Mirror's Edge

by Scott Westerfeld

  Boss X settles into his seat, a sigh pouring from his body. All this time in that cell, he was more worried about the mission than our shared past.

  “I killed Seanan,” I remind him.

  X gives me a look, like I’ve insulted him.

  “I suspected that all along. From the moment I heard there was another Rafia—a body double is always a bodyguard as well.”

  I stare at him. “But if you already …”

  “Why do you think I allied with the Victorians? Because I thought they would win?” A short, pained laugh comes from him. “It was only to meet you, Frey of Shreve.”

  My fingers reach for my missing feels—Calm or Philosophical. Anything to help me understand.

  Boss X has been my friend, my mentor. He asked me to join his crew. And yet …

  “You always knew,” I whisper. “So you hated me.”

  X bares his teeth, his fists clenched. Right—I’m trapped alone in a small cage with a rebel warlord twice my size.

  “Why would I hate you?” he says through gritted teeth.

  It takes a moment to speak. “Because I was my father’s creature. The weapon that took Seanan from you.”

  “Yes,” he hisses, and part of me shuts down, a rabbit going still in the presence of a wolf.

  He reaches out one bared claw …

  … and takes my wrist firmly, painfully.

  “Seanan and I had said our good-byes already. It wasn’t the sort of mission you back away from.”

  I close my eyes, trying to focus—X’s claws are still in my flesh.

  Of course. My brother had no extraction team waiting, no means of escape from the heart of Shreve. He’d come there expecting to die.

  “Your father was only the first of many,” X says. “If Shreve was allowed to ruin the earth, other cities would follow—the Rusties all over again. Seanan wanted to go down in history as a cautionary tale.”

  I shake my head. “A what?”

  “A lesson for all tyrants in the future. With one speck of DNA, they’d know your father was killed by his own son.”

  “But Security kept it a secret. Even Rafi and I didn’t know.”

  “Of course. But if Seanan had succeeded, the other first families of Shreve would’ve used him to blacken your father’s legacy. Just as they’re joining us now.”

  I glance at the anteroom door. Kessa Shard was plotting against my father all along. Rafi’s friends too.

  His rule was always hollow, however unshakable he seemed to me and Rafi.

  I look out the side window at the prisoners lined up. They’re still coming in, crowding the aisles.

  If Seanan had succeeded, ending my father before the invasion of Victoria, how many of these people would never have seen the inside of a cell? That would’ve been worth dying for, I suppose.

  But not everything makes sense yet …

  “Why did you want to meet me, Boss?”

  “To wreak my vengeance,” he says gently, and releases me. “In a war, I knew there would be a chance.”

  “You had plenty of chances.” A hopeful shiver goes through me. “When we talked on the way to the Battle of Shreve—me, you, and Yandre. Is that when you decided I wasn’t so bad?”

  “It wasn’t anything you said, not at first.” A slow laugh moves through him. “You have his eyes, is all.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  Strange, how that never occurred to me. I’ve never seen a decent picture of Seanan, but he must have looked like me.

  Till now, all that mattered was that I looked like Rafi.

  Growing up, there was someone else out there who shared the angles of our face. Our eyes. Maybe our smile.

  “He never even knew about me,” I say.

  “No. But he loathed Rafia.”

  This stings for a moment—any judgment of my sister is a judgment of me, her mirror. But as Sensei Noriko saw that day, Rafi and I were never the same. Even when we were nine years old.

  Still, my reflex is to defend her.

  “Rafi hates our father more than you can know.”

  X’s teeth are bright in the darkness. “Then she must hate herself.”

  I shake my head, but I don’t know for sure.

  My sister is a mystery to me. She had a whole revolution I didn’t know about, ready to go. She sent a spy to follow me.

  And that kiss from Riggs …

  I make one last argument. “Seanan could’ve killed her that day. But he shot wild into the crowd.”

  “A decision in the moment. We had no backup plan, in case your father wasn’t there.”

  The world tips a little beneath me.

  “ ‘We’?”

  X nods slowly. “I was supposed to be there too.”

  I stare at him.

  X is the only one of us who isn’t camo-surged. But since this conversation started, he’s turned into a stranger.

  “You were supposed to die together?”

  “I loved him,” he says simply.

  “Doomed and in love.” My lungs tear in my chest, and it takes a moment to speak again. “Did you think you were Romeo and Juliet?”

  A dry laugh comes from him. “No, that’s you and Col. From two warring families, equal in absurdity.”

  “Maybe so, but we never planned a mission we didn’t expect to survive!” Suddenly I’m angry—with X, with Seanan, with the world for being broken in too many ways to count. “You helped my brother get himself killed!”

  “Yes, I planned it all with him,” X says, weary now. “And he slipped away without me. I woke up that morning to an empty bed—and every morning since.”

  My anger twists into something else.

  “Why did you agree in the first place?” I plead.

  “Your father seemed untouchable. His own people couldn’t rise up because of the dust. His military was too powerful for us rebels to take on. The free cities were spineless.”

  I swallow. “But Seanan could hurt him.”

  “He could destroy the man, and also make him a lesson for all history—if you spoil the planet, your own children will despise you.”

  He intones these last words. Like that was the argument Seanan used to talk X into giving up his own life.

  Because the whole plan was Seanan’s idea. An obsession with a father who’d traded an infant son for power.

  “It was his fight,” I say. “Not yours.”

  “The planet is everyone’s fight. And part of me thought we’d make it out alive.”

  “I’m glad my brother wasn’t under that delusion.” A flash of gratitude to Seanan goes through me, for sneaking out that morning without X.

  He nods. “It took me a long time to realize that your brother didn’t only betray me—he also saved me.”

  The hovershuttle is almost full by now, the nervous, joyful hubbub of freed prisoners all around us. We’ll be leaving soon, heading into battle. Maybe we’ll be shot down by the Shreve navy.

  Maybe this is our good-bye.

  I squeeze X’s hand. “I’m glad he left you there. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

  He’s gone—when I’m the one who killed him.

  But for the first time, I don’t carry all the blame. Seanan expected to die; X could’ve talked him out of the mission. And, of course, my father is always at fault in the end.

  “Seanan saved you too,” X says with a smile. “Do you really think you and Rafi would’ve survived if I’d been there?”

  I turn away, reimagining that day with two assassins, one of them the formidable Boss X.

  A laugh bubbles up in me. “So … you were going to sneak into my father’s ballroom as a wolf?”

  “That was my old body. I went to the surgeons a month later.”

  The world skids beneath me again. Everything is connected to that day, the first time I saved my sister.

  Something makes me reach out to stroke Boss X’s fur. It’s longer than I remember, unkempt from his month in a cell. But it’s a beautiful chaos, a thousand fractio
us tangles intertwined.

  X watches my fingers move.

  “In losing him, I found myself,” he says softly.

  It makes perfect sense—the same thing is happening with me and Rafi, in slow motion. The more we pull away from each other, the more I become my own person.

  X is part of the distance between us. He has his own gravity, drawing me away from her.

  Toward being a rebel, maybe. Or maybe just being me.

  “Are we really friends?” I ask.

  “Family,” X says. “You lost him too.”

  Zura sends us someone who can fly the shuttle.

  “Navich,” she introduces herself.

  She has the long and shaggy hair of a freed prisoner. She squints at the controls, her hands running across them uncertainly. Her fingernails look bitten.

  “How long since you’ve flown?” I ask.

  “A few months, and that was a cargo truck.” She gives us a sad laugh. “They brought me in on one of these shuttles. Should’ve paid more attention.”

  So she was arrested after the Revelation.

  “Take your time,” Boss X says. “My friend here will navigate to the border.”

  My friend—the words settle gently in my heart.

  After a long inspection of the controls, Navich twists both flight sticks at the same time.

  The shuttle lifts into the air, gliding forward on magnetics. But at the entrance to the parking bay, the lifting fans roar to life.

  I bite down hard, crushing the false tooth that hides my extraction transmitter. It vibrates three times to tell me it’s working. I feel the jagged edge of broken ceramic and taste blood.

  I touch my cheek, wondering why city-level tech is always so painful.

  We leap forward, a storm of leaves and dirt swirling around us. The maelstrom covers our view until we rise up, clumsy and newborn, above the treetops.

  We lurch right, then left, holding on tight. Behind us, I hear the standing prisoners stumbling.

  “Sorry! Got it now!” Navich calls, even though she doesn’t.

  We make a wide turn in halting stages, away from the bright and flickering center of Shreve.

  “Are you certain you know how to fly this thing?” X asks.

  “As long as we stay in the air.” She points at a red button. “And for landing, there’s always the emergency autopilot. But that’ll send a distress signal.”

  I hook into my safety harness. “Manual it is, then.”

  More shudders go through the cabin, but these aren’t Navich’s fault—the battle is all around us now.

  We’re part of the air itself, trembling with every explosion, every roaring passage of armored hovercraft. On our right, two squadrons of minidrones are in a dogfight, their running lights twisting and coiling, streaks of tracer rounds skimming the black sky.

  Navich’s hands twist, and we bank hard, away from the skirmish. I hear shouts from behind as passengers stagger and fall.

  “Easy,” X says. “Neither side will shoot at us.”

  She stares at him. “You sure about that.”

  “Yes,” I say—as long as the army of Shreve doesn’t figure out this shuttle is in enemy hands.

  Navich straightens our course, heading north. “What about the border defenses? This thing’s too overloaded to get any altitude.”

  Boss X and I exchange a glance.

  “We have friends at the border,” I say.

  As we fly away from the city’s center, the fighting thins out. Ahead of us, smoke rises from a row of bombed-out greenhouses, but the battle out here seems over and done.

  A few drones in Shreve livery are guarding a solar power field to our west. Navich angles us gently away from them.

  In the rearview monitor, the Shreve skyline still has its familiar shape. The free cities haven’t knocked down any skyscrapers.

  Maybe the whole attack was really a diversion after all, more fireworks than bloodshed.

  Lights twinkle into existence ahead, like stars on a dark expanse of ground. I realize where we are—not far from where Col and I woke up this morning.

  I point through the windshield.

  “Avoid that patch of lights—it’s a restricted area.” I don’t mention the nuclear waste. Her hands are nervous enough at the controls.

  As the lights grow closer, I remember the blinking red of my safety meter. My skin starts to itch.

  The scratch in my throat might only be thirst. The ache in my bones, two solid days of hiking. My nausea, simply battle nerves.

  But my bigger worry is, what has my father done with all that nuclear waste? Is one day enough time to create some kind of weapon with it?

  Navich veers away from the construction zone. The pristine darkness of the wild beckons from beyond the border floodlights. Safety and freedom, if we can only get there.

  “Something’s trailing us,” Navich says.

  In the rearview, the pursuing craft are almost invisible. No running lights, just black silhouettes blotting out the flickers in the sky.

  “Two heavy craft,” I say. “Unmarked.”

  Are they Shreve drones, wondering what a Security shuttle is doing this far out? Or is this our extraction team?

  “I can’t outrun them in this bus,” Navich says.

  X leans forward. “Can you hail them? They’re friends … maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Navich squints at the controls. “Let me see, the comm system should be somewhere.”

  The craft behind us draw closer, their shapes looming, too big to be drones.

  All at once, their running lights flick on. Bright green, the color of the free city of Diego.

  The extraction team.

  I let out a sigh. “It’s okay, Navich. They’re friends.”

  That’s when they open fire.

  Navich screams, twisting at the flight sticks.

  The shuttle tips beneath us, banking at forty-five degrees. A tumult comes from behind, our dozens of extra passengers stumbling in the aisles.

  Out the side window, the right-front lifting fan is smoking.

  “They found out about the escape!” I cry.

  “Then why the Diego colors?” X asks. “They’d just shoot us down.”

  “Right. But the extraction team wouldn’t—”

  Another volley hits, and the giant shuttle begins to yaw around us, spinning in the air. Here at the front, the centrifugal forces feel like being at the end of a whip.

  I’m thrown sideways in my harness, and my face hits the metal wall of the cockpit. Blood wells in my mouth, and more cries come from the passenger cabin behind us.

  The control panel glitters with a host of red lights. Alarms and acrid smoke fill the cabin.

  I clutch my bleeding nose, waiting for a final barrage to end us—but it doesn’t come.

  The view is whirling past the windshield. The darkness of the wild, Shreve’s bright skyline, the lurid green drones, again and again.

  They could’ve burned us from the sky by now. If they haven’t, it’s because …

  “Surrender to them!” I shout at Navich. “They’re rescuing me!”

  X understands and lets out a growled curse.

  Navich stares. “They’re doing what?”

  I point at my cheek. “I have a tracker, and this is a Security craft. They think I’m your prisoner. Surrender!”

  She stares at the control panel. “There isn’t a button for that! And I don’t know how to use the comm system!”

  “Then land us!”

  “With no stabilizers?” She waves at the world spinning in the windows. “We’ll crash!”

  “Hold on, then,” Boss X says, and brings down his fist on the emergency autopilot button.

  The lifting fans let out a shriek, and the landscape tilts in the windows. The forces pushing me into my harness turn slantways.

  We’re going down hard.

  But then the awful spinning begins to slow, the view settling back into recognizable shapes. The world finally comes
to a halt, the landscape rising up in the windows.

  A thump rings through the cabin.

  Then blessed stillness—we’re on the ground.

  “Great, Boss,” I say. “But the ship’s AI might—”

  He pulls out his force lance, sets it buzzing, and stabs the AI panel. “Not to worry.”

  The warning lights wink off, the earsplitting alarms shutting down. In the windshield, one of the drones descends into view, weapons bristling.

  I turn to Navich. “Open the door. I have to get out there and explain.”

  She reaches for the controls, opens the shuttle door.

  Outside the pilot’s cage, the freed prisoners are quiet, looking out the windows with scared faces, many of them bloody.

  I keep my voice firm.

  “Everyone stay calm. These are friends. We’re all getting out of here tonight.”

  They look hopeful, which makes me turn away.

  I walk down the ramp with my hands held up in surrender.

  The craft hovers just above the ground. Its lifting fans are blowing a gale around me—my badge shows zero signal from the dust.

  These must be allies. Except that the craft’s primary weapon, a plasma gun, is aimed straight at my head.

  “It’s me,” I call, pushing my hair from my face.

  Nothing happens, as if the craft is some inscrutable alien visitor and I’m the emissary for all humanity.

  But then twin landing ramps descend. A dozen soldiers spill out, wearing jump armor and moving with the insectoid twitchiness of Specials. They surround the shuttle, aiming their rifles up at the meshed-over windows.

  Strolling out the door behind them is what seems to be a modestly dressed woman with a bland smile.

  The avatar of the sovereign city of Diego.

  “Are you injured?” the avatar asks.

  I look down at myself—endless dirt, a bloody nose, and the grime of two days in the wilderness.

  “Just the usual,” I say.

  “And the rest of the team?”

  “On their way—the mission got complicated.” I gesture back at the downed shuttle. “We have to get these people out of Shreve, along with three more groups. About seven hundred in all.”

  A pause. “Rather ambitious, don’t you think?”