by Caryn Lix
Something clattered behind me.
Every muscle in my body froze, steel slamming into my spine. My heart rate jackhammered as a surge of terror enveloped me. Claws scrambling against metal . . . the long slow rattle of alien breath . . .
Goddamn it, there were no aliens on this ship. Mia had seen to that.
Mia. Of course. “Mia,” I said sharply, pivoting in place. “Is that you?”
She shimmered into view, appearing disappointed. Her hair hung in greasy clumps around her pale skin, and she gave me a wicked smile. “I tripped.”
“Isn’t everyone on edge enough?” I snapped, fighting to hide my irritation. “Do you have to sneak up on people just to prove you can?”
She shrugged. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding apologetic at all. “Just curious to see what you were up to.” She drew close to me and leaned against the wall, resting her sore leg. Reed had fixed her as best he could, but the alien’s claws had done some serious damage to her muscles, and there were limits to his power.
“Since when?” I demanded suspiciously. Mia had never displayed the least interest in what Rune and I were up to in the control room.
She scowled. “Okay, I was bored. So, what are you doing?”
“Where’s Alexei?” I countered. I rarely saw Mia without her massive shadow.
“He was driving me crazy, so I turned invisible and gave him the slip. He seems to think that if I lie still long enough my leg will heal. If Reed couldn’t fix me, bed rest isn’t going to do it either.”
I blinked, startled. That was probably more raw honesty than I’d ever gotten from Mia in a single statement, and it showed that she wasn’t any more immune to the stress permeating the ship than the rest of us. In a way, it made me feel warmer toward her. I’d come to appreciate her strength and determination. But she was still volatile and unpredictable, and I didn’t dare count her a friend yet.
“I was just checking in on our location,” I replied honestly. “We’re near Mars, and I want to make sure we don’t get inside their sensor range.” Omnistellar didn’t have a presence on Mars. That was Mars Mining’s domain. But Omnistellar was the most powerful corp in the solar system, and any other organization, especially an up-and-coming group like Mars Mining, would jump at the chance to curry some favor by arresting us.
“Can sensors even pick up this ship? I thought Sanctuary couldn’t.”
“It didn’t seem to, but . . .” I shrugged. “Why take chances?”
Mia nodded, glancing around, pacing back and forth with the grace and danger of a caged tiger. I’d seen her do it before, stalking the ship’s corridors. I remembered Alexei telling me that Mia hated confined spaces. The words hovered on my lips—Are you okay?—but I didn’t think Mia would appreciate them, so I only said, “Reed broke up another fight just now.”
“Reed’s good at that.” She examined a console as if she could understand it if she stared at it long enough. “People don’t get offended when he tells them off. He does it with a wink, and they walk away laughing.”
“You could try that,” I offered, raising an eyebrow to show I was kidding.
Mia laughed. “Diplomacy might not be my strong suit.” She hesitated. “Look, I’ve been meaning to say . . . everything that happened back on Sanctuary? I didn’t trust you, not for a long time, but you came through. We wouldn’t be here if not for you. I was . . . maybe a bit hasty judging you. Anyway. Thanks.”
A sudden burst of some unidentifiable feeling choked me. This was the closest I’d ever heard to an apology from Mia, ever. And I didn’t deserve it. Not her apology. Not her gratitude. Yeah, I’d saved a few of the prisoners on Sanctuary. But I’d been part of the company that imprisoned them in the first place, and worst of all, Matt was dead because of me.
But I couldn’t tell Mia any of that, so I forced a smile. “Thanks,” I said. “But I don’t think I did that much. You were the one who—”
Mia waved me aside as if I was boring her. “Let’s not do that.”
This time I grinned for real. Mia might be dangerous, but she was genuine. You didn’t have to play games or guess with her. “All right. Then just thank you.”
She nodded, glanced at the console once more, and suddenly disappeared. Her boots scuffed loudly against the floor as she retreated from the console room, a courtesy, I knew, because Mia could move as silently as a snake when she wanted.
The exchange left me bewildered, although not unpleasantly so. I’d made progress with Mia over the last few weeks. I’d hoped the shared experience, the terror of escaping the aliens, might bring everyone together, and it had for a while. Some of us felt it more than others: Mia and Cage and Rune and Alexei, who had faced the nightmare themselves, who had seen friends die around them, and me and Imani . . . Imani, who we’d found dangling from chains on the alien ship, who’d healed herself too late to help her sister.
As the space between Cage and me grew, I’d started spending more time with Imani. We didn’t talk about it much, but we’d both lost family in that attack: Imani lost her sister, and me . . . I lost my mom. When I hung out with her, we talked about anything but our families: reality vids, VR games, our favorite video bloggers. Imani seemed to have a thing for beauty bloggers and could rattle off names I’d never heard of, the so-called beauty belles and their incredibly popular channels. I listened in fascination as she explained exactly what I needed to do to my eyebrows to maximize my features. Maybe I would even try it if I ever got off this ship.
Hanging out with Imani was nice. She was the only person who never brought up the aliens, the deaths, our current circumstances. She had never once turned to me and said, What do we do now? Like me, she just wanted a few minutes to forget, and sometimes we could find that together. I wished she were here now. I could use a few minutes of forgetfulness. I contemplated going to find her, asking her a question guaranteed to engage her interest—So what did you say was the key to a successful online presence?—but a sudden burst of exhaustion overwhelmed me.
I sank down against the wall, staring at Rune’s corner, and stroked my fingers over the smooth silver of my wrist comm, trying not to dwell on how much I missed my dad, no matter how furious I still was. The silence of the control room settled over me. It had been a long time since I’d been alone. Unbidden, memories surfaced: feeling my way around this room in the dark, every sound a potential alien waking from its slumber. I winced, wrapping my arms around my knees, a wave of nausea threatening, and I allowed myself just one moment of weakness, my limbs trembling, my heart racing, my breath coming in short gasps, before I pulled myself together. I couldn’t let anyone see me like this. I had to . . . what? There was nothing to do. Nothing I could do. I stared miserably at the tangled nest of blankets.
And then footsteps raced along the hall. My head shot up, and I jerked to my feet, shaking off my lethargy just as Rune charged through the door and straight into me. We collapsed in a tangle of limbs and Mandarin cursing. Her elbow jammed into my ribs, sending pain spiking into my lungs. “Rune!” I exclaimed, rolling over and clutching my arm. “What the hell?”
“Sorry!” Rune caught my hand and yanked me to my feet with surprising strength, then pulled me toward the console. “Take a look at something.”
“What’s going on?”
“That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me.” A muscle in Rune’s jaw twitched. “I sensed something wrong in the system, and it’s only getting worse. But the computer won’t talk to me, it won’t . . . you haven’t noticed anything, have you?” She turned her wide eyes on me, frantic and imploring, and with a guilty start, I remembered the strange blip I’d noticed a few moments ago.
“Let me take a look,” I said.
“Wait.” Rune closed her eyes, frowning. She ran her fingers over the console, dipping them in and out of the surface, a quirk of her power that had terrified me at first but now seemed as normal as breathing. “It’s clearer here, in the control room. Kenzie, I think . . . it’s a communication!”<
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“A communication from outside? Like from another ship?” My brain caught up, and Rune’s urgency infected me. If that was true, this was the first signal we’d had from anyone in three weeks.
I swallowed hard, forcing myself to be calm. But no communication from outside could be good. It might be Omnistellar on our tails. At best, it was a merchant vessel wanting to know what the hell we were, and that was a question we’d have trouble answering. At worst, it was someone out for blood: an Omnistellar bounty hunter, maybe, someone who’d figured out that we’d survived Sanctuary, who’d come after us to track us down and drag us home.
Still, a tiny part of me hoped that maybe, just maybe, my dad was on the other end of that comm. When he didn’t hear from me, would he have gone to the lengths of hunting me down? Did Dad love me enough to go against Omnistellar for me? Or . . . my fingers trembled on the edge of the console. What if it was Dad, but instead of setting out to find me for my own sake, he’d done it for Omnistellar?
But one look at the actual language dispelled any such illusion. Words washed over me, or not words, precisely, but meaning, and that meaning made my blood run cold. All at once it came rushing back, every second on Sanctuary: the aliens stalking us through the corridors, their unseeing eyes milky and ghastly as their claws ripped into people I cared about; Tyler, my friend, floating into space; Rita, closer than a sister, soaked in her own blood; and of course, Mom, her lifeless body cradled in my arms.
These weren’t words, but they had meaning. Concepts, alien and foreign and yet somehow teasing the borders of my brain with significance.
The aliens were searching for their ship. And if another ship found us, if more aliens were on the way . . . if, God help us, they realized that Mia had ejected hundreds of their unconscious siblings into space . . .
It took every ounce of my decade of Omnistellar training not to run from the room in terror. I’d recoiled from the board when the first wash of meaning hit me, and I felt Rune’s gaze boring into me. I used an old trick my dad had taught me and stared at a spot on the floor until the world stopped spinning, set my jaw, and returned to my task. My fingers found the raised symbols and I closed my eyes, striving for stillness around the rampage of my heartbeat. Doing this came easier now, as I grew more familiar with my power, but I didn’t think the alien language would ever feel natural, even for me.
I brushed the symbols and their significance washed over me, simultaneously benign, almost routine, and yet menacing enough to send a chill down my spine. There was no mistake.
The aliens were coming.
I’d known they would. I’d known it. But I hadn’t let myself consider the idea with any seriousness. I’d hoped we had time, time to plan and think and figure out what to do next. Now, only weeks after we’d escaped Sanctuary, here they were. And if they responded this quickly, who knew what they planned? What sort of firepower they had? What they would do to us?
My eyes fluttered open and found Rune’s anxious gaze. “We have to get off this ship.”
* * *
Ten minutes later we huddled in the control room with what I’d come to think of as our core group. Reed watched with his characteristic quiet wit dancing in his eyes, like he was sketching each of us from the sidelines. Mia paced. Nearby, Alexei folded his huge form against a wall and monitored her with growing concern. Imani sat on the floor near Rune, working her fingers through her long braids. Like Reed, Imani had healing powers, but hers were the mirror image of his. Reed could heal anyone except himself, and Imani could heal only herself. Now, she frowned at her fingers and wiggled them. “Hangnail,” she explained to no one in particular. She caught my eye and winked. I think I was the only one who saw through Imani’s cheerful demeanor. Understanding passed between us, unspoken but never unfelt.
And of course, Cage, his presence simultaneously reassuring and threatening as he stood at my back, Rune as far away as she could manage. She still hadn’t forgiven him for arguing in favor of venting the aliens into space. I wasn’t sure I had either. He might have been right to do it, and we’d reached an uncomfortable truce in the matter. But I couldn’t help remembering how easy the decision had been for him. And there was the way he’d turned on Rune: It’s not the first time I’ve had to kill someone to keep you safe. I’d let it go. I mean, we’d been in the aftershock of an alien attack. But for three weeks, we’d had nothing but time to talk, and I still hadn’t brought it up, still hadn’t asked the questions hovering on my lips. Every day I didn’t, it got a little bit harder, and the space between us got a little bit wider.
He looked to me for support. He wanted answers, but I didn’t have any. I wasn’t sure how I felt myself. Cage was my lifeline on Sanctuary. We’d saved each other half a dozen times, not only physically, but mentally. In a short time, I’d drawn closer to him than to almost anyone else I’d ever met. But the last three weeks had driven home how little we knew each other. I liked Cage. I liked his humor, his level-headedness, his charisma. But even after a month, I didn’t know him. Did anyone, really?
Every eye landed on me. I met Cage’s gaze and nodded. How could he make me feel so confused, so uncertain, and yet so secure at the same time? “The aliens are looking for their own,” I announced without preamble. That brought all movement in the room to a standstill. I spoke quietly; we hadn’t dared close the door for fear of creating too much curiosity in the other prisoners. I didn’t want them to hear what I said, not yet. They were too volatile, too recently released from their cells, and some of them for very real crimes. The last thing we needed was a panic in an enclosed environment.
I allowed myself a small smile. I was thinking like a guard again. Omnistellar would be proud. Too bad I wanted nothing to do with my former corporation ever again.
Mia snapped her fingers an inch from my face, and I recoiled in spite of myself. She smirked. “Wanna explain that, sunshine?”
I counted to ten before I answered, grinding my teeth in irritation, managing to keep my voice level. So much for our moment in the control room. “We received a message. It’s nothing important, a basic call for information, I think. It looks like they’re telling us where they are and asking for our location in return. The good news is, their position seems pretty far off. But it means there are other aliens, and they’re tracking us.”
Cage folded his arms, frowning. As usual, his mind processed information at the speed of light, calculating and planning while everyone else struggled to absorb what they’d heard. “Could we send a response?” he suggested. “Fake coordinates, maybe? Buy ourselves some time?”
I shook my head. “I’m nowhere near comfortable enough with the language to risk that. The second they got my message, if I could even figure out how to send it, they’d double their speed. Rune’s already attempted to disable the signal with no success. We have to get off this ship.”
“We have to destroy this ship,” said Alexei in his soft, barely accented English, so at odds with his massive bulk. “Otherwise they will track it no matter what we do and head straight here.”
“They’re already coming,” I said bluntly. A chill raced down my spine. Cage moved as if to take my hand but must have thought better of it. Because the others were watching? Or . . . ? I shook my head and pressed on. “Rune’s picked up two more messages since then. The aliens are getting closer with each one. We have some time, but . . .”
“But we have to decide what to do,” Cage agreed. The others regarded him with a deference they never showed me, and I stifled a wave of annoyance. He’d led them for a long time, after all. It made sense that they trusted a fellow prisoner more than a guard who’d oppressed them, even if I had turned out to be more like them than I’d ever guessed—or been willing to admit. Still, I’d saved everyone’s lives on Sanctuary. The least they could do was give me the same attention they offered Cage. “Alexei’s right,” he continued. “The only way to throw them off our trail is to destroy this ship, and we don’t have the means to do that, do we?
” He turned to Rune, clearly addressing his question to her, but she folded her arms and glared at the wall.
I sighed internally. The last thing I needed right now was to referee a game of chicken between angry siblings. “Rune?” I demanded.
She addressed her response to me, not Cage. “I checked for any kind of self-destruct mechanism as soon as I got us moving. I couldn’t find anything. Even if all the aliens die, the ship continues. As soon as it goes a few days without manual input, it veers off and returns to wherever the aliens came from. And it carries a full record of everything that’s happened to it.”
Once again, I closed my eyes. Everyone knew what Rune’s words meant, but no one wanted to admit it. I pictured the other kids on this ship. Some of them were your basic teenagers. One was barely more than a child. But some of them, more than enough, were unpredictable. They were criminals before their arrest, and years of imprisonment on Sanctuary had done nothing to improve their self-control or social skills. The alien attack, and the following weeks of what was essentially another prison, hadn’t helped either. When they learned about this, I had no idea what they’d do or if we could control them.
Well, no one else was going to say it. As much as I’d tried to leave the guard behind, I kept embracing that role. Someone had to think responsibly. “So, we either keep going with this ship broadcasting our signal, not to mention our solar system’s, to the aliens, or . . .” A sinking feeling rose in my chest, and I fought it down. After everything we’d been through, after our daring escape . . . “Or we find a way to destroy it from outside.”
Cage nodded, his thoughts already mirroring mine. “And the only way we can do that . . .”
“Is to turn ourselves in.”
THREE
TURNING OURSELVES IN TO OMNISTELLAR was a true nightmare. For the rest of the kids on the ship, it meant going right back to the hellhole they’d escaped, a lifetime of imprisonment for no reason other than their powers or, as Mia pointed out, worse, since they’d proven they could escape a high-security prison once. For me, though . . . I was a corporate traitor. That was the lowest of the low. Sure, people could, and did, switch corporations, leaving one behind for another, but that only happened rarely and with the possibility of advancement. There were policies to follow, rules to obey. Actually betraying your corporation, turning on it, was almost unheard of, and I would be lucky if imprisonment was the worst I faced.