Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

1

“My name is Mortimor Fyde, son. Welcome to hyperspace.”

“Hello,” Cole asked out loud, “is anyone there?”

He shook his head. His thoughts were still rattled from the crash landing, his vision partially blinded from the harsh light outside. He knelt on the buried canopy of the stolen and upturned Firehawk and groped for the strange voices he thought he’d heard during the crash.

It was nearly impossible to concentrate, however, with someone else trying to yell at him. Riggs, his former Academy mate and friend, hung overhead, strapped to the nav chair, completely restrained. Cole could see the whites of his eyes glaring down at him, his cheeks puffing out around the tape, his nostrils flaring with rapid, shallow breaths. In the dull, green glow of the emergency lightstick, Riggs’s angered visage seemed outright menacing, like a monster eager to attack. He grunted more unpleasantries through the tape and shook his head side to side, his eyes squinting with rage.

“Okay, hold on,” Cole said. He stood and reached for a corner of the tape. “Stop struggling.”

Riggs held still, but his eyes tunneled straight through Cole. The tape came off with a loud ripping sound, followed by a bout of cursing.

“You flanker!” Riggs yelled. “What in hyperspace have you done?” He shook his shoulders, struggling against the restraints and the flight harness.

The sight of Riggs’s bound arms made Cole wince with guilt. Tying him up had been necessary during his and Molly’s escape from the Navy, but after the brutal crash they’d just endured, the bindings seemed cruel and pointless.

“Cool your jets,” said Cole. “I’m just as confused as you are.” He touched the red band on his forehead, thinking as loud as he could, but the voices had gone silent. He took the Drenard invention off and held the lightstick close to check that the seam was in the back—

“Why’re we upside down?” Riggs yelled. “What’ve you done? Get me out of here, Cole, I mean it.”

“Okay, okay, just save the air. There’s atmosphere here, but I don’t know what’s in it.” Cole stuffed the band in his breast pocket and reached up to undo the restraints around his old friend’s elbows and hands. “Don’t get crazy, okay? I’m gonna untie you.”

As soon as one of Riggs’s hands came free, he slapped Cole’s away and worked on the other strap himself. “Where in hyperspace did you take us?”

“Funny you should ask like that.” Cole watched Riggs fumble with his harness; he jumped aside just in time. Riggs landed on the inverted canopy with a thud and a crunch.

Cole went to help him up. “If my sources are… well, unless I’m hearing things, we might be in—”

Before he could finish, Riggs was on top of him, swinging wild blows with his fisted flight gloves.

“Stop it!” Cole yelled. He grabbed one of Riggs’s arms after a blow grazed the side of his head. Pulling down on the arm, he twisted his body and tossed Riggs over his hip. Riggs spun and landed with his back against the glass canopy; Cole fell on top of him, spreading his weight out to hold his old friend in place.

“Stop,” he said again as he groped for the lightstick. It had rolled beneath them, reducing the glow to almost nothing.

Riggs panted hard in the darkness; he twisted his shoulders and hips in an attempt to buck Cole off.

“Listen to me—”

“Flank you.”

“Seriously, Riggs, listen. Hold still—”

“Get the flank off me!”

“Okay, I’m getting off, but no blows. Just relax for a second.”

He got off Riggs and backed to one side of the upturned cockpit. Riggs scrambled away, grabbing the lightstick as he went and holding it out between them.

Cole showed his palms and tried to imagine how his old friend must see him: some mad vigilante—a dangerous criminal. There was the theft of Parsona, the death of Admiral Lucin, and what had happened on Palan during the floods. He knew none of it looked good, especially the recent act of kidnapping Riggs and escaping from the Navy, which he couldn’t even begin to deny.

“Hey,” Cole said. “I’m not gonna try and convince you I’m innocent—”

“Good,” spat Riggs.

“I’m not even gonna ask you to put aside your hatred of me—”

“Trust me, I won’t.”

“Fine. But unless I’m hearing voices, we need to get out of here, which means working together if you wanna stay alive long enough to kill me yourself.”

Riggs seemed to consider the logic behind that. “Yeah. Fine,” he said. He waved the lightstick around the cockpit, taking in the scene of the crash. “As long as you understand, I’m gonna do that as soon as possible.”

“But not right now?”

“Probably not,” Riggs said, glaring at him. “So, where are we?”

Cole wondered how to break the news, or if he was just being delusional. He felt for the red band in his breast pocket as the illumination from the lightstick faded, leaving them in complete darkness.

“Damn,” Riggs said. “My eyesight’s screwed.”

“Mine too,” said Cole. The large spot in his vision had broken up, replaced with a dozen smaller dots that danced around like flying, glowing creatures. He hoped the change was a good sign—the searing light they’d encountered upon arrival seemed powerful enough to do permanent damage.

“These things suck,” Riggs said, banging the lightstick against the canopy. Cole could hear him cracking it back and forth to get a bit more glow out of it.

“It was in my suit, the one from Parsona. It’s an old design. The Naval emergency kits are under out seats, we need—”

“I know where the kits are, you Drenard. This is my ship and I stowed them there.”

“Jeez, okay, then help me get them down. We need the—”

“The biosticks, yeah. Tell you what, Cole, let’s agree I outrank you so you can stop pretending you’re in charge here.”

Cole watched a dark silhouette fumble near one of the hanging seats.

“I’m a captain,” Riggs continued, “and you’re not even a navigator anymore.”

“Drop the Navy crap,” Cole said. “It means nothing right now.”

One of the emergency kits fell to the glass. Riggs pushed past Cole and started unstrapping the other one. “To you, maybe, but just because the Navy dropped you doesn’t mean I need to drop the Navy crap.”

Cole reached into the soft case and felt for the cylindrical biosticks; they would last a lot longer than the older lightsticks from whatever era Molly’s parents had salvaged them from. He gave one of them a half-twist, lining up the two inner chambers with each other. The cockpit filled with a soft, blue glow as bioluminescent creatures came out of hibernation and began to feed.

Cole held up the stick—and the first thing he saw in the new glow was Riggs turning to punch him in the nose.

New flashes of light sparked in his vision to join the dull, persistent ones. Cole threw his hands up to fend off the next attack, but it didn’t come.

“That’s for tying my ass up,” Riggs said. “When I kill you later, it’ll be for what you did to Lucin.”

Cole didn’t dare defend himself and get that argument raging again. Besides, he had shot their old Academy instructor in the back. No point in trying to explain why. He reached up and felt his nose. It was sore, but not broken. Pulling his hand away, he saw he wasn’t bleeding, either, just stunned.

The ambient blue light doubled in intensity as Riggs pulled a second biostick from the other kit and activated it. Cole nearly chastised him for not rationing the supplies, but the lines in Riggs’s brow suggested it might be a bad idea. Instead, Cole peered down at the canopy, their only exit. The entire bubble of glass was buried in the ground, blocking off the crazy light outside, but also their chance of escape. Cole couldn’t believe the carboglass had held. If that was solid ground they’d hit, the entire nose should’ve crumpled up around them. He lowered the biostick toward the glass, but he couldn’t see anything through the cockpit—just a dark mass pressing against the clear shield.

“Is there any point in trying to slide the canopy back?” Cole asked.

“Only if it kills you before it kills me.”

Cole swung his biostick around to illuminate the space between them. He studied Riggs’s face intently. “Listen, man, I’m serious. We need to put this aside and think. Be rational.”

“Fine.” Riggs looked around the cockpit, and Cole did the same. The two flight seats hung overhead, and the canopy rose up to the inverted dash, where every control was blank and dark. At the rear of the cockpit stood the flat wall separating the crew from the flight systems: the life-support, engines, and hyperdrive.

“The landing gear,” Riggs suggested.

“Yeah? What about them?”

“Did you lower them?”

“No. Why? What are you thinking?”

Riggs pointed with his biostick toward the metal panel bolted aft of the seats. “We go out through the landing gear shafts. There’s a maintenance tunnel that runs the length of the ship big enough for the grease monkeys to crawl through. We just need to unscrew that panel—” Riggs fumbled in his kit. “Should be a multi-tool in here.”

“Good thinking.”

“Thanks,” Riggs said. “It isn’t something you can learn from a simulator. Hell, if you hadn’t tied me up, I betcha I could’ve landed this thing with my left hand.”

Cole bit down on what he wanted to say; there was no room in the tight confines of their predicament for making Riggs angrier. He’d rather take more blows right on his nose and keep smiling, wearing out Riggs’s rage with a bit of patience.

“Lower the gear with the manual crank while I work on the panel,” Riggs instructed.

“Okay,” Cole said, as pleasantly as he could muster his voice. If they were going to survive this together, he was going to have to build up some trust.

He would start by carefully and meticulously restraining himself for a change.

2

Following her controversial speech before the Circle, Anlyn travels to the Great Rift, accompanied by Edison and an escort of volunteers.

They hope to be present for the invasion foretold by prophecy.

They don’t yet know they are at the wrong rift.

“What are you doing?” Rend asked. He yanked Dor’s hand away from the weapons rack.

“I was just going to touch it!” Dor insisted.

“Are you crazy?” Rend eyed the lance warily. The large weapon stood upright in a padded harness parallel to a dozen others. It rested there as if it were no different than its neighbors, but he knew better. “That’s Lord Campton’s lance,” he said in a hushed whisper, never taking his eyes off it. “The Lance of a Thousand Suns.”

“A thousand suns? That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, I heard it was forged from the magma of Hori I and Hori II and pounded into shape on the coldest corner of Drenard’s dark side.”

Dor narrowed his eyes. “Those are fairy tales, like flying Wadi. How old are you?”

“Same age as you, hot-head, but my dad was there when the lance was wielded for the first time. He said it went off with the power of a thousand suns, and that it made a noise like the universe coming alive.”

“Your dad’s been in the Wadi juice, sounds like.”

“No he hasn’t, my dad—”

Anlyn cleared her throat behind the bickering boys before the argument could get personal. The volunteer peacemakers spun around, and she took as much pleasure in their shocked expressions as she had amusement in their whispered delusions.

“Am I interrupting?” she asked.

“Princess Hooo,” Rend said—

“Lady Hooo,” Dor whispered, elbowing his friend. He shrugged for Anlyn, as if he couldn’t be held responsible for his crewmate’s imprecise knowledge of royal etiquette.

“I’m sorry, Lady Hooo,” Rend said, “I forget you’re engaged. We were just talking about Lord Campton and his lance. My father was there for the speech. He saw—well…” The poor kid glanced at the lance, seemingly miserable with nerves. His hands squeezed fistfuls of his outer tunic as he fidgeted in place.

Anlyn gave each of the boys a serious look as she walked around them and approached the weapons rack. She rested a hand reverently on Edison’s lance. “It belonged to one of my uncles,” she said. She turned to Rend and Dor. “A guard once used it to cut a friend of mine in two. Lord Campton later turned it into a symbol of peace, not war.”

“Told you,” Dor said to Rend.

Rend ignored him. “I heard it was you who used it in the Pinnacle, that the great speech came about because of…” Rend gazed at the lance.

Anlyn could sense he wanted to touch it. She pressed the pad of her finger to the security harness and the clamps clacked open. Pulling it from the rack, she turned around and held it out to the two lads.

Dor reached for it eagerly. Rend grasped the other half as if the lance were as fragile as Thooo eggs.

“Don’t touch the trigger,” she warned them.

Neither boy looked up; they just nodded and turned the large device over and over, inspecting the royal markings and the electrical modifications Edison had made. Rend ran his hand down to the Wadi hook on the one end while Dor tested the point on the other side with a cautious finger.

“I would let you inspect it further,” Anlyn said, “but I actually came to retrieve it before our meeting with the Rift Commander.”

“It was an honor, Lady Hooo,” Rend said. He pulled the lance away from Dor and extended it to her. “I would love to speak with you sometime, perhaps hear more of your interpretations of the prophecy.”

“I would enjoy that as well, peacemaker. And it would please me to hear your interpretation. Now, return to your duties. There will be time enough to gossip while we wait for the prophecy’s fulfillment. For all we know, we may have years together for swapping tales.”

Both boys smiled and bowed low, pulling their outer cloaks up to their chins. Anlyn returned the gesture with one hand, touching the deck with the tip of the lance as she did so. She then moved off in the direction of the embassy ship’s cockpit, smiling to herself.

Behind her, she could hear one of the boys whispering excitedly. Something about “a thousand suns” and “Wadi queens.”

Anlyn kept the end of the Wadi lance just off the deck as she made her way to the cockpit. Several crewmembers and peacemakers greeted her as she passed, bowing low and grasping the edges of their tunics. Anlyn returned the stiff formalities, but all the time-consuming ceremony just heightening her eagerness to join Edison near the bow of the ship. She felt herself hurrying, needing to be near him. She passed through the narrow communications room and crossed the staff corridor, pausing to wave to the off-duty crew dining in the officer’s mess. She then turned toward the nose of the large starship and hurried down the wide central passageway. As she went through the last sliding door, she found Edison waiting for her just outside the cockpit, mindful as always of her fear of going inside.

“Pleasant awakenings,” Edison said, greeting her in his thick, growling English.

Anlyn stepped into his embrace. Her head rested against his belly, her Glemot lover a full meter taller than she.

“Pleasant awakenings to you,” she cooed. She wrapped one arm as far around him as she could and remained there, taking deep breaths. Of all the things she missed about her time aboard Parsona—excepting Molly’s and Cole’s company, of course—she most regretted no longer being able to sleep on Edison’s chest, warm and safe. Now that they were back among her people and Counselors of the Circle, certain decorum had to be observed.

They had planned on marrying, on making their union official, but had promised Molly and Cole they wouldn’t do so until they were all back together. That impulsive and sincere vow had now created the distinct possibility that the marriage would never occur, but they had decided to respect the wishes of their friends. And—as Edison had once put it in his awkward English—they would respect “her culture’s non-optimal stance on betrothal co-habitation.”

Anlyn pulled away from him and gazed up at the silky coat of fur sticking out of his tunics and at the intelligent, bright eyes below his strong brow. She patted his arm and glanced into the cockpit. “Are we there yet?” she asked, unable to see anything over the flight crew, as everything in the ship was built for the height of a Drenard male.

“Approximately,” Edison said. “I have a visual.” He looked down at his lance, which Anlyn held with one hand. “Will that be required?”

“No, but it does carry a certain mystique, which may help.”

Edison frowned.

“I know how you feel about the prophecy stuff, but we’ve gotten quite far on superstition, so wield it as if you believe.” She handed him the lance. “Are you ready?”

Edison grunted. “Approximately.”

Anlyn smiled. She thanked the flight crew without stepping inside, then the two of them turned and set off for the airlock. Once again, the walk was punctuated with bows and raised tunics. Anlyn fought the urge to politely wave them along; she participated in each ritual as she attempted to build solidarity amongst her crew. With Dani’s help, she had hand-picked each crewmember from a legion of volunteers. They had initially thought it would be impossible to find a full ambassadorial complement to accompany her to the Great Rift, but the opposite problem had occurred: so many believers of the Bern Prophecy had shown up that most had to be turned away. And—instead of looking for the few faithful—they had found themselves weeding out the truly fanatic, searching among them for the rare moderate and temperate heads.

A second and larger worry had arisen during their selection process: sniffing for the moles her ex-fiancée Bodi had attempted to plant within the mission. It wasn’t a question of whether some had made it through, but how many.

And what they had planned.

For security reasons, the embassy ship was not allowed to couple with the Rift Keep. A shuttle met them several hundred kilometers out and ferried them to the command corner of the great structure: a small outpost kept separate from the living and business sectors, accessible only by ship.

Anlyn and Edison admired the Keep from their padded seats as the shuttle pilot transferred them over. Like other defensive keeps from the histories of so many races, its position had been determined by tactical necessity. Of course, where most keeps of old were placed on high overlooks, along critical waterways, or by the mouths of important Wadi canyons, the Great Keep stood in the middle of nowhere, out in the vast expanse of empty space. Because that’s precisely where the Bern Rift had been discovered so many eons ago.

“Approximate its diameter,” Edison said, peering through the glass.

Anlyn looked out her porthole at the Keep, even though she knew the answer by heart. The scaffolding of the structure formed a mesh of metal, like a giant cage hanging in the vacuum of space. Ribbons of steel crisscrossed from one side to the other, creating a tangle of obstructing debris around the tear. It looked like something in mid-construction, but it had been completed many Hori cycles ago.

“It’s just over a thousand kilometers across,” she told Edison.

He grunted, obviously impressed.

Anlyn turned to him and smiled; it wasn’t often she saw him in awe of Drenard-built things. The sensation filled her with pride for her race, even as the reason for having constructed the Great Keep gave her a shiver of fear.

“And central to the structure?” Edison put a claw against the glass, pointing toward the occasional flash of golden light emanating from within the keep.

“The stuff in the middle? That’s the armored cube right across the tear. If you think of the cosmos as having a wound, that’s the bandage.”

“Increase specificity,” Edison said, reminding Anlyn just who she was dumbing things down for. She rooted around in her childhood studies, then recited in a sing-song manner:

“It’s saturated fluoroalkane in gold alloy armored canisters. The fluorine and carbon are bonded together, making them extremely inert, therefore hard to demolish from the other side.” She took a deep breath. “Still, the Bern do find ways to destroy it now and then. It’s a constant battle to keep enough in place that nothing gets through.”

Edison turned and looked toward the cockpit of the shuttle. His brows were down, his eyes unfocused.

Anlyn smiled at him. “Oh, my. Did I just get too technical for you?”

“Hmm?” He turned to her. “No, I lapsed into ruminations. What prevents the Bern from employing a Birch reduction using electride salts? The ejected anion would destabilize the bond, resulting in one-four cyclohexadienes. Reacting through the rift on such a solution would be elementary, especially considering the electrical conductance of the golden vessels.”

Anlyn shook her head. “Do what?”

“A Birch reduction. Using electride—”

“No, no.” Anlyn waved her arms. “Forget it. Look, talk to some of the physicists about—”

“Chemists,” Edison corrected.

“Okay, talk to the chemists about that. The point is, the stuff works. Mostly.”

“Mostly? Elaborate further.”

“Well—”

Before she could elaborate further, telling him about the frequent escapes and the methods used to chase blockade runners down, the shuttle thumped against the locking collar of the Keep and it was time to depart. One of the flight crew exited the cockpit and opened a hatch forward of them. He bowed and waved them through as Edison and Anlyn left their seats and approached the door.

“Thank you,” Anlyn said, as much for rescuing her from the conversation as for the flight. She bowed and then stepped out of the shuttle and into one of the many connecting tubes ringing the Great Rift Keep. Through the transparent passage, she could see the vast network of visisteel corridors stretching out for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. They converged on each other like a Drenard freeway, further than the eye could see. Several shuttles buzzed along the perimeter, their hulls twinkling with navigation lights as they ferried workers from one part of the Keep to another.

Strolling down the passageway to greet them was Lord Bishar Nooo, the Commander of the Keep. Anlyn recognized him more by his elaborate tunics than his face. They were family—as she could tell by his outermost layers—but they had never actually met.

“Anlyn Hooo,” he said in greeting, using her common name. He bent over and embraced her fondly. “You must be Edison,” he said, showing his palms and bowing, his eyes darting to the lance held by the Glemot’s side. “Pleased to have you both.”

“Are you?” Anlyn asked. “I’d heard you weren’t amused with our mission.”

Bishar smiled. “Let’s walk,” he said, waving them along the tube. A dozen meters or so from the locking collar, the passage opened into the command center, the military heart of the Keep.

Anlyn followed, looking down at the grav panels visible in the floor of the visisteel tube. They not only provided physical weight, they also seemed to manufacture psychological comfort. She didn’t suppose it would feel pleasant to walk across solid visisteel and nothing else, not with the cosmos hanging on all sides.

“Unsuitable for agoraphobics,” Edison mused in English, obviously thinking the same thing.

“What was that?” Bishar asked, turning to face them.

“My betrothed said this place would be unpleasant for people frightened by open places.”

Bishar laughed. “Without question. Our job, though, is one of constant vigilance. There are outbreaks now and then, and every staff member carries a warning device and possesses a keen eye.” He patted the small object hanging around his neck, nestled in the folds of his outer tunic. “The visisteel makes sure nothing is missed, and a battalion of Interceptors are always on standby, ready and alert.”

“A full battalion? Even with the extermination of the Humans underway?”

Bishar frowned. “Let’s not call it an ‘extermination,’ shall we? It will mean an end to the hostilities in the rest of the galaxy, which will eventually make our job here that much easier. Until then, there will be some cutbacks, of course, and some pilots taking extra shifts. Come, step inside.”

Bishar waved them through a set of clear blast doors and into a room full of manned consoles glittering with purposeful lights. The walls, ceiling, and most of the floor were transparent, creating an uncanny scene of hovering workspaces amid a backdrop of stars, nebulae, and woven strips of steel.

“Cutbacks?” Anlyn asked, pressing the point home. She watched as Edison wandered to one of the control booths and peered over an operator’s shoulder, probably figuring out how to rebuild the entire machine from twigs and grasses if he had to.

Bishar looked down at her, frowning. Like Edison, he was nearly a full meter taller than her and he stood close by, as was the habit of Drenard males. Also habitual was the intimidating sensation this elicited from Anlyn; she turned to gaze out at the Keep beyond the glass rather than strain her neck looking upwards.

“The cutbacks aren’t too severe,” Bishar said. “Besides, we’ve seen an incredible reduction in breakthrough attempts over the past few sleep cycles. We’ve been able to rest up two entire regiments as we prep some of the pilots for transfer to the war effort. It’s a small sacrifice for the defense of the empire.”

“There’s been a drop-off in breach attempts?”

“Quite. Practically to nothing, in fact. Perhaps that’s why you find me in such a pleasant mood, Cousin. Besides, it’ll be a Wadi Winter before you convince me that anything will come of your little plan.”

Bishar laughed in the panting, breathy Drenard way. “Ambassador to the Bern!” he said. “That’s as good as they get!”

Anlyn frowned and waited for him to settle down. “I’m afraid it isn’t your call, Cousin. It’s entirely within my rights as a Councilman of the Circle and member of the royal line to make diplomatic gestures to a hereto uncontacted race of sentient beings—”

“Spare me,” Bishar said, waving his hand. “Uncontacted is a stretch, and you know it. Besides, nobody knows the Scrolls better than I. Ever since the Rift was discovered and the Keep created, the old hierarchy has ceased to apply here. Anything that comes out of the Rift will continue to be hunted down and exterminated. Period. You can sign treaties with the ensuing debris, if you like.” Bishar smiled. “Now, I’ve set aside suitable living quarters where you and your volunteers can get a good look at the entire process. You’re welcome to stay for however long your lunacy persists.”

Anlyn bristled. “As second in—”

Bishar waved her off. “I heard about our uncles, and I know where you stand in the royal line. However, even if you and your furry friend manage to one day scrounge up a male heir—and let’s say the hybrid boy assumed the title of king—even then, you’ll not have jurisdiction here. The importance of this job grants me full immunity from our family’s politics, from your superstitious followers, and thank Hori it walls me off from the Council’s petty squabblings.”

Anlyn turned her back once more, this time to hide the disgust on her face. Then she saw it herself, clearly reflected in the visisteel. She realized Bishar could see it as well. There certainly seemed to be no hiding of anything on the Keep.

“There now, Cousin, let’s keep our temperate selves. If I’m being too cold, I assure you it’s with an inner warmth of mirth. These are exciting times for the Empire, a chance for lasting peace—”

An enormous explosion interrupted Bishar’s optimism. It registered all around them, blossoming like a new sun in a thousand panes of visisteel—a prismatic glory of destruction reflected everywhere at once.

The command room filled with sounds: beeping machines, alarms, and cursing Drenards. Anlyn looked from one bright image to another, hunting for the original as all the workers reflexively slapped at the devices around their necks, triggering even more alarms.

“The ship,” Edison roared in English.

Anlyn turned and found him pointing, a quivering claw extending out toward one transparent wall. His gesture directed her to the sight of the original image, to the burning fury beyond the Keep responsible for all the false reflections.

Anlyn felt her body grow cold. She placed her hands on the visisteel, staring. Disbelieving. The ambassadorial ship had been replaced with a cloud of expanding fire and chunks of glowing steel.

Its crew. Her supplies. Everything.

They were all gone.

3

Two weeks after their struggle with Byrne, Molly and Walter search planet Lok for a member of the Drenard Underground.

Meanwhile, the rift they thought they’d prevented from opening releases ship after Bern ship.

The craft gather as a fleet in orbit.

Molly weaved her way through the dusty, crowded market full of anxious shoppers, the bark of hagglers, and the desperate leer of eager booth attendants. The place looked identical to the last five markets she’d visited in the last five dry husks that called themselves villages. And everywhere they went, the desiccated Lokian air attacked her in the same manner: it wicked the moisture from her mouth, substituting it for cotton. Even her Wadi, who rode along on Molly’s shoulder, seemed weary of her arid, childhood planet. The lizard-like creature’s normally active tongue remained in its mouth as its head bobbed lazily with Molly’s gait.

She scanned the crowd for Walter, which had become another familiar pattern. He was supposed to be helping her find an old friend of her mother’s, but Molly seemed to spend as much time looking for the troublesome Palan as she did hunting down the lady who could get them to hyperspace and back.

A young Callite snuck up and tugged on Molly’s sleeve, interrupting her thoughts. She turned and politely declined whatever he was selling. As she waved the boy off, however, something in a nearby glass case caught her eye—the shape of the thing popping out in her peripheral as intimately familiar.

“Relays and converters,” the boy said more insistently. He held up a basket of electrical parts in front of Molly and rattled them for effect.

“I have what I need,” Molly said. She patted the canvas sack dangling by her hip.

The boy ignored her and launched into his practiced spiel, detailing every sick member of his family and every atrocity committed by the Lokian government. Molly hardly heard him as she brushed past and moved toward the booth of used electronics. She knelt down by the display case and peered inside at the reader propped up on its stand. It was the same make as the one she’d lost on Palan, but just a few years older. There’d been a dozen instances over the past two weeks when she’d wanted one—not so much for reading a book as to have something to write in that her mother couldn’t access. She checked its condition while her Wadi pawed at its own reflection in the glass.

The reader appeared a tad beat up, but no more than a new one would after a few weeks of use. Molly studied the pads of her fingers: swollen and purple, they bore dozens of scabbed-over prick marks and throbbed with a dull, persistent ache. She hated the idea of bartering for any more supplies, but she really wanted that reader.

“Excuse me, how much for that one?” She looked up at the shopkeeper and pointed through the smeared glass.

The Callite booth attendant bent down behind the counter to see which one she was pointing to. He rubbed his brown, scaly jaw, and a forked tongue flicked out over his lips. “Three hundred,” he said in a gruff voice not yet accented by his time on Lok. “And, of course, a vote for the Freedom Party.”

Molly groaned and clenched her fists protectively. Beside her, the Wadi pulled its head back and shot out a forked tongue of its own. It wasn’t that Molly had anything against the Freedom Party—she didn’t care one way or the other about Lokian politics—she was just sick and tired of being polled in general.

“How much if I don’t vote?” she asked.

Through the glass, she could see the shopkeeper’s eyes narrow, his pupils squeezing into vertical slits. He stood and peered over the counter at her. “It’s the elections,” he said. “Everyone votes.”

Molly held up her hands, palms out, to show him her fingers. “I’ve already voted dozens of times. I’ll give you three-fifty for it.”

“The Freedom Party really needs your vote,” the shopkeeper whispered. His English was impeccable, obviously learned in an off-planet school and at a young age, nothing at all like the drawling slang common to Lokians and local Callites. He narrowed his eyes at her silence, the sideways lids coming together like elevator doors. “Don’t you care about what’s going on up there?” He pointed up to the tattered fabric roof of his stall. “The Navy is putting together a new fleet, disguised as aliens. The Liberty Party is behind it all.”

Molly shook her head but kept her mouth shut.

“What about my people?” the Callite asked, moving to a sales tactic Molly had heard too often. “Every day more and more are shipped out—”

“Only the illegals,” Molly interrupted, unable to contain herself. She looked down at the reader behind the glass, wondering if it was worth getting in an argument over.

“But now those shuttles are being shot down. My people are being daily murdered, and you hesitate to vote.”

“I’ve voted plenty,” she said.

The Callite hissed. “For all I know, half those marks on you are for the Liberty Party. The least you can do is cancel one out. And I’ll make it two-fifty.”

Molly blew out her cheeks. “Four hundred and no vote,” she said. “I promise you, I’ve voted Freedom twice as much as Liberty.”

A mother trailing three squealing kids approached, stopping for a moment to look in the shop’s display case. Molly and the Callite stared at one another, waiting for the family to move on.

“Fine,” he finally said, his pupils relaxing. “Do me a favor, though—” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Stick your finger in and pretend, just in case anyone’s watching. I can’t have you making this a trend.”

Molly nodded and reached gingerly into her front pocket to fumble for some chips. Her fingers were too injured and numb to tease the denominations apart by feel, so she brought a few of them out to look through. The Callite made a coughing sound at the sight of the money. Molly tried to curl her fingers around the small pile to hide them. She plucked out two decas and slid them across the counter.

The Callite nodded to the voting machine beside the register. It had become a familiar, fear-inducing sight with its Galactic Voting Company seal stamped on the side. It was about the size of a portable toolbox, but with a single opening on the front and two buttons on the top marked ‘F’ and ‘L.’ Molly noted the letter ‘F’ was nearly worn off the button, while the ‘L’ was shiny and new. Voting machines on Lok tended to bear the mark of their owners, rather than the political stance of its users.

Missing, of course, was any list of candidates—or any way to know who or what one was actually voting for. When Molly told her mom they’d arrived in the middle of an election cycle, she thought Parsona was going to fry a circuit board. After their first few supply runs and stays in a handful of small towns, Molly and Walter had discovered why: election years weren’t the safest of times to be running around, needing things. Most people stocked up well in advance.

The Callite swiped his arm over the two chips, and the money disappeared from the counter. He deposited them in the slit at the top of the register, where they fell a long way and landed with a hollow thunk. The keeper frowned, then reached to the top of the voting machine, pushing down the ‘F’ with a loud click.

“I appreciate this,” Molly said. She stuck her index finger into the machine, looking up and down the stalls at the milling shoppers to see if anyone was watching—

Without warning, the padded clamps inside the device squeezed around the joints of her finger, locking her digit in place. Molly whirled on the keeper, and her Wadi hissed.

She put her other hand on the face of the machine and tried to pull her finger out. The Callite placed both of his hands on top of the heavy device, holding it firmly in place. He leaned close.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just such an important election. Hold still, there’s only a tiny—”

Prick.

Her index finger had already been hit once that day in order to secure a full tank of water for Parsona. The metal needle hit that fresh wound, and it felt like a bullet ripping through the pad. Molly gasped as the pain shot all the way up to her elbow like an electrical current. She slapped the top of the counter with her other hand and bit her lip to keep from yelling out. The Wadi shot down her back, sticking its head under the hem of her shirt, its tail swishing madly.

With a loud click, the ‘F’ at the top of the machine popped up, and the chemicals in her blood logged one more vote for the venerable Freedom Party.

The clamps loosened soon after, and Molly withdrew her finger. She pressed it into her shorts, which were already spotted on both sides with brown dollops of dried blood. The Callite bent down and smiled as he removed the reader from the case. He laid it on the counter, and then dropped an “I Voted” adhesive healing strip on top of it.

Molly grabbed the reader and shook the strip off onto the counter. The stupid things just made her hands more useless.

“Thanks for shoppi—”

“Flank off,” Molly grumbled. She dropped the reader into her shopping bag of assorted fruits and hardware parts and shooed the Wadi to her shoulder. She stalked away from the booth, kicking up plumes of dust with her flightboots as she went.

All around her buzzed yet another dry, dusty village she couldn’t wait to get out of. And as soon as she found Walter and finished her latest project on the ship, that’s exactly what they’d be doing. For the past two weeks, they’d traipsed halfway across her birth planet looking for an old acquaintance of her mother’s: a Callite that went by the name of Cat. The ephemeral alien possessed an uncanny blend of notoriety and elusiveness. Everyone knew her, had recently seen her, but wherever they gestured, Molly and Walter found only another trace of her passing—another nod and extended arm pointing them ever after the mysterious woman. But now Molly had a solid lead on Cat’s whereabouts, even though she loathed where it was taking her.

High above the small village, another Bern ship tore through Lok’s atmosphere, its passage marked with a loud rumble. Molly fought the urge to look up, to see which direction it was heading. Like the other ships, it no doubt came from her father’s old place, leaving the rift she had failed to close. Whatever Byrne had done, it had been enough. Or, if her mother’s guess was right, it wasn’t the old rift they were coming through at all, but rather the new one Byrne’s body had made when it was zapped out of existence. Molly wasn’t sure which scenario made her feel more guilty. Either she’d failed to stop him from opening the old rift, or her life had been saved by the same act that now threatened the rest of the galaxy. Either way, a door to a very bad place was currently open, and Byrne’s fleets were pouring through. Her feeble, bumbling efforts to stop him had come too late and proved too little.

Molly walked faster as the ship roared up into orbit, her cheeks burning with the memory of her failure. She concentrated on looking straight ahead, ignoring the complaints from the other market-goers. Even though none of them could possibly know of her involvement, the presence of the ships filled her with a paranoid dread, as if the annoyed crowds might suddenly realize the fault was hers and descend on her in the form of an angry mob.

“The Liberty party has the best plan for dealing with those things,” a lady walking behind her said. A male voice agreed, but a Callite walking the other direction didn’t. Molly quickened her pace even more as an argument broke out, the din of political discourse competing with the roar of thrusters vaporizing air.

If there was one thing she had learned and learned well regarding Lokian elections, it was that the process spilled copious amounts of blood. For votes and otherwise. And frankly, she was growing sick of the sight of the stuff.

As she left the squabble in her wake, she felt ever more impatient to do the same for the entire village. Her entire planet, even. All she wanted was to get to hyperspace, to find Cole, to be in his arms, and to see her father. Hopefully, the next stop would be their last. The problem was, Cat the Callite’s trail seemed to be taking them toward Bekkie, Lok’s capital city.

The absolute last place she wanted to be with elections looming.

4

Cole worked the manual crank to open the landing gear hatches and heard the distant hiss of air leaking inside the ship. He grabbed his helmet from the ground and snapped it on, even though his suit could only retain an hour or so of air. Riggs left his helmet off as he worked the last bolt out of the panel behind the seats. He pulled the sheet of flimsy steel free.

“Drenards, it’s freezing out there!” Riggs said. He turned to Cole and smiled at his closed visor. “The air’s fine, man. Frigid, but breathable.”

Cole lifted his visor and felt the draft of cool air on his face. It didn’t match the bright, searing light he’d seen during their rapid descent. “I wanna go first,” he told Riggs.

“Be my guest. I’d rather keep you in sight, anyway.”

Cole bit his tongue and grabbed one of the survival kits before ducking under the back of the hanging nav seat. He squeezed past Riggs and pushed the kit into the maintenance tunnel, then crawled head-first after it.

Cole held his biostick aloft as he worked his way across a series of jutting pipes and bundled wires. Above him, a smooth track ran into the distance, a mechanic’s car hanging from its rails just a few meters ahead. Inverted and useless, the track and car taunted Cole as he moved across a rough terrain of mechanical systems, trying not to cut his flightsuit open on any of the sharp hose clamps.

The air he crawled into became more frigid by the meter. Cole snapped his head forward, locking his visor down against the biting cold. He could see light coming in from an opening ahead, which reminded him of a little problem: the blinding light they’d encountered during the crash landing was still out there. Without the canopy filters, they’d be blinded in an instant.

“What’s taking you?” Riggs asked from behind.

Cole leaned on one elbow, his chest resting uncomfortably on a pump housing. He flicked his visor up and yelled back through the cold air: “That blinding light is still out there. It’s gonna be hard to see a thing.”

“Follow the grease-monkey track,” Riggs yelled up to him. “There’s a tool locker past the belly panel. Might be some welding plates in there.”

Cole nodded and continued forward, heading toward the bright shaft of light. It came down through the nose gear bay, just five meters or so behind the cockpit. The harsh rays filtered past the landing pads and the hydraulic gear. Soon, more spots danced in Cole’s vision. He thought his sight was getting worse until one of the spots flew through his open visor and hit him in the face.

It was snow. A flurry of dancing flakes streamed down through the open hatch.

Cole didn’t dare look up as he passed beneath the shaft. He kept his head down and stowed the emergency kit off to the side before heading deeper into the belly of the Firehawk.

“Damn, it’s snowing,” he heard Riggs say. “Doesn’t burn the tongue, either, so we’re good on water.”

Cole felt relieved to hear Riggs thinking like that. It gave him hope that they could work together to survive the mess they were in. He crawled over a piece of ductwork and felt the red band push into his ribs. It reminded him of the voices he’d heard during their crash landing. He wondered if they’d been real, or if he was just losing his mind. Maybe he had been hearing things amid all the alarms. Was he really in hyperspace? What did that even mean? Had he hallucinated the entire conversation?

He felt himself leaning toward the latter. They were probably on a planet, somewhere near the polar caps. Any time now, the Navy would trace their hyperspace signature and come to rescue them.

Well, rescue Riggs, anyway. They would want to imprison him.

He continued to crawl forward, not sure what to believe. Or even hope for.

“Should be right there,” Riggs hollered.

Looking back, Cole could see Riggs just past the pool of light and the descending snow. He had retrieved and donned his helmet, and his open visor already held a dusting of the white flakes. Riggs pointed to one side of the tunnel; Cole followed the gesture and recognized a handle on the hatch beside him. He rolled over to one side and flicked the compartment open. The door was just as upside-down as everything else, so he had to hold it up against gravity while he set the biostick inside. Grunting—his ribs resting on something hard and sharp—he tried to find a more comfortable position while he peered inside.

Most of the tools were still strapped in place, but several of the boxes had come loose in the crash. The gear had been stowed with a ton of combat Gs in mind, which meant the crash had been rougher than it felt. Cole thought about how he’d barely gotten his grav suit connected in time and shivered with delayed fear.

The compartment contained a lot of useful stuff. He grabbed a utility blade and leaned back on his shoulder, still holding the heavy door up. He stuffed the knife into one of the pockets on the front of his flightsuit.

“Did you find them?” Riggs asked.

Cole grunted and forced himself back on his side. “Not yet,” he hollered. He saw a large wrench strapped to one wall of the compartment and worked it loose, then propped it under the heavy hatch, holding it up. Letting go of the lid, Cole worked his head into the bin and started rummaging around by the soft, blue light of the biostick.

“Got ’em,” he said, his voice echoing in the metal compartment. He came out with three welding plates held together with a rubber band. Each of them should snap into the inside of their visors, hopefully providing protection from the light outside. One of them was marred with scratches and small blisters where bits of glowing metal had landed on it. Someone must’ve been welding as they held the plate in their hand, pretty much ruining the thing. Cole rolled over and slid the curved piece of plasteel into his hip pocket and looked for anything else useful. Satisfied with what he had, he turned around in the tight crawlspace, banging his helmet on some pipes as he wiggled back toward the shaft of light.

“One for each?” Riggs asked, looking at the dark plates of plasteel in Cole’s hand.

“Yup. And a third that’s in pretty bad shape. Here.”

They had to pop their helmets off to snap the plates to the insides of their visors. Every movement brought grunts of exertion as they tried to position themselves on mechanical systems that should’ve been above them, easy to access from the sliding mechanic’s cart.

Cole got his helmet back on and snapped the visor down. It made everything pitch-black, so he lifted it back up. He hadn’t done much welding, not since making it into flight school, but he could remember how you had to move the wand into place by feel, not able to see anything until the plasma arced out to whatever you were working on.

“I’m going first this time,” Riggs said. He had his helmet back in place, his visor open.

Cole nodded. He left his own visor cracked just enough to see where he was putting his hands and knees; the angle of the plasteel blocked off the blinding light from above.

Riggs worked both survival kits between the mechanic’s rails and up into the landing gear housing, a square column of hydraulic pistons, wires, and cables. He slowly wormed his way out of sight, his feet ascending up into the falling flakes of snow. Cole pushed behind and prepared to make the climb out as well.

“It’s cold as Pluto up here,” Riggs said, his voice muffled by his helmet. “I can’t see anything.”

Cole made his way up the struts of the extended landing gear, his head level with Riggs’s knees. He looked away and raised his visor a little more so he wouldn’t have to yell.

“Can’t see because it’s too bright?” Cole asked.

Riggs crouched down in the landing gear well, his boots perched on the retracting struts by Cole’s hands. He cracked his visor. “No, the plates work great, there’s just snow in every direction. The drifts look like they’re up to the ship’s belly on one side. A few more hours and we’ll be buried.”

Cole looked at the two survival kits lodged by the hydraulic reservoir. With heavy rationing, they contained enough food and supplies for a week at the very most. He thought about what they should salvage out of the ship. “Can we build a lean-to on the sheltered side of the hull?”

“I don’t know, man. The snow is coming in sideways, and there’s lots of it. Probably gonna cover the entire ship. Looks like you really screwed us big-time.”

Cole couldn’t look up to read Riggs’s face because of the light streaming down around him, but he could hear some of the raw malice returning to his old friend’s voice.

“I swear we jumped to open space,” was all he said in defense.

Riggs snorted. “Obviously.”

Cole grabbed the extended struts and swung himself around to the other side of the gear. He flipped his visor shut and climbed up the opposite side of the hydraulic pistons Riggs clung to.

“I’m gonna have a look,” he shouted.

“Be my guest.”

The smooth hydraulic arms were slick with oil and snow, causing Cole’s boots to slide around as he searched for a good perch. The welding plate made the world so dark he could barely see, even with the bright light beginning to filter in. Above, the sides of the landing gear well were lined with the open hatches that normally protected the skids when they were stowed. The flat plates of steel pointed up into the sky, creating two high walls Cole couldn’t get to the top of. He reached instead for the rear portion of the well, wrapping his gloves around the thick plating that formed the underbelly of the Firehawk’s fuselage. Hoisting himself into the bright light, Cole found the darkness replaced with a featureless landscape of snow and ice. The flakes in the air were huge, thick, and moving sideways. Moreso than the light wind seemed to warrant.

If fact, there didn’t seem to be much wind at all, not enough to explain snow moving horizontal to the ground. Suddenly, the incongruent mix of sight and sense induced vertigo, and Cole felt as though he were peering out through a window in a cliff face. He cracked his visor a little to see if perhaps the helmet was blocking out the wind.

Nothing.

He snapped the visor back in place, banishing the sliver of bright light that had attempted to work its way inside. Looking beyond the belly of the Firehawk, Cole noted the visibility would probably have been pretty good without all the driving snow—the visor seemed to filter the light perfectly.

Which means, Cole realized suddenly, the ambient air in this place is as bright as a cutting torch!

He checked out the side of the hull catching the drifting snow. Like Riggs had said, the level had already ramped up even with the massive bulk of the upturned ship. He lowered himself back down below the lip of the open hatch and cracked his visor; Riggs knelt across from him, clutching the other side of the landing struts.

“Give me one of the kits,” he told Riggs.

Riggs passed it up, and Cole worked the long strap over his helmet. He then pulled the utility knife out of his flightsuit and held it out to his former friend.

“What? I get to kill you know?” Through the crack in his visor, Cole could see a thin smile on Riggs’s lips.

“Maybe, but not directly. I want you to follow these wires from the landing gear down into the maintenance tunnel and cut them back as long as you can.”

“You gonna rappel down with them?”

“I want to see if the snow is packed enough to walk on. If not, we’re gonna be trapped here while we get buried alive.”

Riggs took the knife. “Joy,” he said. He worked his way down the well, tracing the wires and cutting them free of their zip-ties as he went.

A minute later, Cole pulled the free end of the wires up to him. He had a good seven meters of the stuff, more than enough to get to the edge of the snow.

He checked the other end of the wire to make sure it was secured to the hatch, and then began climbing out.

Riggs grabbed one of his boots before he could get very far. Cole looked down at the black visor peering up at him.

“Be careful,” he heard Riggs yell through his helmet, his voice muffled and distant. “Don’t die before I can kill you.” He shook the utility knife at him for effect.

Cole smiled behind his visor and pulled himself out, crawling all the way up on top of the metal belly of the Firehawk.

The surface had already iced up, making Cole’s boots slip as he tried to rise to his feet. Coupled with the vertigo of the sideways flurry, the slickness made him feel unstable and a tad nauseous. His brain wanted to lean into the snow, but there was no wind to hold him. His stomach flipped; he sank back to his hands and knees and decided to stay there, the survival pack dangling off one side of his back.

Cole kept one end of the wire wound tight around his glove and played the rest out behind him. It was a half-dozen meters to the edge of the white, fluffy snowbank that led up to the ship’s belly. The thick flurries in the air made everything fuzzy, but it seemed as if the bank was visibly growing and creeping forward, the large flakes piling up fast.

Riggs was right: they didn’t have very much time. If they didn’t figure out something quick, they were going to freeze to death in a large Navy-built coffin.

Cole crawled toward the snowbank, reaching it just as the mostly flat belly of the ship started curving down to the side. He pressed one gloved hand into the whiteness and felt the solidity of wet pack, not the dry stuff he feared he’d find. He crawled into it another meter until his knees crunched in the stuff, and then his boots. He worried about the dizziness, his head still reeling from vertigo, but at least the snow gave him more traction than the ice. Enough to think about standing up.

Before he could, he saw something strange in the snow. One of his gloves was inside a boot print. Cole lifted his hand and looked down at the impression, feeling even more turned around. He looked over his shoulder, back at the bare metal of the Firehawk’s belly, and saw his tracks through the snow—the parallel furrows created by his knees as straight as the wire trailing through them.

How did I make that impression? Cole thought.

When he looked forward again, the mystery resolved itself: out of a thick flurry of snow, he saw a boot a few meters away. Looking up, he saw there was a furry leg inside that boot—and a twin next to it. Together, they supported a humanoid wrapped in scraps of fur to the top of its head. Black goggles poked out of the mottled strips; the figure seemed to be staring down at him.

Cole reached one arm to the man. “Mortimor?” he shouted inside his helmet. He couldn’t believe it. He felt giddy with the thought of not just finding living beings out there, but possibly the very person he thought he’d heard during the crash, the last person he thought he’d ever meet in person.

The figure nodded his head as if he’d heard Cole.

But the gesture must’ve been a signal to whoever had crept behind him, because that’s where the blow to his neck came from.

Cole collapsed, his helmet striking the metal hull through a few inches of snow. The impact popped his visor open, letting in the searing light and the biting cold. Cole squeezed his eyes shut and tried to bring his hands up to close his helmet, but someone knelt on his back, bending his arms high in a direction they didn’t normally go. Cole felt the emergency kit being ripped off him.

Whoever it was barked out orders to someone else. He spoke English, but with a strange accent: “Check for more crew. Grab everything you can, fusion fuel first.”

“Why we still raiding?” someone else yelled. “Ain’t we getting outta here soon?”

“And leave this lovely weather? Hell, no. Now get moving. You’ll be buried in an hour.”

Several pairs of boots stomped away; Cole could feel the vibrations coming up through the fuselage and into his helmet. He yelled out to warn Riggs, but the person on his back twisted his arm up until his shouts turned into gasps. As Cole fell silent, fighting to breathe past the pain, he heard more sounds: the crunch of snow as someone approached from the other direction, stomping up the drift. Cole tried to peer ahead, to see who it was, but his visor was open too wide to hazard even a glance.

“Take this one to the sled. I’ll help Saul.”

The person on Cole’s back released him. Before he could move to close his visor, a new set of powerful hands—more than one pair—seized his arms. Cole was dragged forward; he dug his toes into the snow in protest. He tried to snap his visor shut by whipping his neck, but it had already frozen in place.

The men on either side had no problem handling his weight as they crunched down the bank of snow. They marched for what seemed a hundred meters or so. Cole heard more voices ahead; he kept his head down and his eyes tight, conserving his energy.

When they stopped walking, one of his escorts let go of his left arm. Cole didn’t hesitate; he spun in that direction, back around the guy holding his right arm and lashed out with one knee. It connected with something soft, causing his other arm to come free. He reached up and slammed his visor shut so he could see what he was fighting.

The blow to his stomach came just as he was blinking the world into focus. He doubled over. Something slammed into his right knee, buckling him. Cole fell to the snow as several people crashed down on his back, beating him unconscious.

5

Anlyn screamed. She ran out of the command center and down the hallway, the glass tube providing an anguishing and perfect view of the fiery destruction beyond.

The corridor beneath her feet trembled as Edison raced to her side, reaching for her as she collapsed to her knees.

“Nooo,” she whimpered. She covered her face with her hands so she wouldn’t have to see, but the flashing lights and warning alarms from the command room echoed off the glass around her, sliding through the cracks in her fingers and hammering home the reality of the loss—of the so many lives destroyed.

“It came from the Rift,” someone in the command center yelled.

Anlyn could hear Bishar screaming orders, demanding updates, and scrambling a regiment. She felt like the great paradox of burning ice—the frozen heart of the depressed wrapped in a flame of vengeance.

That didn’t come from the rift, she told herself. She knew. Bodi, her ex-fiancée, was responsible. It was an act of sabotage, designed to spare only her. It stunk of him. Immediate. Remorseless. Savage. The cowardice of asking lackeys to sacrifice their lives.

Anlyn looked at her palms. Below—past the grav panels and through the transparent visisteel—she could see ships darting out from their stations. She watched them as they roared toward the expanding cloud of debris.

Edison wrapped his arms around her as she fought valiantly to not break down. She felt like a Wadi canyon with its base eroded by the wind. Her shoulders shivered as if they threatened to topple off her body. Outside, all her hopes were scattering in a billion pieces. So many noble, valiant believers had been reduced to dust. Thinking of them—of the many faces, smiling and bowing in the corridors—it made the ridiculousness of her mission hit home. It made her feel lonely and young. A little princess, spoiled and spouting prophecy, journeying to the Great Rift because of some old words handed down through time.

The shame she felt—the guilt—they shattered floodgates already weakened by despondency. Anlyn sobbed into Edison’s fur. She heard his lance drop, felt him scoop her up into his lap.

Over his arm and through the tears, she watched a pointless fleet of emergency response ships circle the new nebula, looking for clues. The only good they did was to whip what remained into whorls and eddies of nothingness.

“We caught something on vid,” Bishar said softly.

Anlyn tore her eyes away from the debris field. She had no idea how long she’d been staring, transfixed, into the blossoming cloud. She wiped her face and looked up at Bishar, then pushed herself from Edison’s lap. She took a few steps away from them both, trying to look less like the child she suddenly felt.

“It looks like a solid beam of light,” Bishar said. “It’s only there for a single frame, right before the explosion. We’ve never seen anything like it from the Rift. It’s—there’s nothing we could’ve—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Anlyn told her cousin. “And it wasn’t the Rift’s. I know who did this, and I know why.”

“Cousin, I know you’re upset. We all are. Several among your volunteers had family here at the Keep. There will be a great cooling for all—”

Anlyn turned to face Bishar, her face as stern and serious as she could muster. “There will be a great burning, Bishar Nooo, that’s what there’ll be. And I do not doubt the Rift’s involvement out of some superstitious fancy—I know the work of my former suitor. Check your vid again, and tell me which direction that beam of light was going.”

“But Cousin, I already told you it was on a single frame. How do you suppose we determine the direction if we can’t see it moving?”

“I don’t expect we will. You have your bias and I have mine. They just point in opposite directions.”

Bishar rose to his feet and looked through the visisteel. “If what you say is correct, I’ll file the charges myself. There’ll be an investigation. The Circle will look into this—I’ll demand it.”

“The Circle is aflame,” Anlyn said, “and Bodi’s the torch. My mission here was our only chance at snuffing it.” She looked down the passage-way toward the control center. “I’ll not be surprised if the flash of light you saw was a message to the Bern, or that the reduced break attempts are no coincidence ahead of my coming—”

“Preposterous! I’ll hear your theories of jilted lovers and such barbarisms as this,” Bishar waved a hand at the scene beyond the glass, “but not of treason against the Empire. Not from the Circle, nor from any Drenard for that matter.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” she muttered.

Edison picked up his lance from the floor and rose, taking his place by Anlyn’s side.

“I detest supposition,” he said, looking out at the ships encircling the cloud. “All theories are testable, or they are not truly theories.”

“I don’t follow,” Bishar said. “Is he speaking English?”

Anlyn turned to Edison. “I think he’s saying we should go and see for ourselves. Is that right?”

Edison nodded.

Anlyn rested her head against his side and reveled in his warmth. She looked out at the swirling loss, at the stars of her galaxy beyond. Reflected in the glass, she could see the confusion on Bishar’s face.

“He means,” she told her cousin, “we need to enter the rift to know.”

Bishar gaped at Anlyn. “I hated the idea of you hanging out here with a full complement of peacekeepers while you waited on some insane prophecy to come true. What makes you think I’ll go along with this plan?”

Anlyn looked over at him; she noted the way his hands clenched the sash across his tunics.

“Because,” she said, “I asked the former as is my right and duty as a member of the Circle, a right you were prepared to deny. I ask you now as my cousin—”

“A cousin I hardly know!” Bishar shook his head. “I’m sorry, but what you need now is some rest while my men investigate. You can burn away your woe in peace and think with a cooler head come morrow.”

“Come morrow, I will be on the other side of that rift or I’ll be dead by your hands,” Anlyn said. “For that’s what you’ll have to do to stop me.”

Bishar laughed, but eyed Edison warily. “Nonsense, Cousin. To stop you, I’ll just have to stop you. Come, my men are on the alert, and my best experts will go over the evidence. We’ll travel to Keep Central and get you more cloaks and a warm meal. While you rest, I’ll prepare my report for the Circle and request transport for your safe return to Drenard. It does no respect to the dead for you to add to their number.”

Anlyn reached over and took hold of Edison’s lance; he relinquished it willingly. Bishar made a sudden move forward, but Anlyn backed away, and Edison shoved her cousin so hard he nearly fell.

“Not a move!” she told him as he staggered backward.

In the command center, several heads watched the scene intently, hands reaching for warning devices—and worse.

“In case legend of this lance has not yet arrived to this corner of the galaxy,” Anlyn yelled beyond Bishar, “I will tell you that what you saw beyond this glass is easily reproducible right here! I’ll take an entire corner of the Keep with me, by the twins of Hori.”

“Anlyn.” Bishar held out his hands, pleading. “I understand your rage, but you must cool yourself.”

“I am cool, Cousin. Cool as ice. And I take it from the quiver in your voice that you know of this lance.”

It was a bluff, the lance a mere pyrotechnic toy, but in Anlyn’s experience, rumors rarely dwindled in their retelling.

“I’ve heard stories,” he said, a false smile creeping across his face.

“You’ve heard whispers from shadows carried on a Drenard wind compared to what this device is capable of. What I am capable of. Here’s what you’ll do. Before you write your security report, you’ll craft a letter to every family from that ship expressing my—expressing our deepest grief. Then you’ll swear by Hori it was sabotage and open an investigation. But first, call your best pilot and have him bring the swiftest Bern ship you have in impound and lock it to the end of this corridor. Make sure there’s plenty of fuel and supplies. One pilot. He’ll be free to go.”

“And what will you do with this ship?” Bishar asked. He kept an eye on Edison, who had backed to Anlyn’s side. “Do you think I’ll unblock the rift for you?”

“Yes, I think you will. Feel free to tell the Circle we were on my ship when it blew, if such will protect your job. And if you think your soul is better served by blasting us out of the cosmos and living with your family’s blood on your hands—that is your decision to make. The other option is to allow us to depart and face our deaths in our own manner. Choose this, and no harm will come to your people.”

Bishar continued to show Anlyn his palms. He glanced at the lance.

“Very well,” he said. “My men will escort you to your end. We had an interior barrier patch upcoming, anyway. I’ll move it up the schedule. I’ll even use the attack on your ship as an excuse for having done so. But know this: any sign of a breach, and your ship will not prevent us from firing. Also, I will not chance discriminating between Bern craft if things get ugly.”

Bishar looked at her sternly. “One more thing,” he said. “Your mission will not pass back through here, no matter what happens. You’ll not be allowed through. Ever. Understand that I am doing this not for you, but to get you out of my tunics so I may perform my duties. You leave this galaxy never to return, because even if you did, you would not find your Empire welcoming you home as they did the last time. I’ll make sure of that, Cousin.”

6

The starship Parsona roared a dozen meters above the prairies of Lok, low enough to scatter wild game and part the tall grasses. It was nearly dawn, and the stars over the eastern horizon had disappeared as the black gradually melted into blue. With her lights off and altitude low—clinging to the cover of a slipping night—the old ship flew with a mind of not being seen. More importantly, she flew herself for just the second time.

“Feel any better?” Molly asked. She looked up from her reader to the instruments arrayed across the dash.

“It’s not quite as sluggish as before,” Parsona said through the radio speakers. “Firing the thrusters myself feels better than updating waypoints and letting the autopilot do the rest. Of course, I wouldn’t trust me in a dogfight or in a tight canyon.”

Molly laughed. “Neither would I. You know, we have a few relays left—I’m pretty sure I could interface you with the hyperdrive. It’s the same basic hook-up we did with the laser cannons, and the nav computer has a ton of electrical triggers left—”

“I’m not sure about that,” Parsona said.

“Why? It’s no different than firing the lasers or operating the thruster solenoids.”

“I know,” Parsona said. “It’s not that. It’s just that—I’m not sure I want to be in control of the hyperdrive. I don’t know that I’d trust myself.”

Molly nodded. “Okay. I understand.”

And she did. Ever since she found out her father and boyfriend were probably stuck in hyperspace, the temptation to just jump to the center of Lok had become unbearable. She felt a shiver of panic every time she considered it, followed by a pang of cowardice each time she did nothing.

“Another contact on SADAR,” her mom said, interrupting her thoughts.

“I see it,” Molly said. “Looks like one of the big models.” She watched the blip intently, having become something of an expert on recognizing the signatures of the Bern ships. The flashing indicator moved away from the rift situated over her home village and slowly worked its way toward a low-altitude orbit. Leaning forward, Molly peered up through the carboglass at the glimmer of orbiting hulls overhead. The fleet moved smoothly, like an animated constellation against the backdrop of fading stars. One of the vessels, a potato-shaped monster the size of a decent moonlet, was usually visible even during the daytime. All the ships did was shuffle around in various formations, almost as if drilling for upcoming maneuvers.

“What are they waiting on?” she asked her mom. “Why don’t they attack us or just move on to someplace else?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re just being methodical. Or perhaps they’re waiting on something. I know as little of the Bern as you do.”

Molly looked down at her lap; her Wadi was stretched out along her thigh, its gleaming scales catching the first rays of dawn. She stroked the animal’s back, right between the two nubs rising from its shoulder blades, and fretted over her mounting concerns.

“Between the Bern up there and news of the Drenard invasion, even if we do get to hyperspace, will there be any reason to come back? I mean, will there be anything left to come back to?”

“We need to plan as if there will be,” her mother said.

“And you’re sure this Cat person can help?”

“She knows the people who can. She’ll remember me.”

“You, the ship? Or the old you?”

Molly still had a difficult time separating the experiences of her mothers—the personality copied to the ship’s computer and the husk of a woman she’d met, virtually, on Dakura. Somehow, the former had become more real to her than the latter. And that was true even before she found out Walter and Cole had pulled the plug on her mom’s physical body.

“She knows of the old me, not as I am now.”

“And she was part of the group you and dad were sent to investigate? The source of the illegal fusion fuel?”

“She did some work for them, yes. It took your father and myself a long time and a spot of luck to get an introduction. Unless we go through her, it’ll take just as long if not longer to make contact again. Especially with everything else that’s going on.”

“You mean the Bern?”

“Partly. More the elections, though. Callites are tolerated seven out of eight years. Ignored, really. But come polling time, their numbers—the amount of votes they can wrangle together—it creates tension. Contacting and dealing with the Underground would be easier any other time.”

Molly sighed and looked back to her lap. Her new reader rested on her other thigh, opposite the Wadi. The creature pawed at the device playfully, almost as if it knew Molly was about to redirect her attention away from scratching its back and return to the letter she was writing Cole. She patted the animal’s head and looked over the first line of the note, wondering why she was bothering with writing it. It wasn’t like she could send it to him, or even be sure he was still alive. Her thoughts drifted to her father—and the same nagging doubts arose for him as well.

As her chest grew heavy, the Wadi gave up its jealous jousting and crawled from her thigh to her shoulder; it wrapped its tail around Molly’s neck and flicked its tongue against her cheek. It did stuff like that, and always in response to the same few moods, almost as if it could sense how she felt. Molly was cautious, however, about reading too much into its idiosyncrasies. She tilted her head to nuzzle the animal and wished, not for the first time, they could somehow communicate with each other, mostly to find out what was wrong with the alien creature. No matter how much she fed it, or how much water it drank, the poor thing kept getting smaller and smaller.

It had taken a few days to be sure, but by now there wasn’t any doubt. Except for some plumpness around its belly, the colorful lizard had gone from iguana-sized to something half that, like a big gecko. The troubling part was not being able to ask anyone about the species or research it any way. There was little enough out there on the Drenard planet and even less on its fauna. All Molly knew was that the strange animal had taken to eating and drinking more than a Glemot—but despite all that intake, it continued to waste away…

Walter’s door slid open, recessing into the jamb with a quiet hiss. The young Palan exited his room and peeked across the cargo bay. Up in the cockpit, he could see one of Molly’s elbows sticking out over the flight controls. The ship was dark and silent, the barest glow of dawn lighting up the sky beyond the canopy. Walter tip-toed across the hallway and unlocked Molly’s cabin door with her Captain’s codes. He kept an eye forward as he waited for her room to slide open.

Slipping inside, Walter forced down the panicked feeling that gets Junior Pirates in trouble—the “heist shakes” that’ll get someone busted faster than the floods. You have to think clearly, he always reminded himself. Stay focused on the loot. Remember what you’re after.

It helped that he’d done this several times in the past weeks.

He went to her dresser, dropped down to one knee, and opened the narrow drawer at the bottom. Two stacks of clothes: the white tanks she wears under her flightsuit on one side and the plain cotton underwear on the other.

Walter reached under the latter, feeling for his treasure. His.

He wrapped his fingers around the small piece of fabric and pulled it out. Rubbing it with one thumb, he realized how unnecessary this charade was. She should just give it to him. Willingly.

Bending close to the carpet, he looked for the single hair he knew would be there and found it. He slid the drawer closed, holding the hair in place until it caught in the dresser. Walter shook his head at the ancient trick, resolving to love her even though she did stupid stuff like this.

He keyed open her door and bent down low, his palms on the ship’s decking. Slowly, he peeked around the corner of the doorway, keeping his head in a spot people rarely looked. Molly’s elbow was still visible sticking out over the controls. Walter pushed up from the deck and darted across the hall, back to his own room. As he ran, he clutched his new favorite thing to his chest, eager to get alone with it.

He left the lights out in his room and went straight to the bed, jumping under the covers. Feeling with his fingers, he found the seam in the piece of cloth and made sure it was in the back. With a shiver of anticipation, he lowered the red band down over his forehead.

“Hello?” he thought.

Silence. He waited, growing impatient. Several minutes seemed to go by, but it could’ve been a fraction of that—

“Ah! Walter, it’ss been a while.”

“Yeah,” he thought, “I haven’t had the time. Been bussy.” It was a lie. Truth was, Molly hadn’t been off the ship long enough to do any proper snooping in almost three days.

“Well, I can’t wait to hear about what you’ve been up to.”

“Ssure, but not now. I, uh, can’t talk long thiss time.”

“I undersstand. Hey, I meant to assk you about ssomething lasst time, but you had to run before I could bring it up. You know thosse two armss you have? The oness in the bottom of the tool chesst?”

Walter cringed at the incessant hissing from the stranger’s choice of words, the red band relaying everything in his own voice.

“Arms?” he thought aloud. “I—how did you know about thosse?”

“You were thinking about them the firsst time we sspoke. Don’t you remember? I heard it quite clearly.”

“Oh.” Walter forgot it worked that way. But why would he have been thinking about those stupid things?

“Ssurely you know the armss I’m talking about. Unlesss you jusst have armss sstrewn all over the sship—”

“What? No. No. They’re the only oness. But I wanted to talk about—”

“Right, right. The gold. Well here’ss the deal, Walter, I really would love to help you claim it, but firsst I’m going to need a favor from you.”

“Okay, but it better not get me in trouble.”

“Of coursse, of coursse. All I need you to do iss get me thosse armss. Do you think you could do that?”

“What? Why?”

“Doess it matter? I could jusst asss eassily assk you what you want with thoussandss of barrelss of gold.”

“I don’t know.” Walter rubbed his head, thinking. His coppery hair felt soft under his hand; it was getting too long and needed another pass with the shaver. He tried to picture himself with it grown out and what Molly would think about it. “How do I get them to you?” he asked. “Where are you?”

“I’m on my way to a little planet called Lok. Do you know it?”

Walter nodded. “Yeah.”

“Exscellent. Wait, you’re not there now, are you?”

“Am I thinking that?” Walter asked.

“Why don’t you tell me where you are?” the voice asked. “I’ll come right to you. Quick as I can.”

Walter shook his head. He knew how these transactions went down. It was always best to get information, never a good idea to give it.

“I’ll bring them to you,” Walter thought. “Jusst pick a sspot.”

“And you can deliver them? You have a sship?”

“Yess,” Walter hissed.

It was another lie, but he kept those thoughts deep. Palan deep. The truth was: it didn’t matter that he had no ship of his own, nor did it matter he couldn’t even fly one. What he could do was reprogram hyperdrives to go wherever he wanted, just like how he’d sent Cole into a star and what he’d done back on Palan. With that kind of talent, every ship was practically his, and he may as well be the one flying them.

Molly checked the instruments on the dash one more time, making sure her mom was on course and holding steady, before she leaned over her reader. Typing on the thing was quite painful with the current state of her fingers, all of which were scabbed and blistered with dozens of votes. And yet, the writing was psychologically soothing, somehow, even though she couldn’t properly phrase an ounce of what she was feeling. It didn’t seem to matter; just attempting to do so—to reach out to Cole in some tangible way—eased the pressing weight off her chest, allowing her to breathe a little.

She stared at the first two sentences of the journal tab while the Wadi crawled down her flightsuit and stretched back out along her thigh.

Horrid. She deleted the entry. Then she wrote the exact same thing. She deleted it once more. She repeated the same stilted, juvenile wording over and over. Molly finally shook her head and decided to start from scratch, forgetting the need to make it perfect. She would simply write her thoughts as they came to her, unscripted and unedited.

She looked over the entry and felt like a fool, every sentence clumsier than the one before. Holding down the function key with one finger—the pressure causing her pulse to throb up into her wrist—she hovered another finger over the “del all” button.

She stopped and wiped at her eyes. She powered the thing off, instead.

“Whatcha doing?” Walter asked.

Molly jumped, and the Wadi shot up to her shoulder, wrapping its tail around her neck and licking the air.

“Good gracious, Walter, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“That wass my loud walk,” Walter said. “What’re you working on?”

“Oh, just writing some notes to myself.”

“Like a diary?” Walter peered over at her reader.

“No. And don’t you think of hacking into it. You’ve got enough gadgets to play with that you can leave mine alone.”

Molly knew it was pointless as soon as she said it. Keeping the little pirate out of anything electrical was like tugging against the pull of a black hole. He was gonna get in, and she probably just made it more tempting to tell him not to.

“How far are we from the next csity?” Walter asked. He crawled over the flight console and into the navigator’s seat. Cole’s seat.

“Not far. Another half-hour. See where it says ETA on the nav computer?”

Walter leaned forward and glanced at the dash. He nodded, and Molly told herself he probably didn’t need the lesson. The kid had recently done stuff with the ship’s missile systems that she didn’t think possible. He was worthless with a physical tool but a wiz with the digital sort. Then again, that may have just been due to laziness—

“There it iss!” he hissed, practically standing up in the nav seat.

Molly peered through the carboglass and saw it as well. Beyond the prairies and past a long stretch of dry dirt lay Bekkie. The town was nothing more than a wide and growing sprawl of hastily-built wooden structures, yet it was as cosmopolitan a city as Lok could boast. Which wasn’t saying much.

“Careful where you put your hands,” Molly told Walter, urging him back in his seat.

“It’ss ugly,” he groaned. “Jusst like all the lasst placses.”

His disapproval was quite a blow to Molly’s birth planet, seeing that his home planet of Palan was the sort of place you wouldn’t strand an enemy.

“It’s just different, that’s all,” said Molly, not able to summon up anything more positive. “Hopefully this’ll be our last stop.”

“The friend I sspoke to on the radio iss here?”

“Yeah,” Molly lied. The truth was: Walter had spoken with her mother, but Molly had kept her presence in the nav computer a secret for so long, revealing her now would be hard to explain—and harder the longer the ruse lasted. She felt like a kid probably does who keeps something from their parents until they can’t figure out why they started lying in the first place. And then they find themselves trapped into lying even more.

“What’ss her name again?”

“Are you kidding me? We’ve been looking for her for two weeks and you still can’t remember her name? It’s Catherine. With a cee.”

“That’ss right. A hard csee.” Walter turned and smiled at Molly. “I like that name.”

“Yeah, well try and remember it. This is already taking longer than I’d hoped. Now, the mechanic I met in the hardware store said we’ll probably find her in one of the pubs, so I want us to stick together, okay? The election stuff will probably be worse here than it was in the smaller towns, so we really need to be careful.”

“Okay.”

“Another thing: No looting.”

“Fine.”

“I really mean it, Walter.”

“I ssaid fine!”

Molly narrowed her eyes at him to hammer it home, then leaned forward to disengage the autopilot relays, taking over from her mom. She pulled back on the flightstick to gain a bit of altitude. There was enough traffic in the air around town to feel safe from the fleet above, almost like a solitary bird feeling emboldened by joining a large flock.

With a better view of the layout of town, she started picking out which of the many stables to land in. There were several to choose from on the near side of town, all of them a few kilometers from the city center to minimize thruster noise. Most looked extremely busy, whether due to the Bern fleet or the upcoming election, she couldn’t know. She picked one in the middle of style, with not too many fancy ships, but no derelicts propped up on wooden stilts, either. Something she could afford, but where Parsona wouldn’t get robbed.

“There’ss a better one over there,” Walter said as she peeled away for the stable she’d chosen. He pointed to one closer to town where fancy hulls gleamed in the growing light of dawn.

“A little out of our league, pal.”

Molly thumbed the landing gear down and grabbed the radio. The town ahead stirred with plenty of activity despite the early hour. Headlights moved through the city streets, each pair kicking up a plume of dust that streaked off and thinned in the breeze.

Molly squeezed the mic. “GN-290 Parsona to…” she read the stable’s info from the nav screen, “… Pete’s Hideaway. Come in.”

She pulled into a hover and waited for a reply.

“Pete’s Hideaway, here. Come back.”

“Yeah, this is the Gordon Class ship hovering east of you. The two-ninety. We’re looking for a place to stay, over.”

“Roger and welcome, you picked the right place. Anywhere you like. Those small huts with lotsa room around them are the heads. Over.”

Molly laughed. “Thanks for the heads-up. Parsona out.”

She hung up the mic and brought the ship down between two other craft a little nicer than her own. The thrusters sent up a puff of dust, blocking out the view through the windshield. Molly moved the Wadi to the back of her seat and crawled over the control console to go check in at the stable office. As she crossed the cargo bay, she felt a sudden surge of giddiness, a rare crack in her two weeks of loneliness and dour moods. She could feel it as she lowered the cargo ramp into the cloud of swirling dust outside: today was going to be her lucky day.

“How many nights you need her stabled?” the man behind the counter asked. A patch on his coveralls said “Pete,” but it looked like a logo rather than a nametag. Molly pegged his age at sixty, but knowing Lok, it was probably a rough forty. They had skipped introductions, so she decided to think of him as Possibly Pete until she discovered otherwise.

“I’m not sure how long we’ll be here, to be honest.” Molly eyed the voting machine on his counter, the ‘L’ nearly worn off. “Should I pay as I go?”

“Yup, that’ll work. Just need you to fill out them papers. She need water?” Probably Pete bent down over the counter and squinted through a grime-streaked window in the general direction of Parsona. Like the pane of glass, Pete had a sheen of grease on him, almost like it oozed straight from his pores. Even his long hair, which fell out of a backward cap in stringy clumps, seemed coated in something foul.

“She need water?” he asked again, giving Molly a curious glance.

“Uh, no, but thanks. We filled up in Cramerton.”

“Cramerton? They got water out there?” Potentially Pete slapped the counter. “Don’t that beat all!”

Molly laughed politely, but wasn’t sure it was a joke. On her mental to-do list, she added dropping another iodine tablet into the freshwater tank, just in case Possibly Pete’s sense of humor wasn’t intentionally dry.

“There you go,” she said, handing back a form with mostly made-up information. She had checked the “Liberty” box under political affiliation to match his voting machine.

Probably Pete narrowed his eyes at the form, his hands coating the fresh paper with his oily perspiration. “Fyde,” he said. “Wait a second—” He pulled off his cap and ran a tarry hand through his hair, the black on him so dark it verged on purple. “I know your ship. My Uncle Pete did some work on her once. What was your father’s name?”

“Is,” Molly corrected him. “His name is Mortimor—”

“Mortimor!” Poseur Pete slapped the counter, leaving another hand-print. “That’s right! How’s your old man doing?”

Molly shivered, a sudden wash of paranoia tickling her scalp. Two weeks of traipsing across her childhood home had teased her with a weak sense of nostalgia, but she never considered the chances of bumping into someone who might know her. She had been six when she left and could barely remember anything from her childhood.

“My dad? He’s, uh… fine, I guess. We don’t talk much anymore. He, um…”

“He split on you, did he?” Pretend Pete pulled off his hat and slapped the counter with it, smearing the grease there. Molly was beginning to pick up on his unique brand of non-verbal communication. It made her feel sorry for the counter.

“Don’t that beat all?” he said, tugging his hat back on. “Never thunk him to be a runner.”

“Yeah…” Molly didn’t know what to say, figuring it didn’t do any good to replace a misconception with a lie. “Do I pay now, or at the end of the day?” She clenched her fists, waiting for the reply.

“Each night up front, usually.” He turned his cap the correct way and pressed the bill up with a single, blackened finger. “But we’ll settle up when you get ready to go, how’s that?”

“Thank you so much,” Molly said, sighing. She smiled at him and relaxed her fist. Pretend Pete pulled out a slip of paper and shoved it across the counter, leaving a trail of purplish slime behind.

“The codes for the heads are on the back. TP’s for sale in the ship store. If you need power for any reason, we have one thousand and two thousand amp hook-ups. No partyin’ after three, and welcome to Pete’s.” He smiled at Molly. “I’m Pete, by the way. Pete the fourth. And that’s my boy in the picture.” He pointed a filthy digit at a curling print of film taped to the register. “That’s the newest Pete. Pete the fifth.”

He beamed with pride. Molly wasn’t sure if it was for siring another Pete or being able to count that high—or maybe both.

“Nice to meet you,” Molly said. “And good looking kid.”

He rubbed one hand on his coveralls, the direction of the grease transfer questionable, and held it out to Molly. “Nice to meet you too, Molly Fyde.”

She moved her hand into his nasty clutches as gently as possible. Penultimate Pete shook it, his grip firm and slick. She could feel her hand sliding around inside his palm and half expected it to pop out like a freshly caught fish.

Pete’s lips pulled back in a smile so wide she could see his gums. A bright trace of purple gunk ran along the edges of his teeth.

“Molly Fyde,” he said again, pumping her trapped hand.

“Walter?” Molly poked her head into his room and then looked back through the cargo bay toward the cockpit.

“He left almost as soon as you did,” her mother said through the intercom. “I almost said something—”

Molly glanced at the camera in the corner of the bay; it had begun to feel as natural as looking someone in the eye. “No, that’s okay. I’m glad you didn’t.” Molly went to the sink and started washing her hands. “I guess this is what being a parent is like, right?” She shook her hands over the basin and reached for a towel.

“I wouldn’t know,” her mother said.

“Yeah… sorry, I wasn’t trying to—”

“No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking out loud. And I want to remind you to be careful looking for Cat today. If she’s still politically active, there’s no telling what she’s getting herself into.”

“I’ll be fine.” Molly folded the towel, left it on the counter, and walked toward the cockpit. “I’m probably better off hunting her down without Walter, anyway. Oh, by the way, the guy who runs the stables knew Dad. Pete the fourth.”

“Hmmm. Never heard of him. Must’ve been during the years I was out of action—after my body went to Dakura but before your father smuggled a copy of me off.”

“Do you think I could ask him about the fusion fuel? He seems shady enough. Like, literally.”

“Maybe. Could be dangerous. If Cat doesn’t turn up, we’ll give it a shot. Check in with me if you don’t find anything.”

“Okay. Is there anything else you want to tell me about her—?”

“Head’s up,” her mother said tersely. The speaker popped, the intercom falling silent as Parsona killed the connection.

Molly heard footsteps on the boarding ramp and turned to lecture Walter on what “stay put” means.

But it couldn’t have been Walter stomping up the ramp.

He doesn’t have six legs.

7

Cole came to and made the mistake of opening his eyes. A stinging whiteness—more of that harsh light—invaded his retina like an infection just waiting for an open wound. Between the blows to the back of his helmet and the lance of photons, it felt as if his skull had been split wide open. He kept his eyes squeezed tight and tried to concentrate on his surroundings with his other senses.

Whatever he lay on seemed to be swaying with a gentle motion. He could hear a group of men talking and laughing in the distance. Over that, he heard the sound of runners plowing through snow, coupled with the rhythmic crunch of heavy weight on wet pack.

The temptation to crack an eye and look around was fierce. Even stronger, though, was his desire to avoid pain, which he knew would come with any more of the light. He tried to move his arms, but he could feel that they were tied in front of him. His elbows were also seized to his body and his wrists had been bound tight. They’d left him on his side, on a metal deck of some sort, and taken away his helmet and gloves.

Cole wiggled his elbows back as far as they would go and brought his hands up. Something kept them from coming all the way: a line that tugged between his hands and his feet. He bent over, curling into a ball, and was able to reach his mouth with his fingers, but couldn’t get his wrists high enough to probe the knot with his teeth. He relaxed his body, giving up. They’d tied him up good. Almost as if they’d had plenty of practice.

Cole patted his chest and felt the mound in one pocket created by his red band. The knife was gone. If he remembered correctly, Riggs had it last. Thinking of his old friend—and not knowing what they’d done with him—very nearly caused him to open his eyes and look around. Cole cursed to himself. He curled his cold fingers around each other to warm them, and then he felt something hard across his chest.

The other welding plate.

The voices were coming from somewhere ahead of him, so Cole went into a tight fetal position and slipped the plate out of his pocket. Holding it by the edge, vertically, he brought his hand up to his chin and adjusted the plate until the other side pressed tight against one eye socket. His head was still woozy from the crash and the blows to his back, so he concentrated hard on which eye he was about to open before cracking it.

Light reflected around the edge of the plate, creating a halo of the brightest white that rimmed Cole’s vision, but he could still squint and see. To either side of him stood bundles of gear—sacks and crates—all tied to a metal deck with line made out of some natural-looking fiber. Beyond, he could see half a dozen figures, all covered in fur. They looked like wild game teetering on hind legs, smoke trailing out of their mouths as they yelled and laughed. A few of the men worked handles on a tall mast in the center of the deck, but the thing had no sail. It was just a flat, vertical bar with slits running up and down the length of it. The men kept working on something at its base. They would look up the pole, glance ahead, and then repeat the procedure.

Cole shut his eye to rest his retina from the halo of leaking light; he wiggled back against a pile of goods. One entire side of his body was almost completely numb from the cold metal, but he didn’t want to attract attention by sitting up. He worked the edge of the plate tight to his face again and cracked his eye to look for Riggs.

There was no sign of him, but he couldn’t see the entire deck. He craned his neck as much as possible, but the uncomfortable position and the constraints of his bound hands didn’t give him much of a vista. One thing he did notice was the absence of snow on the deck. Looking past the fur-clad men, he could see it was still driving sideways in heavy sheets, but none of it was in the air around the little craft. He couldn’t quite make out the bow of the ship, but something up ahead must’ve been splitting the flurries, sending the flakes to either side.

He raised his head to investigate, and one of the furry figures tapped another and pointed in his direction.

Cole froze. The alerted figure marched back in his direction, descending the few steps from the platform around the mast. At the base of the steps, the man stopped by a wooden barrel crisscrossed with ropes and pulled something from the lid—a mug of some sort. Stooping down in front of the barrel, he came up with a trail of steam rising from the mug, which wafted back in Cole’s direction.

The smell got to him before the man did: chocolate with a hint of rum. Or more like rum with a hint of chocolate. Cole felt paralyzed with indecision, wondering whether it was better to hide the plate and await his fate in darkness, or stay alert and have it stolen from him. Before he could decide, the figure was before him, crouching down close.

“I’ll have that,” the man said, snapping the plate out of Cole’s hand.

Cole squeezed his eyes shut and held them tight. The man’s accent was a bit different from the others, but there was still a hint of something foreign in it, or perhaps something archaic.

“Who are you guys?” Cole asked, his own voice shaky from the cold and fear.

The response was a loud sip from the mug, then the figure smacking his lips. Cole heard him put the mug down, followed by the sound of fluid being swished inside a vessel, like someone shaking a thermos back and forth.

“Who are we? We’re the same as you lads,” the man replied. “We’re the tainted.”

Before Cole could ask what that meant, he felt a wet rag laden with the smell of something chemical pressed to his face. He held his breath as long as he could, but he finally had to gasp for air.

As soon as he did—he was out again.

8

The Bern ship brought up from impound was far larger than Anlyn had expected. It was a warship, twice the size of the Ambassadorial craft she’d lost. She nearly balked and asked for another, wondering if she and Edison could operate such a craft for long periods of time.

The airlock hissed open, and a frazzled-looking pilot exited with his arms held high. Anlyn and Edison moved aside as the large Drenard squeezed past the duo to get to the control room. Bishar waved him through the door and thanked him, ushering him to the others who had stopped what they were doing to watch the bizarre confrontation.

“You aren’t thinking clearly,” Bishar said to Anlyn.

For a brief moment, she wondered if he was right. Perhaps setting off to aid Molly was just another way of running from home, from the looming war, from all her royal responsibilities. Maybe her real duty was back in Drenard’s Pinnacle, sitting around the Circle where she could fight with words.

She shook the doubts away and backed toward the door, keeping the lance between her and Bishar. “Check the ship,” she told Edison in English.

She stayed near the airlock, the weight of the lance and the bluff it represented already exhausting her. Edison disappeared inside.

“There’ll be no foul play,” Bishar assured her. “My actions will not be questioned when I write this up.”

“I’m not in the most trusting of moods, Cousin. I’ve half a mind to take you with us to make sure nothing happens. I hope you can appreciate my honor for not doing so.”

Bishar laughed nervously. “I do. More than you know. When you get to the rift, I’ll have a barrier tug remove a few canisters. We’ll replace some of the interior ones, but I won’t have them out for long. If you hesitate to go through, I’ll assume you came to your senses, and you can dock up back here. I’ll gladly forgive these transgressions and have you as a guest for dinner. We’ll prepare the finest Drenardian cuisine and eat in honor of the dead. Then we’ll see about working toward justice come morrow.”

“If you’re sincere, I appreciate the offer. You’ve been more than fair.”

After a few minutes, Edison stomped back through the airlock, his chest puffing as if after a great run. He spoke to Anlyn in English: “Vacated, by rough inspection. Single deck with a looped perimeter passageway. Adequate nourishment and spares, but absolute dearth of armaments.”

“You had the weapons systems removed?” Anlyn asked Bishar.

“Of course, but not just now. We do that for every ship we capture and impound.” He glanced back and forth between the two of them. “Are you really planning on waging war with those who rule the rest of the universe?”

“I’m hoping I don’t need to defend myself from friends and family before I get there,” Anlyn replied.

A sudden sadness washed over Bishar’s face, erasing the tension and anger. “I’m sorry we met like this,” he said.

“As am I.” Anlyn handed Edison his lance and bowed to her cousin, keeping her eyes on him all the while. He gave her a nod and a frown as she backed through the collar adapter and into the starship.

Edison followed. She left him behind to close the ship’s door and secure the hatch while she rushed off alone toward the bow. As her bare feet padded along the steel decking, she tried to prepare herself for what must come next. She was about attempt something she had promised herself she’d never do again. Something she’d hoped to avoid for the rest of her days:

Fly.

Anlyn had learned to pilot in the Royal Academy—just the rudimentary basics needed to qualify licensure and uphold ancient traditions for Drenardian royalty. She likened it to the Pheno people’s habit of teaching their important females to ride Theryls, even if there was no chance of them ever taking one into battle.

Her real mastery of the art of space warfare came at Darrin, during the tumultuous civil war between the two planets and her time spent as an arm-dealer’s slave afterward. She had spent more than a Hori cycle there chained to a cockpit, learning to kill and speak English while daily tortured by a vile human named Albert.

Since her flight into freedom just over a month ago, Anlyn had pledged to stay away from cockpits for the rest of time. She could imagine herself sinking back into a depression if she had to work in one—could see herself losing her sanity again. Now, she didn’t know she had a choice. She couldn’t ask Edison to take over for her while she cowered in a bunk; that was just a different sort of slavery, one self-imposed.

Anlyn jogged along the empty corridor, past a few crew quarters and a mess hall full of hastily stacked boxes. She went through a large cargo bay and then finally came upon the dreaded place. She paused at the imaginary boundary between passageway and cockpit, that invisible line in the decking rising like some Darrin forcefield. She stood there for a moment, listening to the pounding of her own pulse. When she heard Edison stomping through the cargo bay, his gait drowning out the sound of her heart, she knew she could no longer delay. Summoning her courage, she stepped inside and approached the forward seating.

Her skin crawled as she pushed through the invisible barrier, the sight of the empty chairs filling her with a sense of dread. They were human-sized, just like Lady Liberty’s, and nothing at all like the Drenard Ambassadorial ship. She rested a hand on the back of the nav chair and lifted one foot, using it to scratch her other ankle. It took her a moment to realize she was doing it. It took a moment longer to remember that the metal hoop of steel was no longer welded around her leg, the chain no longer coiled by her feet.

“Are you okay?” Edison asked. He spoke in Drenard, a sign he was communicating for feelings, rather than information.

“I’m fine,” Anlyn lied. “Just worried about where you’re going to sit.”

“The removal of the armrest mechanisms will be elementary. I’ll have the task performed prior to our intersection with the rift in spacetime.” He bounded aft to search for tools, his switch back to English telling.

Anlyn felt a stab of annoyance, but she had herself to blame for lying to him. She wasn’t worried about how poorly he’d fit in his seat, but how well she would in hers.

Walking around the outside of the pilot’s seat, she noticed the Bern arrangement conformed to human standards: leader on the left. All the controls seemed familiar in layout, though covered in the Bern alphabet. It was one of those languages she recognized, even if she couldn’t make out much of what it said. The stylistic swoops and curls were often printed in political cartoons back home; the Drenard translations below would say something funny or satirical about their sworn enemy.

Anlyn sat down and adjusted the harness straps. She figured out how to raise the seat while she waited on Edison to get back and translate; the pilot had left the thrusters running, but she couldn’t tell which control released the clamps.

When she heard Edison set down a toolbox behind her, she turned and asked him which switch decouples the ship from the airlock.

“That one,” he said, after scanning the dash a moment.

Anlyn thanked him, amazed at how quickly he’d picked up yet another language. His intellect occasionally threw up emotional barriers in their relationship, but it often opened other sorts of doors. Like getting him on the Circle as the Cultural Counselor, for example. And now it served them well as he had become, through unspeakable tragedy, their mission’s sole Bern translator.

Anlyn wrapped her pale blue hand around the control stick; she checked the needles on the gauges, making sure they were all between the black high and red low marks. She flipped the switch Edison had indicated and pushed away from the Keep.

Before she knew it—before her emotions could stage a revolt—she was flying again. Slow at first. Hesitant. But getting to the center of the Keep required a lot of twists and turns as she dodged around the trusses and steel beams built specifically to impede progress from Bern interlopers heading in the opposite direction.

As she weaved between the glass corridors, passing close to several, she could see her people lined up inside, blue hands spread out on the glass. Pairs of eyes tracked her passing, either wide with astonishment or narrow with accusations. Anlyn felt like a criminal, or a specimen arousing curiosity. Meanwhile, off to either side of her, sleek Drenardian starfighters kept pace, bobbing in and out of the mazelike structure while keeping their guns trained her way.

Just in case the specimen turns hostile, she told herself. She wondered if the rumored power of Edison’s lance was all that kept them at bay.

As they progressed into the interior of the keep, the habitable corridors disappeared, and the density of the obstructing beams increased. Also, more and more of the gold canisters became visible—larger slivers and triangles of shimmering honey flashing out between the beams.

After a few tight, final squeezes, the three ships rounded into an open workspace where Anlyn could see several tugs pulling the blockade apart, creating a hole for her to fly through. A collection of replacement canisters stood nearby, another tug busying itself around them like a herder tending his flock.

Anlyn had to wait while they finished. She held the ship perfectly still as the two starfighters hovered to either side, their bows pointing straight at her. As if we pose more of a threat than the rift ahead, Anlyn thought. She tried to ignore them, as well as the hollow pit forming in her gut from having their weapons aimed directly at her. Instead, she lost herself in watching the tugs work. They pulled out several more layers of armored canisters—the innermost eaten away in places—until the rift was eventually exposed.

When the tear in space became visible, Edison grumbled something in English too obtuse for her to follow. In the recess of gold opened by the tugs, she could see empty space and stars beyond. A few structures glimmered in the distance beyond that, like bright stars. It was an odd sight, for the tugs had only removed half the layers in one spot. The hole in space stood in front of the rear half of the rest of the golden cube. She and Edison were looking through them, rather than at them. And not through them so much as through a rip in the very fabric of the galaxy, a doorway to another galaxy that was not theirs.

Anlyn shook the wonder of the scene away, scared that Bishar’s men would see her hesitation as a change of heart. She increased thrust, moving the large craft forward.

“How’s the hyperdrive?” she asked Edison, wishing she’d boned up on some basic Bern during their flight from Drenard.

He pulled up a different screen on his readout. “Cycled and optimal.”

They passed the outer boundary of canisters, entering a bright, golden cave. Ahead of them loomed a hole in space where the other half of the Keep should be. Anlyn continued to power the ship forward, slow and steady. She thought of all the brave men and women who had come on the mission with her, their lives lost. And why? Had she misread the prophecy? Was she misreading it again? No longer were they waiting for the Bern to show up—she and Edison were now going to them. Once more, it felt like a mistake. She wondered if their arrival in a Bern craft would give her and Edison more time to announce their arrival in peace, or if she and her love were about to join the rest of her mission in being reduced to dust.

The nose of the Bern ship broke the boundary between the two galaxies, and then the cockpit did the same. The walls of gold were suddenly replaced with tar-black space salted with an unfamiliar constellations of stars.

Before Anlyn knew it, she and Edison were out among them. The Keep was gone, and their massive warship immediately felt like a tiny speck drifting into the dark—piercing the vast and wild unknown.

9

Molly exited the cockpit preparing to scold Walter, but instead found three strangers stomping into her cargo bay: a human and two Callites. All three of them were enormous, and all three wore coveralls splattered with a purplish paint. Plumes of dust trailed them from outside, the kicked-up fog swirling around their feet.

“Excuse me—?” Molly was barely able to begin her question before choking on the nauseating reek of the figures. A foul gaseous cloud had entered with them—the smell of alcohol and sweat and something rotten. Molly nearly gagged as the human strolled up, appraising the interior of her ship with a smirk.

“Mortimor?” the man yelled. “You in here, you old bastard?” He looked over at Molly and smiled, as if they were all awaiting some gruff reply from her father.

None came, of course. Molly blinked the tears out of her eyes and covered her mouth with the back of her hand. “Can I help you?” she managed.

One of the big Callites plopped down in Edison’s wide crew seat, his brown skin webbed with the outline of interlocking scales. The small plates gave their kind a reptilian look, despite the long, flowing hair most sported. And while the majority of aliens in the galaxy looked roughly humanoid, Callites took the similarities to another level. Human kids who painted themselves up as Callites for Halloween were almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The overall likeness didn’t help the local tensions between them and Humans, of course. Differences in skin texture seemed to be quite enough for most people. If anything, the many other traits they had in common just made cohabitation more difficult.

While one Callite got comfortable in Edison’s chair—his body sagging with obvious weariness—the other large male crossed over to the tool bench and picked up a power driver.

“Hey, don’t touch that!” Molly said.

“It’s okay,” the Human said, walking over to her. “We’re old friends of…” he looked pointedly at Molly’s ring finger, which was helping shield her mouth and nose from the stench, “… your boyfriend?”

“My boyfr—? You mean my father? And he’s not—hey, seriously, don’t touch that!” Molly stepped toward the guy inspecting her tools, but the Human grabbed her shoulder, spinning her around.

“Mollie? Mollie Fyde?” He whistled, looking her up and down. “Drenards in hyperspace, is that you? My goodness, you’ve grown up. And out!” He stared directly at her chest. The massive beast in Edison’s seat looked at her as if to confirm the observation, and then started toying with the flight harness.

“I’m Scottie,” the man said. He pulled her close, attempting to transform his grip on her shoulders into an embrace. Molly pushed against him, both hands on his chest, which left her mouth unguarded. “Scottie Paulson, your father’s old friend.”

His breath went right into her mouth, all over the surface of her tongue and back down her throat. It tasted like cheap liquor and cavities full of rotten meat. She gasped, which just drew the burn deep into her lungs. Molly visualized puking all over his coveralls but couldn’t quite manage it.

She shoved on his chest, instead. “Get off!” she squeaked, bending back over the galley counter as he pushed forward. He easily weighed twice as much as she did. “Seriously—” Molly coughed. “Get off me!”

Scottie took a step back and chuckled to his friend by the workbench. “I just wanted a hug. Hell, last time I saw you, I could bounce you in my lap!”

“Look,” Molly said. She held her hands out in front of her and scanned the three males. “I don’t know where my dad is, so I can’t help you guys. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave, okay? I was getting ready to go into town, and I won’t be on-planet long, so I need to lock up and—”

“Lock up?” The Callite by the workbench waved a power shunt through the air. “But then we can’t leave!”

“Good point, Ryn.” Scottie studied Molly, grinning. “Be odd of you to lock us up inside here, wouldn’t it?”

“Inside? I—no, you guys need to get out! My father isn’t—”

“Here? Yeah, you said. Tell you what, we’ll just wait for him to get back.” Scottie walked aft through the cargo bay. “You go on to town and we’ll keep an eye on things here.” He poked his head into the engine room, then turned and smiled at the silent oaf in Edison’s chair. “Check it out, Urg.”

Molly moved to intervene as the large Callite rose and stomped across the cargo bay. It was as futile as trying to wave down a StarCarrier.

“Listen—” she said. But nobody was.

The large Callite disappeared into the engine room while Scottie moved aft, peering inside each crew quarter.

“Hey, you guys really can’t—”

Scottie slapped his hand by Molly’s door. “I call this one!” he told his friends. He looked at Molly. “Smells nice,” he added, bouncing his eyebrows suggestively.

Molly wanted a gun. Plasma, laser, mechanical, she didn’t care. She wasn’t sure if anything would stop the two big fellows, but she really wanted to try. She turned and looked at the security cam in the corner of the bay and saw it twitching to follow the action.

Molly frowned at the camera. She backed slowly toward the cockpit as the two Callites jostled with each other, both trying to squeeze into Cole’s room at once.

The cockpit door shut itself as soon as she stepped inside. Molly locked it, pulled up the cargo cam, and the Wadi jumped from the back of the captain’s seat to her shoulders. She flicked on the radio.

“You know these guys?” she asked her mom.

“Never seen them before in my lives. Either of them.”

“Either? Oh, you mean your lives. So are they’re lying? What should I do?”

“It could be your father knew them when I was on Dakura. What you should do is go find the local law. Or Cat.”

“You think the law’s a good idea? What if they check the ship’s name?”

“That won’t be a problem. The local government hates the Navy as much as you distrust them. Besides, the Navy has a minimal presence here. Your father and I were sent undercover just as much to avoid bureaucratic wrangling over jurisdiction as anything else.”

Molly leaned over the dash and looked through the carboglass toward the stable offices. She could see Pete standing by the door. He seemed to be squinting through the dust in their general direction.

“Okay, I’m gonna go for help. Can you lock the doors to the crew quarters?”

“No, but that’d be something nice for us to hook up.”

“Yeah, let’s make that a priority. I’ll lock the cockpit from the outside. Keep an eye on things.”

“That’s all I can do,” her mother said.

Molly nudged the Wadi to its favorite spot behind her neck and keyed opened the door. She snuck out, locked the door with her captain’s codes, and then hurried toward the cargo ramp.

The mute oaf stuck his head out Cole’s door and saw her leaving. “Hey,” he said, proving to be not quite as mute as she had thought. He pointed at her, obviously trying to think of something else to say, while Molly jogged down the boarding ramp. She weaved through the stables, around and under the parked ships, and headed toward Pete. Hopefully he could help.

Before she got close enough to ask, however, he called out across the dusty lot, his hands cupped around his mouth: “Scottie and his boys find you okay?”

“What?” Molly asked. “It’s not okay they found me! Did you tell them where I was?”

“Hell, I called right after you checked in. Them boys been looking for your father for some time.”

“He’s not with me!” The Wadi scampered down the back of her shirt with the outburst, sticking its head in one of the baggy pockets on Molly’s cargo shorts.

“That’s right! You told me that didn’t you?” Pete smiled at her and pulled his hand out of his coveralls. He had a toothpick sticking out of his fist, the exposed half dark purple. He put it in his mouth and used his tongue to slide it to the other side.

“I want them off my ship,” Molly told him.

“Well, now, you’ll have to talk to them about that.” Pete leaned to the side and somehow spit a stream of dark juice past the toothpick. A long trail of the stuff hung from his lower lip, thick as molasses. He reached up and swiped it away with his palm, then rubbed it on his coveralls.

Molly looked at the stains covering him and wondered just how much of Pete’s coloration was actual grease. If any.

“I tried to tell them to go,” she complained. “But they wouldn’t listen.”

“Could be they think it’s their ship,” Pete said flatly.

“What? Their ship? That was my father’s ship and now it’s mine!” Molly looked down at the Wadi as it tried to curl itself into her pocket. Its tail swished in the air, then disappeared.

“Well, now.” Pete spit again, dribbling it right down the front of his coveralls. The maneuver seemed to save him a step or two. “What I heard was your daddy owes Scottie some money. You never know with interest compoundin’—they might have a claim on her.” He nodded toward Parsona. “Besides, why’d your daddy give such a fine ship away? How old are you?”

“Where’s the sheriff’s office?” Molly asked, ignoring the questions and cursing herself for allowing a tangle of lies to develop.

“Directly on Main,” Pete drawled.

Molly turned and headed off in the direction of town.

“But he’s gonna tell you just what I said,” Pete hollered after her.

Molly followed the busiest road into town. She preferred the thick plumes of dust from the traffic and the catcalls from the vehicles’ occupants to the unknown of quiet streets. Especially with so much dangerous politicking in the air.

Most of the cars on Lok were large-tired buggies suitable for travelling between towns with no interconnecting roads. They passed by in one of two speeds: slow—the people trying to sneak away from the trouble they’d just caused; and fast—the ones about to effect their own.

Ignoring offers for rides and things less-pleasant, Molly kicked at rocks along the shoulder and fumed over the idea of those brigands being on her ship and likely going through her things. The Wadi rode along across the back of her neck, its tiny claws gripping her shirt and a little flesh, its head lolling with her gait. Grumbling to herself, Molly walked past rows and rows of politicians smiling down from their posters and banners, all of them promising her something for just a few drops of blood.

She stopped at the outdoor counter of the first cantina she came to and bought water for herself and the Wadi. She chose her left pinky for the vote, even though it was swollen to the point of uselessness. Her new strategy was to sacrifice one digit completely so she could heal up the rest.

After paying, her Wadi curled across her forearm, leaning sideways with its back against her chest. Molly dripped water into its mouth, then took some for herself. Walking like that caused her to flash back to planet Drenard and that hot, arid, and dusty hike they’d taken together. The comparison of that horror-filled day to her current annoyance lifted her spirits somewhat. As long as she didn’t look up at the fleet in orbit, she could pretend things weren’t quite as bad as they could be.

Another buggy roared past, kicking a plume of chalk into the air. Molly could hear the powdery dirt crunching between her teeth, could feel it turning into a film of mud in her mouth. She took another gulp of water and tried to fight off the panicked sensation she sometimes felt in crowds—the need to run and escape from the noise and commotion, seeking the vacuum of space.

As she made her way into the center of town, her complete dearth of vivid memories of the place struck her for the first time. She seemed to remember visiting Bekkie with her father several times, but they were just memories of memories of memories, built up over a longer lifetime of forgetting. The only building she recognized was the tall church, its several spires sticking out over town. And even its familiarity was likely no more than a recollection from an old photograph, or a postcard that she’d seen more recently.

The noisy traffic gradually ground down to an even noisier standstill around the central square. Buggies with trailers unloaded goods, while Sisyphean storekeepers swept dirt back into the streets, and pedestrians milled about through the gridlock amid a chorus of bleating horns. The town had a familiar odor and sound, a boisterousness that touched her nostalgia, but it also seemed bigger and more crowded than it had before.

Perhaps it was the political rallies, which Molly could hear in several directions. They mostly consisted of large groups of people chanting names or terse phrases that somehow captured an entire (and mostly vapid) platform. Or maybe the larger crowds had something to do with the Bern fleet. Perhaps rural Lokians had come to Bekkie in hopes of an affordable ticket off-planet, only to find the strange ships overhead weren’t allowing anything of the sort.

Then again, not that many people in the crowd seemed to be looking up, at least not beyond the posters of smiling faces, all promising something. While Molly stressed about her family and friends and what seemed to be a looming disaster of galactic proportions, everyone else was worried about whether or not their candidate would be in power when it all came crashing down. What little politics she’d followed on Earth—a planet that never felt enough like home to get invested—seemed magnified and uglier on Lok. In yet one more way, the planet she had been born on felt incredibly foreign to her.

One thing she could remember about Bekkie, and something that hadn’t changed, was the paucity of non-Humans in Lok’s capital. After living on Earth with all its diversity for so many years—and having spent the last two weeks in the poorer countryside—Molly felt abnormally surrounded by her own kind. Oddly enough, it made her feel more conspicuous. She felt like the only alien in town, surrounded by nothing but Terrans, and therefore unable to blend in.

The sensation brought back a clear childhood memory of Bekkie, an emotion, really. As a kid, she’d only known a handful of people, all of them Humans, their faces blurred by time. She could remember a trip into town with her father once, how she’d expected to see so many new races, and how disappointed she’d been to see so few.

She wondered if that’s where her fascination with aliens came from. The flight out to Palan had been so exciting—that long queue of diversity strung out just for her like a parade of exoticness. But did that make her a xenocist in a way? Pining for some exhibitionistic display of otherworldliness? Celebrating a thing just because it was different?

In the shops she passed, she did see a few Pherons and Callites working, usually with a smock on and some cleaning or serving prop in their hands. Both of their home planets were just a jump away from Lok, providing a nice source of cheap labor. The more Molly looked for them, the more she saw—but she really had to seek them out. They blended too well with their environment, partly because of their camouflaging uniforms, and partly because they seemed so less kinetic, less boisterous, than their Terran counterparts. They seemed perfectly content—or trained, perhaps—to fade into the layered background to which they’d been relegated.

A loud crunching sound interrupted her scanning of the crowd; Molly looked down to find the Wadi eating the lip of the water bottle, the vessel sucked completely dry.

“No.” She pulled the plastic out of the Wadi’s mouth and moved the animal to her shoulders; she waved down an older couple passing by.

“Do you know where the sheriff’s office is?” she asked them.

“Almost there,” the gentleman said, eyeing the Wadi with some curiosity. “Everything okay?”

“Do what?” Molly asked. The man’s genuine concern had thrown her off guard. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”

“Just keep going and it’ll be on your right,” his wife said.

“Thanks. Both of you.”

The pleasant exchange felt odd after a few days of bad run-ins, mostly with shopkeepers. It reminded her that not everyone in the galaxy was evil scum out to kill her, take her blood, or destroy the universe. She wiggled her shoulders, trying to work some of the tension out of her body. She knew it wasn’t good to let other people’s rudeness dictate how she felt. She kept that in mind as she weaved through the crowd for another block. Finally, she spotted a building ahead with bars across the windows and recognized the painted silver star hanging over the door. Molly kicked her flightboots against the jamb, dislodging the chunks of caked dirt deep in the treads. She pushed her way inside.

The door hinged back with a creak, and bells jangled overhead. The office inside looked like a huge shoebox hewn out of rough lumber. Two shafts of dust highlighted the place, the particulate matter so dense in the morning sunlight that Molly considered ducking under them. In the back sat a table, pressed up against two of the shut cells. A prisoner in each cell sat close to the bars, their hands poking through and holding fans of cards. A young man sat at the table outside the cells. He wore a vest over a buttoned-up shirt, and a gun hung from his belt. Molly nodded to the three figures as she closed the door, setting off another racket from the bells.

Someone cleared their throat to Molly’s side. She turned and squinted through one of the shafts of dust to find a man appraising her over a folded newspaper. He sat behind a desk, leaning way back in his chair, his old herder boots propped up on a smattering of loose papers. When he pushed his hat back with a solitary finger, Molly felt like looking around for the holo cameras. The entire scene was so cliché, it had moved from comical, directly to spooky.

“No pets,” the man said. He shaped his hand like a gun and aimed it at the Wadi.

“She’s trained,” Molly said. “She won’t be a problem.”

“Better not.” His thumb decocked, and his finger came up a few inches with the imaginary recoil. He blew across the tip, smiled, and then holstered it away. “What can I do for you?”

Molly approached the desk, fighting the urge to swim through the shaft of lit dust with her hands. She glanced at the group of men playing cards, their faces slowly turning to follow her movement across the room. She noticed the walls were papered with election posters, rather than wanted posters. The only giveaway was the smiles; otherwise, even the actors would probably have been the same.

“I, um, have a problem with some men, Sheriff…” she bent forward and tried to read the name on his star.

“Browne,” he said for her, looking down at the star as if he needed to be reminded. “And I ain’t much help on marital disputes. Unless you need a lesson on starting a few.”

One of the card players chuckled at this, and the Sheriff shot him a look, as if prisoners could have fun, but not at his expense.

“No, it’s nothing like that. I just pulled in today, and some people claiming to be friends with my father—”

“Scottie?” Sheriff Browne interrupted. “You come in on Parsona?”

Molly swallowed. “That’s right. And I—”

“Can’t help you,” the Sheriff said. His newspaper flapped back up in front of his face, and his hat sank down a few inches.

“Can’t, or—”

“No pets, ma’am. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“But I—”

“No pets!”

The Wadi’s head recoiled from the outburst. Molly reached up and rubbed its back, trying to soothe it. “Could you at least tell me where I might find someone?” she asked. “I’m looking for…”

“Ain’t no tourguide, neither.”

“…a woman, a Callite that goes by the name of Cat.”

The newspaper came down, just low enough to expose Browne’s eyes.

“Cripple Cat?” he asked.

Molly looked to the card players. The other lawman gave her a huge smile. She turned back at Sheriff Browne. “Uh, I guess. I just know her as Cat. Or Catherine. Do you know where I can find her?”

The Sheriff pulled his feet off the desk and shot forward as his boots fell heavily. Molly took a quick step back.

“You’re lucky to know her as Cat. Most people don’t.” Browne shuffled some papers around on his desk and came up with a few stubs. He handed them out to Molly. “Twenty each.”

“What are they?”

“Tickets to see Cat.”

One of the card players chuckled again and got another visual blasting from the sheriff. Molly reached into her pocket for some change from the cantina and held it out. Sheriff Browne looked at the two coins.

“Just one ticket?”

“Just one,” Molly said.

Her heartbeat quickened as she took the stub.

She was getting close, she could feel it.

10

Cole startled awake as if from a bad dream. His arms and legs jerked reflexively but wouldn’t move; they were pinned in place. He blinked, gradually bringing the world into focus, fearing more of the bright light. What he found proved worse.

He was strapped to an inclined platform, his legs tied down a meter apart, the thick ropes looped around his ankles and through holes in the solid steel. He glanced up at his hands, which were similarly bound high over his head. He tried jerking down on them and felt his bruised ribs sing out in pain, jolts of electricity lancing from his chest to every new bruise across his body.

“Good luck with that,” someone said.

Cole turned to his side. He had to lean his head forward to look around his own arm, then saw Riggs tied up a few meters away, strapped to an identical structure: an angled sheet of steel halfway between flat and vertical. He also noticed several empty racks scattered about the small room, all roughly arranged around a gated drain in the center of the floor.

“Couldn’t tell if you were breathing or not,” Riggs said. “Was gonna be pissed if you’d already died on me.”

Cole grimaced. It felt like the room was swaying, but it could’ve been a problem with his head. He leaned it back against the steel and thought he could hear the crunching of snow reverberating up through the metal contraption and into his skull. He assumed they were still on the move, just in a bigger craft. Above, a ceiling of dark plastic allowed a wan glow of light to filter into the room. The spots were gone from his vision, but his headache lingered.

“How long have I been out?” he asked.

“No clue,” Riggs said. “Longer than I was, obviously.”

“Yeah,” said Cole. He tried to push up with his restrained ankles to take some of the pressure off his ribs, but every movement caused him to wince in pain.

“Doesn’t feel too good, does it?”

Cole looked over and saw a smirk on Riggs’s face. He decided to roll with the jab, stunned that Riggs could actually take pleasure in Cole’s condition as if he had nothing to fear himself.

“What do you think they want with us?” Cole asked, changing the subject and also trying to remind Riggs that they were on the same side and had a common enemy to worry about.

“I’m guessing it’s nothing good, but at least they seem to want us alive. Maybe ransom. Surely they’re not dumb enough to kill a Navy pilot, which means I’m probably safe. You still got no clue where you jumped us?”

Cole wondered how best to tell Riggs that they might be in hyperspace. But then, he couldn’t shake the doubt, the feeling that it had been an auditory hallucination. He couldn’t even remember what he’d heard, exactly. He glanced down at his flightsuit, looking for the bulge of the red band in his breast pocket, but he was unable to tell if it was there or not.

“You didn’t double-check your jump vector, did you? We could be anywhere in the galaxy right now, right?” Riggs groaned. “Flankin’ useless.”

Cole clenched his jaw to hold back the retort forming in his throat. He twisted his arm in the restraints, trying to force his thumb flat so he could pull it through the knotted rope.

“Well, at least they’re Human,” Cole told Riggs, trying to change the subject. “I think so, anyway. They were speaking English around me.”

“I can do you one better. They speak Late-Millennial English.”

“Do what? How can you tell that?”

“Junior Academy poetry reading.” Riggs grunted; it sounded as if he were attempting to arrange himself more comfortably, or pull himself free. “I had to memorize that accent for a recital.” He said the last in a strange voice, one that nearly matched what Cole had heard from the men.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Cole said.

“What? Me in poetry class? Or that you either discovered time travel or jumped us to a frozen rock full of Late-Millennial poets?”

“They don’t hit like poets,” said Cole.

“Yeah, you’re right, but they don’t have to be poets, just from the same era.”

“Twenty-first century?”

“Late. Or early twenty second. Jeez, man, did you sleep through English and history?”

“Yeah, I was more interested in Planetary Astronomy. Listen, I don’t think we’re on a planet. What would you say if I told you we were in—?”

A click of metal and an explosion of light cut him off. Cole shut his eyes and turned his head to the side as hinges squealed, and a door across the room opened. He waited until he heard it slam shut—returning the small space to a comfortably lit state—before reopening his eyes. He blinked rapidly and tried to focus on the shape shuffling toward him. Several men wrapped in fur had joined them in the cramped space. Two of them crouched down on either side of the door, their goggles off and dangling around their necks. One had the fur over his face pulled down, exposing a snarl.

The third man approached Cole and Riggs. He slowly pulled his goggles off and pushed his arm through the strap to secure them around his elbow. His face was completely covered with strips of fur, dotted with melting snow. Reaching up, the man began unwrapping himself, gradually revealing a tan face with a leathery complexion and a head topped with a mop of bright, blonde hair.

A mouth was exposed, smiling, his white teeth standing out against a rich tan and the dark creases in his skin. The man looked like a surfer—like someone who had spent his entire life on the beach. Cole had a hard time matching that neck-up look with the garb for an endless winter.

“What do you want with us?” Riggs asked.

The man turned to him. “A few answers,” he said calmly. “Oh, and then your undying loyalty, of course.” His smile broadened. His voice was warm, deep, and thick with a forgotten accent. It harkened back to a time when English was spoken by a minority of Humans, back before it gathered the rich pronunciations that would come with universalizing the language. It reminded Cole of some old pre-holo vids, flat stuff he had watched in Portugal as a kid.

Riggs laughed. “Not the best way to win us over, asshole!”

Cole ground his teeth together, wishing Riggs would calm down. He watched the blonde man pull off his gloves and tuck them into his belt. Every motion seemed both purposeful and relaxed. An odd combination, yet seductive, like watching an expert perform some complex task without pause or worry, just sure precision. The man reminded Cole of one of his old flight instructors: rugged and handsome in an ageless way, a guy who could speak through a smile and somehow make you want to follow him anywhere.

“Actually, Captain Riggs, we’ve found this to be the best way to win people over.”

“Do I know you?” Riggs stammered.

“You may’ve heard of me,” the man said. “My name’s Joshua. Joshua O’Connell.”

Cole felt a twinge of recognition; he looked to Riggs, who was shaking his head.

“How do you know who I am?” Riggs asked.

The man laughed. It was like warm honey being poured into Cole’s ears. The two men by the door joined in, whether by some shared joke or sense of duty, it was hard to tell.

“Your name’s on your flightsuit,” Joshua said, pointing at his chest.

The two men by the door laughed harder. Cole watched Riggs turn red as he glanced down at his chest. Cole did the same, looking at his flightsuit from Parsona, the one with Molly’s father’s name on it.

Joshua waved down the two hyenas by the door and smiled warmly at Riggs. “Normally, I leave these orientations to my subordinates. They break you down, I build you up, that sort of thing. However,” he turned to Cole. “You are causing quite the stir. Got people whispering all up the chain of command. Enough to make my new boss pay a visit.”

“He’s nobody,” Riggs said. “A flunky. You leave him be.”

Cole glared at Riggs, begging with his eyes for him to be quiet.

“Now, now, lads.” Joshua clapped his hands in front of him and left them clasped. The double-fist moved up and down as he spoke. “Let’s not think about what you should or shouldn’t say to me. My advice? Just skip the resistance bit. Assume we’re already the best of friends.” He spread his hands out to include the two goons by the door. “All of us will be on the same team before you know it. The sooner, the better.”

“Cool,” said Riggs. “When do we get to dress in coon skins and tie you guys up?”

Joshua’s smile faded. His bright eyebrows came down over his eyes, draping his sockets in darkness. “Look, boys, I know you have a lot of that Academy nonsense rattling around in your skulls, lord knows we get our share of noobs here—”

“Noobs?” Riggs asked.

Joshua turned to him. His eyes were bright, despite the dimness of the light filtering through the dark ceiling above. “Newbies,” he said. “People that don’t know how to calculate proper jump coordinates.” He walked over to stand close to Riggs; Cole followed with his eyes. “I don’t know where you kids thought you were jumping to, but something got in your way.” He spread his arms. “Welcome to hyperspace. Now let’s stop annoying me with questions and start soothing me with answers.”

“Hyperspace?” Riggs leaned forward against his restraints. “What are you talking about?”

Joshua started to say something, but he turned instead to Cole. His mouth remained hinged open, hovering around a half-formed word. Slowly, his frozen expression transformed into a smile. He snapped his fingers at the two men by the door.

“Why aren’t you just as surprised?” he asked Cole as the other men crossed the room.

Cole pulled against the knots around his wrists, dragging himself up the incline as much as he could. He took a deep breath once his diaphragm had the weight off and then slid back down. He felt winded just from being tied up in the position; it wasn’t conducive to long conversations.

“I’m shocked speechless, is all,” he finally said.

The two men walked toward Riggs, disappearing from view behind Cole’s arm. There was a loud screeching noise as they pushed Riggs’s rack around, lining up the base with the drain on the floor. One of the goons approached Joshua and held out his hand.

Reaching in a fold of his furs, Joshua brought out a bag of purple fluid and handed it to the guy, who set it on the ground near the drain.

“What’s your story?” Joshua asked.

“I’m just a noob,” Cole said, repeating the strange word but without the ancient accent. “A flunky, just like he said.”

Riggs shook his head. “Don’t tell them anything!” With his rack adjusted, Cole could now see him without straining his neck.

Joshua signaled to one of the goons; the man dug a thumb in Riggs’s armpit, causing him to gurgle with pain.

“What can it hurt?” Cole asked his old friend, pleading with him to go along so whatever happened, they’d do it quick.

“Precisely,” said Joshua, turning to Riggs and waving the goon off. “The only way it hurts is if you refuse to talk.” He turned back to Cole and lowered his voice. “Who did you contact with the D-band?”

“The what?” Cole scanned the three men. “Wait, what year do you think it is?” He wondered if Riggs’s time-travel joke had any merit—

Joshua shook his head. “We know what year it is, now stop asking questions and start answering them. Who did you contact with the band?”

“Nobody,” Cole said, wondering how they even knew what the thing was for. “I heard some voices, that’s all.” He glanced over at Riggs. “Please don’t hurt him.”

“What did the voices say?”

“That you were coming. And welcome to hyperspace.”

“You knew?” Riggs hissed. Cole turned to his friend, saw his eyes wide with astonishment. Riggs grunted in agony as the goon dug his furry mitt into his ribs again.

Cole grimaced with empathic pain and looked away. He turned to Joshua. “Please stop,” he begged.

“Are you coming from Lok?” Joshua asked.

Cole swallowed and shook his head.

“Speak up.”

“Never been there.”

Joshua pointed a finger at him. “But you know something, don’t you? You recognized the name of the planet.”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“But not as part of an invasion? Maybe an alien force with a different name?”

“No.”

Joshua’s finger shook. “Tell me what you know about Lok or I’ll have your friend’s limbs removed.”

One of the goons laughed. Joshua snapped his fingers in the man’s direction and the goon fell silent. Cole stole a glance at Riggs, whose lips were pursed thin and tight.

“I know someone who was born there. That’s all.”

“Do you, now?”

There was a knocking at the other side of the metal door. The three men put on their goggles; Riggs leaned away as the man beside him let go of his neck. One of the goons walked over to the door and opened it, letting in a flash of light.

“What is it?” Cole heard Joshua say, his own face averted and his eyes closed.

“Our esteemed guest is on deck, sir,” he heard a voice say.

“Excellent. Tell him we’ll be there in a minute.”

“He wants you right away, sir.”

“And I want you to stall. Take him to the mast if he’s impatient, that way we’ll be there before he knows it.”

“Yes, sir.” The door banged shut; Cole opened his eyes and waited for them to adjust to the relative darkness. Joshua stood in front of him, his goggles now down around his neck, his hand reaching into his fur coat. “What’s your name?” he asked Cole.

“Mortimor,” Cole said, looking down at the patch on his suit.

“No, it’s not.” Joshua pulled something out of the folds of fur—two cylinders of wood, bright and polished. “I recognize the getup. I know you’re not him.”

“You’ve got me confused for someone else,” Cole said. “Where I come from, it’s a common na—”

“Do you know what this is?” Joshua asked. He held the two cylinders up for Cole to see, gripping them in a single fist, side-by-side.

Cole shook his head.

“Ever heard of the Luddites?”

“I know what a luddite is,” Cole said. He snuck a quick glance at Riggs, who seemed livid and confused by the discussion—his forehead was full of wrinkles, but his jaw kept clenching and unclenching.

“The Luddites,” Joshua said. He held one of the glossy cylinders away from his body. The other one dropped toward the ground and then stopped, hovering in mid-air less than a meter below its twin.

“The terrorists?”

All three of the men laughed. “No, not terrorists, my friend. Freedom fighters. We were once devoted to liberating mankind from the technology that blinded them to a good life.”

“You preferred to die toothless and young, is that it?”

Cole regretted saying it as soon as it came out. He tensed for a blow, but none came. Eying Joshua warily, he saw a thin smile creep across the man’s face.

“There were some… flaws in our worldview, sure, but we have a much higher purpose now. We now know and understand mankind’s failings, and we’re working to fix them. However,” he twisted his outstretched hand slightly and the levitating stick swung in the air, “we still loathe technology. Deep down—the original members who are still with us—we prefer the simple things in life.”

Carefully, Joshua reached below the hovering wooden handle and grasped it with his other hand. He then brought both of the cylinders parallel to the ground while keeping them apart.

“Simple is always better, don’t you think?”

Cole raised his eyebrows.

“The wire between these two pieces of wood is constructed almost entirely out of carbon. Lovely, beautiful carbon. The matrix of life.”

He moved the handles closer, but Cole still couldn’t see a thing.

“The strand is just a few atoms wide, and yet, it is nearly unbreakable, held together by the natural forces of electromagnetism. Gorgeously simple, really.” Joshua’s eyes changed focus, away from the nothingness and fixed on Cole. “Do you know what that makes this lovely wire?”

“Easy to lose?” Cole joked.

Joshua tilted his head to the side and smiled. “It makes this the sharpest thing in the universe.” He turned to the goons beside Riggs and nodded. The man with his wrappings down off his mouth smiled, his shaded eyes darting toward Cole before he knelt down and yanked Riggs’s pantleg out of his boot. He unzipped the expander on the side of the flightsuit’s leggings, then slid the black fabric up past Riggs’s knee. He pulled hard, bunching the material in a band so tight around his thigh, that Riggs grimaced in pain.

Cole stared at Riggs’s exposed, pale leg and noticed for the first time a trough in the rack right behind the thigh, running from side to side. The goon performed the same ritual on the other pantleg, unzipping the boot expander and yanking the material up high.

“What do you want to know?” Cole asked.

Joshua flashed the briefest of smiles, there only for an instant. He frowned and shook his head. “For starters, I want you to stop asking me questions. I want the both of you to concentrate instead on spilling your guts.”

The goons laughed at this. Joshua nodded to one of them and jerked his head toward Cole; the man came over and stood by his side. Cole expected him to jam his fingers in his ribs or armpit, just as he had with Riggs, but the man clamped his hand over his mouth, instead.

He pulled Cole’s chin to the side, forcing him to watch as Joshua knelt down in front of Riggs with the two handles held far apart. Cole saw his friend’s boots twitch, straining against the ropes. Riggs tried to yell something, but the other goon clamped his hand around his mouth, forcing the two former friends to look at each other. Riggs’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring with desperate, shallow breaths.

Taking extreme care, Joshua slowly inserted one of the handles in the rack’s trough and fed it behind Riggs’s legs until it slid out the far side. He again grasped both handles and held them far apart, his muscles straining as if pulling the invisible thread taut. He looked back at Cole and smiled, then turned to Riggs’s legs.

Cole could feel his own eyes bulging as he shouted into the furry mitt covering his mouth. His cheeks filled with the muffled roar of his own voice as Joshua brought the handles toward his chest. Cole knew Joshua would turn to him, would give him one last chance to speak before he did anything bad. Or maybe it would all be a cruel joke. A hazing ritual. A prank meant to bond them together.

But Cole was wrong.

There was almost no effort in what Joshua did. He brought the two handles together in front of Riggs’s thighs, switched them to the opposite hands, and then pulled them away from one another. Cole couldn’t even tell if the motion made a sound over his own muffled pleas.

Riggs’s face remained frozen for a moment, then his face twisted up in confused concentration, almost as if he were fighting to place a smell. Cole tried to breathe through his nose as Joshua stood back and began rolling one of the handles in the air, sucking the other one up to it.

The real horror didn’t begin until the goon by Riggs let go of his mouth and reached for the purple bag. Riggs struggled against his restraints, grunting. One of his thighs came away from the rack.

His boot didn’t.

Cole gaped in sick disbelief at the lower half of his friend’s two legs, both of which were still strapped to the rack. There seemed to be a long delay before the thighs began jetting blood, splattering the boots and running down the steel toward the drain. The thighs kicked even more as Riggs writhed in horror. Cole’s head filled with a dull roar—his own moans reverberating through his skull, back into the steel rack, then echoing in his ears. It gave his rage a metallic tinge, like fear and hate wrapped in foil.

He could barely hear Riggs scream as the goon began slapping purple goo on the ends of his stumps. Thick pulses of blood sprayed through the man’s fingers before he could get it stopped. It came in rapid, forceful spurts, a visual measure of Riggs’s racing heart.

After what felt like minutes of struggle and abject terror, Riggs’s head finally fell forward, his jaw slumping to his chest. Blood continued to leak out of his legs; the man tending to them paused for a moment, licking some of the purple goo off the back of his hand.

The man holding Cole’s face let go and stepped away. Cole tried to suck in a lungful of air, but before he could, he heard his own disbelieving wail leak out, the last of his held breath forced into a whimper vying to become a scream:

“What the flank? What the flank!”