I gesture at the flickering skyline. “Ambitious? Like starting a war?”
“Not a war. An evolving situation.” The avatar brightens, looking behind me. “Ah, Boss X. We meet at last.”
X comes down the stairs. His eyes scan the avatar up and down, and he sniffs the air.
“You’re not real.”
“We are Diego—the sum total of every interaction in our city. The pulse of the power grid, the flow of traffic, every conversation, every purchase. We are very real.”
“Don’t get them started,” I say to X. “Listen, we need to get out of here. That shuttle probably sent—”
“An alert,” the avatar says. “Yes, you two should come aboard at once.”
X plants himself. “We’re not leaving these people behind.”
The avatar regards the damaged lifting fan, then sighs.
Seconds later, three more crew come running from the Diego craft, carrying tools and parts. Two of them start working on the fan, the other checks the shuttle’s underside.
“We did hail your craft before opening fire,” the avatar explains. “But you didn’t answer.”
“Pilot issues,” I say.
The avatar looks up at the shuttle. “And who are these people you want to save?”
“My father’s political prisoners. Heroes of the resistance.”
“Mixed in with smugglers and crims, no doubt.”
X growls a little. “Have the free cities started sorting refugees into good and bad?”
The avatar gives him a look of disgust. “No need to be insulting. We aren’t Rusties.”
There’s a roar from overhead—the second Diego craft opening fire at something in the distance. Answering explosions shake the air around us, and then a few pieces of burning wreckage fall from the sky, tumbling bright across the dark terrain.
Everyone takes cover except Diego.
“Scout drones,” they say. “Shreve command is interested in us.”
Boss X stands up from his crouch. “Then fix our shuttle.”
“That seems doubtful, and even if we get it flying, the Shreve border defenses will be a challenge.” The avatar hesitates. “Another signal is coming in—Col Palafox, on one of these overloaded shuttles. You really are making this extraction difficult.”
I look back toward Security headquarters—if Shreve is coming for us, they’ll target Col’s shuttle and the other two as well.
“Get them an escort,” I tell the avatar.
“Already done. But a war zone is not ideal for mass transportation.”
“You made it a war zone!” I shout. “This was supposed to be a diversionary attack!”
The avatar looks at me curiously. “Your reaction confuses us, Frey. You must have known your message would escalate things.”
“My message?”
“The one smuggled out by Riggs. We didn’t believe her at first—her story was too convenient for the rebel cause. But then you confirmed it.”
I shake my head. “I confirmed something?”
“With your appearance on Shame-Cam,” the avatar says. “A brilliant improvisation.”
My mouth opens, but I have no idea where to start.
“But I didn’t …”
“Surely you did, Frey. Why else expose your undercover identity to the entire population of Shreve, if not to send a message to the outside world? Stolen shoes—the ground itself is deadly. Combined with orbital radiology, the truth was inescapable. You forced even the most cautious cities to face your father’s nuclear agenda.”
I turn toward the battle over Shreve. “So all this—is about my shoes?”
“It’s about armageddon,” the avatar says. “If your father is scrounging Rusty nuclear waste, he’s building city-killers. Thus our escalation.”
I turn to X, as if he can help me make sense of all this. But he’s been locked in a cell for a month.
“I didn’t send Riggs out,” I say to the avatar. “But it’s true—my father spent today digging up spent nuclear fuel.”
“Which does complicate things,” the avatar says.
“Or makes them simpler—just end him tonight. Then we don’t have to evacuate anyone.”
“Regime change: the simple solution.” The avatar shakes their head. “Humans.”
“He’s trying to make nukes!” I cry. “Take him out from orbit!”
An infinitely remote expression comes across the avatar’s face.
“We considered that strategy, and even sent recon drones flying over his tower. What they saw dissuaded us—your father has brought the nuclear material to his own home.”
“He what?”
“He’s created a dead-man’s switch, of sorts. A decapitation strike against him will result in catastrophe.”
My heart skids in my chest.
If the free cities railgun my father’s tower, they’ll spread a cloud of radiation across the whole city. They might as well nuke Shreve themselves.
Holding his own population hostage is exactly what my father would do.
Mutually assured destruction—not of his enemies, but of Shreve itself.
“Then we storm his tower,” I say. “Take it in hand-to-hand combat!”
“Riggs’s warning reached us mere hours ago, Frey.” The avatar sounds disappointed in me. “A ground assault against a nuclear hazard will take days to prepare.”
I curse, looking up at the shuttle. From its windows, scores of scared, expectant faces stare out at us.
“Then we have to get them out of here.”
“Not tonight,” Diego says. “That engine is beyond repair.”
X claps me on the shoulder, his eyes bright.
“We can make a stand here—seven hundred of us, with orbital support from the cities. The Shreve army is already in tatters. We’d have a chance.”
I stare at him. “They’re civilians, truck pilots and kids from random cliques, unarmed. Throwing them into a battle is …”
A suicide mission.
X frowns. “A minute ago, you called them heroes.”
“For protesting my father. That’s not the same as fighting an army!”
He holds my accusing stare, with a darkness in his eyes I haven’t seen before—X’s bravery comes from the same place as my brother’s.
“Not everyone has a death wish,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
“Let them surrender, Frey,” the avatar says. “The two of you can come with us. Your primary mission has succeeded.”
“We can’t,” I say.
The three of us stand there a moment in silence.
Another roar comes from the sky, and I almost take cover. But it’s the approach of a second mass arrest shuttle.
It settles heavily on the ground. Next to the sleek Diego warship, it looks clumsy and misshapen. It’s taken fire, the scorch marks of projectiles lining its flanks.
“Last chance, Frey,” the avatar says. “Come with us to safety.”
It would be easy to fly away. But X won’t go without the rest of the prisoners. And maybe if I’m here, a captive, the free cities will move against my father sooner.
“I’m staying.”
“You still aren’t your father’s daughter, are you?”
I stare at them. “What do you—”
Behind me, the damaged lifting fan on our shuttle roars to life again. The mechanics run back aboard the Diego craft, the Specials following them.
It takes me a moment to understand.
“Are you kidding? You were testing me again?”
Alone now on the landing ramp, the avatar smiles. “The world never stops testing you, Frey. Why should we?”
Fury sweeps through me. My fist closes, thumb inside, and the variable blade slips into my hand. “You would have left all these people behind?”
“Only if you allowed us to, Frey.”
I wish I could hurt them, but the knife won’t do anything.
The AI is a system—I’d have to unravel an en
tire city, a million lives upended, customs and connections shattered. And yet I no longer find that inconceivable, if it wipes that smug expression away.
The doors of the other shuttle open. Col steps out.
“Why’d you stop?” he calls. “The others are just behind us!”
“Get us past the border defenses,” I tell Diego.
They don’t answer, but long seconds later, a curtain of fire comes down from the sky.
The streaks fall in parallel, choreographed diagonals of plasma. In the distance, the darkness ignites, a row of blinding pearls strung at the edges of the wild.
The sound arrives long seconds later, a shrieking chorus from the split-open sky—then a gentle warmth on my bare skin, like sunrise.
“Shreve is an open city now,” the avatar says.
Six of us ride shotgun, four Victorian prisoners of war joining me and X on the shuttle’s windy, shuddering topside. The repaired lifting fan looks shaky in its makeshift brace and whines like a drill in stone.
The other three shuttles keep station around ours, their top decks dotted with armed prisoners and commandoes. Col and Zura ride on the next one over. They’ve brought spoils from Security’s armory—more autocannon, handy if any small drones come after us. The two Diego hovercraft are on overwatch, their dark shapes blotting out the stars above.
Our ragtag army has gained an equally ragtag fleet.
The night is cold up here. Even with our speed limited by the damaged fan, the fifty-click wind is a freezing gale. I’m huddled next to Boss X, clinging to the heat of him.
“Sorry things got awkward back there,” I say.
A shrug goes through his frame. “Healthy debate is the rebel way.”
“But what I said about having a death wish …”
He lets out a grumbling laugh. “I’ve been accused of worse.”
I hesitate but say it anyway— “Do you think my brother did?”
X ponders this question for a while, looking back at the battle over Shreve. We can see the city much better from up here in the open, and the fighting seems to have settled. Dogfights and drone strikes streak the sky, but the orbital bombardment is over.
My father’s tower still stands, a monument to self-preservation at any cost.
“Seanan didn’t have a death wish,” X says at last. “Just a firm grasp of how unimportant we all are, compared to the planet.”
“But … you and he were important to each other.”
X hesitates, turning to the wild now, its darkness drawing nearer. “The struggle was how we fell in love. We belonged to the fight against people like your father.”
I try to understand, but erasing yourself to fix the world doesn’t make sense to me. The world has been trying to erase me since the day I was born.
I grew up protecting my sister, but the whole planet is too big and abstract compared to her. Tonight may be historic, something that will echo down the centuries, but I’m only certain of the realities around me—the flashes of light painting the sky, the gunfire in the air, the warmth of X against my back, the bitter cold of everything that isn’t him.
“I’m not sure I can be a rebel, Boss. I’m done with being selfless.”
He laughs a little. “Your sister’s a rebel, and she’s managed to keep her sense of self intact.”
“Except for pretending to be me.”
“She’s pretending to be both of you—the deadly sister and the charming one. Which is worrying.” He turns to me with a grin. “Maybe she’s trying to absorb you, as some twins do in the womb.”
A shudder goes through me, even if he’s joking. Which I’m not sure he is.
A rumble comes from behind us, and we turn to see fresh explosions fading in the sky, not far away. In my infrared, more sparkles scatter across the darkness, followed by the sound of metal being shredded.
The cold air seems to make the noises of battle sharper, brighter, like the glint from a freshly oiled blade.
“They’re coming after us,” X says. “We’re wounded prey.”
“And we’ve stolen my father’s secrets,” I say. “Every one of those prisoners may know something that can hurt him.”
The flashes come again, and the rumbling reaches us quicker, like the thunder of an approaching storm.
Our pursuers keep closing, till I recognize the wide-set running lights of Shreve’s flagship.
“The dreadnought.” I hoist my autocannon, the metal cold and heavy against my chest. “Not much we can do with these.”
“Maybe we can make them flinch,” X says.
We set the barrels of our cannon spinning, adding their shriek to the damaged lifting fan’s.
Overhead, one of the Diego ships unleashes a bolt from its primary plasma gun. A column of glowing air follows it into the darkness, heat prickling my freezing skin.
But the bolt spatters like a burning snowball against the dreadnought’s armor.
“Diego appears to be outclassed,” X says.
“They weren’t expecting to start a war tonight. And that’s my father’s biggest ship.”
A buzzing comes from our left, two small drones screaming out of the darkness. The shuttle trembles beneath us, projectiles rattling its metal skin. But they’re shooting at the engines, not us on the topside.
We open fire, all four of our shuttles blazing with pinpricks of light. Both drones spark and shatter, tumbling into the trees below.
The two Diego craft above us fall back, trying to keep the dreadnought away from our convoy. But X is right—they’re outgunned.
“In front!” comes a wind-torn cry from the next shuttle.
X and I spin around—another flight of drones is coming at our little fleet, dozens of microcraft the size of dinner plates. Too small to carry weapons, they’re trying to ram us.
Our autocannon smash them like skeet.
The sky lights up behind us, the warcraft exchanging fire in earnest now. One of Diego’s ships loses its stabilizers and goes whirling away into the dark.
“Uh-oh,” I say.
Moments later, the other Diego craft lifts up and out of the battle, leaving nothing but empty air between us and the Shreve dreadnought.
“A pity,” X says. “We almost made it to the wild.”
The dark gap in the border is just ahead. But the dreadnought can destroy us just as easily out there.
Maybe X simply doesn’t want to die in a city.
The Shreve ship draws closer, stately and unhurried in its pursuit. A miraculous orbital strike might take it out, but at this range, we’d all be pulverized together.
“Boss,” I say, my heart sinking. “We have to surrender.”
X sighs. “You may regret it, Frey, once you’ve been in a cell for a few weeks.”
I wonder if I’ll even last that long, but I can’t tell X about the dose of radiation I took—he’ll want to keep fighting for me.
He startles, his lupine ears twitching.
“Did you see that?” He peers into the darkness at our left.
Something flashes past in the corner of my eye.
Then another, and I recognize the shape …
People are tumbling from the sky.
Someone falls past right beside us, and we lean over the edge of the shuttle. The body doesn’t hit the ground—retrojets flash to life, bringing it to a soft landing in the trees.
“Those Diego Specials,” X says. “Were they wearing jump armor?”
“Yes.” Somewhere overhead, they’re abandoning ship.
I look up, just in time to see the wounded Diego hovercraft hurtling downward at us.
No—at the dreadnought.
Whirling end over end, its stabilizers blown to pieces, it somehow manages to spiral its way toward the Shreve craft. If they all jumped out, it must be the Diego AI itself flying, all those thousands of processors calculating wind speed, fan angle, lag time, and the air resistance of a thousand jagged, spinning surfaces.
I imagine the avatar at the contr
ols, her face utterly blank in the hurtling, empty craft.
The two ships hit, the smaller breaking into pieces, the dreadnought’s armor buckling at last. The shock wave hits us, hot and full of stinging debris, knocking me backward like a fist.
I skid across the shuttle’s metal deck, sliding for a moment down the angled sides. My hands grasp a window frame, bringing me to a halt.
The lifting fan screams just below me—the hurricane of its airflow drags at my body, trying to pull me in. Maybe I should let go, and drop onto the grill protecting the blades.
Only instinct keeps me from releasing my grasp.
Then I look down—the mechanics removed the grill when they repaired the fan. Nothing’s underneath me but naked metal spinning a hundred thousand times a second.
If I fall, there’ll be nothing left of me but slush. I’ll probably wreck the engine and bring the whole shuttle down.
My fingers cling in the cold, fighting the downdraft. The dreadnought’s rolling crash is still underway, hurling out smoke, splintered trees, and shuddering air.
Caught in the shock wave, our shuttle starts to slew again. It spins into a slow turn, the angular momentum lifting my feet out into midair.
There’s a meshed-over window just in front of me, one of the prisoners staring out of it. Face-to-face, we contemplate our imminent destruction.
Then the woman looks over my shoulder, her eyes widening.
What now?
Shouts come—impossibly—from behind me. Then I hear the buzz of smaller lifting fans and feel gloved hands grabbing at my arms, trying to peel me off.
I fight, kicking backward, clinging to the metal. Some furious part of me doesn’t want to be captured, even if escape means tumbling into the spinning blades below.
But my muscles are spent, and I’m pried off, pulled away from the astonished prisoner staring at me through the window.
My feet hit a hoverboard deck, and strong arms wrap around me. I can’t move.
“We got her, Boss!” the person holding me cries out.
“Get clear!” answer X’s voice.
As we swerve away, I smell animal skins.
The air around me buzzes with hoverboards. I finally see them all swarming through the dark gap in the border.
The sky is full of rebels.
The city of Shreve is open, and my big sister is here.
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