by Erin Bowman
Dedication
For Jeffrey—
Shine bright, baby boy
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
I: The Captives
II: The Testing
III: The Bond
IV: The Getaway
V: The Prisoner
VI: The Detainment
VII: The Compound
VIII: The Ally
IX: The Summit
X: The Cure
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Erin Bowman
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Seven levels underground, in the Paradox Technologies lab that had become her prison, the programmer sat hunched over her keyboard.
It wasn’t enough. No matter how many hours she bled into the project, despite bleary eyes and cramped fingers and millions of lines of code, the tech wasn’t ready. She could barely think straight anymore, not with the feeds having fallen silent for nearly three months.
Groaning, she turned to the computer beside her, her only window to the outside world. It had been programmed to update with specialized records from the Trios, providing the programmer with a glimpse of her daughter’s life via legal documents and report cards, test scores and news reports. Several floors underground and light-years between them, and this was what she was supposed to be grateful for?
Finish the tech, and you can go home to her, Solomon Weet had promised. Finish the tech, and I’ll let you leave.
If the programmer thought she actually had a chance of getting past Paradox’s security, she’d have stabbed Sol in the chest thirteen years ago and returned home that instant. But the facilities had proved to be a fortress.
The computer flickered to life for the first time in three months and the programmer jolted. A news anchor appeared on the screen, reporting from Soter’s arctic ring. The story was grim, unfathomable.
The programmer frowned, certain she’d heard things wrong. She’d watched travel visas be created just five months ago, read an update when her daughter had landed on Soter in late June. And then silence. Silence for three months that had felt like three years—three sleepless, restless, anxiety-filled years—until this news, today.
She watched the clip again. The anchor recited the chain of events as if it were unremarkable, no different from any other piece of reporting. A Cat-5 blizzard had hit Soter and buried one of Hevetz Industries’ research bases. Seven employees died while trying to evacuate. Their identities had finally been confirmed.
The programmer sat rigid as the anchor read off the names:
Dylan Lowe
Dr. Lisbeth Tarlow
Lyndon “Cleaver” Jones
Toby Callahan
Sullivan Hooper
Nova Singh
Althea Sadik
I
The Captives
UBS Paramount
Interstellar Airspace
ALTHEA SADIK STOOD IN FRONT of the door to her holding cell. There was no mincing words; that’s what it was. Not a room or personal quarters, but a cell. A prison.
She cocked her head, considering the small window in the base of the door. It was meant to serve as a passage for food, so that guards could pass meals to her. At least she assumed there were guards. No matter how hard she stretched the limits of her now-extraordinary hearing, she couldn’t make out their heartbeats. There was only Coen Rivli, the boy monster in the cell beside hers. They were monsters together now, forever altered by the contagion they’d encountered on Achlys.
What plan? he whispered in her mind.
She’d told him she had one just moments earlier—her first words spoken to him telepathically. Now she said only, Follow my lead.
When she’d first surveyed the room, Thea thought the window in the door was too small to fit her. But Thea was small, too. Little more than a meter and a half tall, roughly forty-seven kilograms in weight, with a figure like an inverted pyramid. The widest part of Thea was her shoulders, not hips, and she’d never been more happy for it. If she angled her body while sliding through the window, her hips would pass easily. But her shoulders . . .
Thea reached across her body, grabbing her left wrist with her right hand. Moving deliberately, she tugged. As her shoulder popped from its socket, a small gasp escaped her. The pain was a tiny blip in her consciousness, and then her brain pushed the feeling aside.
Thea? came Coen’s voice. You okay?
Her pulse had quickened. He must have heard it.
I’m fine.
The glass was double-paned, secured with a latch on the outside. She kicked with her heel, shattering the first panel.
She froze, listening, stretching her hearing.
No one was coming. Motion sensors or cameras must not be watching the cells. Foolish.
She kicked again, breaking the second panel of glass. Thea was still barefoot, wearing only the T-shirt and leggings she’d been in when the crew of the UBS Paramount had taken her and Coen by force. She was still trying to process how the crew that she’d thought would be her savior had turned out to be an enemy. The Paramount had pulled in her shuttle not because it had been sent to rescue survivors from Achlys but because it was collecting a resource that would serve their agenda. Lieutenant Burke, Paramount’s acting captain, had made that much clear when interrogating Thea just earlier. Once he was done studying the Psychrobacter achli swimming in her—and Coen’s—veins, he would try to replicate it. And control it.
Like all Radicals, Burke wanted the Trios to secede from the United Planetary Coalition. Even when so many citizens believed the systems were strongest united, he was hell-bent on Trios independence. And from what Thea had pieced together in her interrogation, it sounded like Hevetz Industries had allied with Burke as well, that the company’s owner was another Radical lurking in plain sight. If Burke got his way, he’d create an army of soldiers—hosts like Thea—to force the Union’s hand.
Thea bent, knocking the remaining shards of glass from the edges of the window frame. Then she lowered herself to the ground and poked her head through.
A dark hallway. No guards.
She wiggled forward. A stray piece of glass dug into her bicep, but she pressed on. Her shoulders slipped through the opening. The rest was easy. Just a quick tilt of her body when her hips reached the frame, and then she was in the hall.
She stood and moved to Coen’s cell, her feet tracking blood on the dark tiles. By the time she reached his door, she was no longer bleeding. The wounds had sealed, her body healing at inhuman speed.
A series of sliding metal bolts secured the door. She unlocked the first, second, third. Then tugged the door open.
Coen stood in the frame. Half of his shoulder-length hair was pulled back in a bun, a dark knot atop his head. The rest hung wildly around his face. His chest swelled with each breath, and beneath the collar of his T-shirt, Thea could make out the edges of his tattoo, black ink against his light brown skin.
Thea. His breathing was labored, as though it had been him forcing his way through that tiny window. His pulse beat with excitement.
Silently, he moved to her, crossing the threshold, gathering her in his arms.
Thea wasn’t prepared for how the contact softened her resolve. His chest beneath her cheek, his arms warm and reassuring on her back. So unlike the hands that had dragged her to this cell while she was only half-conscious. It almost made her want to linger. Almost.
He backed away quickly, as though he’d heard her thoughts. Perhaps he had. Then he took her wrist in his hand and braced his other palm against her dislocated shoulder. Don’t yell, he warned her.
She breathed out as he thrust her shoulder back in
place. It was no worse than an annoying pinch.
Let’s go, she said.
There was only one direction to travel—down a dimly lit, windowless corridor lined with doors. Thea led the way past the cells, all empty based on the lack of heartbeats. A part of her had hoped she’d sense Nova Singh here. Their captors had cut the power to the pilot’s cryo pod when storming the Exodus shuttle—a gamble that could easily kill a person. Nova’s absence from this row of cells could mean only one of two things: she was dead and had been disposed of, or she was in a coma and being held elsewhere on the ship.
None of that’s good, Coen said.
Thea flinched; she hadn’t realized she’d been sharing her thoughts.
Sorry. I wasn’t trying to pry.
It’s not your fault if I’m projecting it, Thea said, and hurried on.
At the end of the hall was a service ladder. Thea grabbed the rungs and climbed, coming up against a smooth hatch door. The hand wheel to open it was surely on the other side. She put a palm to the cover, using all her strength to try to turn it. Help me with this.
Coen scrambled up the ladder. Working together, they pushed until the cover groaned, then creaked, then began to spin.
A moment later, Thea was shoving it up and stepping through the opening. She squinted in the newfound brightness. The room was a white cube, locked off on all ends. She sensed heartbeats, though, and zeroed in on the guards. Dozens of them, on the opposite side of a sealed door. They spotted her and shouted orders. Gas began to fill the chamber.
Quick! She motioned for Coen.
He joined her at the main door, but the ground sparked to life beneath them. Shock rod plates lined the floor. Heat surged through Thea’s bare soles, pain laced her limbs. When her legs betrayed her, she fell to her knees, waiting for the shock to subside. It didn’t. The sedative continued to pump into the room, and Thea slumped to her side, writhing.
In his mind, Coen Rivli could picture the window in his cell’s door, the tiny opening through which Thea had somehow managed to crawl. Without her, he’d still have no idea what waited on the other side—not the hall or the ladder or the dead-end room they’d never be able to breach. He wondered, momentarily, if not knowing would be better. Not knowing meant he could hope. Now he knew escape was impossible.
He forced his eyes open. Blinked rapidly. Everything was bright and shiny.
For a moment, he thought he was still in the room above the hatch, but then he had the vaguest memory of a mask being put over his face. Not one to fend off the gas, but one to administer it, keeping him sedated as he was dragged . . . somewhere.
Coen pushed himself upright, finding a cot beneath him. Not the cot from his cell, though. One of the walls in this room was made of glass. Beyond was a space he recognized. A table he’d been on some hours earlier, nearly unconscious as medics inspected him and retrieved blood samples.
He was no longer in his cell, but an isolation chamber in the ship’s medbay, which wasn’t much better. Just a different kind of prison.
Coen swung his legs over the cot. There was a faint throb in his side. Probably a guard had struck him with a baton. He rolled his shoulder, stretched the muscles in his abdomen, and the pain faded with the movement.
A languid pulse beat in his ears. Thea’s.
He shot to his feet. Standing, he could see over the operating tables and regenerative beds, to the other side of the medbay. Thea sat in a chamber of her own, massaging the back of her neck.
That went well.
Her head jerked up, and her eyes found his. Didn’t it?
I wasn’t joking, Thea.
Neither was I. Her pulse didn’t twitch. Even the tone of her thoughts was even, her expression calm. We’re back on a main level of the ship. That’s better than being locked below a hatch.
It’s still a ship, Thea. There’s nowhere to escape to.
The medbay’s main doors slid open and Lieutenant Burke marched in, a group of men on his heels. Two wore standard military uniforms; the third, a medical jacket.
“How’d they even get out of the cells?” Burke was asking.
“The feed door,” one of the officers replied. “The girl dislocated her shoulder.” He passed a Tab to the lieutenant, who watched the device, brow wrinkled.
I guess there were cameras after all, Thea mused.
Of course there were cameras. Maybe she hadn’t fully processed the direness of their situation yet, but Coen had. They were on a Union battleship, a military vessel that hailed from the Trios. It would be equipped with the very best technology and staffed by officers and soldiers, presumably all of whom were Radicals. If even a single person on this boat was loyal to the Union, representatives from Galactic Disease Control would be present. Instead, Burke had Hevetz employees helping him. Coen had seen the Hevetz logo on the jackets of the medics who had inspected him.
Coen watched Lieutenant Burke take in the surveillance footage, the man’s pulse blipping up a hair.
I nearly attacked him when he interrogated me after Achlys, Thea said. That why he’s scared.
The image made Coen smile, at least until he realized that a successful attack from Thea could have unleashed Psychrobacter achli on the Paramount. A small injury to her, a bit of that blood passed to Burke, and that was it. Madness, all over again.
Burke strode to Thea’s chamber and stared down at her. “There isn’t a scratch on her. She’s bleeding in this footage.”
“Sir, it is my hypothesis that Psychrobacter achli gave the hosts not only enhanced physical strength but incredible healing capabilities as well,” the man in the medical jacket supplied. “And who knows what else. I’d love to run some tests on them.”
“Negative,” Burke said. “I’m putting them in cryo until we reach the research facility. We don’t have adequate means of restraining them here.”
“But sir—”
“This is not open to debate, Farraday. We only get one shot at this, and I’m not blowing it.” Burke turned to the officers. “Get a fully suited unit in here, and tell them to bring shock rods and sedation masks for the hosts. We’re moving them immediately.”
Coen could guess what would happen next. A sedative would fill his chamber. Once he hit the floor, the suited unit would slip a mask over his face to continue administering the drug, and he’d be dragged to a new location, helpless. And once they reached the destination facility Burke had mentioned, Coen imagined security would only be tighter.
Thea seemed to be running through a similar line of logic because she said, Maybe our best chance is to try again as soon as possible. Run for an escape pod?
To what—land on Achlys again? Coen shook his head. It’s the only rock for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
What about a shuttle, then? she offered. Maybe we can make it to a shuttle.
And fly it . . . how?
“Nova,” she blurted out. Thea threw a palm against the glass of her chamber and stared down Burke. “Where’s Nova? Our pilot!”
The lieutenant folded his arms over the front of his uniform. “As good as dead. Try anything, and I’ll see one of you ends up the same. I only need one host to accomplish what I’m after.”
Dread rushed through Coen. Without Nova—without a pilot—they were truly stranded.
“Why are you still here?” Burke barked at the two officers beside him. “I said to get me a unit.” They muttered apologies, pressed a hand over their hearts in some type of salute, then fled the room. Burke began to follow, but paused in the doorway, looking over his shoulder at the man in the white coat. “And, Farraday? Make sure they don’t talk in the meantime.”
The doctor—Farraday—looked between Thea’s and Coen’s chambers. He was middle-aged, with ashen skin and a red beard peppered with gray. His shaved scalp glinted beneath the operating lights. He didn’t look like a threat, and yet Coen could sense a coldness to him. His heart rate was calm, almost lazy, and he eyed them with a look of disgust that made Coen’s skin craw
l.
The man nodded to Burke, then rolled his eyes once he was alone. “Make sure they don’t talk,” the doctor grumbled. “Not a word spoken in this entire footage, and he thinks they’ll start talking now.” Farraday glanced at Coen, gray eyes boring in. “But you don’t need to talk, do you?”
Don’t say anything, Thea whispered.
Obviously, Coen shot back. But he wasn’t quick enough to keep his gaze from drifting to her.
Farraday caught it, and looked at Thea. “I wonder if . . .” He let the thought die and instead pulled a Tab from the inside of his lab coat and began recording notes. “Don’t mind me,” he said, taking a seat where he had a good view of both chambers. “I’m just observing.”
“Observe all you want,” Coen said. “Maybe you’ll crack our fancy code of not talking. Figure out if we’re blinking our communications. Or maybe we’re relying on sign language. Let’s start with this. Do you know what this means?” He made an obscene gesture through the glass.
The doctor’s pulse remained steady.
Don’t bait him, Coen. It’s not worth it.
Coen glanced Thea’s way, but she had her back to him, leaning against the glass door of her chamber. The doctor followed Coen’s gaze and frowned, making another note in the Tab.
We’ll be out of here soon enough, she continued. You heard Burke. They’re moving us to a research facility. That’s when we make our break.
They’re putting us in cryo until we get there.
Which means once we’re at the new facility, they’ll breathe easier, think we’re secure. We’ll find a way then. I never thought we’d actually escape today. I just wanted to case our options.
Coen sat on the edge of his cot and sighed. You said you had a plan.
I do, and it’s evolving. This was step one. Now we know step two comes later.
Coen thought maybe Thea should tell him all her envisioned steps, in detail, that perhaps working together might ensure they weren’t captured just minutes after breaking free of their cells.
How do you do it? she asked.
Do what?
Control which thoughts you share and which you don’t? I can tell you’re annoyed with me right now. Your pulse kicked up, and I can practically feel the heat your emotions are giving off. But I didn’t hear any of it. You didn’t project anything into my mind. How?