Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

26 · Lok · The Present

Mere hours after Molly dealt with Saunders’s reaction to Anlyn, she found herself faced with an even more daunting proposition: Now she had to introduce her friend to an entire crowd, a crowd that had been raised and taught to loathe her kind.

She cupped her hands around her face and leaned against the cargo bay’s porthole. Beyond, in the dim glow of Parsona’s landing lights, she could see the surviving Navy crewmen and the remaining Callites seated in rows, listening to Admiral Saunders speak.

“I’m nervous,” Anlyn said beside her.

Molly turned to see her friend’s face pressed up against the adjacent porthole, looking out.

“It’s not too late to back out,” Molly said. “You don’t have to lead this mission if you don’t want. I could go, and you could take Parsona to the Carrier for the missiles. You’d be hidden there—”

Anlyn shook her head but continued to gaze out through the carboglass. “I’m not nervous about that,” she said. “Going back to Darrin, flying in combat again… I think I can handle those things—”

“Are you nervous about facing them?” Molly pressed a finger to the glass.

Anlyn turned away from the view outside. “Let’s put it this way: If you didn’t have all the guns stored away in here, I don’t think I’d feel safe going out there.”

“They’ll be fine. The Admiral is breaking the news to them gradually, so there won’t be the same degree of shock.” Molly looked back out the porthole. “I hope,” she added quietly to herself.

Saunders looked like he was just warming up, his arm-waving reminding Molly of her Academy days and all his energetic debriefings after simulator missions. Like all his former cadets in the audience, she could tell when he was nearing his final point by how high his hands got in the air. They fluttered like featherless, wounded birds flapping for altitude. The poor things hadn’t made it past his shoulders yet, so she went to see how Ryke’s engineering lesson was going.

Molly joined Edison in the aft hallway and peered into the engine room.

Two of the new arrivals from the Underground—warped down from another of the captured Bern ships just hours earlier—were also in the hall. One was a Callite, an old recruit from Lok and a friend of Dr. Ryke’s. The other was a race Molly had never seen before, a smaller version of the Bel-Tra, thin and hairless. The two of them quietly chatted together, paying little attention to the lesson going on inside the engine room. Molly hoped their distracted affect meant they already knew what they were doing.

She patted Edison’s arm, and he moved aside enough for her to peek in. Ryke stood in front of Parsona’s hyperdrive. He had the control panel off, wires hanging everywhere. A large electrical schematic was taped to the side of the open drive, and Ryke waved a soldering iron in the air as he spoke. Molly listened in for a minute; she watched several of the gathered nod their heads as they absorbed the step by step routine. Counting Edison, they had a total of seven engineers who would soon know how to make alterations to hyperdrives, giving them the potential to jump from any one place to another while ignoring gravity and all obstructions between.

The only other piece they needed to make it work was Ryke’s secret nav program. It was at that point in his earlier conversation with Molly that she had balked. Her preference had been to wave off the entire mission, taking their chances with the long way back, rather than risk trusting anyone with such powerful knowledge. But Ryke had just grown more excited, explaining the alterations he could make to the code to create an absolute failsafe.

Each drive they altered, he explained, would be good for a single jump. Four of the tap wires soldered by the engineers would have nothing to do with making the modification work. They would fire when the hyperdrive engaged, but they would be connected to the control board that housed Ryke’s program. The ship would make its solitary jump from Darrin back to Lok, but the business end of the hyperdrive would jump somewhere else entirely.

Molly stood by the engine room door and watched Ryke conduct the lesson. She smiled as he paused now and then to scratch his beard or brush his hands across the schematic. The Lokian dialect seemed an odd match with the subject matter. Combined with his squat build, the jarring mix of pure genius and provincial upbringing made him instantly lovable.

“I think they’re almost ready for us,” Anlyn whispered.

Molly turned to see her friend at her side, her pale blue face scrunched up in what she recognized as Drenard worry. She nodded, then reached past Edison and waved at Ryke.

“Five more minutes,” Ryke said, holding up his grease-streaked hand, his stubby fingers spread out.

Molly patted Edison on the back and followed Anlyn into the cargo bay. In the cockpit, she could see Cat leaning back against the console, her lips moving as she conversed with Parsona. Molly snapped her fingers and waved, then pointed toward the cargo ramp. Cat nodded and held up one finger. Someone slapped on the outside of the hull.

“You ready?” Molly asked Anlyn.

“No, but let’s do it anyway.”

Molly keyed the loading ramp open. The lip swung away and toward the dirt, gradually revealing the faces of those standing in the back rows and then those seated on the ground. A palpable wave of shock washed over the bodies of those gathered, Human and Callite alike. Molly could sense two conflicting emotions in Gloria’s survivors, both of them borne of military training. There was the primal and uncontrollable fear reaction of seeing an enemy in the flesh, and then there was the stoic formality unique to a gathering of those in uniform.

Anlyn stepped cautiously onto the ramp, her boots joining the whistles of the night bugs as the only sounds. The regal tunics she had been wearing for weeks had been replaced with her old Parsona flightsuit, which she and Molly agreed would soften the visual blow and help the gathered see her as a pilot and one of them.

Anlyn held up both of her slender arms, the lights from the cargo bay filtering around them and into the dark forest beyond, casting large and hazy shadows.

“Greetings,” she said. “My name is Anlyn Hooo.”

Molly watched her friend scan the crowd, amazed at the poise and bearing of what she had once seen as a fragile girl in slave chains.

“I wish I could greet you in peace,” Anlyn said, “but I bring you tidings of war instead. War against a common foe that has, for too long, brought our races together in conflict. Your commander has just told you the nature of the threat above us, these glimmers in the night sky that shot down your friends and loved ones. Know then, that I was raised to fear the sight of you, just as you were trained to loathe the visage you see standing before you tonight—”

“We’re supposed to trust you?”

Anlyn stopped speaking, her arms frozen mid-gesture. The gathered grumbled, turning to look amongst themselves, but no one took credit for saying it. Saunders stepped toward the cargo ramp, his face lit up crimson in the light spilling out of Parsona.

Molly waved him off and stepped forward, taking a spot beside Anlyn.

“Do you trust me?” she asked the crowd.

There were nods and a chorus of assents, none among either of the groups easily forgetting the nature of their rescue.

“Yeah, but you’re one of us!” someone shouted.

“Am I?” Molly asked. She took another step forward. “Am I one of you? As most of you know, I was recently locked up on your very ship for murder and for treason. Am I one of you? I was kicked out of the Academy for being different. I never graduated as you did.”

“You’re asking us to follow a Drenard into battle,” the anonymous voice protested.

“Would you follow me?” Molly asked. “A girl, not yet eighteen, with no military credentials to her name. Would you follow me into battle?”

The chorus of assents was louder, the back few rows of seated rising to their feet.

“Well, I am a Drenard!” Molly shouted, pressing her fist to her chest. “I have been to their home planet. I have participated in ancient rites, and I am just as much a Drenard as she.” She pointed to Anlyn, and the crowd hushed. Even the night bugs ceased their twittering.

“The only difference between me and Anlyn is that I’m not half the pilot she is. I don’t have a fraction of the familiarity with where you’re going. She—” Molly took a step back up the ramp and put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. She lowered her voice. “She was held captive, a slave, by a Human from the Darrin system. She has more reason to hate our race than we have of hating hers—but she is able to see past this. And now I beg of you to show the same restraint.” Molly scanned the crowd, pausing to catch her breath. “Anlyn is my friend,” she said simply. “If you trust me, you can trust her.”

The crowd remained still. Saunders stood frozen between them and the ramp, only his head moving as he turned to look back and forth from the duo to the assembled crowd. Anlyn squeezed Molly’s shoulder, then took a step down the ramp.

“The present is defined by history,” she said softly. “Hate burns from fires set so long ago that their source has become charred and forgotten—it has become a mystery. There is so much more to fear here than simply each other.”

She pointed to the sky. “There is our doom, whether it is on the battlefield of tomorrow or our gradual defeat a generation hence. Look at how few of you remain from your previous encounter. Just an inconsequential fraction. Well, our distrust of each other is just as meaningless. We have a chance, however slim, to succeed—to take down even a handful of those great ships above. And even if we fail, even if we join the already fallen, our actions, taken together, will be the locus of a new fire, one that might spread through the generations. One of trust and hope, rather than hate and fear. Today could eventually become the new past that shapes a better tomorrow.”

Her soft voice faded out over the crowd and amongst the trees. The night bugs resumed whistling, softy at first, testing this strange intrusion into their habits. Molly watched the crowd as they turned to each other, whispers growing into murmurs as the twilight chirping swelled to its own chorus. Molly feared the solid stone of military formality had been cracked by their doubts, fear and rage seeping through the fractures. She feared the Callites would see more empty promises, more potential letdowns.

But the whisperings and murmurs didn’t grow any further. They didn’t rise with a mad hiss interspersed with shouts for violence. The hushed sputtering remained calm and grew calmer. The crowd seemed to be accepting—believing—or at least wanting to.

Saunders strolled up the ramp, his eyes sparkling with wetness as he glanced toward Molly and Anlyn. He took his place between the two girls, his poise and carriage several light years from the shocked pile of jelly he’d been earlier that afternoon. He looked out over the Callites and what remained of his fleet, his throat bobbing as he fished for his voice.

“For the Gloria,” he finally said, his words cracking with emotion.

“For the Gloria,” someone whispered.

“The Gloria,” Molly said.

The chant grew, finding its rhythm, gathering its voice even among the Callites, who had their own, smaller shuttle crashes to consider. These aliens rose alongside the meager survivors of a once-great ship, stirred by the cheer, all of them defying the silence of the night. They stood and shouted in the openness of that wooded clearing, daring the menacing fleet above with the audacity of their plans and with the power of their full-throated promises of war.

27 · Lok

After the stirring rally, the attack plans on the Darrin asteroid belts were reviewed for the final time. Squads were formed, gear equipped, rations portioned out. Molly busied herself among the fevered activity, helping where she could, her own mission to the StarCarrier lingering at a lower level of thought. She had no time to fear her involvement in the next day’s plans—she was too busy worrying over the impossible task she was about to send these poor, bedraggled survivors out to perform.

Perhaps, she wondered to herself, this was too much for any of them to absorb and process all at once. Most of the raiders had only a few hours training with the bizarre swords sent down from the Underground ships. The vast majority of the Navy pilots had never flown a real mission outside a simulator. And with their paltry numbers, they only had the crew and supplies for forty ships with an average of three crewmembers per ship—a minimum verging on unsafe.

Molly went over the plan in her head one more time, taking each stage individually to remind herself how doable might be the whole: Using the data from Parsona’s recent visit to Darrin, each squad would jump inside one of the asteroid bases, just on the other side of their force fields. Teams of three would then storm each weapons shop, commandeering any ships they might find. Once secured, the crews would jump out to the predetermined rendezvous point where they would lock up in pairs, moving Ryke’s engineers from one craft to another as they modified the hyperdrives. If any of the ships need more fusion fuel, or any of the crews needed medical attention, that would be taken care of at the same time. Meanwhile, the pilots could familiarize themselves with the ships’ controls and test the weapons systems.

They had set aside a full eight hours for the Darrin phase of the plan, with two hours reserved for the rendezvous and modifications, which meant—thanks to Ryke’s modifications to the drives—they would be back at Lok by local sunup. That should give Molly and her crew plenty of time to set up in the StarCarrier and begin bombarding the Bern command ship with teleported missiles.

Going through it slowly, it seemed almost too simple. However, as she watched Navy brass squeeze their bellies into combat armor, and Scottie show Callite civilians how to load firearms, the plan seemed destined to fail. Molly helped one of the crewmen secure a Velcro strap around the back of his armor, getting it as tight as possible; she then walked around Parsona to see how Ryke and Walter were coming with their “rift.”

“You guys about ready?” she asked, walking out to where they’d set up a few floodlights.

Walter nodded without looking up from his computer. He typed furiously, wires trailing from his handheld to a control console that had been jumped down from one of the Underground ships. The device had been one of the five originally meant for closing the rift on Lok. The Underground command was still waiting until the bulk of the Bern fleet moved off before risking a flight to the planet’s surface. They had sent the console reluctantly, seeing the distraction gained from the Darrin mission as a greater boon than the loss of one more backup platform.

The number-crunching for the jumps to Darrin would fall to Parsona, who had the SADAR data from their recent trip to that system in her memory banks. With the mass of the hundred and twenty or so crewmembers and their gear, they had more than enough fuel for the one-way jump with plenty left over for the missiles. All the fusion fuel Molly had longed for and bartered for, and had nearly used to jump to hyperspace, would go instead to this mission. The consequences of her decision, the reality of having fully made it, dawned on Molly for the first time as she watched Walter and Ryke work. This was the thing she had wrought, whatever happened next. This was her plan, with real lives at stake. This was what she had chosen to do, rather than rescue Cole and her father.

She suddenly felt pregnant with doubt.

Stepping past the console, she checked on the appearance of their fake “rift.” It was nothing more than a gap between two trees that had been smeared with the droppings of mooncrawls, giving the halo a pale glow. Molly found the getup ridiculous, but she figured it seemed ominous enough. Besides, once people started disappearing as they walked through the “rift,” there would be no doubts that it was working. And work it would, thanks to the jump platform sunk into the ground between the trees and the four insulated wires snaking from it to Parsona’s hyperdrive.

Molly saw Walter had covered the platform with leaves, even though he must know they would only be sitting there until the first jump. After that, she guessed everyone would be too nervous to see that they were passing over a flat, black pad on the ground.

Satisfied with her inspection, Molly turned back to the console. Ryke looked up from its display screen, his face lit with an eerie, green glow.

“It’ll be almost two in the morning Darrin local time when they arrive,” he told Molly.

“Perfect,” she said. Molly squeezed Walter’s shoulder. “Are you set?”

He nodded without looking up from his computer. Molly had given him a supervisory role of making sure the rate of escaped fuel was matching their projections—nothing he could cause trouble with but something that made him a part of the greater plan. Over the past day or two, perhaps ever since the StarCarrier incident, he had seemed overly eager to lend a helping hand. It was something Molly wanted to foster as much as she could.

Seeing that she wasn’t needed around the rift, Molly walked back toward her ship, steering for the small planning group that included Saunders, Anlyn, and several of his senior staff.

“How long?” Saunders asked as she approached.

“We can go at any time. We just need to get everyone lined up in the correct order so we know who we’re sending where.”

“Quite lucky to have one of these rifts so close,” Lieutenant Robinson said. Saunders’s chief of staff flashed Molly a friendly smile.

“No luck involved,” Molly told him. “That’s how my friends even knew this clearing was here. Besides, the rifts are everywhere, you just have to know how to look for them and how to open them up.”

The lies came out like honey, sweet and smooth. Molly felt an odd sense of déjà vu, remembering another time in a wooded clearing when she’d been shocked with the ease that lies could be told. The flash of recollection settled like particulates in water, arranging themselves in a thickening film. She suddenly remembered Cole lying to Orville on Glemot, how she’d barely known him back then—not as a civilian, anyway. She recalled how shocked and disgusted she’d felt, afraid even, of Cole’s ability to lie so well and so easily.

And now it’s a new power for me, she realized. Molly watched the staff members nod to one another; they seemed to think her explanation was the only rational one. Robinson continued to smile, obviously buying it as well.

“Well, I think we’re due a little luck,” Saunders said grimly.

The rest agreed with him while Anlyn pulled Molly to the side.

“Everything okay?” Molly asked.

Anlyn nodded. “Fine. People are actually going out of their way to be nice to me. I think they’re overcompensating a little.” A grave expression washed over Anlyn’s face, one that filled Molly with dread.

“What is it, Anlyn?”

“Edison and I switched assignments with group thirteen,” Anlyn said.

“But I thought you two were going to retrieve Lady Liberty.”

“I know. But then Edison and I got to thinking that it just made more sense this way. We’re both familiar with the layout of his base, and I know what kind of ship he would have replaced her with—”

Molly shook her head. “This is about revenge, isn’t it?”

Anlyn didn’t say anything. Her eyes didn’t waver from Molly’s.

“You’re even more familiar with Lady Liberty,” Molly pointed out. “I mean, you’ve flown her into combat a thousand times. And besides, there won’t be any fighting involved in picking her up. She’s right where we left her, and we can’t afford to lose either of you—”

“I’ll still command Lady for the flight here,” Anlyn told her. “We’ll transfer over when Edison goes to modify the hyperdrive.”

Molly ran her fingers through her hair. She looked up through the clearing at the stars overhead.

“And you’re right,” Anlyn whispered. “It is about revenge.”

Molly stared at her, agape. “You admit it?”

Anlyn nodded.

Molly turned away from her friend, disappointed by the decision. She watched the dozens of small squads as they formed up in a jagged line stretching from the console and back around her ship. In the glow of Parsona’s worklights, she could see flat hands zooming through imaginary space, dogfighting one another in mock battle as old lessons were dusted off and honed to something approximating sharpness.

Anlyn moved by her side; her tiny hand settled in the small of Molly’s back.

Molly started to voice her objection, but Anlyn interrupted.

“Look at them,” she said quietly.

Molly swallowed her thoughts. She watched as hands soared in mock battle and eyes were cast upward toward the fleet that had taken away the friends and family of those gathered.

“This whole mission is about revenge,” Molly said. “Isn’t it?”

Anlyn’s small hand moved from Molly’s back and went around to her side, squeezing her. Their bodies rested on one another as the two friends pulled themselves close.

“It is,” Anlyn said softly. “So let me have mine.”

28 · Three Jumps

Anlyn and Edison stood side by side, the only squad comprised of just two members. The argument had been that Edison counted twice, if not three times. And not just for his ferocious power, but for his navigation and engineering skills. With Anlyn’s abilities at the flight controls, the duo almost seemed like overkill.

Standing close to her fiancé, Anlyn could feel the warmth radiating off him. Edison kept scratching the back of one paw through his flight gloves, a habit she hadn’t seen of him before. It made her wonder if he might be more nervous than he was letting on.

Anlyn certainly was. She had briefed the groups earlier, after their weapons training, to let them know about the slight chance they might jump into empty hangar bays, and not to be alarmed. Darrin, she knew quite well, didn’t always operate on a steady schedule. It was more like an orbit of competing firehouses that were on watch at all hours of the day. The difference being: they were poised and ready to go out and start fires.

Anlyn had instructed them to proceed as planned if their asteroid was empty, to just move in and set up ambushes. In many ways, it might make for a smoother mission.

The line moved forward as another squad filed into the fake rift. The members of each group went in two seconds apart, just like when she, Edison, and Ryke had jumped down from the Bern ship to Parsona. As they shuffled forward, the nervous chatter in each group fell silent. Ryke, Walter, and Molly stood by the glowing control console to one side, overseeing the coordinates being fed into the platform.

There was another surge forward, and Anlyn could clearly see the groups ahead disappearing into a dark cleft between two glowing trees, a convincing illusion. Yet another surge, and then there was only one group left ahead of them. Ryke waved his arm, directing each member forward while Walter peered into his little computer, a sneer lit up from its dim glow. The coordinates were changed, and the group ahead moved into the rift one at a time.

Six seconds later, she and Edison were up. Ryke waved. Anlyn caught a darting glance from Walter and saw a worried smile on Molly’s face. Each image was a flash from her surroundings giving her a strobe-like consciousness of all that whirled around her. She gripped her pistol tightly with one hand and pulled her visor down with the other, just in case the garage was open when they arrived. Edison lumbered ahead and into the rift. A perfect shadow took him.

Anlyn counted:

One.

She whispered a call to the Horis for luck.

Two.

And she followed.

Admiral Saunders and his two highest ranking officers comprised the last group of three to step through the rift. Saunders remained skeptical about the mysterious object, even as the long queue ahead of him was swallowed up. He half expected to step between the trees and find his crewmen on the other side, stumbling around in the darkness.

But then it became his turn, and the one they called Doctor Ryke waved him forward. Saunders strode through the glowing gap—

Half a galaxy away, Saunders fell to Earth. He had just enough time in the air to feel a twinge of guilt for the nature of his arrival. He materialized a meter off the ground and landed with a squishy and awkward thud on top of Senator Kennedy’s grave. Along with his burning conscience for such a rude, albeit necessary, landing came a dozen internal stings from the rain his body absorbed out of the Washington sky. Becoming one with the droplets caused flaming sensations like heartburn, only in every part of his body: his arms, legs, and one in his head that felt like an ice-cream headache.

Saunders grimaced in pain as the air beside him popped, followed by a wet splash. He peered through the rain at Commander Sharee as she fell to her knees on top of Robert Kennedy’s grave, her face contorting in agony as she suffered the same internal burns. Lieutenant Robinson came in next, right on John Kennedy’s plot. Saunders’s second-in-command landed gracefully, a puddle splashing up around his Navy blacks, his face as stoic as ever.

Molly’s rift had worked. Defying everything he knew about interspace travel, the three Navy veterans had been magically whisked clear across the galaxy, back to the epicenter of their Naval Empire and the Galactic Union. Saunders’s tactical brain couldn’t help but think what a military boon such knowledge would bring. He had to force himself to remember the importance of his current mission, his brain whirling with potential uses for these rifts.

The three crewmembers checked in with one another, grim smiles on all their faces. They then trudged through the soggy grass toward one of the many twisting concrete paths, their boots and pants mud-splattered and their hair soaked. In a heavy silence, they marched up a wet walkway through Arlington National Cemetery, white tongues sticking up through the green hills all around them as if catching the rain.

Just as they had expected, the cemetery had been a perfect place for them to arrive. It was the nearest known coordinates to the GU’s capital where taboo could be relied upon to keep the air obstruction-free. Of course, Saunders was expecting plenty of other sorts of obstructions as their mission advanced. He and his two commanding officers might’ve been too old and unfit for the sort of combat the others would see, but they were well familiar with the bureaucratic dogfighting ahead of them.

As the trio stomped up the windy path, they headed for the kind of fight with which they were more familiar. Fights where desktops were their battlefields, words their weapons, intrigue and deception their tactics, and lives were lost by the billions, rather than the thousands.

Molly watched the final group step into the rift and fade into nothingness. The ensuing silence, the heavy emptiness pressing down on the wooded clearing, nearly smothered her. The past day had been a whirlwind of anxious thoughts, of competing chatter, of stomping boots and gun chambers clacking back and forth. There had been a constant chorus of Velcro being adjusted and readjusted… and now all that remained was a comparative silence, making the residual buzzing in her head all the louder. The severity of what their small group had begun, the mission on which she had just launched so many brave souls…

Molly shuddered and looked up through the canopy at the lights twinkling overhead. To try and crush that fleet with a group camped out in the woods seemed as likely as destroying a constellation of stars. The humming in her head continued. In the silence of the vast woods, she could begin to hear her doubts.

“I reckon that went well,” Ryke said. He flicked a series of switches on the console, and its displays faded to black.

“What’s the damage?” Molly asked, referring to their fuel supply.

“Only used up twenty percent of the tank. More than my calculations, but not by much. Each squad took more heavy gear than I would’ve liked.”

Cat came up to help lug the large control console back into Parsona. They only had a few hours to put everything away before flying to the StarCarrier and doing it all over again with the missiles.

“But we still have plenty of fuel for the fireworks?”

“You bet.”

Molly nodded and moved to collect the jump platform from between the trees, but Walter grabbed her arm before she could get there. She turned and saw his reflective skin glowing in the light of his portable computer. He looked up from its screen to face her.

“What is it?” Molly asked. Her Wadi flicked its tongue out at him, then scampered down her back and into one of the cargo pockets on her hip.

“The person in the computer needs you.” He pointed to his handheld device. Molly reached for it, but he pulled it away.

“Inside,” he said.

Shrugging, Molly went to collect the wires so she could spool them up on her way to the cargo bay.

“I’ll get that,” Walter said. “Ssee what your friend wantss.”

“Thanks,” Molly said. She rubbed Walter’s head with one hand, his newly-buzzed stubble scratching her palm. She had no idea what had gotten into him, but he had become incredibly helpful of late.

Molly hurried toward the ship, past Ryke and Cat. She kept one hand on the Wadi’s pocket to minimize its jouncing. When she got to the cargo ramp, she saw Scottie and Ryn arranging the climbing gear across the deck in preparation of their descent through the Carrier.

“You guys about ready?” Molly asked on her way to the cockpit.

“Getting there,” Ryn said.

Molly gave them a thumbs-up over her shoulder. Entering the cockpit, she made sure the speakers and mic were both switched on.

“Everything went well?” Parsona asked.

“From what we can tell, yeah. What’d you wanna see me about?”

“About?”

“You said you needed to speak to me.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, Walter said you wanted me in here.”

“That’s odd. I’m looking at my recollections right now, and I don’t see that exchange anywhere.”

“That is odd,” Molly said. She glanced over her shoulder as Cat and Ryke brought the control console inside.

“Maybe he’s just playing games with you,” Parsona said. “I saw him fooling around with those gruesome arms earlier. I really wish you’d get rid of—”

Molly missed the rest. She stomped through the cargo bay, her skin electric with the paranoia that Walter was up to no good. She swore, if he let her down one more time, she wouldn’t care how many jams he squeezed them out of—she would kill him with her bare hands.

Stepping into the night air, she tried to calm herself by taking a deep breath. She didn’t want to jump to conclusions. She felt the Wadi twirl in her pocket, trying to get comfortable, or maybe tumbling after its tail.

“Hey, Molly,” Walter yelled, calling her from the other side of the ship.

She ducked under the starboard wing and followed the black wires as they rounded the thrusters and headed off toward the imaginary rift. One of the worklights was still on; she could see Walter standing in its pool of photons, his skin reflecting much of it back her way. He stood there, as still as he could be, holding a bundle against his chest.

It looked like a lumpy towel. Some leaves and small twigs stuck to it as if it had been dropped. Molly stormed his direction, preparing to grill him for answers, when he spoke out, hissing:

“I wanna sshow you ssomething.”

Two more long strides, then Molly saw it: The way the leaves were piled up ahead of her—one corner of the jump platform sticking out—the wires doubling back along the ground.

She saw it, but it was too late. Her feet hit the platform, and Walter’s face flashed as he pressed something.

His computer screen winked to life.

And then Molly winked out of the woods.

29 · Darrin

The sensation of complete displacement rocked Anlyn’s senses.

Jumping through hyperspace in a ship was nothing. The cockpit remained the same, even the view from the canopy was normally no more than a jiggling of lights as stars jolted like startled insects. Earlier that day, she had jumped from one cargo bay to another, but even that couldn’t compare—the environs of one locale and the next were too similar.

With the jump to Darrin, however, her senses were totally rocked. The dark, cool forest exploded into light and heat. A fully-lit hangar popped into being around her. Air kept warm against the vacuum of space could be felt through her flightsuit. It was like waking too fast from a deep dream. Anlyn’s eyes struggled to adjust.

Crouched down in front of her, she saw a blurry Edison. His visor was up, his eyes blinking rapidly. She nodded to let him know she was okay.

Edison moved to the side, and Anlyn saw a looming wall of thruster cones beyond him. It was Albert’s new ship, a replacement for the one she’d stolen what seemed like forever ago. It had five thrusters, which she immediately pegged as one of the Darrin II designs. Not quite Lady Liberty, but then business probably wasn’t going so well since Anlyn’s emancipation.

She sized the ship up as she and Edison stole around it and toward the entrance to Albert’s shop. They moved quietly and swiftly, or as much of the former as Edison could muster while Anlyn pushed her limits on the latter.

The door to the shop was unlocked, which meant Edison didn’t need to use his sword to cut their way inside. The door slid back noiselessly and Edison took the lead. And not just because of his bulk and the power of the strange weapon he carried, but because he had actually spent more time freely exploring the asteroid’s corridors than Anlyn ever had. In a few days of being Albert’s guest, he had been given access to the arms dealer’s house in a manner never extended to his slave of so many years.

They passed through the lobby and opened the door to the living quarters, which squeaked as it recessed into the jam. Edison glanced back, and Anlyn thought she could see his flightsuit rippling with nervous fur underneath. He shrugged, and they moved forward through the dimly lit hallway, past the kitchen, leaving the kid’s rooms behind.

They headed directly for the master bedroom.

Albert woke with a start. Some noise—probably Luke rummaging in the kitchen—had disturbed his dreams. He listened to the sound of his wife breathing: deep, peaceful snuffles. He rolled over gently, pulled the covers up to his shoulder, and wiggled his face close to her hair to breathe in the calming scent of her shampoo.

Then the bedroom door opened, letting in a spill of light from the hallway. Must’ve been Jenni that woke him, having trouble sleeping again. With a deep sigh, Albert rolled to the other side, pulling back the comforter to let her in, resigned to an evening of no sleep, to another long night of bruised shins from her infernal, nocturnal, kicking—

The light in the hallway went out. Not out, exactly—it became blocked by something. Beneath Albert’s confused and sleepy surface thoughts, something triggered an alarm. Some part of him knew, from night after night of repetition, that the amount of light shielded didn’t match his little Jenni.

He reached for the lamp beside his bed, but the overhead light came on first.

And the thing from the hallway rumbled closer.

The plan was to be generous, to give Albert the quick death he had done nothing to deserve. One shot from Anlyn’s gun to the chest, another to the head, nothing said to his wife. No kids would be involved if it could be helped. They would grab the forcefield controls, get the ship, and make it to the rendezvous point. Quick and uncomplicated.

Edison did his part, bursting through the door, hitting the lights, making sure the room was secure, then getting to one side so she would have a clear shot.

But the barrier between her pistol’s plasma and Albert’s heart wasn’t a physical one. That wasn’t what stopped her. The real barrier, one she didn’t foresee needing to overcome, was some internal system linked between her brain and the tendons in her finger. It wouldn’t allow the latter to constrict. Anlyn took several steps forward, as if proximity would help her overcome the paralysis, but it just made things worse. She thought it would be easy, that the years of abuse, pain, and torture would steer her toward release, but the opposite was true. Albert’s power over her came trembling back, reminding her how meek and subservient she had been.

Albert’s eyes, meanwhile, grew wide as the terror of recognition coursed through him. His wife rolled over, one hand patting him, wanting to know why the light was on.

Albert remained speechless, but Gladys didn’t. She squinted at the intruders, gasped, then yelped and covered her mouth in surprise.

“You—” Albert muttered.

Anlyn’s hand quivered. It was the same hand that had pulled so many other triggers, reducing man and machine to dust. It was once a hand infamous for its ability to kill, all at Albert’s whim.

But she couldn’t. Even as she focused on the years of starvation, of subsisting on a Wadi diet of nothing but water, she couldn’t. Anlyn tried to feel the shackle around her withering ankle, tried to see Albert for all he had done to her, but all she saw was an old man in bed with his wife and two burglars standing over them.

Her hand slid down. The gun pointed away from Albert’s chest.

Albert’s arm moved beneath the blanket, a small mound creeping toward his waist.

The first to utter something was Edison, just a grunt of alarm. His hand moved swiftly as Anlyn screamed for Albert to hold still. Gladys yelled “Wait!” her white and wrinkled hand extended out over her husband, fingers splayed, body begging.

Edison roared.

He swung his arm down, whizzing past Anlyn. There was a loud pop, a surge of electricity in the air that Anlyn could feel through her flightsuit. Edison flew back, grunting, the scent of charred fur coming from somewhere.

Gladys got hit by the surge as well. She flew from the bed with a yelp, taking the blanket with her.

That left Albert at the epicenter of the discharge, unmoving at first, his body exposed. He wore a set of pajamas Anlyn knew well, and she recognized the shimmer of his personal forcefield all along them, the glisten of hardened air and energy just like the barrier that gated his hangar bay.

Albert’s hand rested on his belt, on the device that controlled the fields. His other hand moved up and down, patting his stomach, almost as if looking for something he’d misplaced. He tried to sit up—and a strange groan leaked out of his lungs.

He collapsed back into his pillow.

Something in the air caught Anlyn’s attention. She saw it as Gladys began whimpering and sobbing. It was the handle of Edison’s sword, hovering in mid-air, the end of it pointing directly at Albert. Following the tip, Anlyn focused on Albert again and saw where he was patting himself. She watched blood ooze from a crack in his form and gather behind the shimmer along his body, pooling up inside the forcefield that was doing more to hold Albert together than it was to protect him.

Edison reached over the bed and pushed Albert’s trembling hands away. He deactivated the device on Albert’s waist. When the forcefield released his buckblade, the handle fell to the ground. Edison and Anlyn both jumped back from it, lest the invisible sword do something effortless and awful. On the other side of the bed, Gladys’s soft whimpers grew to wails as the thin line seeping blood around her husband’s waist opened like a purse.

Her wails blossomed to shrieks, then to mad screams. Gladys reached for her husband, ignoring Edison as he removed the device from Albert’s waist. She grabbed one of Albert’s hands and pulled it to her cheek, but the movement just made things worse.

Albert’s body yawned wide, spilling things. The mad screams turned to gagging noises and pants for air, to nausea and hyperventilation, to the sounds of primal fear and disgust.

Anlyn had hardly moved through it all. She watched in detached confusion, the gun in her hand still pointing somewhere between Albert and the floor.

“Vacate with haste,” Edison said, reaching down to scoop up his blade and turn it off.

“I—”

“We have to go,” he said in Drenard, pulling her toward the door.

Anlyn felt herself dragged back, away from the terrible scene, away from Albert’s wide and motionless eyes staring up at the ceiling. Terrifying shrieks and accusations lanced at her as she stumbled back, shuffling and transfixed and trying to come to her senses.

It only got worse in the hallway, where they ran into the kids. Luke and Jenni stumbled out of their rooms with sleepy eyes and frightened mouths to see what was wrong with their mother.

Edison shouldered them aside. Anlyn followed in his wake, the look on both of the kids’ faces seared into her memory as sudden recognition seized them, their young brains putting together the horrific sounds from the bedroom with the unexpected presence of their father’s former slave, running free.

Anlyn hurried after Edison. A dozen words of regret and apology choked up inside her, all crammed in her throat as they tried to swim past the labored gasps of air heading the other direction.

Out in the hangar bay, Edison found the ship unlocked, just as they’d expected. Not needing to cut their way inside meant they could finally remove their helmets. Anlyn popped hers off as she made her way to the cockpit. She finally managed to swallow down a gulp of air, her first in what felt like forever.

Edison brought up the ramp and got ready to lower the forcefield while Anlyn settled into the pilot’s seat, her body still quivering, her mind continuing to race over what had just happened.

Then she thought on what lay ahead of them, the mission to return to Lok and face the Bern, and she settled on an awful truth:

This had been the easy part.

30 · Lok

“Molly? Walter?”

Cat swept the portable spotlight across the edge of the clearing, looking for any sign of them. She’d found the jump platform where one of them had dropped it halfway back to the ship, but she could find no trace of where they’d gone to afterward. She played the light across the trees one more time, throwing shadows deep into the woods, then powered it down to save the battery. Returning to the platform, she disconnected the four wires and carried it back to the ship to share her lack of results with the others.

“Nothing?” Scottie asked.

Cat shook her head.

“Were they—?” Ryn made a rude gesture with his hands, which Cat broke up with a slap from hers.

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“How’dya know?” Scottie asked.

“Because we’ve had girl talks,” Cat said.

That was too much for the boys. They roared with laughter.

“You—” Scottie snorted. “Girl talks?”

More guffaws from both of them.

“You guys are assholes. I’m worried about our friends, and all you—”

“Hey, Cripple!”

Cat turned to see Ryke standing in the entrance of the cockpit. He waved her over with one hand, his other one tugging on his white beard. He was the only person who could, in some magical manner, call her “Cripple” in a way that sounded nice.

“Where’d you go?” she asked Ryke. “I thought you were gonna help me look for them.”

“I was. I mean, I am. Or I did.” He stepped to the side and ushered Cat into the pilot’s seat.

“There has to be some kind of mistake,” Parsona said through the radio.

Ryke waved Parsona off as if she could see him. He pointed to the SADAR screen in front of Cat.

“What is this?” Cat asked. “Signature traces?” She dialed out the range and got rid of two of the overlays. The controls were similar to ships she had run, but with way too many options and readouts for her to see past.

“Two jumps,” Ryke said, pointing. “Here and here. Both less than forty kilos. Both to roughly the same spot.”

“Is that a moon?”

“It’s that big ship up there.”

“Do what? Why would Molly jump there? I don’t understand.”

“She wouldn’t,” Parsona said.

Cat turned to Ryke. “Did you know about this? How did you think to look here?”

He gestured to the screen. “Because this is where I always look for people.” He said it with a hurt tone. “And plus, there was something about that boy—”

“You don’t trust him either?”

“I don’t know about that, only… he said we had twenty percent of our fuel in captivity.” Ryke held up his small reader. “I show nineteen point nine two eight.”

“So he rounded up?”

Ryke looked at her as if she’d gone mad, or had struck him with a physical blow. “You think he’s the sort to do that?” The whiskers above his lip flapped with a disgusted puff of breath.

Cat rolled her eyes. “Oh, gimme a break.”

“Molly hinted to me many times that Walter couldn’t be fully trusted,” Parsona told them.

“When was this?” Cat asked.

“Let me check our prior conversations… Forty seven times over the past four and a half weeks. Most recently, yesterday at eight thirty two. Another time earlier that morning at—”

“Okay, I get it,” Cat said. She looked to Ryke. “So, how do you read this?”

He leaned forward. “Two objects, less than forty kilos each—”

“No, not that. I mean, do you think the Palan is working for the Bern? Did he make a mistake? Is he looking for adventure, what?”

“Oh. Hmm. Hadn’t thought about that. I was just excited to have found them.”

“That’s not finding them.” Cat jabbed a finger at the SADAR. “That’s locating where they used to be!”

“What in the world is going on in here?” Scottie asked, squeezing into the back of the cockpit.

“More girl talk?” Ryn hollered from the galley, followed by snorts of laughter.

“Shut it,” Scottie told him. He turned to Cat, all the levity drained from his face at the sight of her. “What’s going on, Cat?”

“Molly’s gone.”

Ryke tapped the SADAR. “Jumped into orbit,” he said.

“Do what?”

Ryn squeezed in behind Scottie. “Who’s gone where?”

“Why would she do that?” Scottie asked.

“She wouldn’t,” Parsona said again. “She’s been abducted.”

“So what do we do?” Cat asked the others.

“We need to tell the Underground,” Ryke said.

“And what? Have them put out a missing persons report?”

“No, but they have all our translators. They can at least keep an ear out. Besides, they need to know she’s in that big ship.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Ryn said.

“I’ll be damned,” said Cat. “Don’t you start on—”

“No, he’s right,” Scottie said. “How many hours before the pilots jump back? At dawn, right? If that monster is still in the sky, and if the Navy geeks are right that it’s what sent them crashing down, then we need to get to the StarCarrier’s missiles—”

“Flank that,” Cat said.

“Cat, be reasonable for just a second. We need to—”

“You wanna send bombs in after her? You wanna blow up the thing she just jumped into? Flank you, Scottie.”

Everyone fell quiet. Old friends looked down at each other’s boots.

“I’m sorry,” Cat whispered. “It’s just—”

“No, I’m sorry, too,” Scottie said. “But we started a war tonight, Cat. We’ve all been here before. Hell, you especially. And look, we’re friends and all, but we knew the chances going into this, right? We know what happens to friends in war—”

“Yeah,” said Cat, finishing his thought for him. “Friends die.”

31 · Near Darrin

The hijacked ships jumped into the rendezvous point near Darrin, one after another. Each successful arrival was celebrated, and they held out hope for the others. But after three hours, the gathering fleet realized two of the crews wouldn’t be joining them. There weren’t any reliable reports to explain what went wrong, but one of the squads saw an asteroid base explode as they were leaving the system, which accounted for one group. Anlyn gave the other missing group as much time as she could while the rest of the ships locked up, swapped engineers, made modifications to the drives, tended to small wounds, and distributed the fuel and supplies evenly.

The newly trained mechanics moved from one engine room to another, following Ryke’s wiring schematics and uploading the new firmware he’d provided. They were short one Callite engineer, who had been in a group gone missing, which meant extra work for Edison. Anlyn ferried him from one ship to another while his dexterous claws made quick work of the modifications. She looked for any sign of trauma in him, any hint that he had been affected by Albert’s death the way she had, but it was either missing or very well hidden.

The third ship they locked up to in their queue of modifications was Lady Liberty, which had been retrieved from its hidden orbit deep within Darrin II’s asteroid belt. As Anlyn and Edison switched ships with the crew, she noted a hint of guilty relief from the others at having gotten the safer assignment. Little was said between the two groups as they filed past each other in the cramped airlocks.

Anlyn hadn’t expected it, but walking through Lady’s cargo bay and entering the cockpit felt nearly as bad as her first flight in that Bern craft, back at the Great Rift so many seeming sleeps ago. Gone were the slave chain and the eyebolt that had held her for so many years, removed by Edison prior to Molly’s and Cole’s trip to Earth. But everything else was intimately familiar: the controls and readouts, the screens and portholes, all the walls of her old prison that somehow seemed to contain an entire other life she’d known. It was like walking back into some prior existence that had been stolen, that she could never get back, even after the death of the man who had taken it from her.

As she settled into the worn seat, Anlyn was thankful for the task of locking with more ships while Edison performed modifications on the remaining hyperdrives. She needed to do something rote with her body while her mind scrambled for purchase. Looking down at her hands, how they trembled so, Anlyn couldn’t imagine going into battle in such a state, much less attempting to lead so many others. The sudden lack of confidence was unsettling. For countless years, she had flown into combat knowing she would win, and she had been able to do so almost on autopilot. She had formed a habit of warfare in order to avoid punishment and pain. She had fought without caring, and so fought without fear—without fear of failure.

As she went over the weapons systems, each powerful device a trophy from her days as the best customer-wrangler in either Darrin, she confronted the awful taste of preparing herself for a different kind of fight: A fight she cared deeply about. A fight she would be crushed to lose.

The difference was light years apart.

“Gloria leader, wing two.”

Anlyn snapped out of her cold thoughts and keyed the radio on her helmet. “Wing two—” Her words came out as whispers; she swallowed and tried to find her voice. “Wing two, go ahead.”

“Requesting permission to assume command of one of wing three’s ships,” the pilot said. “The two missing flight crews were both in our wing, leaving us with eight.”

Anlyn hesitated. She didn’t know any of the pilots and only knew what a few of their ships were armed with. As skilled as she had been in a cockpit, she had always flown into battle solo, never with even so much as a wingman. Her stomach sank; she could feel the back of her neck thrum as her heart raced and pounded.

Molly was meant to do this, she realized. My thirst for revenge has cursed everything. This has all been a mistake.

Lady Liberty seemed to do a barrel roll as her mind reeled. She even wondered if she’d upset the prophecy somehow. She was no Human, just a Drenard. Did that mean anything?

“Gloria leader?”

Anlyn keyed her mic. “Uh, negative wing two. I’m transferring two of my squadron to you. Wings two through four will go in with a full complement of ten. All wing leaders copy?”

“Four copy.”

“Three copy. And we have just one drive left to modify over here.”

“Wing two, here.”

“Two, go ahead.”

“Gloria leader, that leaves you with just eight ships.”

“Copy that,” Anlyn said.

She silently wished she could give up even more.

“We could just as easily argue about this on our way to the Carrier,” Scottie told the others. “We need to get a move-on before the fleet from Darrin gets back and finds that big ship still up there.”

Ryn grunted. “Hell, they can argue about it all they want. We’ll be climbing down to the armory.”

Ryke stared up at the ceiling and scratched the thick, white tangle of beard below his chin.

“What’s on your mind, doc?”

“Nothing. Just… theoreticals.”

“Well let’s hear ’em,” said Cat.

“It doesn’t apply, sorry. It’s just a problem Arthur and I were working on. This would’ve been one of its uses if we’d ever gotten it to work.”

Cat took a step closer. “Do I have to throttle it out of you?”

Ryke shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand half of it. Besides, it ain’t workable.”

A look from Cat, and he held up his hands, preparing to explain.

Scottie and Ryn must’ve seen the look as well—they stopped their impatient shuffling and crossed their arms, hugging themselves still.

“We were working on a way to bring people back from raids instead of using the skimmers.” Ryke turned to Cat, who had been on her fair share of raids in hyperspace. “We had just lost another lad due to a frozen locator, so we started thinking outside the box in a big way. The idea we came up with was to create a small rift, like the kind I made back in my house, the very kind the Bern are using now—”

“What, and you would just step through that rift and grab someone from the other side?”

“Theoretically. Problem is, we never figured out how to make a rift that isn’t grounded to hyperspace on one side, but not the other. When one object is scurryin’ about—like the surface of Lok for instance—you can compute the blasted equations and link up between here and hyperspace. But between two moving objects, like Lok and that ship up there, it just can’t be done. It’s like in physics, going from a two body solution to a three body—” Ryke frowned and narrowed his eyes. He rubbed his whiskers. “See? I’m losing ya, right?”

“Well, what was your idea, then?”

“It’s useless, really. The idea was you could open a rift from your location to hyperspace, jump someone to the other point and have them open a rift to the same spot in hyperspace.” Ryke meshed his fingers together. “Basically, you would try and sandwich the two rifts together, allowing you to step right through.”

“Like the two rifts we used in your house that one time?”

Ryke nodded. “Only, the rifts would be far apart over here and near together in hyperspace, the opposite of what we did back then.”

Cat ran her hands up over her face. “But you’d need a console on both sides, right?”

Ryke nodded.

“So this helps us none.”

“That’s what I tried to tell you!”

Ryke scanned their faces. There was no sound in the cockpit for a long while. He scratched his beard.

“We need to try something,” Parsona said, her voice cutting through the tense silence.

“I know,” said Cat.

“But what?” Ryn asked, shrugging. “Wouldn’t Molly just want us to continue on? I mean, this was her plan.”

“I know what we need to do,” Cat said.

Everyone turned to her.

“You guys need to go ahead to the Carrier. Take out as many ships as you can with the missiles. Try to wound the big ship, maybe send some bombs up, but away from where Molly jumped.”

“And what’re you gonna do?” Ryn asked.

“You guys are gonna send me up first. Right now. With the platform.”

“Where?” Scottie asked. “To that big ass ship? You want us to send you up after them?”

Cat nodded. “A meter or two from their coordinates, to the side and up.” She turned to Ryke. “I’ll radio back her condition and coordinates. Maybe it’ll be something you can use.”

“No,” Ryke said. “No way. It won’t do any good, and we’ll just be tossing your life after hers. Besides, you’re the only one of us who can fly this ship, so even if you have a death wish, you aren’t as expendable as you like to pretend.”

“Actually,” Parsona said, “that’s not true.”

The gathering looked toward the dash, as if meeting the ship’s gaze.

“What’s not true?” Scottie asked.

“That Cat’s not expendable?” Ryn laughed.

“No, that Cat’s the only person here who can fly me,” Parsona said.

“I can.”

32 · Final Betrayal

Molly stomped toward Walter in the black of wooded night, preparing to grill him for why he’d lied about her mom needing her—and then the world vanished in a flash of light. She suddenly found herself floating, her legs pedaling for the forest floor, but finding nothing but air.

Bright air.

Her brain rebelled from the jarring assault, from the sudden and drastic change in environment. Her vision seemed off; the pungent odor of the forrest was gone; even the feeling of the cool and damp air on her skin had gone away. Her every sense lurched, groping for what wasn’t there, recoiling away from the new things that were.

And then that discombobulated instant, that frozen moment of unfeeling confusion, was shattered as Molly’s toe caught steel decking. Her knee crashed down, her palms smacking cold steel, her body sprawling clumsily after.

The air went out of her lungs. Molly rolled over, clutching her knee, a small cluster of dried leaves crackling at her back. Her startled Wadi bolted out of its pocket-cave and shook its head, its scent tongue whipping through the air.

Above her own groans, Molly heard a muted pop of air followed by the thud of another body crashing into steel. Lifting her head and squinting in a harsh light her nighttime eyes had not yet adjusted to, she saw another form through a glass partition:

Walter.

Molly sat up, her head still spinning from the jarring relocation. She cupped one hand above her eyes, shielding them from the overhead lights while they adjusted. Three walls of glass and one of steel surrounded her. Walter looked at her through one of the clear walls; he was in an adjoining holding cell of sorts. By his side he held a towel with a thin arm—one of Byrne’s arms. With the other, he slapped at his prison walls, his complexion shiny with confusion.

“What have you done?” Molly yelled at him through the glass.

He seemed as clueless as she. He glanced around himself as if he expected to see something or someone. Then his face lit up; he patted frantically at his flightsuit, reached into one pocket, and extracted a red bit of fabric.

Molly rocked back on the balls of her feet and fell onto her butt. Her mind reeled. She watched Walter through the glass as he lined the seam up in back, pulling the band into place. His brow furrowed in a mask of concentration, of thoughts forced to the surface. It was a look Molly remembered well from their time on Drenard. But nothing else about her predicament made sense. The Wadi turned circles in her lap, obviously agitated. Molly turned to the hallway beyond one of the glass walls. Sensors and cameras twitched on extended arms, their eyes winking with red lights. She wasn’t sure if it was the cameras or Walter’s thoughts that brought them, but their hosts didn’t take long to arrive.

Four uniformed men strolled into view, weapons lolling in hip holsters. They lined up along the hallway and stood frozen as statues.

Through the transparent cubes stretching off beside her, Molly could see a fifth figure walking their way. He was a stick of a man, and his long strides seemed a bit… off. It took Molly a moment to realize it wasn’t his legs that made the gait seem strange: it was the lack of swinging arms.

He marched past Molly’s cell without even looking her way. He nodded toward the glass wall before Walter.

Two of the uniformed men moved forward. One of them waved his hand in the air, which caused the partition to lift into the ceiling. Walter seemed relieved. He brushed imaginary dirt off his flightsuit as if removing the embarrassing stain of having been unfairly incarcerated.

His smug expression melted, however, as the guards seized him. They produced a set of restraints—metal bands with a silver cord between them—and clasped them on Walter’s frantic wrists. They then pulled him into the hallway.

Molly could hear him hissing in frustration through the thick glass partitions. She watched as one of the guards bent and retrieved Byrne’s arm. He rummaged around in the towel and extracted the other, then turned to the former owner of the arms, smiling, and Molly realized where she was. She was with the Bern, up in their fleet. The fact registered without making sense.

Byrne nodded to the man holding his arms. He jerked his chin to the side, and Molly watched intently, wondering if they were going to reattach the things right there, if he was going to torture her with them once again, if her destiny was to be choked to death by those hands and somehow she had teased fate or delayed it.

But the guard didn’t even pause by Byrne. He ran urgently past Molly’s cell and on down the hall, as if those arms would save someone’s life if they arrived and were transplanted in time.

One guard was left holding Walter by his restraints. Two others came for Molly. The glass wall slid up, and they entered her cell brandishing another set of the metallic cuffs. Byrne stood behind and between them, helping form a wall. Molly backed up against the steel panel behind her, feeling her body tingle with the urge to fight, to claw and lash out, to scream and kick, to die in that box rather than be taken anywhere. A million ways to move surged through her at once, all the lessons she’d learned at the Academy, the new things Cat had taught her, all of it cancelling each other out.

She stood—frozen and bewildered—as they reached for her. The only thing she was aware of was the Wadi, which had returned to its cave in her hip pocket. She could feel it in there, vibrating and unable to act—just like her.

The only other thing spinning through her mind was this latest act of duplicity from someone she thought was her friend. That was the true paralyzing force, the thing that made it impossible to move, to resist the guards as they reached for her. It was the powerful shock brought on by this betrayal, this final betrayal perpetrated by the infernal Palan known simply as—

Walter Hommul.