the ship carved a sharp 180-degree turn.

The warships and the star in the background pulled away, and they faced Eden once again, built onto the sun-facing surface of the planet in front of them. Except this time, instead of the lush settlement, beach, and body of water under the protective barrier, Adora saw the black mass of the Beast spreading slowly and steadily outward from the landing bays. Countless ships were pouring forth from the landing bays scattered around, each trying to escape. Adora hoped Ly and Vasher were among them.

The beams from the capital ships now behind them shot forward past the bow of the Dzivia and lasered into the planet, the barrier, the settlement. Consecutive explosions rippled across the surface. Dozens of escaping craft got caught in the crossfire.

Corynth reached for the throttle in the center console between him and Adora and slammed it forward. The viewscreen distorted into a psychedelic tunnel which, a moment later, swallowed them. Adora screamed a third time, and the Dzivia rocketed forward into hyperspace.

They had escaped an Eden under siege, both from the Beast and from the Empire, and that tiny screen embedded in the center overhead console blinked the name of their new destination at them:

Phoenix Station.

End of Part Three