Molly Fyde and the Land of Light

29

Dani pulled the vehicle to a stop at the edge of the government district. Edison lumbered out of the back seat, and Anlyn followed. As she stepped to the sidewalk and approached the passenger door, the window slid open.

“Be careful in there,” Dani said, leaning over from his seat to catch her eye.

“I will be,” she said.

Dani glanced at Edison, then his lance. “Don’t use that unless you win the vote, and only outside. The spectacle will be just as important for our cause as the politics; otherwise, the vote won’t stick.”

Edison nodded.

“We need to go,” Anlyn told them both. She pulled Edison toward the crowded walkway as Dani waved, then merged back into the traffic. The couple marched swiftly as the crowd parted to either side, the confused jumble of foot traffic becoming ordered and sedate ahead of them.

The crowd morphed into two walls of Drenards, all of whom gawked at the couple as they strode through the heart of the government district. Part of the treatment could be attributed to the royal regalia Anlyn wore, signifying herself as the next in line to the throne.

Her large companion explained the rest.

“Use English when you’re conferring with me,” she told Edison. “Few of the Circle Members are fluent.”

“Understood,” Edison replied. “My Drenard vocabulary lacks finesse.”

Anlyn reached up and put her hand in his. “Nonsense. I’ve never seen anyone pick up a language so fast. I just hope you don’t overlearn it the way you have English.”

“My understanding of that last is non-optimal.”

Anlyn squeezed one of his large fingers. “Exactly. Now, remember the rules. Most votes are controlled by kicking members out on technicalities. Any slip-up and our voices won’t be heard.”

“My familiarity with such gatherings contains both accuracy and precision. Glemot Councils operated in parallel fashion.”

“Okay, here we go…”

They passed under the Clockwise Gate and into the Apex, the arbitrarily chosen “top” of the Drenard home planet. With all the important, habitable land arranged in a ring, locations were given by distance from the top, which is where the Circle met. One direction away from the Apex translated best as “clockwise” into English, but “spinward” would also work. The other direction was “counterclockwise.”

Not only did land value plummet according to distance from the Apex, even elements of Drenard psychology could be accurately measured in the manner residents of the upper ring looked— metaphorically, of course—down on those that lived and worked throughout the lower half of the ring. Clockwise residents even argued with counterclockwise folk, as if the direction around the ring were somehow any less arbitrary than the chosen top and bottom of the planet.

Once one place had been chosen as special, of course, subsequent improvements had surely made it so. While most of the great ringed city around Drenard stayed in perpetual twilight, a cone of reflected and filtered sunlight bathed the massive circle that made up the Apex.

It was one of the few places on Drenard where flora grew in the open, unshielded by glass. Acres of gardens spread here in a complex of labyrinths, all protected by a high exterior wall to shield out the persistent wind, but otherwise uncovered. The wall itself was webbed in colorful ivy that weaved around and up the barrier, popping with blooms that shivered up high where vortexes of wind dipped into the gardens.

Anlyn strolled through the gate, taking in the familiar sights, breathing the old smells. It took her a few nostalgia-filled moments to realize Edison was no longer beside her.

She turned and saw him back by the gate, his head turning from side to side as he absorbed the marvel of the Apex gardens, the small trees, the flowers, the patches of green grass. He had both arms raised, the light of the twin stars shimmering on his fur. Anlyn’s chest heaved with pride for her home, but then she caught the movement along Edison’s arms, the waving fur she recognized at once for sadness.

“Burn me,” she cursed, hurrying back to him. “I should’ve warned you.”

He looked at her, his eyes bright with moisture. “I’m within tolerances,” he said. “Mere recollections of home.”

She took his hand again. “I’m sorry, love, just concentrate on the path.”

“Negative. Observing remains important.”

She nodded and guided him along. Together, they strolled over extravagant pathways of real wood, none of the less expensive marble used elsewhere. Anlyn tried to distract him by pointing to the Pinnacle, the building resting in the center of the large park.

“That’s where the Circle meets,” she said.

“Stupendously unassuming,” Edison growled.

“To you, maybe. But this is one of the shortest buildings on Drenard, a rare luxury.”

Edison swept a paw across the view, the top edge of the building just visible as it stretched across a good portion of the gardens. “Massive, nonetheless,” he pointed out.

“It’s wide, yeah. Another decadent waste. We could feed or house a lot of people here… don’t get me started. Oh, and when we get to the top of the steps, let me do the talking. There’ll be a lot of guards on the balcony and none of this crowd. Go ahead and hold your lance, just keep the tip like I showed you.”

Edison unclipped the strap that held his modified lance to his back and moved it into his hand. He kept the weapon vertical, tip-down, and tucked next to his hip.

The modifications he’d made had been a romantic gesture, a gift for their looming wedding ceremony, but when Dani saw a demonstration, he insisted they bring it along. If everything went their way, they would use it to seal their victory, making the celebration legendary and less likely to be overturned.

As they wound their way toward the center of the Apex, Anlyn noticed most of the crowd was flowing in the same direction. Word of the meeting had already spread, as had the rumors of multiple deaths in the royal line. The entire planet buzzed with uncommon energy, a wild force that could be shunted toward war or peace, and it was up to Anlyn and Edison to make sure it went toward the latter.

The couple ignored the attention they got from the crowd and just followed the walkway as it snaked through the gardens. They went past small ponds full of floating flowers, through a fake canyon where manufactured Wadi holes leaked miniature waterfalls, then through the dragonmoth plantings, where various colorful plants swarmed with the bright, silvery insects.

Eventually, the path wound back toward the Pinnacle where a wide set of wooden steps awaited beyond the mingling and surging crowds. A sizable group of Drenard youth stood clustered near the bottom of the steps, listening to an adult speak. When the guide spotted Anlyn and her tunics, he directed the group’s attention their way and launched into an excited spiel on royal finery.

“Ignore them,” Anlyn told Edison. She pulled him through the crowd and up the steps, taking the first few too quickly before remembering her station—and trying to forget her youth. She bent forward slightly, grabbed her outer tunics with both hands, and concentrated on walking with perfect grace.

The tall steps leading up to the balcony made it difficult; they were designed by male workers for male strides. Beside her, Edison’s problem continued to be walking slow enough to not get too far ahead. She marveled again at the irony: when she fled Drenard, she dreamed of falling for a more sensibly sized alien. A human, even, though that idea likely came from her desire to perturb her uncles.

No matter: whether by dumb luck or DNA, she’d ended up engaged to a man almost as big as her last fiancée.

The ruminations ended as she reached the top of the flight of worn steps and saw an entire battalion of the royal guard awaiting them.

The guards stood, neatly arranged in the sunlight, their number quadrupled exclusively for her and her partner. The commander stepped forward in his deep blue tunic; Anlyn didn’t recognize him, but she could read everything in his layers and the way his heavily decorated lance nearly drug on the ground. His posture communicated respect, but she knew better.

“Lady Hooo, the Circle is in session. Your distinguished presence really is not required.” His hand rose, urging her to turn away.

“Step aside,” Anlyn said, sweeping her arm to indicate the side she’d prefer. Her voice was cool, but her eyes were aflame.

The guard stood firm, possibly out of stark terror. His eyes had moved to Edison, darting up and down his tunics, obviously just now realizing they both outranked him. Edison moved forward, and Anlyn could see his fur rippling with the anticipation of danger.

“Step aside,” Edison repeated in Drenard. “That’s an order.”

If the guard’s legs were shaking, the tunic hid his embarrassment. He bowed and slid out of the way, waving his hand at the other guards. Anlyn wondered how long Bodi had hoped these clowns would delay her and whether the shock of hearing Edison speak fluent Drenard had done the trick.

As the guards shuffled aside, like a sea of blue parting down the middle, they revealed the Pinnacle beyond: squat, round, and wide. Anlyn moved toward the old building, glancing up at the twin shafts of light streaking down to the center of its low roof.

To either side, the Great Balcony stretched off, wrapping the entire Pinnacle with a wooden platform around which Circle members could walk and confer. Anlyn had been there several times with her father, but she never dreamed she’d return one day as a member, however temporary that status.

Ahead of her, the reflected sunlight from the orbital mirrors ended in a crisp line, and the perfect shade of the eclipsing disc began. The gardens were given the luxury of natural light, but it wouldn’t do for the Circle to indulge. For that reason, the Pinnacle remained cloaked in darkness, a round slab of metal high up in orbit shielding it from the light. Anlyn sucked in a deep breath of warm Drenard atmosphere before stepping across the artificial terminator.

Edison followed, struggling to not overtake her as they moved toward the old Pinnacle doors, supposedly cut from the last living tree on old Drenard. When the two guards to either side moved to pull them open, Anlyn waved them off.

She needed to do this herself.

Reaching up, she grabbed the ornate handles on the old doors, each one standing not quite three meters tall. Male Drenards, to exaggerate their bulk, often made a show of bowing as they entered.

Especially those that had plenty of clearance.

Anlyn threw the wooden antiques open and took a step forward. She held her head high, remaining erect, despite how utterly small and insignificant she felt.

“Contacts on SADAR,” Parsona said.

Molly glanced up at the security cam as she limped through the cargo bay. Mom. The reminder of her failure on Dakura hit her hard. Nothing had been learned; her mother’s old memories had not been taken care of. And now they’d never be allowed back.

“Navy!” Cole yelled. Molly hurried to the cockpit to find him leaning forward from her chair, Walter in his. She rested her hand on the back of the seat, the spot’s emptiness reminding her of the Wadi locked in her stateroom. So many concerns swirled in her mind at once that she couldn’t see any of them clearly.

“Let me have that seat, Walter.”

He unbuckled himself and jumped out, his eyes fixed on the sight of the large ship that had jumped in-system.

Molly peered through the carboglass. “That’s a StarCarrier,” she murmured, awed. She’d never seen one in person. It lay out in the L1 between the moon and Dakura, but its blocky outline was instantly recognizable.

She took over control of the ship with her left hand and nosed around for the back of the moon. “They probably won’t even notice we’re here,” she said. “We’ll get on the other side and thrust out to clear space—”

“GN-290 Parsona, KML32, this is GN Naval Command Task Force Zebra KPR98. Maintain altitude and respond, over.”

“Damn. Not good,” Cole muttered.

Molly increased thrust. She’d developed a small habit of running whenever anyone said “freeze.”

A second voice came through the radio: “Molly, this is Admiral Saunders from the Academy. We’re prepping to jump Firehawks to the other side of the moon. Do not spin up your hyperdrive. If you do, I’m going to send every missile in our fleet down your tailpipes. Reduce thrust this instant or become a fireworks display. Your choice.”

Molly took in the SADAR and nav charts. Several new contacts popped up in the free space she’d planned on escaping to. Her brain whirled, looking for an idea.

“This isn’t good,” Cole said again.

“Mollie… I don’t think we have a choice.” It was her mother’s voice. In many ways, more familiar and real than the one she’d just spent hours with—

“We could jump blindly,” Molly suggested.

Cole opened his mouth to protest, but it was Parsona that vetoed the idea first. “Absolutely not, Mollie Fyde. Don’t you dare. It would jeopardize everything.”

“As will being caught!” she countered.

“Who iss that talking?” Walter asked.

“The radio,” Cole lied. “You might wanna go strap in, buddy.”

Walter nodded and ran back to his seat.

“Molly, Admiral Saunders. We’re firing missiles in five seconds. Reduce thrust and maintain altitude.”

Molly thought about the last time she’d seen Saunders, just a few weeks ago. He’d been a Captain, then, and doubled over from a blow between the legs. Lucin, his boss, lay slumped over a desk, dead. She had a hunch the missiles weren’t an empty threat.

She keyed the microphone. “Reducing thrust,” she said, pulling back to hold her current altitude.

“What’s the plan?” Cole asked.

“I don’t have one,” she admitted.

“You had better encrypt me if you guys are planning on getting caught,” Parsona suggested. “If anyone searches the computer while I’m active, they’ll see this isn’t nav data, and your father went through a lot of effort to hide me from the Navy.”

Molly looked at Cole. “I guess the plan is to be caught,” she groaned.

“Thank you for complying, Parsona,” the first voice said. “Hold position and prepare to enter hangar bay four.”

“Roger. Hangar bay four,” she radioed back to the Navy. She flipped off the mic and turned to Cole. “Get the Wadi plenty of food and water. Enough for a few weeks. Put it in the lazarrette under one of the thruster panels. Make sure the door’s sealed to keep the atmosphere in there.”

“It’s in your quarters?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure it won’t bite me?”

“I’m sure. While you’re in there, grab the two red bands in the top drawer of my dresser. Hide them with the Wadi.”

“Gotcha.”

“Oh, and tell Walter to go along with whatever happens and to keep his mouth shut.”

“With pleasure.”

Cole shook himself out of the tall spacesuit and headed back to lecture Walter. Molly pulled up the nav screen and sighed.

“Tell me what I need to do to encrypt you,” she said to her ship.

To her mother.

The balcony inside the Pinnacle stood thick with spectators, far more than Anlyn could remember in any of her childhood visits. She and Edison pushed through them, out onto the clockwise landing that overlooked the gathered Circle members below. A low murmur rippled through the crowded seats, and heads—even those around the Circle—turned to survey the source of the distraction.

Anlyn led Edison down the flight of steps between the rows of seated onlookers. Below lay the large circular table around which the council manipulated an entire empire. Anlyn noted grimly that several seats stood empty, draped with white mourning cloths. She forced herself to look straight ahead, ignoring the legion of onlookers filling the seats to either side of the aisle and stretching out through the darkness all the way around the Pinnacle.

The timing of their arrival, she saw, couldn’t have been better. Bodi stood in the bright light that shone down within the circle, the table before his empty seat illuminated by a second shaft of harsh rays, signifying his turn to speak. She nodded to her former fiancé, baiting him, as she walked around the back of the Circle members and approached one of the empty seats.

“Anlyn,” Bodi murmured, a hint of false surprise in his voice. He stood in full Royal regalia, some layers of which he hadn’t actually earned, only borrowed thanks to their supposed engagement.

Several members turned to him before looking back to Anlyn, following her with curious gazes. She took her place behind Bedder’s empty seat, and waited while a council page hurried forward, confused, to remove the mourning cloths.

Anlyn rested her hands on the high back of the stone chair, the old petrified tree cool to the touch. Her eyes traveled up from the empty seat to meet Bodi’s. “I am assuming Bedder Dooo’s position within the Circle.” She turned slowly to sweep the words across the entire gathering. Edison took his place beside her at Muder Dooo’s chair. The page hesitated, not sure what to do.

Bodi broke the tense silence from the Light of Speak: “Lady Hooo, you have been through much these past few months—”

“And I have learned much from these ordeals.” The words contained a coo of sarcasm. Anlyn tilted her head slightly and used a wry smile to punctuate her bitterness. Everyone present knew full well Anlyn had fled Drenard to get away from Bodi. And his role in the recent ambush on her and her friends was assumed by all present.

Bodi smiled back at her, defusing the barb by pretending her warmness contained sincerity. “One of your high measure must also know that war planning is a lowly endeavor. Beneath your station and—”

Anlyn interrupted again, ignoring the Center of Speak and causing expensive tunics to shift uneasily. “Nonsense,” she said. “The fate of our empire means more to me as a result of my position.”

Bodi switched tactics. “Then perhaps I may appeal to your fairer sex and caution against getting dirt on—”

“Counselors.” Anlyn looked at each of the dozen or more members. “I will—”

“You violate the Center of Speak!”

It was Tottor, the Navy Counselor, a distant cousin of Anlyn’s. He’d won his high post over several other candidates whose Wadi were larger in every way—but those counselors did not have Royal blood within them.

Anlyn turned to address his outburst. “No, Counselor, it is you who violates the Center of Speak.” Tunics fluttered at this. “When I entered the Circle, as is my right, I was addressed by Lord Thooo, who holds the Center. This conversation is his choosing, and it is over when he says it is over.”

Anlyn turned back to Bodi while Totter seethed, his blue skin purpling with rage. Several members of the Circle who had won their posts due to merit attempted to cover their panting chuckles.

“Lord Thooo,” Anlyn continued, “you call my gender to attention in an attempt to discredit me while pretending to honor me.” All eyes turned to her again at this accusation. Anlyn once more addressed the entire room. “Many sun cycles ago—long before the threat we face today ever made itself known—female Drenards not only served on the War Circle, they served in the General Assembly and on every Planetary Board—”

“Enough,” said Bodi, both palms held up to Anlyn.

Anlyn took this to mean that he had no further complaints. She stepped around and climbed up in her seat, kneeling on her shins to rest her arms comfortably on the male-sized table. She turned to Edison and gestured to the empty chair beside her. The pup nodded solemnly as the page hurriedly swiped away the mourning cloth. Edison held up his lance, as he’d been taught, and laid it lengthwise across the table.

Bodi complained immediately. “That is Lord Muder’s chair. Your pet will not be allowed—”

“Lord Edison Campton is my betrothed. He is not my pet, and I am no longer yours,” Anlyn laced her words with cold venom. “Lord Muder is the second uncle I have lost this week, and his widow has granted Lord Campton—”

“Lord?” snorted Bodi.

Anlyn smiled. “Ninth degree, Lord Thooo. And as you are an eighth-degree Lord, you will not be permitted to use his first name unless he permits it, a protocol I’m sure I need not remind you of again, lest you desire to leave these proceedings.”

Bodi purpled at this. The entire Circle could surely see the hem of his tunics vibrating with frustration. “No alien, Lady Hooo, has ever—”

Anlyn cut him off again, each jab to her ex-fiancé’s ego like a blow to a fighter’s belly, sapping his endurance. “Lord Campton is a Drenard. If such a thing may be measured, he is more a Drenard than you. He will be my husband. He has been given this seat by Widow Muder. He will go before the election board during the next cycle to retain his seat.”

“With all respect, Lady Hooo, his seat holds the Chair of Alien Relations, how will a nonlinguist—”

Anlyn smiled as Edison rose to respond. She spread her pale blue hands across the ancient table, its ten-meter diameter cut from a single petrified tree, the largest ever found on the cold side of Drenard. She rubbed the polished grain and watched each Counselor’s reaction as Edison spoke.

“Distinguished Counselors,” he said in a perfect Drenard coo, “the subject being discussed from the Center is my qualifications as Lord Muder’s replacement.” He swept his face across the circle, wide teeth flashing. “While my dialect has the lilt of upper Drenard, a result of my association with Anlyn,” he stressed her common name as he met Bodi’s gaze, a brilliant blow, “it might interest you to know that my race has a long history of rapid language acquisition. I am fluent in English, and I am already conversational in Bern.”

Bodi seemed more stunned than the rest to see him speaking—with the accent of Drenard royalty, no less. The full implications of this creature’s presence on the Circle appeared to finally settle through his thick skull. With Edison’s status as Anlyn’s betrothed, and the recent death of two members of the royal family, Bodi was looking at a potential Drenard king!

Anlyn saw him sway forward as it sank in, ready to pass out, or perhaps considering a mad rush to kill his rival with bare hands.

Were he not so blasted timorous, Anlyn thought, he’d surely attempt himself what others failed to do in cowardly ambush.

Bodi glared at Edison. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped, closing it. Anlyn hoped it wouldn’t be the last time she tripped him up; one misstep on either side could result in expulsion.

“I call for a formal Vote of Protest—” Bodi began, his voice shaking.

“Bodi—,” Edison began, cutting him off once more, but this time in a blatant breach of protocol. Anlyn spun in her seat to warn him, fearing all would be lost.

“—I would like to issue a Citation for violating the Light of Turn.”

The Circle grumbled, dozens of spectators in the packed house panting with laughter. All heads turned to the second shaft of light being reflected through the hole in the roof. Eight minutes ago, those photons had left Hori II, Drenard’s smaller sun. They travelled through space—across millions of kilometers of vacuum—before reaching a series of occluding disks stationed in orbit. Those clockwork orbital machinations continually shifted, directing the narrow shafts of light down through the windy Drenard atmosphere, piercing the roof of the Pinnacle. One shaft remained stationary in the center, where all speeches of importance must be made. The other shaft slowly orbited the surface of the giant, petrified tree, indicating whose turn it was to speak.

Everyone in attendance—thousands of Drenards—focused on that spot of illuminated marble.

The Light of Turn no longer stood before Bodi’s empty seat; it now rested before Lord Mede. He rose, purple with so many eyes turning his way, and nodded apologetically at Bodi.

“I forgive the transgression,” he said meekly.

Anlyn let out her held breath and settled back against her seat. In the Center of Speak, on the symbolic highest point of the planet Drenard, Lord Bodi Yooo shivered with rage. Otherwise, he did not budge. His eyes focused on Edison.

His imagination concocted murder.

30

Molly surveyed her prison cell aboard the Navy StarCarrier. Due to a spate of recent events, she’d begun to consider herself somewhat a connoisseur of incarceration.

With its riveted metal plating, functioning sink with hot and cold water, flushable toilet, and padded double bunks, she gave it three stars. It couldn’t match the filth and squalor on Palan—and it lacked the extra, decadent touches of a Drenard prison. In a Navy known for operating along one extreme or the other, she’d discovered the one thing they do in moderation: lock people up.

In a strategy right out of the Navy manual of torture techniques, her captors had left her alone for an hour. The idea was to marinate a prisoner’s brain in their own guilt to prepare them for the grilling ahead. Molly knew all about the tactic, but that didn’t prevent it from working. She had a lot to feel bad about: the Wadi locked up in the laz, just waiting to be discovered; the multiple failures on Dakura; the fact that she was no closer to discovering what her parents had been up to on Lok; and the utter lack of progress on helping rescue her father.

She felt positive that whatever Lucin thought could end the war, was somehow connected to her parents, but she couldn’t see it. And now she’d be court-martialed and airlocked for what had happened at the Academy, dead before she could unravel the mystery.

As the hour of guilt wrapped up, she half expected Saunders himself to arrive and begin the softening process, but her first visitor in Navy black didn’t fit the profile. Too thin. The mysterious figure strode by the bars slowly, his fingers rapping against the cold steel.

Molly remained seated but leaned forward as the face centered itself between two bars.

“Riggs?”

“Hello, Fyde.”

She couldn’t believe it. Riggs had been one of her classmates at the Academy. He and Cole took turns flying as each other’s wingman. He had graduated early during Lucin’s cover-up of the Tchung Affair, and Molly had never found out where he’d been stationed. Now she knew: he’d been assigned to Saunders. She rose from her bunk and approached the bars.

Riggs took two steps back.

“Gods, Riggs. It is you!”

“Don’t try anything.” He looked at her warily. “I shouldn’t even be down here, I—I just had to see for myself.”

“See what? Riggs, this is just a misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding?” His face contorted with rage. “You killed Lucin! You armed your spaceship, a spaceship you stole from the Navy, and I heard about your fight with Delta Patrol—”

“That wasn’t a fight! We ran away!”

“So you don’t deny the other stuff?”

Molly could see tears filming over Riggs’s eyes.

“Lucin was about to kill me!” she said. “And I didn’t steal that ship, it’s mine!”

Riggs shook his head. He backed up and leaned on the wall across from her cell. “Not anymore,” he said. “And they’re getting everything from your little alien friend. You and Cole are gonna be tried as traitors.”

“Who—?”

“The Drenards, Molly? Are you serious?”

Molly cursed under her breath, “Walter, you flanker.” She saw Riggs’s body stiffen and feared he might take her anger as a confession. “It’s not like that, Riggs. We had a Drenard friend that needed—”

“You have Drenard friends?” He shook his head and crossed his arms. “I used to stick up for you. I treated you like a little sister. Me and Cole. I don’t know what you did to him, but you aren’t gonna sweet talk me into buying your bull. Ha! I guess I’m safe ’cause I always saw you as a sister.”

“Riggs, I—”

“Save it for Saunders,” he said. “We all know you killed Lucin, and we know how you left Saunders behind. You’re just lucky the CO made sure the boarding party was full of the oldest marines, the people who don’t understand what you did; otherwise, you probably wouldn’t have made it to this cell alive.” He leaned forward, the tears on his cheeks caught in the light overhead. “I can’t promise you I wouldn’t have joined in,” he added.

With that, Riggs spun away from the wall and marched out of sight.

Molly clung to the bars, speechless.

They gave her another hour to steep. Molly couldn’t help but admire the plan. Even if the Navy had nothing on any of them, she knew they were all receiving the same line from their grillers: your friends are flipping, and he who flips last gets burned worst.

She also knew the best course of action was to think about something else, but it was impossible not to focus on the very thing she concentrated on avoiding. And she knew Walter. She had little doubt the traitorous bastard was spilling his guts. It wouldn’t be the first time he turned them in to the Navy expecting some sort of reward.

Molly looked up through the bars and pictured Riggs leaning on the far wall, his arms folded, his eyes down. It was crazy how young he’d looked. He shouldn’t even be out of the Academy. Neither should she nor Cole, for that matter. They were all little, nubile pawns staggering around a board that Lucin had set up and left unfinished.

She tried to mentally study that board, to determine which opening he’d used and which gambits to ignore. Once again, his tragic death at Cole’s hands haunted her. The only person who could help her understand what was going on had been murdered—adding one more unpardonable deed to her growing list of sins.

She sat on the edge of her bunk, gazing down at the long, straight shadows the bars cast across the floor. It occurred to her once again that jail cells provided her with her only opportunities to calmly sit and ponder her mistakes.

How fitting.

A wide shadow slid over the lines at her feet, interrupting her thoughts. She didn’t need to look up to know who it was.

“Admiral, huh?”

She meant it as small talk, a compliment, even. It came out snide and rude.

“Interrogation room B,” he barked to someone else.

Molly looked over, but he was gone. Two guards in Navy black had taken his place. The bars of her cell descended into the floor, and the two men came at her with cruel smiles.

Rumors of her exploits had likely thinned the herd of people who could be trusted to handle her. They cinched the cuffs behind her back and wrenched them up high as they marched her down the hall. Molly walked on her toes, grunting from the pain in her shoulders, but that just brought sniffles of laughter—and the guy holding the cuffs responded by pulling them up higher.

Just like being back at the Academy, she thought, only these are larger and stronger boys.

Interrogation room B consisted of a metal-plated box broken up by a door on one wall and a mirror on an adjoining one. A metal table in the center had been welded to the floor, as had the wide benches on both sides. A precaution, Molly knew, in the event of gravity malfunctions. The guards cuffed Molly to one of the benches, nodded to the mirror, then walked out.

Saunders entered soon after with a reader and a glass of water. He slid his bulk between the table and the bench, took a sip of the water, then set it down with a clack of glass on metal. He stared at the reader for a moment before setting it aside.

Molly watched the condensation on the surface of the glass drip down, forming a ring of wetness around the base. The entire scene was so cliché, so much like every Navy drama on holovid, it was all she could do not to laugh. Just thinking about how awful and crazy she would seem if she did break out in a giggle-fit made it even harder to contain.

“You keep interesting company, Ms. Fyde.” Saunders leaned forward, both his forearms resting on the table in front of him, his fingers interlocked into one meaty fist.

“I’m sorry,” Molly told him. She looked him right in the eyes. “I’m sorry for attacking you that day.”

Saunders smirked. “Oh? But not sorry for killing my friend, eh?” He grabbed the reader for a reference. “Are you sorry for Corporal Timothy Reed? Or Special Agent David Rowling? Or how about Staff Sergeant Jim McCleary? Aren’t sorry about any of them?”

“Are those the guys from Palan?” Molly asked.

“The men you killed, yeah.”

“I am very sorry for them. And I’m sorry for Lucin. But they were all in self-defense. You were the exception. You were the only person I attacked in anger, and I’m sorry—”

“I don’t want your apology, Fyde. I’m actually glad you attacked me. I was going to spend the rest of my life at that Academy. I would have been happy, sure, but I turned down dozens of promotions out of love for that place. I needed a kick in the ass to get me out here fighting the good fight.”

Molly was dying to point out that it wasn’t a kick in the ass that she’d given him. Her desire to laugh returned—she swallowed it down, afraid she might be losing her senses.

“What about the fourth guy on Palan?” she asked. “Was he okay?”

Saunders looked at the reader again. “Agent Simmons? No, we know who killed him. Not that it’s going to save your butt. We’ve got more than enough to jettison you into space. I’m just here to make sure we have it all.”

That wasn’t the person Molly was thinking about, but she ignored the discrepancy.

“I’ll answer everything honestly, Captain—I’m sorry, Admiral. I’ve been hunting for answers for over a month, and you’re welcome to the few I’ve found.”

He smiled at this. “You sound as eager as your Palan friend. Boy had so much to say, we couldn’t get it down fast enough. Horrible English with that kid. Turns out he is a fast typist, though. We put him in front of a computer, and the lad is writing a book on what you guys’ve been up to.” Saunders set down the reader. “Now I want to hear it from you.”

Been up to? Molly wondered how much Walter knew of the disaster on Glemot and just what kind of trouble he could really get them in.

As if they could airlock her twice.

“What do you want to hear?” she asked Saunders. She tensed up, afraid of his answer.

But, as it turned out, not quite afraid enough…

Saunders smiled at her and unclasped his hands.

“Why don’t we start with who we’re talking to on your ship’s nav computer.”

31

“I’m sorry?” Molly licked her lips and eyed the glass of water, but her hands were locked behind her back and fastened to the bench. She pictured a long straw extending from the vessel, ushering fluid into her dry mouth.

“Our computer guys found something in your nav computer. They think it might be an AI, or some sort of complex logic tree. It claims to be your mother, and of course, she thinks that our guys are you. Did you steal her off Dakura just now?”

“Yes,” Molly lied.

“I thought you were going to tell me the truth, Fyde. I have to say, I’m disappointed. Lying to me on the very first question. We’ve been talking to Dakura Security. They assure us that such a theft is not possible and that nothing in a standard ship could host one of their AIs. So. Who is she?”

“My mom.”

“How’s that possible?”

“I don’t know. She said she was a copy from when they originally admitted her into Dakura years ago.”

“You want to tell me why you killed your mother on Dakura?”

“What?” Molly furrowed her brow, confused.

“Your friend Walter confessed to doing it, but he said it was your plan. We just want to know why. Why kill your own mother? Or is there no reasoning behind your madness?”

“I didn’t know she was dead,” Molly said somberly. Her dry mouth suddenly felt full of saliva. She felt sure she’d vomit if she tried to swallow it, but had no choice. Her stomach twisted up in knots thinking about her mom, happily birthing and mothering little Mollies just a handful of hours ago—and now gone.

If any of it turned out to be true.

“Well, now,” Saunders said, leaning away from the table. “I would expect you to be a bit more enthused to find out your attack was successful. Or are you just upset at getting caught?”

“I didn’t want to kill her.” Molly looked down at the desk as another layer of blackness heaped on top of her miseries. Each was like a smothering blanket, except they just made her more cold.

“Let’s come back to that. I want to touch on a few things during this session to help steer the next one. We have several jumps before Earth, so you and I will have plenty of time to drill down to details.” Molly glanced up, saw his chubby face break into a smile. She looked back down as he asked the next question:

“How did you get recruited into the Drenard Underground?”

“The what?”

“I’m getting sick of that as an answer, Fyde. The Drenard Underground. Your parents were members. Lucin’s reports claim they infiltrated the group as double agents, but it’s looking like they were actually taken in by these sympathizers. Now, you visit Drenard and take part in some kind of ceremony, get inducted as an honorary Drenard. Afterwards, you set out to cover up any evidence left behind by your parents. I’m slowly piecing together what they were doing on Lok; I just want to know what sort of nasty business you’re getting tied up in.”

“I’ve never heard of the Drenard Underground,” Molly said. She looked up at Saunders, a half-truth giving her a sense of dignity. But the other part of her knew she’d just sat in front of a simulated fire in one of their headquarters, chatting and having tea with her mother, one version of which spoke Drenard.

“Is your father still on Drenard? Is he working for them?”

“I don’t know where my father is.”

Saunders leaned forward. “Just so you know how this is working, Fyde, the cameras behind that mirror, and the microphones over your head, are all keeping track of your lies. We’ve already established that you’re unwilling to be truthful with us, created a baseline. What we’re looking for now are the things you withhold. The things you think are important.” He spread his fat fingers, his hands folding out like an open book. “The things you don’t tell us are worse than your lies.” He lifted one arm and tapped his temple. “The eggheads behind that mirror are telling me right now that the more you’re aware of this inability to fool us, the more power we have.”

He smiled with how clever he was, his cheeks folding down over the corners of his mouth. “Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to let you return to your cell and think about what you’re doing here. You’re a traitor to the human race; you’re aiding our enemy and leaving behind a long trail of dead and wounded, including the man who loved you and trusted you the most. You will be killed for these crimes, Fyde. I promise you that. It’s a done deal. You and Cole both. It might help if you just consider yourself already dead.

“Imagine it for a second: imagine you’re in whatever special hell they reserve for Drenard lovers. Now, someone gives you a chance to come clean. To give information that will help our cause. Help your race. Wouldn’t you love to come back and give that information? Confess everything? Do a bit of good with your life?

“I know this Underground business isn’t you. I know you’re just a hurt teenage girl, messed up because your mother and father abandoned you and you washed out of the Academy. You aren’t brainwashed the way they were—you’re just confused. I know this. You know this.”

He stood up. “Go sit in your cell and think about what I’ve said. Think about where your lies and actions have gotten you so far. Think about the people you’ve hurt. And why have you done these things? For a dream of continuing something your parents started? What if what they were doing was wrong? Have you thought about that? Or do you just trust them because they birthed you on some backwoods planet and disappeared? How much do you know them? I think you should dwell on that as well.”

Saunders left the room, waving at the mirror as he went by. The two guards entered soon after he disappeared; they undid her cuffs from the bench and hauled her back to her cell.

Molly tried to see herself through their eyes as they handled her roughly:

Traitor.

Whipped dog.

Beaten.

She could feel it in her own flat, shuffling steps, and the way her toes never left the decking. She knew how it looked, knew it made it easier for them to pull her hands up high behind her, inflicting as much pain as they could.

She couldn’t really blame them.

Not long after the guards left, having shoved her face into her bunk while they uncuffed her hands, Molly had another visitor. She expected Riggs, or someone else from the Academy, but she was surprised to see Saunders’s bulk looming through the bars.

“That’s what you call giving me time to think?” she asked, still rubbing the circulation back into her wrists.

“Get over here, Fyde.”

She pushed herself up and went to the bars.

“That was the speech they’ll record and analyze. This is the one between just you and me. I’ve already established your propensity for lying, so good luck trying to get anyone to believe your side of what I’m about to say.”

“Look, Admiral—”

“Can it, Fyde. Listen. I’m going to make a career off the mistakes you’re making. I’m going to win medals for cleaning up the mess your parents made and that you’re now smearing across the galaxy. But I meant every word of my speech back there. You can do some good with the little amount of life you have left, before you crash and burn in spectacular fashion. And before you start thinking on these things, I want you to know how I found out about your parents and their work on Lok. The official version is some miraculous sleuthing on my part—enough to skip a few ranks and get Zebra command—but I want you to know what really happened. Just so you realize what you’re up against. How good my intel is.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Lucin told me everything.”

“What?”

“Everything.” His smile faded, jowls collapsing. “I held him as he died in his office. He was spitting up blood and spilling his guts, and not just those that you and Cole blasted out of him. He told me about the special assignment your parents were on. About the Drenard Underground. About what I would find on your ship if I looked hard enough. He told me everything.”

“Saunders, listen. Whatever he said—”

“Let me guess, it was a lie? I think we’ve sorted out the liars from the heroes without your help. I’ll take a dying man’s word over a traitor trying to save her ass any day of the week.”

Saunders stood as straight as he could, tugging down on his black jacket. “I’m telling you this so you can keep Lucin’s last words on your mind as you think about what you need to do. The words he sputtered with his very last breath. He didn’t ask me to tell his wife that he loved her. He didn’t leave any inspiring words for the Academy or anything for him to be remembered by. He used them on you.

“‘Save her,’ he told me. ‘Save her.’ I think he meant for me to save your soul. Rescue you from yourself. It’s going to be up to you on whether or not you made that great man waste his final breath. Did a galactic hero perish worrying about a soul that couldn’t be redeemed? Or was his hope for you justified?

“So, while you’re in here scheming on how to fool me, think on that. You think on whether you want to keep secrets or if you should just tell me what you know.”

He turned and stomped off down the hall, leaving her with her befuddled thoughts.

What did she know?

She knew Walter was a dead Palan if she ever got her hands on him, that was one thing she felt absolutely certain of. She now knew the Drenard Underground existed and that her parents had investigated them on Lok, maybe even gotten involved with them. There was a slim chance her father was a Drenard by rite, if her “mother” could be trusted. But what if Saunders and the Navy had it wrong about the Drenards? It was something she’d been dwelling on since meeting Anlyn. What if the war was some kind of massive misunderstanding? The Drenards had seemed no more prone to kill her or assist her than any other race had, humans included. What if they—meaning every race in the galaxy—were just terrified, confused, and lashing out?

What else did she know? She knew she could trust Cole. There was no point in questioning him. Even if she ended up wrong about him, she wouldn’t mind if that mistake got her killed. She’d likely welcome it with open arms, as she nearly did the last time she doubted him.

What about Lucin? He lied to her and used her. Would he really have lied to Saunders as he died? What would be the point? And what if Saunders had made up that entire scene?

Molly thought about the Navy men sitting in her pilot seat right then, chatting away on the nav keyboard and pretending to be her. What would her mother be telling them? Surely nothing more than she’d been willing to divulge already. And why wouldn’t she see them on the camera? Or overhear their conversations? It didn’t make sense, unless her mom was playing them for fools.

Then again, if it was something her mother knew, why would Navy cryptographers have to ask her? That knowledge would be stored as 1s and 0s on the nav computer. They could just take the info.

What about her other mom? Was she really dead? Would that explain the intense bout of white light and noise she’d endured on Dakura?

She lay back on her bunk and looked up at the underside of the sagging mattress above. What should she do? Carry these mistakes to her grave? Hope her father could rescue himself? Hope her mom would get whatever sensitive information she had to the right people?

And what about the Wadi? Molly rubbed her temples. The thing never even got a name. What would they do when they found an unknown species onboard her ship? Would they dissect her?

Then there was Cole. He would be killed, and for what? For helping her? For falling in love with her? He said on Drenard he wasn’t afraid of his own death, but Molly was plenty afraid for him.

Maybe Saunders was right. Maybe all of this was her fault and she just needed to throw her chips in with the Navy. Every misadventure had been predicated on her absolute faith in two parents she hardly knew. Was it okay to love and trust people completely for no other reason than they birthed you?

And then there was Byrne. Molly had almost forgotten about him. Was he dead? She watched him stand there in a complete vacuum. Could you fit robotics that complicated in such a thin shell? Whether or not he survived, what did he have to do with all this? Why did he suggest he owned her?

Molly grabbed the rough pillow under her head and pressed it into her face. She used it to muffle a yell of frustration, her stomach clenching with the effort.

The screams gradually turned to sobs, her entire body giving in to the overwhelming sadness.

She pulled the pillow tighter to her face, smothering her despair and desperation.

32

Molly was wide awake when they came for her. Her brain had never stopped racing through the same loop of questions, so she was fully alert right when she should have been sleeping. As soon as she heard the footsteps approaching, she rolled from her bunk and moved to the shadows on the other side of her dimly lit cell. If this was an attempt on her life by zealous crew members, she would go out fighting.

Two silhouettes strode into view, the silver bars dividing their profiles into black slices.

“This the one?” It was barely a whisper, nearly inaudible. Molly shrank back into the corner, hid behind the pedestal sink, and pressed herself into the wall. One of the men seemed to fumble for something in his pocket; the other silhouette lurked behind. The figure closer to the bars murmured into a device, and the barrier slid into the floor.

The crew members were coming for her.

The larger man went straight for her bunk, putting his back to Molly. She flinched, thinking of rushing the man from behind, maybe trying to snap his neck. Then she thought of the bars, the man in the hallway, and the fact that she’d still be trapped inside. She rushed for him instead, pushing off the wall with her foot.

The dark figure by the bunk spun as she flew by, reaching for her. The one outside her cell had leaned against the far wall. He seemed shocked, unable to even raise his hands in defense as Molly hurled her entire body into his stomach, driving the air out of him in the form of a grunt. He crumpled in the dimly lit hall, his hands still clasped in front. Molly spun with clenched fists to fight the man coming out of her cell.

The dark figure hissed her name, walking toward her with his hands spread out. Molly stayed in a crouch, one hand holding down the man she’d already taken out. She tried to calm her breathing as she prepared to defend herself.

The tall figure emerged from her cell and called to his comrade. “Riggs? You okay?”

Molly looked down. A pale, familiar face glowered back up at hers. She recognized the rage as well as the man. Black tape covered his mouth, a detail Molly couldn’t process properly. Her hand, pressing down on his shoulder, moved up to his neck. She looked to the standing figure and threw out her terms: “Another step and I crush his windpipe.”

“Please don’t,” the other man whispered. “We need him if we’re gonna get out of here.”

Molly loosened her grip on Riggs’s neck and looked down at him again. He was trying to reach up to fight her hands away, but his own were tied together and strapped to his belt.

She looked up once more as the other figure came forward another few steps, his hands still wide apart. She squinted into the simulated nighttime of the StarCarrier’s hallway, his face coming forward into the pale light.

The first thing she recognized was the flash of his wary smile.

“Cole?”

He offered her a hand while pressing a finger to his lips. Molly reached out and grabbed his arm, squeezing it and fighting the urge to pull herself into him.

She looked back at Riggs, and at her empty cell. Somehow they’d gone from prisoners to captors. Her brain reeled as she attempted to rearrange her tactics.

“What’s going on?” she asked him, halfway heeding his gesture of silence by keeping her voice at a whisper.

Cole knelt beside her and glanced at Riggs, making sure he was okay. “We’re getting out of here. Let’s lift him up.”

They each grabbed one arm and hauled Riggs to his feet. As Riggs pulled his legs underneath him, Molly noticed the laces of his black Navy boots had been tied together. He could walk, but running would be hazardous.

“Is he helping us?” Molly asked. The disgusted and angry look on Riggs’s face hadn’t wavered from his visit the day before.

“Yeah,” Cole whispered, “but not because he wants to. We need to get off this hall, and then we can talk about it.”

Molly looked over her shoulder, back toward the guard station beyond a distant partition. Black security camera warts lined the ceiling, but Cole didn’t seem concerned about them. After they passed through a series of open gates, Cole reached back into a pocket and withdrew a small shiny device. It looked like a Navy-issue communicator.

“Seal the hall,” he said, and the gates behind them slid shut. Cole straightened as they did so and several lines of worry disappeared from his forehead. Molly watched this with interest, frowning at the creases that remained.

“Can we talk now?” she whispered.

“Yeah, but we need to keep walking.” He indicated a direction through the wide engineering space. “This way.”

Molly helped pull Riggs along, glancing over her shoulder to assure herself that they weren’t being pursued. “How’d you get out?”

“Walter.”

“What? That little bastard—”

“Forget it. I thought the same thing when they questioned me and I heard what he was doing. I should’ve known when they said he needed to spill his guts on a computer. The sneaky little—”

“Oh, gods,” Molly groaned. “They let him on a computer. I’m so stupid. I was ready to kill him—I felt like a fool for trusting him again.”

Cole laughed at this. “We probably are fools for trusting him.”

“How’d he do it?” Molly knew it wasn’t important; they could go over the story later, but her curiosity gnawed at her.

“He’s got access to almost everything. My old buddy Riggs here came by my cell to gloat earlier this evening. He was jawing at me through the bars when they receded into the floor. I had no idea it was coming, I just wrestled him down and tied him up with his own laces. Meanwhile, Walter started hissing at me through his radio, giving me instructions and guiding me with the cameras.” Cole looked up at one of the warts for emphasis.

“He opened a supply closet for me, got me these duds, guided me to you.” Cole pointed to an open lift, and they led Riggs inside. The light shone brighter in the small space; Molly could see Riggs’s nostrils flaring as he fought to breathe through his nose.

“How does Walter plan on getting us out of here?”

Cole laughed and shook his head. “He doesn’t. He got me out, and I’ve been planning the rest. Hell, I’m not sure he woulda busted me out had he known how good a wrestler you are.”

Cole flipped open the communicator again. “Down, please.” The doors closed, and the lift vibrated into motion. He let Riggs lean against the far wall and turned to Molly. “Every guard between us and the cargo bay has been routed off-duty. Walter scheduled Riggs’s Firehawk for a fleet patrol. He and I are gonna tow you and Parsona out of the hangar bay.”

“Just like that?”

Cole smiled. “Just like that. You know, they pulled me off pilot training and taught me comms and navigation. It was supposed to be a demotion. You wanna know the truth?”

The elevator beeped its arrival and the doors hissed open, allowing the rhetorical question to float out into the vast hangar bay. Cole pushed Riggs ahead of them and winked at Molly.

“The person scheduling the guards is the one with real power.”

33

Molly could see Parsona’s profile standing above the sleeker Firehawks. She, Cole, and Riggs angled in the ship’s direction, walking down the wide landing strip at the center of the hangar. The vast cavern bulged with metal shapes, but no crewmen. It appeared they’d be strolling out of here as casually as they liked.

Something about that filled Molly with unease. She had grown accustomed to nothing coming easily or without great cost. This felt like one of those gifts she’d pay dearly for later.

Riggs tried to make things interesting once by pulling away from Cole and stumbling for a few steps. His laces, however, made large strides impossible, and Cole caught up to him quickly, preventing Riggs from hurting himself in a fall to the metal decking.

“Stop that!” he told Riggs in a tone that suggested several earlier attempts.

Molly hurried to resume her spot by one of his arms. A dozen steps further, Cole led them close to a Firehawk. Molly looked up and saw Riggs’s name stenciled below the cockpit as the captain of the ship. “Marcelli” was listed as the navigator.

Walter sat on the decking by the Firehawk—leaning over a portable computer. Wires trailed from his screen up to an access hatch on the side of the ship. He beamed when he saw her.

“Molly!” He stood and ran over, throwing his small arms around her waist. She patted his back and thanked him—quite a departure from what she’d previously been planning if she ever saw him again.

He smiled up at her. “Almosst ready,” he hissed.

“Did you disable the Firehawk’s weapons systems?” Cole asked, indicating the wires tethering his computer to the craft.

Walter sneered. “Among other thingss,” the boy said cryptically.

Cole shrugged. “Great. How long before we can go?”

“Almosst ready,” he repeated.

“I’m gonna need help getting Riggs in the cockpit,” Cole told Molly. Riggs shook his head at this and tried yelling inside of his own mouth, his cheeks puffing out.

“What’re we gonna do with him? Why not leave him here?”

“Two reasons: I really don’t wanna add Firehawk theft to my rapidly expanding criminal resume, so he’ll be needed to fly the thing back. And, unless you want to locate his auth chip and cut it out of him, we’re gonna need his full presence in the Firehawk to tow Parsona out. Hold him for a sec.”

Molly held Riggs’s arm. Her old friend’s eyes locked onto hers and flashed with raw malice. Cole grabbed a nearby boarding platform and rolled the steps over to line up with the cockpit.

“You don’t think Walter could bypass the auth code?” Molly asked.

“I didn’t ask. Okay, here’s the plan: once we get clear of the fleet, you’ll power up Parsona. By the time she shows up on the Navy’s SADAR, it’ll be too late. We’ll jump both ships to a rendezvous point where I’ll shut the Firehawk down, pop the cockpit, and push off to you. You pick me up, and we’ll jump out of there long before Riggs can reboot the ship or the Navy can trace the exit point of our jump signature. Easy as pie.”

Molly shook her head. “I don’t like it,” she said, as she helped pull Riggs up to the cockpit. He tried to kick off the steps, so Cole reached down and grabbed the knot of his shoestrings, pulling both of his feet up. Molly held up half of him with both arms, and they literally carried him up the steps.

“What don’t you like? We need the Firehawk’s signature on SADAR to get out of here, and we need Riggs’s auth code to get the signature.” They pushed Riggs down in the navigator’s seat and Cole fastened his harness, locking him in place. Riggs wiggled, testing them, and blew out his cheeks. Molly pulled Cole down the steps.

“I don’t like bringing him along. I know what you’re doing, and I love that about you, but Riggs is not going to come around, especially not bound and gagged. He’s not our friend anymore, Cole. I mean, he thinks I’m working with the Drenards, for galaxy’s sake. Walter can easily—”

Cole pulled her further down the steps. “Technically, you are a Drenard.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, and you know I need to try. I just need some more time with him.”

“I get that, that’s fine, but all this vacuum transfer nonsense—it just feels too risky.” Molly glanced up at the cockpit. “Why don’t we just meet at Lok? It’s only a few jumps from here—”

“That’s even riskier,” Cole said. “The Navy will have two signatures to follow and more motivation to catch us. Plus, do you really want Riggs knowing where we go and what we do there?”

“Isn’t that the reason you want him along?”

Cole shook his head. “Gods, I don’t know. Maybe I’m being selfish; maybe I just want him to not hate us.”

“Hey, if you need to do this for you, that’s an even more compelling argument. Just say so. But no cowboy transfers in the vacuum. Let’s meet on Lok and stagger our jump coordinates, give the Navy two trails to sniff. If we both double back at least once, or they’re slow to mobilize, they’ll never find us.”

Cole sighed. “Okay. The only logistical problem left is coordinating the tow without the fleet picking up our transmission over the radios. I haven’t quite sorted out how we’re gonna time that.”

Molly smiled. “Let’s go change into our flightsuits. I have just the thing.”

“Can you hear me?” Molly thought.

“Loud and clear,” came Cole’s words, but in Molly’s voice. “The helmet makes the band ride down to my ears, though.”

“Same here. What we need to do is sew these things into the liners. It’d be stellar to not have to thumb the mic to talk in the cockpit.”

“Or worry that Walter’s listening in,” Cole added.

“Then again, it might not be too nebular to have Cole hearing everything,” Molly thought to herself.

“Like what?”

“Huh?… That, uh, was a joke, silly. Um, my thrusters are warm if you wanna pull in the lock.”

“Roger.”

Molly watched the Firehawk rise off the hangar deck and fly down the center lane. She lifted up Parsona and pulled into his wash, following him toward the massive airlock at the end of the bay. During major engagements, the entire deck would be depressurized, pilots and navigators using the dozens of personnel locks to enter the StarCarrier’s vacuum, allowing rapid take-offs and landings. For maintenance and patrol, the entire bay was kept pressurized to allow support personnel to work freely and without helmets.

With a little maneuvering, both ships fit in the airlock with room to spare.

Molly didn’t have a prisoner to watch, so cable-duty fell to her. She typed a caution to her mother in the nav computer, moved the Wadi from her lap to the back of her seat, and gave Walter a pat on the shoulder.

“Don’t touch anything,” she told him for the third time.

He smiled through his visor and turned in the nav seat to watch her go. Molly grabbed the commercial nanotube towline and stomped down the cargo ramp.

Outside, she snapped one end to the eyebolt under Parsona’s nose. The cockpit glass was too far above for her to check in on Walter, filling her with paranoia that he might be fiddling with instruments on the dash, or discovering her mother. She had to force herself to not rush the job.

Double-checking the connection on her ship, she made sure the release mechanism wasn’t stuck, then pulled the line to the back of Riggs’s Firehawk, careful of the hot metal around the thrusters. She secured the other end of the line to a tow bolt outside the jet wash’s cone of influence.

“All set,” she thought to Cole.

“Great. Make sure you shut everything down—”

“I know.”

“And after we disconnect the tow line, let me pull away before you jump out—”

“I know the plan, Cole.”

“Come up to the nose for a sec.”

Molly walked quickly to the front of the Firehawk, ducking under the stubby wings. She was surprised to see the hatch open, Cole’s visor up.

“Problem?” she asked.

“No, I just felt like saying goodbye so you hear it in my voice.”

“I appreciate you being romantic, but we don’t have much—”

“I love you.”

Molly snapped her visor closed and popped her helmet off. She brushed her hair back off her forehead and looked up at him.

“I love you, too. And stop worrying, this is gonna go smooth as milk.” She watched the lines of worry in Cole’s forehead deepen. “I’ll see you on Lok,” she said. “Walter’s in your seat, and he’ll have my back.”

Cole laughed. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” He smiled down at her. “All right, see you in a bit.”

With that, he snapped his head forward, throwing the visor of his helmet down without touching it. Molly laughed at the hotshot maneuver and watched the cockpit glass slide forward and seal tight. She ducked under the fuselage and looked up at Riggs, but only the side of his helmet was visible. She ran back to Parsona, pulling her own helmet back on.

Inside, she settled into her seat and nodded at Walter, giving him the okay to depressurize the airlock. He punched commands into his computer, and the atmosphere within the chamber became visible as it was sucked into the large side vents, condensing into moisture as the pressure changed.

Molly watched the thrusters ahead of her fire up, the Firehawk humming to life. She had to fight the urge to do the same with Parsona. It felt unnatural to watch the airlock empty of atmosphere while keeping her ship powered down.

As soon as the air had been completely evacuated, she gave Walter another thumbs-up. For Cole’s benefit, she tried to keep her surface thoughts to a minimum; she didn’t want to distract him while he sweet-talked the patrol watch.

In her own head, meanwhile, she could hear Cole read off Riggs’s authorization numbers, sensing them on the surface of his mind as he spoke them, and then feeling the tension as he waited for the guard to acknowledge.

Beside the hangar bay’s red atmosphere light, the integrity light went from green to red. The doors opened a crack, then slid apart and revealed the star field beyond. Cole eased forward, pulling the slack out of the towline. Parsona lurched, the landing gear scraped on the deck, then Cole angled up and brought both ships high in the lock before they exited into clear space.

As the two ships pulled out of the massive StarCarrier, the only eyes looking their way were electronic ones. Their signature on SADAR would appear a little larger than normal, but communications officers aren’t taught to fear anything leaving the belly of their own ship, which meant the duo didn’t merit a second glace. And besides, the ship ID blinking over the blip would perfectly match the newly revised patrol roster. Screen-watchers no doubt would sip their cold coffee and continue swapping lewd jokes and lewder lies.

It would be another hour before anyone was scheduled to check the hangar bay or deliver breakfast to the detention cells.

Should be more than enough time.

“Okay, we’re well outside the fleet perimeter,” Cole thought. “Any further and they’ll wonder what we’re patrolling.”

Molly laughed and glanced through the starboard porthole; the constellation of cruisers and destroyers flashed and twinkled like bright, nearby stars.

“This’ll do,” she agreed.

“What’ss sso funny?” Walter asked her. “I wanna wear a red band.”

“They aren’t toys, now keep it down so I can concentrate.”

Walter sank in the nav seat. “What a wasste, ssending one with him,” he grumbled.

Molly ignored Walter and reached for the tow release. “Disengaging,” she thought, as she pulled the handle. The taut cable ahead of her wavered with the release of tension, and they were free, drifting with their forward momentum. Cole pulled the Firehawk far enough away to not throw her jump off with its small bit of gravity.

“Ladies first,” he thought.

She smiled, but there were better reasons for her to jump before he did. It wouldn’t look great if his ship ID disappeared from the fleet’s SADAR, leaving hers exposed. Plus, if he jumped from the same general area, it might confuse both of their hyperspace signatures, confounding, or at least confusing, the pursuit efforts.

Her hyperdrive had been spinning up ever since they left the carrier. Molly brought the rest of Parsona on-line, her ship’s identification moments from broadcasting to the fleet. She watched the nav screen, just waiting for the jump coordinates to register, her finger hovering over the hyperdrive switch.

“Be careful,” she thought.

“You, too,” Cole replied.

The ship came on-line. Half a second later, the nav indicator flashed green.

“I wanna pussh it!” Walter yelled.

But it was too late. The stars had already shifted.

Cole watched his SADAR display intently. Parsona’s ship ID flashed for a brief moment, then winked away.

Success.

His own hyperdrive was already spinning up; he checked the coordinates on his nav display one final time.

The radio on the dash cracked to life: “Flight three-two-seven, this is the Cruiser Denali. Riggs, we just had a glitch on our SADAR. Picked up a ship ID near you guys. Can you do us a favor and sweep that area? We might need to do a quick calibration with you.”

Riggs writhed against his restraints and shouted into his cheeks, desperate to signal his allies.

Cole saw an opportunity to delay the pursuit. “Roger, Denali, we have an anomaly out here; we’re gonna check it out for the science boys. Be right back.”

After a pause, the radio cackled with more questions as Cole lifted the cover on the jump button. But something came through his consciousness besides the radio: Molly’s words slicing through his own thoughts.

“Did you say something?”

“Molly?”

“Yeah? Where are you?”

“We haven’t jumped yet. Uh, wow. I guess we’ll be able to keep in touch on the way to Lok.”

“Well, it might not be good for whatever kinda batteries these run on.”

“Yeah. Hey, I gotta jump. One of the cruisers saw you leave.”

“Okay. Hey, Cole?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“Me, too. See you soon.”

But Cole was wrong. Dead wrong.

He pressed the red button with his gloved finger, and the instruction to jump coursed down a fiber optic wire, racing through the nav computer on its way to the hyperdrive. Normally, it would pick up the coordinates locked into the dash display and carry this location to the drive in the rear of the Firehawk.

Not this time. The program had been changed. No matter what numbers were computed in the nav display, only one set of coordinates were ever going to be sent to the hyperdrive ever again. Those numbers were picked up and sent back. If Cole could have seen them, looked at what they referenced on his nav chart, he would have been screaming right along with Riggs.

The Firehawk containing the two old friends winked out of space, departing the fleet forever.

The ship reappeared four light-years away, directly in the center of Delphi II.

The largest star within a single jump of the fleet.

34

The Light of Turn crept in front of Edison, signaling his chance to speak. Lord Rooo concluded his argument with a polite nod to the new member, gathered his tunics in both hands, and crossed to the wooden steps that led up and over the unbroken circle of the council table.

Edison rose, pushing back his stone chair with a loud squeak. “I defer my time to Lady Hooo,” he said.

As he lowered himself back down, there were murmurs of disappointment in the crowd, likely from the xenophobes eager to see the hairy barbarian trounced by savvy, lifetime politicians.

Anlyn ignored them and rose from her seat. She walked clockwise around the circle, trailing Lord Rooo as he made his way back to his place. When she reached the legendary steps, she gathered her tunics and steeled her nerves for the walk over.

Looking down at the wooden treads, their centers worn concave with thousands of years of steady use, she took a slow first step, wondering when last a female had done so. She marched up and across the top of the bridge without pausing, not wanting any rumors of her lingering to spread among the spectators and leave the Pinnacle. If any action could be misread, she was certain it would be.

A spot of light stood in the center of the circle, an unmoving disc of photons from Hori I. Anlyn entered the shaft and felt the heat on her skin. She wondered if it had been a mistake to not coat herself in the new cosmetics used by wily politicians. She tried not to think about perspiring—knowing it would just hasten it—and surveyed those around her.

Large Drenard males, the most powerful figures in the race’s empire, returned her gaze. Many of them had worn thin expressions of bemusement at Bodi’s expense less than an hour ago. Those looks seemed to melt away as they absorbed the wisp of a female standing before them. Anlyn doubted the Chair on Drenard Cultural History could even remember how many cycles ago a woman had last served.

She bowed slightly to Edison—a Circle formality for deferred time—but also as a personal gesture. He flashed his teeth at her, wishing her well.

Anlyn thought back to a month ago, to watching him drill a small hole in one of her slave-chain links. Edison had worked the drill back and forth, hollowing out a thin channel, then had cleaned up the shavings. He had made sure she watched as he pantomimed snapping the link in half. Although both spoke English well enough, neither had said a word.

Edison explained later that it had been a favor for Molly, but that it had eventually liberated something within his own heart.

Two days after that scene, Anlyn had helped free Edison from a set of restraints aboard Parsona. The symbolism was not lost on them, and neither was the fact that both had felt alone in the universe: Edison by virtue of being one of the last of his kind, Anlyn due to her voluntary exile.

The week they’d spent together in the Darrin system, alone and working to repair Parsona, had blossomed into something more powerful than love. It was a connection that defied differences in species and their own internal barriers to being loved.

Anlyn shook the pleasant memories out of her head and cleared her throat to address the Circle, then she worried both gestures would be taken for weakness. She needed to appear strong, even though she felt weak. Brave, even though she felt scared. She concentrated on Edison’s smile and began to recite the words her aunt had taught her:

“I am Anlyn of the Hooo.” She swallowed and turned to take in more of the Circle. “I accept my Chair within this most esteemed Circle on behalf of Widow Dooo. I vow to put universe first, galaxy second, and myself last. I will serve, steadfast, on the thin border between Light and Dark. I will be guided by the fire of the passion in my heart and the cold calculation of my brain. Between these two extremes, I will find the truth of a good path and walk it straight.”

Several of the older Circle members and seated spectators cooed softly at the fine acceptance speech; it was one of the more traditional, ancient ones. The younger members, some of those aligned with Bodi, frowned, expecting more. Edison bristled with pride.

Bodi rose from his seat and destroyed the moment for her: “With all due respect, Lady Hooo, you’ll need to speak up to be heard.”

It was one of the few exceptions to the Center of Speak, and revenge for Anlyn’s handling of him an hour prior. Bodi’s allies panted with soft laughter.

Anlyn felt the rage pushing its way from her heart to her head, her body flushing with heat, her center falling off its line. She took a deep breath before continuing, forcing her eyes away from the safety of Edison’s and across the gathered males.

“The Circle has gathered to consider the eradication of the Humans, a decision being made as inflamed anger burns from the events of the past days. From my Chair, I will be counseling against this distraction from the true Drenard purpose.”

The laughter stopped immediately. Even the elders, proud to see Anlyn returned to her home in good health and taking a temporary seat on the Circle, seemed displeased.

“One cycle ago,” Anlyn continued, “the first Human to become a Drenard left our planet. There was much hope that the prophecy of the Light Seer would come true. When it didn’t, this very Circle ringed to consider the fate of the Humans. One of my uncles used to speak of that debate, of the constant swings from fire to ice. He was always glad that temperate heads prevailed.

“I am young, I know.” Anlyn looked up into the audience, her hand on her chest. “I do not feel it, but I can see it on your faces: I am young, I am female, and I am royalty. Any side of this triangle is enough to cast doubt. All three will have each of you counting the radians to the next election. But know this: I have spent over a year of my life held captive by the worst sort of Human. Despite this, I have seen what good can come of them. The one that you consider a threat? She is my friend. I have seen her Wadi Queen, and the rumors are true. I will do everything I can from my Chair to protect her people as she has promised to do everything she can to help ours.”

She paused while the whispers grew, rumors of Molly and her Wadi crackling, spreading like a fire. Anlyn gave them a moment while she watched the Light of Turn move closer to her seat. She lifted her eyes from the Circle and swept them over the large crowd; her entire body followed, spinning in place, as if taking them all in, even as the light from Hori I made it impossible to see very far into the shadows.

“Our empire has moved to the darkness,” she told them, and coos of discord swept the gathered. She raised her voice. “It moved to the darkness as we relied on the Seer’s prophecy to light our way. It moved to the darkness when that light never came. And now we feel the urge to throw ourselves into the fire, eager to kill or be killed because we’ve grown frightened of the dark.

“I came here today to urge restraint.” She placed one of her fists in the palm of her hand. “A few of our true enemy, posing as Humans, have sown anger in your hearts. Some of you wish to eradicate them all, pushing throughout the galaxy and exterminating our neighbors. I come here to—”

“You come to urge NOTHING!” someone yelled from the audience. There were coos of surprise, the rumble of thousands turning in their seats. Blue tunics descended from the balcony as those seated near, moved away from the man, who continued to protest.

“We’ve tried nothing already!” he yelled. “We’ve tried restraint! We want WAR!”

The guards in blue seized the figure, pulling him up the aisle.

His tirade continued amid a growing chorus of nods and whispers.

Whispers growing to shouts.

The conversation Molly was having with Cole stopped—his thoughts removed from her head and replaced with pain.

Molly shrieked and slapped at her helmet, fumbling for the clasps. Her brain wailed with the same white noise and painful light she’d felt on Dakura. She couldn’t find the release clasps, so she shook her gloves free, feeling with her bare hands around the back of the smooth shell. As soon as she clicked them loose, she shoved her helmet up and tore the band off her head.

The noise went away immediately, leaving just a resonant hum in her skull. Remnants of the white light remained, however. She tried to blink the haze away, looking over at Walter to focus on something.

The Wadi flicked its tongue out from the back of the nav chair, scared clear across the cockpit.

“What’ss wrong?” Walter asked, recoiling away from her.

“I—I don’t know. I was talking to Cole, and then it went haywire.”

“Lemme ssee.”

Molly handed him the band. “Be careful. It hurts.”

He lowered the band near his scalp hesitantly, like a cadet preparing to shoot himself with a stunner for laughs. Before it even made full contact with his buzzed head, Walter yelped and tossed the band to the side. The confused Wadi leapt from his seat and back to Molly’s, claws digging into worn leather.

“It’s okay,” Molly told the Wadi.

“No, it hurt like hypersspacse!” Walter complained. “Ssoundss like the middle of a sstar or ssomething!”

“That’s actually a pretty good analogy,” Molly said. “I hope we didn’t break them.” She reached for her helmet, her vision nearly back to normal.

But in the pit of her stomach, something felt empty and raw, like a hole had formed that her heart might drop down into. She stopped for a minute and concentrated on breathing, sucking in deep breaths, her chest constricted with… something.

The sensation was unique, but it stirred old feelings inside, as if she’d experienced this before. It felt like cold boredom, but deeper. The sensation of becoming lost, or just not knowing what to do next.

It reminded her of the day her dad went missing.

Molly shivered, her vision blurring again, but this time from natural causes. From tears. She grabbed the red band from Walter’s armrest and rubbed it with one hand.

Meanwhile Parsona drifted idly in the vastness of the cosmos.

Silent and alone.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Parsona said through her helmet.

Molly leaned back against the bulkhead, one of her pillows in her lap. The Wadi sat on her dresser, lapping at a saucer of juice, its eyes closed in contentment.

“I wanna jump back and check on him,” she said.

“He’s probably at his own jump-point thinking the same thing. What both of you need to do is keep heading to Lok, stick with the plan—” Parsona broke into laughter.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m sorry, it just reminds me of your father and myself. We spent a lot of time apart with our work on Lok, and the comm towers on that planet were frightful. We were forever dropping calls and wrestling with ourselves over who should call back and who should wait. Gods, we were so in love…”

“So you think this is nothing? ’Cause it sounded just like getting disconnected from… the other you.”

“I think we should continue to Lok, dear.”

“Is there something you’re not telling me, Mom?”

“Plenty. But it’s for your own good.”

“Stop saying that, seriously. I don’t wanna hear how important our mission is without knowing what I’m doing. I mean, look at where that’s gotten me. I have no home, almost no friends, no safe place to go, and barely enough to eat for a few weeks. Oh, and I’m being led around by my dead mom who I recently found out worked for the Drenard Underground.”

“Sweetheart…”

Molly checked her watch. “Fifteen more minutes for the hyperdrive to cycle. I’m leanin’ toward jumping back to the fleet’s last position, seeing what happened.”

“Your father and I did fall in with the Drenard Alliance. What the Navy calls the Underground.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding. Why keep this from me? Anlyn’s my friend, I would’ve listened.”

“I know that now. I hate that you’re caught in the middle of this, but it’s so much bigger than you or me. You just got interrogated by the Navy, imagine if you’d known—”

“They interrogated you as well. What did you tell them?”

“I told them the same thing your father did ten years ago, just in case they’d listen. Of course, I repeated the same things over and over again, so they’d think it was a logic tree. I watched them board, let them think I thought it was you.”

“What did you tell them? And you’ve got twelve minutes before I jump back to the fleet.”

“That the Drenards are not their enemy.”

“Ha. I’m sure that went over well. ‘The race that’s been blowing up your loved ones for almost a century really want to be your friends. Come hunt lizards in sunny paradise.’ Was that it?”

“You’re upset.”

“Damn right. As much as I love Anlyn, I barely escaped that planet alive. People there tried to kill me—”

“A dispute between lovers was the way Anlyn explained it—”

“Yeah, but—”

“Have you ever wondered why the war never leaves the Drenard arm of the Milky Way? The Galactic Union and the Navy have both been told the war can end at any time; all they have to do is stop trying to enter that portion of the galaxy.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s the same message your father came back to Earth to deliver in person. He had to flee after receiving the official reply.”

“What a stupid thing to keep from me, if true!”

“Perhaps, but telling you the war is actually a blockade action just leads to more questions. Difficult questions…”

She had a point, because the next one formed on Molly’s lips, like a reflex: “What are they keeping us from?”

“Not keeping, Mollie. Protecting.”

“Fine,” she said. “What are they protecting?”

“Us.”

“My grandfather served on this Circle for two full cycles,” Counselor Yur said from the Light of Speak. “He was adamant about the danger posed by the existence of Humans. Even when the first signs of the so-called prophecy came to light, he recognized this as mere coincidence. People finding what they sought. It’s increasingly clear that my grandfather was correct. The existence of a race of people with such incredible resemblance to the Bern makes it impossible to perform our duty of policing this galaxy. We have allowed a dangerous forest to grow as we try to guard against individual trees.

“The decision is not an easy one, I agree. It never should be easy to wipe out an entire species. But when not doing so will lead to many thousands of races going extinct, the choice is much simpler. I will be voting, as I always have, for the extermination of the Humans. The argument that we cannot guard the Great Rift while also launching an offensive against their fleets ignores our success at holding this arm of our galaxy while doing the same. Our Navy is more than up to the challenge of warring on both fronts.

“I defer the rest of my time and give up the Center to my good friend Counselor Bodi.”

Yur bowed slightly, turned around, bowed again, then headed for the wooden bridge. He had not chosen to address any of the other Counselors and give them a chance to speak, a tactic that would not win him any favor. However, his arguments had been heard before and were unlikely to sway anyone on the Circle. Bodi, and others who planned to change their vote for war, represented the new wind. They were the ones etching away at canyon walls from unexpected directions—eroding new paths for Drenards to walk.

Anlyn watched her ex-fiancé take the Center of Speak for the second time. He refrained from looking at her, probably fearing she’d usurp him again. As much a bumbling fool as he could be, as thorough as he was at discovering and making mistakes, he rarely repeated them.

“Thank you, Counselor Yur, for the remainder of your time.” Bodi bowed in his direction before turning to face the largest concentration of Human sympathizers. “Fellow Counselors,” he began, “as I was saying just a few hours ago, our duty to this galaxy is being forgotten.”

Several Counselors stiffened at this accusation, the remembrance of duty being one of the five Great Virtues of any good Drenard citizen. Bodi let the insult hang in the air before continuing. He placed one of his pale blue hands on his own chest, fingers splayed out across the colorful regalia on his tunic.

“I am also to blame,” he said. “And the lapse is easy to forgive once it is understood. There is an inherent tension between two of the Great Virtues: remembering our duty to protect the galaxy and remembering our duty to our neighbors. For too long, we have placed the latter virtue ahead of the former. We have tried to balance both, living on the fine line that exists between them, but I fear our grip on the scales is slipping. We have put the entire galaxy in danger in order to protect the Humans.”

Anlyn cringed from the mixture of metaphors. She couldn’t understand what her father had seen in this man.

“And what have the Humans done? Despite numerous envoys who have assured them complete freedom in the rest of the galaxy, they demand to know what lies in our corner. They attack, and their reason for attacking again is that we have defended ourselves. Upheld one of our Virtues.

“I respect our forgiving nature. I do not call for us to live in the full sunlight of war, but neither do I think we should move to the dark and allow ourselves to freeze due to the coldness of our compassion.

“We are a race born on the edge, squeezed on either side by two different dangers, and that is where we find ourselves today. Perhaps that is why we have grown too comfortable with the fire of Humans on the one side and the black hole in space that we defend on the other.

“The vote has always been one of holding this line with the Humans or of pushing out to extinguish them. I find this decision to be untenable. There is an alternative that has been discussed much in the past but soundly rejected—even by myself.”

He paused and scanned the crowd, lifting his arms and splaying his stolen tunics for effect. “We should tell the Humans about the Bern threat,” he said. “We should let them look amongst themselves for signs of infiltration. The vote I submit to the Circle today is this: either we tell the Humans about the Great Rift, and the nature of the Bern Empire, or we whittle their numbers down until the Bern can no longer hide among them.”

“Second,” cried Yur.

The Drenard beside him nodded. “Third,” he said.

Anlyn froze, disbelieving. Five more Counselors cast their votes, putting the decision—if such a biased dichotomy could even be considered a “decision”—before the Circle.

Bodi had just succeeded in changing the nature of the vote. No longer would it be between war and peace; rather, it would be between a massacre they controlled or a rebellion they fomented.

Anlyn reached over and groped for Edison’s hand, her plan unraveling before her eyes. The decision would now come before the end of the day.

And either way, it would spell the end of the Humans.

“They’re killing us to protect us? That’s crap, Mom. What are they really hiding?”

“Sweetheart, the universe is bigger than you know—”

“No more riddles, Mom. And you have seven minutes before I go look for Cole.”

“No riddles, just facts.”

It was eerie for Molly to hear an artificial voice fighting to remain calm, but that’s what her mother seemed to be doing.

“Humans have had a hard time accepting changes in scope,” Parsona said. “First, realizing the Earth was round, then that the stars are more suns, finally that the nebulae were entire galaxies. In many ways, being the dominant technological race in our galaxy has been a detriment to our growth, not the boon that we are—”

“Six minutes, Mom, and you still haven’t told me anything.”

“Our entire galaxy is at risk, Mollie. And other galaxies. All at risk of being invaded and completely taken over by a force of evil you can’t comprehend. They are known to many other races, the Drenards included, as the Bern. They control most of the universe, perhaps all except the Local Group. For many years, they’ve been trying to invade and add us to their territory. The Drenards guard the hole in the Milky Way through which the Bern have been trying to enter—”

“Then why not just tell us this? Why keep it a secret?”

“Because the truth is, and this is something I shouldn’t tell you: the Bern look a lot like humans. Or vice versa. We’re almost identical to them. Now, can you imagine the witch hunt if this were common knowledge? It would tear us apart quicker than the Drenards could. Besides, there’s a good chance the Navy is riddled with them, that the Navy is being run by people without our best interests—”

“Byrne,” Molly muttered to herself, the pieces falling in place.

“Mollie. Where have you heard that name? Tell me this instant.”

“He was on Dakura. He was in your—in the other Parsona’s head. He came for me, Mom. Had me tied up in his ship…”

The Wadi flicked out her tongue, jumped from the dresser to the bunk, and ran up to Molly’s chest.

“That’s why we were fleeing Dakura, why we had that other ship airlocked to you. I’m sorry, but there wasn’t any time to tell you—”

“Where is he now?” Parsona asked.

“Was he a Bern?” Molly thought about him standing in the hangar, smiling in the vacuum of space.

“Yes, one of the very worst kind. Do you know where he is? Did he talk to—did he get a chance to talk to the other Parsona?”

“Yeah. Oh, Mom, they had me strapped to a dentist chair, there was nothing I could—”

“It’s okay. It’s fine. We need to get to Lok, sweetheart.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m reading too much into those bands. Cole’s probably gonna get there before me and start to worry.”

Molly stopped petting the Wadi and glanced at the clock by her bed.

“Drenards,” she said. “We shoulda jumped out of here two minutes ago.”

She threw the pillow aside and ran toward the cockpit.

Anlyn sank in her seat as Lord Vahi cast his vote for war. She and Edison hadn’t voted yet, and it wouldn’t even matter. Not that there had been a viable option, but her choice to abstain would have meant something different before the subject was already decided. Any formal complaint would now be registered as indecision.

The cooing in the crowd grew, nearly drowning out Lord Yesher’s vote. Several Counselors slapped the table for order. The Counterclockwise door flung open, and several spectators from the balcony spilled out to relay the news. Others took this as a sign that the proceedings were over and began pushing their way to the aisles.

They were hoping to get out before a throng formed.

But they just became the throng.

Two more Counselors cast a vote for Bodi, becoming part of another mob, one protecting its political legacy by moving with the crowd. The member beside Edison voted the same and had the audacity to stand, preparing to race out after votes from the least senior members. The entire Pinnacle thrummed in anticipation. Males felt an urge to return home to families and prepare for the next step, the step the Circle had voted for:

War.

Edison growled “Abstain,” but nobody heard. Only the Keeper of Time seemed to notice, moving the Light of Turn to Anlyn.

She stared at the circle of sunlight on the marble before her. Her peripheral vision vibrated with movement. The balcony doors opened and shut like organ valves, pumping hysteria into the streets and throughout the city. The noise had become a persistent roar, a growling fervor.

“Minority Position,” Anlyn said to herself.

Louder: “Minority Position.”

The Keeper of Time mistook her moving lips and ushered the Light of Turn onward, ending her chance to speak.

Anlyn watched the spot move away, a shock of resignation coursing through her. She rebelled against it. Wouldn’t stand for it. She stood up in her chair, jumped to the top of the table, and grabbed Edison’s lance. Fumbling with the switches, she wished she’d paid more attention to his demonstration. Several Counselors scrambled for her, ready to pull her down. Edison pushed them back as several Drenards in blue scrambled down the aisles, wading through the frantic crowd.

“I invoke Minority Position!” Anlyn yelled, as loud as she could. She rested the butt of the large lance on the table, ducked her head, and pulled the trigger.

The tip of the lance erupted in a shower of light. Dozens of hues pulsed out in a spray of pyrotechnics, the charged plasma deflected by prismatic filters into harmless sparks of fire. The blossom radiated upward, arcing to the ceiling, bouncing off and exploding into even smaller slivers of flame.

Anlyn covered her head to protect it from the shower and squeezed the trigger all the way. The lance hummed, casting out Edison’s favorite note at 349.229 hertz. It was “F” below middle C. The precise sound wave that creates supernovas, vibrating out from the core of collapsing stars and throwing entire solar systems apart.

It was the note of nebulas. The sound of destruction and creation.

Those that remained in the Pinnacle froze, including the Counselors and the guards. They shielded their eyes, but couldn’t turn away. Thousands of tiny bones, deep in hearing canals, resonated with the pure note, that lone chord of the cosmos.

Anlyn released the trigger and stood upright in the remnants of the plasma falling to the floor.

“I invoke Minority Position,” she said, loud and confident. “I vote for telling the humans about the Bern threat, and I demand to give voice to the dissenters.”

She looked down at Edison, needing another dissenter, an abstainer to change his vote.

“I second,” he said.

The few that had not voted for war early on threw in their assent. The Keeper of Time, gathering his wits from the control booth, returned the Light of Turn to Anlyn.

The Light of Speak, meanwhile, stood empty in the center of the Circle. Throughout the beam, a shower of fine ash could be seen descending from the ceiling. The spectators that had not yet fled into the Apex stopped. They watched Anlyn.

And waited.

35

It was nighttime on the frontier side of Lok. Molly brought her ship down through the atmosphere, descending toward the darkness of her abandoned, childhood village. She leaned forward to get a better visual through the carboglass, disturbing the Wadi in her lap. It flicked its tail, claws skittering on the polished plate that moments ago had held Molly’s leftover lasagna.

SEE?_ Her mother typed.

Molly checked the SADAR; a ship the size of a Firehawk sat right outside the commons. Cole had beaten her there. She didn’t take her hands off the flight controls to respond to her mother, but she thought about the red band in her chest pocket, considered popping off her helmet to try it out, to see if she could contact him. Instead, she focused on a soft arrival, pointing her thrusters away from the other ship and using the old commons as a landing pad.

Parsona settled to the dew-covered grass. Her belly opened, the cargo hatch lowering to the soft soil.

Molly popped her helmet off and set it on the rack. “Don’t touch anything,” she told Walter. “I’ll be right back.” She stroked the Wadi on the head and moved the creature from her lap to the back of the chair. Peering into her water bowl, she made sure it was topped up, then headed through the bowels of her ship and out into the crisp night.

Byrne had his hands on her immediately.

Molly tried to scream, but cold, bony fingers covered her mouth. She struggled against his arms, but they were unnaturally strong; they pinned her against his body in a vise-like grip, her feet dangling in the air. The flashlight fell from her hands and banged against the cargo ramp; it rolled into the grass, its beam snuffed out by the unkempt length of the dry blades.

Thin lips came down to her ear, brushing against them.

“You’ve been expected,” Byrne whispered, his words close, yet no hint of breath puffed against her cheek. Molly reached back to claw at his face, but he just tucked her under one arm as he keyed the cargo door closed. When the ramp sealed, he struck the control panel with his bare fist, demolishing it completely and denting the hull around it.

Molly kicked her captor physically and herself mentally. She berated herself for not keeping her helmet on so she could warn her mom.

She struggled to take in a breath of air—the way she was being carried forced her to exert energy just to stabilize her body. Her legs hung awkwardly, her spine bent and jolted with pain from each of Byrne’s steps. Even the red band added to her torment, the small lump jabbing into her ribs through her flightsuit pocket. She twisted around and grabbed Byrne’s arm to support her weight—it was like clutching a solid-steel rod.

Just when she thought she’d pass out from the exertion and inability to breathe, Byrne threw her down in a patch of dirt. The area around her glowed in the soft light of a nearby work lamp, and something hummed softly in the distance.

Molly tried to launch herself up, but Byrne grabbed her again and pushed her back to the ground. His fingers dug between the muscles in her neck, squeezing nerves that shot numbness into her arms. The underlying pain made her mouth feel like it was full of metal as her lungs continued to scream for air.

“You seem to have a problem keeping still, don’t you, Mollie Fyde?”

Byrne’s other hand went to her thigh, up near her hip. Fingers as hard and thin as screwdrivers dug deep at her hip socket, grinding against the bone. Molly had never felt such pain before. It wasn’t something she could scream about—that would have required some degree of motor control. Instead, her jaw fell open in shock, her eyes wide with fear. Even the leg he wasn’t gripping vibrated with pain, both flight boots thumping the packed soil. It was an agony on the verge of nothingness, a numbness that could be felt.

Her stomach lurched, then bunched up in knots.

Molly turned her head to the side and threw up her lasagna. She spat, her eyes rolling up in the back of her head as she tried to will herself unconscious. She dreamed of the comforting blackness that usually overtook her in moments of raw shock.

But Byrne’s iron grip held her just over the precipice of consciousness. Her legs continued to tremble uncontrollably from the pain.

When he finally let go, there was nothing Molly could do but relish the feeling of not being tortured. She tried to wipe her chin, but her arm flopped, limp and useless. Byrne remained crouched beside her, looking at her like a specimen of some sort.

“The next time you try and stand up, I’m going to do something very bad to you. Nod if you understand.”

Molly nodded. Once. It was all she could muster. Just moving her eyeballs around to take in her surroundings felt like an accomplishment. She and Byrne were in a small plot of land; tall weeds grew up next to a low brick wall. There was a fireplace at the far edge of the pool of light, a chimney rising from it and up into the black Lokian night. It was the ruined foundation of an old building, all the wood long since ground to dust, carried off by the wind.

Byrne grinned. “Recognize the place?” he asked.

Molly tried to shake her head, but only her eyes moved, rolling back and forth.

“No? You should. We had tea in this very room back on Dakura. This is the little hell your mother chose for her eternity.” He laughed. “Eternity! She didn’t last another twenty years, thanks to you.”

“Din’t kill ’er,” Molly slurred.

“Even worse. You had one of your cronies do it, didn’t you? Just like Lucin. Tell me, where are you getting your information? I know it isn’t from your father. And there’s not an inch of that ship I haven’t inspected. So I’m curious—how did you know to go to Dakura, and just what do you know about this place?”

A weak smile was all she could pull off. Byrne’s hand came to her knee and started sliding up her thigh. Molly could feel the pain, like a memory, even though his fingers hadn’t returned to the right spot yet. Her leg went numb in anticipation and she tried to slide her pelvis out of the way—but it didn’t budge.

“WALTER?”

His name boomed through Parsona, scaring the hell out of him. He froze, then quickly slid Cole’s things from the top of the human’s dresser and back into the drawer. He pushed it closed as quietly as he could and peeked out the door—up, then down the hallway.

“Hello?”

It may have been his imagination, but he thought the camera in the corner of the cargo bay moved slightly. “Hello?” he asked again. “Where are you?”

The voice boomed down the length of the ship:

“COME TO THE COCKPIT.”

Walter had the sudden urge to do the very opposite. He looked the other way, to the laz, then back up the shaft of the ship. The Wadi’s head peeked around the corner from the back of Molly’s seat.

Its tongue flicked out.

“What if I don’t wanna?!” he yelled to the Wadi.

The creature’s head pulled back.

Walter crept up through the cargo bay; he glanced at the portholes, which showed nothing but pitch black outside. He wondered if he was about to get in trouble for looting Cole’s room. He cautiously entered the cockpit, which hadn’t changed since he left it. The Wadi flicked her tongue out at Walter, tasting the air.

“You have a very loud voicse,” he told the Wadi.

The voice boomed in response, filling the cockpit: “HIT THE BUTTON MARKED ‘MIC’ ON THE RADIO. IT’S THE PANEL BESIDE THE LOUD HAILER, AND RIGHT NEXT TO—”

Walter flicked it before the voice could complete the sentence. “I know where the radio iss,” he hissed.

“There you are,” the lady said, in a more sensible volume. “I need your help.”

“Sssure you do. But who are you?”

“Can you adjust the squelch?” the voice asked. “I’m getting quite a hiss from the cockpit mic.”

Walter leaned across the controls between the two seats, his face just a foot from the radio. “That’ss jussst how I sspeak,” he said, showering the dash with saliva.

“Oh, my apologies. Listen, I’m seeing a hyperdrive signature ahead of us—I mean ahead of you—that I don’t like. I need you to run some tests for—”

“Who are you?” Walter interrupted. He shooed the Wadi from Molly’s seat and plopped down in the captain’s chair.

“I’m, uh… a friend of Mollie’s. I—well, I was supposed to meet you guys here, but the door’s stuck. The cargo ramp. Can you check it for me?”

“Are you outside?” Walter spun in his chair and peeked through the porthole. The planet was darker than space, but a pale glow could be seen directly ahead of the ship.

“I was. I’m radioing from my ship. Can you check the door for me? I think something’s wrong with it.”

“Ssure,” he said, working his way out of the seat.

“Just see if it’ll open, but don’t go outside. Oh, and I might need you to check something on SADAR when you get back. I’ll tell you what buttons to press, and you can follow along.”

“I’m not sstupid,” Walter said, stomping out of the room.

This was so annoying. He hardly ever got time to himself on the ship, time to sniff around.

He walked past his crew area, and the sight of all the empty chairs washed away his frustrations. He could feel himself brighten. Literally—the sheen of his metallic skin taking a more silvery hue.

Then again, he thought, our crew has gone from five to two in less than a week.

He felt pretty proud of himself for that.

He strolled over to the ramp controls and lifted the glass. Tapped the buttons.

Nothing.

He hissed in frustration, his skin resuming its prior, duller sheen.

Molly dripped with sweat, despite the cold. Byrne’s question about her source of information hung in the air, his hands positioned to deliver more pain. She couldn’t tell him about Parsona—so she fought to think of any other connection—anything he’d mentioned on Dakura. The fingers started to press in, and Molly remembered something. His reaction to hearing about her godfather.

“Lucin,” she gasped, then sucked in a lungful of air before it could be forced out of her with the attack.

But the attack didn’t come. The fingers rested on the spots, little divots of torture burned into her body’s long-term memory.

“I thought so,” Byrne said, his hand not moving. “What else did he tell you?”

About Parsona, she thought. But protecting her was the only reason she’d lied in the first place. “He told me about my mom. About Dakura. The mission my parents were on.”

“Which was?”

Molly took a deep breath. Even talking was exhausting. “Are you testing me? Or interrogating me?”

Mr. Byrne laughed at this, and his hand came away. He grabbed Molly by her armpits and carried her closer to the light, plopping her down in front of some odd contraption.

“Both,” he told her. “Do you know what I’m doing here?”

Molly shook her head “I don’t even know what you are,” she lied.

“Think of me as a scout,” he said. “Behind me is an army of trillions. And I’m going to open a door and let them in.” He turned to the side and waved at the silhouette of a device Molly found… familiar. It was a large cross of steel with wires leading to all four points. She traced the cables down to the ground, through the ruins, and off to the shadow of a ship outside the village square. She could see now that it wasn’t a Firehawk.

She looked back to the contraption. “What is that?” she asked.

But she already knew. She’d built one just a month ago, on Palan. She’d used it to rescue Cole from that hellish prison.

“You know, don’t you?” Byrne leaned in and studied her face. “Your mother knew more than she let on. Did she teach you how to use this?” The hand came to her thigh again. Without even looking, he seemed able to attach his fingers to just the right spot.

Molly shook her head. The bony digits pressed in, making the world flash around her and go silent. She moved her lips to say, “It was an accident,” but couldn’t even hear herself.

The fingers came away, the pain diminishing to a dull, lingering ache.

“What was an accident?”

She tried to force a long breath among the short and rapid ones.

“I built one,” she whimpered. “On accident. To rescue a friend, I built one of those.” She nodded her head toward the metal cross.

Byrne leaned in close. His eyes were wild, his face twitching with small muscles that bulged in odd places.“What did it do?” he asked. “Where did you build it?”

“I teleported some rock, moved a cell wall, to free a friend—”

“Bah! Then you didn’t build what—”

“—on Palan,” she finished.

Byrne reacted as if shocked by a bolt of electricity. Both hands, with uncommon speed and precision, flew to Molly’s armpits. Fingers found nerves there between her ribs and under her shoulders. He didn’t yet start squeezing, but Molly could tell this would be a level of agony beyond what had already transpired. Anticipatory pain tingled along tendons as if they knew what was coming; her shoulders crept up in fear.

“Where on Palan?” he spat.

“In the canyons.” Molly forced out the answer as quickly as she could. She tensed her legs, stretching her spine, trying to levitate away from his grasp.

“Liar,” he said. His fingers applied a little pressure. Molly felt dizzy, could smell something like ozone, could taste the pain. It was a new experience, and it hadn’t really started. Her throat constricted, her eyes watering.

What is he looking for? she wondered in her haze. She would give it to him, whatever it was, she’d hand him everything for a quick death, that’s how bad it felt.

“It was in space, wasn’t it?” he yelled. “You did something in Palan’s orbit. You opened a door!”

He no longer looked calm and in control. He looked desperate. In Molly’s state, his thin face, spitting with rage, looked like the specter of death, come to take her away.

“I know it was in space,” Byrne shouted, “because I came through it with Parsona. Tell me how you made it.”

With Parsona? A door? From where?

“I’ll help you,” Molly hissed. “Just. Stop. Hurting. Me.” She had to force each quiet word around a separate pant for air.

The hands relaxed. Byrne surveyed her face.

“There are two doors in this old house,” he said. “Invisible doors. Both were opened by friends of your parents many years ago and then resealed. It was a daring, foolish invasion, and now we get to return the favor.”

Byrne turned and nodded at the metal cross. “I can open old doors,” he said, “but I can’t create new ones. I’m thinking you can. You just don’t know how you did it, do you?”

“And that’s what you went to my mom, the one on Dakura, to find out about? How to make them?” Molly cherished the conversation, hoping it would continue. Her body tingled with the absence of pain.

“No. I went to her to determine which door to reopen.”

The game show. Her mother’s words came back to her, the innocuous analogy made deadly.

“One of these doors will open and end your galaxy, along with the threat it poses. My people will move in and systematically destroy this… mutation.” Byrne looked over Molly’s head. “The other door would have led you to your damned father…” He peered down at her, his eyes narrowing as Molly felt her own widen. “But don’t waste your time hoping, I’ve already sealed that one forever. And soon, the other door will open…”

His voice trailed off. “Wait,” he said. “Your mother. What do you mean by the one on Dakura?”

Oh, crap, Molly thought, grimacing at the slip. She could see how tortured criminals were broken, how the pressure of layered lies smothered until desperation forced you to tear them off, exposing the truth underneath, forgetting the consequences.

In the glow of the work light, Byrne’s face smoothed out, the bunched muscles disappearing. His grin grew into a menacing smile.

“Your father made a copy, didn’t he?” The nasally laugh returned, which scared Molly more than his rage.

Byrne peered over Molly’s shoulder, into the darkness of the commons. “How ironic,” he chuckled. “To think that the answer was under my nose all these years!” His laughter swelled as his hands came away from Molly’s armpits. One of them slid up her chest to her neck. She tried to pull away, but the other hand tangled itself in her hair, balling into a fist around a thick clump of her locks. The two sides of the vise worked together to squeeze off her air supply. She clawed at them, but they were made of steel. Indestructible.

“All these years, I had the hyperdrive under my feet! This galaxy and more could already be ours!” The hysterical laughter ceased as he looked away. Molly gurgled for air, arching her back and digging her heels into the dirt. She could feel her eyes bulging out; she looked up at Byrne with tears streaming down her face, wondering where Cole was, why he wasn’t there to rescue her—

Byrne smiled down at her, as if calmly waiting for her to die.

When her esophagus closed completely, her ability to even gurgle was taken away. The world became silent, and the last of Molly’s consciousness marveled at how quiet death could be. She teetered on the edge of life, peering over the other side, when—in the scary vacuum, the eerie silence that had ensued—a loud metallic click rang out. The release of something mechanical.

Byrne squinted into the darkness, his fingers relaxing. Molly wheezed a large gulp of crisp air past her burning neck, a temporary reprieve from the suffocation. Her captor leaned farther over her, peering toward the commons.

Molly turned her head as far as she could and looked back to her ship; Byrne grabbed the work light and shone it in Parsona’s direction. A dark shape fell from one of the wings and into the tall grass.

“What was that?” Byrne asked.

Molly remained silent, save for her rapid pants for more air.

She had no idea.

Byrne scanned the commons with the work light, keeping a hand on Molly. “Who goes there?” he called out, playing the beam across the hull of the ship.

Another object fell from the wing, flashing briefly in the cone of light. It disappeared in the grass and clanged loudly against something else.

“Were those missiles?” Byrne asked Molly.

Molly clung to a fresh lungful of oxygen and pursed her lips. As the fingers dug back into her hair and neck, she asked her own silent question:

Walter—what in hyperspace are you doing?

“Walter, what are you doing?” Parsona asked.

“Firing the missssilesss,” he spat.

“You have to arm them first! I told you not to jump ahead, just follow my instructions.”

“But—”

“Listen to me. We don’t have much time, and it’s very important. We need to stop a man from opening a door, and the readings on my sensors say he’s already trying.”

“But—”

“Those were our only two missiles, so you’re going to need to get in one of the escape pods and eject into the grass. I don’t care what you have to do to stop this, we’re all going to be dead either way, do you understand me?”

“But what about this wirelesss menu for the misssiless?”

“Do you hear what I’m saying? Very bad things are about to happen if you don’t get out there and stop that man. Destroy his machine. Do something. Now leave those wireless settings alone, they’re only for disarming missiles after they’ve been launched properly.”

“I can arm them,” Walter said flatly.

“No, you can’t. Trust me, it doesn’t work that way. It would take a quantum computer a dozen years to hack into—”

“I’m already in.”

Silence.

“That’s… that’s impossible.”

“No, it’ss the ssame key the Navy ussess on Palan for their mainframe. I ussed to log in and delete sstuff for fun.”

Walter shook his silvery head as he armed the missiles. “It’ss a sstupid passsword,” he added to himself.

Bright lights popped in Molly’s vision as the choking resumed.

Flashes of pain. Explosions of misfiring, confused neurons. When another bright light erupted from the commons—the flash of a missile coming to life in the dewy grass—she could barely distinguish it from her own illusory fireworks. It wasn’t until the object sailed overhead, trailed by a cone of plasma, that Molly could actually tease it apart from her misery.

The missile flew over the remains of the house and slammed into Byrne’s ship, which exploded in a fury of twisted, glowing metal. The hyperdrive wasn’t destroyed immediately, however. As the shockwave from the blast expanded out into Lok’s atmosphere, the drive continued to hum on a low setting—still trying to unlock a gate through which armies were destined to spill.

The wave of compressed air hit the commons moments after the bright ball of fire. It slammed into the contraption behind Byrne, teetering it. The old agent almost had enough time to scream before the cross fell across his back and erupted in a glory of sparks.

The majority of him winked out of the universe, accompanied by a soft pop of air as it rushed in to fill the vacuum.

Beyond, in the engine room of Byrne’s ship, the hyperdrive erupted, coating the wreckage with burning fusion fuel. The smell of something dead, billions of charred carcasses, wafted out over the commons.

The odor drifted down to Molly, coating her in its foul tartness…

…as she finally drifted off to black.

36

Anlyn stepped over the wooden bridge, noting with horror the small flecks of charred ash her pyrotechnic display had created in the ancient wood.

She crossed the circle and entered the Light of Speak, which felt even warmer the second time around. There were fewer eyes upon her, but the intensity of each gaze had been multiplied.

Several of the Counselors had already left, the vote done and sealed. Only a few hundred spectators remained, likely those gossipers hoping some dollop of news would trump the Drenards that had escaped with the scoop. Anlyn saw that Bodi had remained, probably to gauge any potential threat.

She took a deep breath.

“I represent the Minority Position,” Anlyn said, “and I wish to have my doubts recorded, that they be our doubts in the cycle to come.” Several dissenters nodded, as well as a few who had voted “war” well after the issue had already been decided—swept up in the fury of the political mob.

Anlyn looked over the Circle and into the sparse crowd, directing her speech to them. “I am Anlyn Hooo of the Royal Tree. When I was born, my people believed in a great prophecy. In both song and rhyme, they celebrated the end of the Bern threat as foretold by the one we call the Light Seer but who our enemy refers to as the Bern Seer.

“There are many ways to read the Prophecy. Some have urged for peace with the Humans because it seems our combined power alone can end this grave threat. But there are those who walk the way of the cold and see the Prophecy as a promise for doom. For them, the flood spoken of puts an end to our galaxy, to our entire universe.

“A cycle ago, a human couple came to this planet, first as prisoners under suspicion, then as guests. When one of these became a Drenard, a new interpretation of the Prophecy was seized upon. Soon, this new method of reading grew and became known as ‘The One’ reading. And yet—like all other readings before—the proclamation failed. The difference was, this time…”

Anlyn scanned the crowd through the glare of the cone of light. She took another deep breath and licked her dry lips. “The difference was that this time so many of you believed. And your faith devastated you as it was pulled away. It had become attached, and it took something with it as it was discarded. I watched it happen as a youth, not affected as I had not yet learned to believe. I watched what transpired, and I promised myself it would never happen to me. I would never believe in anything.”

Anlyn looked to Edison, then turned slowly, taking in the whole of the darkness beyond the circle.

“We are a people that thrive on the edge, balanced between the passion of our burning hearts and the rationality of our cold thoughts. When I ran from here, from my home…” she turned to Bodi. “When I ran from you, it was with a heart that had never been lit. It was with cold thought alone.

“Mortimor and Parsona Fyde came to Drenard a full cycle ago, and they were, neither of them, the One. But I believe… I believe they gave birth to the One. It’s insane to hear it, I know. But it’s not insane to know it. I have feared this burning in my heart, but not now. Now, I balance it with my cold, objective thoughts.

“Molly Fyde, the daughter of Mortimor and Parsona, rescued me from bondage. What are the chances of that? Born on Lok, and therefore more from that planet than either of her parents, she is Human and Drenard alike. And the Wadi, I know the rumors don’t agree, but take it from me—I’ve seen it! I’ve touched it! The Living Queen is real.”

Anlyn met Edison’s gaze, felt the tears streaking down her face. “The Prophecy is real. I don’t know how, but I know that it is. You have been burned before by false hope and the passion of faith, and I watched from a distance. I will not ask anyone to go with me, but go I must.

“While the rest of the great Drenard Empire prepares for war with our neighbors, I will go to the great Bern Rift as the Prophecy decrees. I will await whatever comes through to harm us, alone if need be.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Bodi shouted. “The vote is over. You’re reciting superstition, not a Minority Position. I demand that—”

Anlyn whirled on him. “My going will have nothing to do with your insane war or your false vote. I’ll be going as an ambassador to the Bern people, as is my right as next in line to the throne.” She nodded to Edison. “And if the Counselor on Alien Relations will accompany me, we’ll take the full regiment of volunteers decreed for that purpose.”

“Alien Relations? Ambassador?” Bodi scoffed. “For the Bern?!”

“Ambassador, yes.” She paused, turning in the Light of Speak to address Bodi once more. “For the Bern? No.” She lowered her voice as the wave of panic and confusion returned to the Pinnacle, spectators pushing their way to the exit to trump the other news-bearers.

“Two can bend the rules, Bodi. For right as well as wrong. The Prophecy will not disappoint another generation, I know it.”

“You’re a fool,” he spat at her.

Anlyn turned, walking back to the wooden bridge dotted with tiny burns.

“Aye, a fool,” she murmured. “A happy, hopeful fool.”

When Molly came to, Walter stood over her, prying Byrne’s fingers off her neck. She could feel the other severed hand still tangled in her hair; she reached back and touched it, a solid clutch of steel wrapped around a handful of her locks. It seemed the two arms were all that remained of Byrne in the galaxy.

Fighting for a breath, her throat burning, she croaked, “What happened?” as Walter pried the hand away.

“I ssaved you,” he said through his helmet’s open visor. He held Byrne’s arm up with one hand and waved it in the air like a sword. The fallen work light illuminated the scene with a dramatic glow, the batteries flickering for added effect.

Molly fumbled with the hand knotted in her hair, wondering if she’d have to cut it out to free the thing. “How?” She turned to look back toward the commons.

“Your friend called on the radio,” Walter said. He jabbed a finger against his helmet. “She taught me how to usse the SSADAR and fire the misssiless.” He stopped swinging the sword and took his helmet off, dropping it into the dirt and leaning in close to Molly.

“Doess thiss make me your navigator?” he asked. He bent down, his metallic face flickering in the light of the burning ship. “Sshould we kisss?” He pursed his thin lips, his eyes wide and begging.

“Ew, no!” Molly turned her head and brought her hands up to his chest.

It came out harsher than she’d intended.

“Fine,” Walter said, pouting. “The cargo door iss bussted, sso good luck getting back insside on your own.” He marched off toward the wreckage of Byrne’s ship, slicing the air with the severed arm and mumbling to himself.

Molly groaned and sat up, Byrne’s arm tugging at her scalp. She yanked a clump of her hair through its grip, and it finally came loose, taking some hair with it. Grimacing, she scooted back to the low wall, dragging Walter’s discarded helmet with her. Her entire body felt sore and on fire; she could still feel at least twenty fingers digging into various sensitive places.

She took a deep breath, rubbed her bruised neck, then worked the helmet in place before keying the mic on its side.

“Mom?”

“Mollie? Thank the stars! Where are you? Are you outside? The door’s stuck—”

“Mom, slow down.” She swallowed painfully and flipped up the visor. Walter’s silhouette stood out against the burning ship beyond the other wall, three arms waving.

Molly took a deep, painful breath, the putrid smell of death filling her lungs. “Byrne was here.”

“Was? Where is he? I thought with the blast that you’d—”

“I’m fine,” she whispered, her voice still hoarse. “And he’s gone wherever his hyperdrive took him. It… it zapped him and left his arms.”

“Oh, dear. He’ll be very upset without them.” Her mom paused. “I saw the device running, nothing’s happening there? Is there anything—”

“No—”

Molly coughed, her throat scratched and irritable. Tears welled up in her eyes from the pain, then real tears followed as the rest came back to her.

“Dad,” she sobbed. “He said Dad was here, but he locked him away—”

“Oh, Mollie…”

She looked toward the burning ship, forced herself up and collapsed on the wall. She scanned the horizon.

“Cole…” More tears. “Mom, where’s Cole? Something bad happened to him, I can feel it. It’s just like when dad left—” She brought her hands up to the helmet, supporting her weary mind. “He’s… Cole’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Mollie. Come back to the ship. You’ll have to climb up through the pod bay—”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to.” Lying back along the length of the wall, she looked up at the bright stars in the moonless sky. “I’d be better off joining him,” she said to herself.

Her mother was silent for a while.

“I might be able to help you,” she said.

“Help me what?”

Parsona hesitated.

“Join him,” she said.