Impostors

by Scott Westerfeld

“What do you mean by break?”

  “Sometimes you were confident, certain of yourself. Other times, you acted like someone overwhelmed by ongoing trauma. Our psych team assumed a split was forming in your personality. It never occurred to them that you were actually two people.”

  “A sane one and a crazy one.” I close my fists to keep my hands from shaking.

  “That’s not a useful way to talk, Frey.”

  “Really?” I can’t look at him. “What would you call it?”

  “What they did to you was brutal. The broken bones. Having to hide all those years. Having no friends, and him as a father.”

  “So it’s not just the bones—I’m broken too.”

  Col takes my hand, soothes it open.

  “Frey. You’re the healthy one.”

  I stare at him. “What?”

  “When our team explained the psychic break, they focused on something called foreign language anxiety. People who speak a second tongue, even fluently, have hitches in their grammar when they’re anxious—or when they’re falling apart inside. When Rafia speaks French, she gives herself away.”

  I start to say that it’s impossible. Rafi’s the confident one. Brash and imperious. But then I hear her voice in my head.

  This isn’t normal.

  What if she didn’t mean me?

  “This is what I think,” Col says. “She had to watch it all happen—you being brutalized, hidden away. She couldn’t protect you, her own sister.”

  “No. It’s my job to protect her.”

  “Exactly. You had a purpose, Frey. When the assassin tried to kill Rafia, you could save her.” He looks away. “But she could never save you.”

  My mind rushes back to that day. What Rafi said to me later …

  I just sat there screaming.

  The whole time. Just not out loud.

  I turn to Col, a rush of anger coming over me.

  “So you knew Rafi was sick? And you thought it was okay to keep her as a hostage?”

  “To get her away from him! To show her what it’s like to live with a real family, in a normal city!” Col spreads his hands. “Your father can’t live forever, and she’s his heir. We thought if I could make an alliance with Rafia, we could change Shreve someday, without a war.”

  An alliance. My heart beats sideways once.

  “Your grandmother,” I say. “That first day, when she told you to give me a tour …”

  He looks down at the ground. “Abuela was never particularly subtle.”

  “And the story about your hunting bow?”

  “A way to get you down to the monastery, where you’d feel safe talking to me. Where I could make friends with you.”

  Something hard is pulsing in my throat. I can’t breathe.

  He’s the first person I’ve ever kissed.

  And he was faking it.

  Col takes both my hands now. “But you really were different from what I expected, Frey. I just didn’t know why.”

  I pull away and stand up too fast. My head spins, and I reach out to steady myself—my hand brushes one of the plastic cases full of death.

  He’s still talking. “When I kissed you, it was real.”

  It doesn’t matter what he says now.

  His mother, his grandmother—they were conspiring with Col the whole time. Laughing behind my back when I thought he was really my friend.

  I’m a freak, from a family of freaks. I have only one purpose in this world.

  “I have to go home. My sister is hurting, and I need to save her.”

  My head is still spinning as I weave down the aisle, shelves full of weaponry on either side. Col’s calling after me, but I don’t care and I can’t trust him.

  My feet hit the ladder. It wobbles under my weight as I haul myself up toward the smells of forest and life.

  I have to get back to Shreve—now. My sister has no one but me and she thinks I’m dead.

  “Frey!” Col calls from below.

  Telling him my name was a mistake. Giving up my sister, my home, for him was madness.

  I pull myself up and out through the door, sucking in fresh air. Dark branches crisscross the sky.

  “Don’t move!” comes a voice from the trees. “We don’t want to hurt you, but we will if we have to.”

  There are four of them.

  Kneeling at the edges of the crater, rifles raised, they have me surrounded. Their sneak suits are invisible against the forest, but shimmers of body heat escape.

  All I can see is anger and betrayal. I hurl my knife, sending it in a sweeping arc that will burn them to the ground. It roars to full pulse for a millisecond—

  Then sputters and falls into the leaves, lifeless.

  The battery is dead.

  So am I.

  But the soldiers don’t open fire. They must think I was throwing the knife away in surrender.

  “Hands in the air,” one of them calls down.

  I obey, looking for some kind of weapon on the forest floor. There are only branches, leaves, rocks. Nothing to equal four rifles aimed at me from above.

  “We know you have Col Palafox,” the leader shouts. “Surrender him to us—now.”

  I look up at her. How do they know Col is here?

  Then I hear a clambering on the ladder behind me.

  “Stay down!” I hiss.

  “Zura?” he calls up.

  “Col!” she cries. “¡Estás vivo!”

  She comes racing down the crater wall. When her suit flickers from forest camo to combat livery, I realize two things.

  One: She’s a Special, surgically modified beyond any normal soldier. No other kind of human could make that descent look so effortless. Specials were the lethal endpoint of pretty-regime surgery. Their muscles enhanced, their reflexes speeded up, their bones reinforced with duralloy. Their minds were made cold and hard, and their faces fashioned with a fearsome angelic beauty.

  At the start of the mind-rain, Special surgery was illegal. But it seems everything is permitted now.

  Two: She’s not wearing Shreve colors, but the light blue of the Victorian army.

  Behind me, Col hauls himself up the ladder.

  As the Special runs across the broken ground, she pulls down her sneak suit hood. She has dark hair and surgery that makes her almost frighteningly beautiful. Col runs to meet her and they embrace, smiling and laughing. Spanish spills from their lips, too fast for me to grasp any meaning.

  I look up at the other three soldiers. They’re making their graceful way down, all of them with the uncanny, inhuman grace of Specials. Only one keeps his rifle pointed at me. They look a little tired, like they’ve been on the run since the attack began.

  I figure they won’t shoot me if I lower my hands.

  Part of me doesn’t care. Too much is tangled in my head—my sister’s illness, Col knowing I was a hostage, his false kiss.

  Suddenly every old break in my bones burns, as if all my damage is on fire. I can feel the scar over my eye and the dirt on my face. Nothing seems solid or real, not even the forest floor beneath me.

  I want my knife, but it’s fallen somewhere in the leaves.

  My feet shuffle toward it, and I drop to my knees, sweeping the undergrowth with my hands. Searching for the only thing I still trust.

  There it is, hard metal in my hand.

  When I raise it up into the air, one of the soldiers is standing there, ready to shoot.

  “No!” comes Col’s shout through the spindly trees.

  The man hesitates, and seconds later Col is there, putting himself between me and the leveled rifle.

  “¡Esta es mi amiga!”

  My brain churns through the half-understood words.

  My friend.

  More Spanish flows around me, explanations and confusions.

  I sit there, staring at my knife. What would the soldiers do if I just walked away? I could take Col’s hoverboard and fly home to save my sister.

  Or would he let them shoot me?

>   “Frey.” Col kneels before me. “It’s okay. They’re Victorian.”

  “I can see that.”

  He’s beaming. “But they’re getting orders from the codebook!”

  I shake my head. He might as well be speaking French.

  Col gathers himself, grasps my shoulders. He leans close, his words slow and careful.

  “They think my mother is still alive.”

  Zura, it turns out, is the woman who taught Col how to shoot a bow and arrow.

  She and the others are Victorian House Guard, elite commandos who were on patrol with my father’s forces when his treachery began.

  “One minute, we’re hunting rebels together,” Zura explains in accented English. “The next, they start shooting at us. We got away, but we couldn’t find any other friendly units. And then …”

  She pauses to give me a wary look. I may be dirty and disheveled, but I’m still wearing my sister’s face.

  Col has ordered them not to ask why I look so much like la princesa Rafia. They must think I’m a commando surged for some undercover mission.

  “You can talk in front of Frey,” he says. “I trust her.”

  “Frey,” Zura repeats carefully. “Yes, sir. A few hours ago, we got a message from the book.”

  Col turns to me. “The codebook is the keys to the Victorian army. It drops hidden messages in the global feeds, which only our forces can read. There’s only one book, and my mother keeps it with her—always. She must have gotten out that night!”

  “Col,” I say softly. “That’s wonderful.”

  The anger in my veins has sputtered out, but nothing has replaced it. Like there’s a battery in my heart, and it’s spent from all this fear and fury and betrayal. I don’t feel anything.

  I just want to go home and save my sister.

  “The orders gave us a code to transmit,” Zura continues. “It turned on the tracker on your hoverboard. We couldn’t believe it when we got a signal!”

  “Jefa put a tracker on my board?” Col shakes his head, laughing. “She always said she’d never do that.”

  “Thank the saints she did,” Zura says. “And she must’ve been the only one who knew about it. Which means she has to be alive.”

  Col takes a slow breath. For a moment he looks almost anguished, as if this new hope is too much to bear.

  I reach for his hand. “Never underestimate your mother, Col. You can take that from me.”

  There’s bitterness in my voice, but a weight is starting to lift. Maybe a loss I’ve been blaming myself for never really happened.

  “Do you know where the book is?” Col asks Zura.

  She shakes her head. “All we have is a location, deep in the mountains, to take you to. Your mother must be there.”

  Col turns to me, his eyes alight.

  “Frey, she’s alive.”

  He’s waiting for me to be happy, to see that our alliance is back on track. As if he hadn’t just told me that he played with my emotions from the moment I set foot in his home.

  I was deceiving them too. But I never lied to Col about how I felt.

  Then something hitches in my brain, and I turn to Zura. “How much of the Victorian army is left?”

  “You’d need the codebook to know that. But we’ve been prepared for a guerrilla war, in case Shreve got the jump on us. There must be dozens of units still out there.”

  “Then why isn’t someone here already?” I ask.

  The two of them stare at me.

  I gesture at the hidden doorway. “There’s enough firepower in that bunker to level a city. Why hasn’t Aribella sent someone to collect those guns?”

  Col looks stricken for a moment. As if I’ve told him his mother is dead again.

  “My guess is,” Zura says, “they simply aren’t here yet. It’s only been hours since we got our orders. But Frey’s right—we should take what we can carry.”

  “Of course.” Col stands, brushing aside my doubts. “We’re wasting daylight. Let’s load the car and go.”

  The Specials spring into motion, two of them heading down into the bunker. Zura turns back toward their hovercar, which is waiting up in the clearing.

  When I don’t follow, Col hesitates. “Frey, are you coming?”

  I take a breath.

  Ten minutes ago I wanted to fly back home and save my sister. To leave the Palafoxes and their sophistication, their hypocrisy, behind forever.

  But I have no plan, no food or water, no chance of winning against the whole Shreve army.

  And here I have allies. I have Col.

  Or at least I thought I did.

  “You can’t lie to me anymore,” I say. “You can’t use psych profiles, or polygraphs, or scans. Don’t treat me like someone you’re trying to trick, or fix, or control. Okay?”

  “I promise. And let me ask you something too.” He takes a moment to choose his words. “From now on, Frey, show me who you really are.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  But an impostor is exactly what I am.

  The commandos’ car is a light attack craft, its skin set to jungle camo. It’s swift and loaded with firepower, but the hull is pitted and scarred. I’m not sure how long it can keep flying without repairs and a battery charge.

  The Palafoxes better have a hidden factory somewhere, with solar panels the size of soccer fields.

  It’s cramped here inside the car. Six people in a machine designed for four, along with a hoverboard and eight plasma guns—as many as we could fit. Two of the Specials squat in the back, giving up their seats for me and Col.

  The pair of us are eating spagbol, self-heating survival food that my father wouldn’t allow anywhere near his hunting lodge. But hunger really is the best sauce, and it’s delicious. Even better is the clean water from the hovercar’s taps.

  The mountains are an hour’s flying time away, but it’s taking forever. Every few minutes we dip down into the trees, cowering whenever the radar shows a blip.

  Creeping along like this was tedious on Col’s hoverboard. Squished inside this tiny, damaged car, it’s downright sick-making. One of the lifting fans is damaged, so the car rides at an odd, wobbly angle.

  But Col looks more hopeful than he has since we watched his home turn into a column of smoke.

  His mother might be alive. He has a bunker full of weapons, an army prepared for a guerrilla war. Maybe the Palafoxes still have a chance in this fight.

  Maybe they can still hurt my father. Maybe together we can save Rafi.

  I wonder what she’s doing now. Is she on some balcony, smiling and waving at the crowds? Screaming at my father? Crying in our room, thinking I’m dead?

  Is she really falling apart?

  It seems like nonsense, diagnosing someone from readouts captured by hovercams. Psychological warfare teams aren’t doctors, after all. Rafi sounded so happy when she called and told me how to make my dress. Like she was smiling the whole time.

  Of course, she was also smiling on that balcony half an hour ago, thinking I was dead.

  Maybe I’m not the only impostor in the family.

  We’re heading west, and the hot sun fills the hovercar as the afternoon drags on.

  The Specials have given Col a set of Victorian battle fatigues. The forest camo makes him look older, harder. I’m still in my sweats and bloody nightshirt.

  He’s staring at an airscreen in front of him, drinking in every word about the war.

  “Looks like a soft takeover so far,” he says to me. “No troops in Victoria. But the feeds and city interface are under Shreve’s control.”

  “They’ll spread spy dust soon,” I say. “Then they won’t need soldiers.”

  “The other cities have cut off trade, at least,” Col says. “They’ve promised never to buy the metal from your father’s stolen ruins.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say. “He can always use it himself. He wants Shreve to be the biggest city in the world.”

  Col lets out a curse in Spanish, and
the soldiers all glance at him, then at me. They’ve all had old-style Special surgery—a cold beauty that makes me shudder.

  They still don’t trust me. Of course, I look exactly like their enemy’s daughter. It wasn’t until Col let out a burst of angry Spanish that they let me charge my pulse knife.

  “No one’s talking about a war to free us,” Col says. “All those treaties …”

  His voice breaks off. The soldiers all sit up straighter.

  On the airscreen is a row of three young faces. The hovering text gives their names.

  In the middle is Teo Palafox.

  He looks like his older brother, but with darker skin and pale gray eyes. He wears a bored look, like a littlie forced to sit for a school picture.

  Col waves a hand, and the volume comes up.

  —sometime last night. The School of Genève is conducting an investigation, in cooperation with the Warden Consortium. Authorities are concerned that the unexplained disappearances are related to the attack on the city of—

  Col waves away the sound, and his head falls back into the crash cushions of his seat. No one says anything. The soldiers are motionless except for Zura’s hand on the flight stick.

  “They took him,” Col murmurs. “And two of his friends. I know those kids.”

  I reach out from the backseat, wanting to put a hand on his shoulder. But I don’t know who I am right now.

  His fellow warrior? The girl he kissed?

  Or am I the impostor again, my father’s agent in his house?

  I wait until Teo’s face is gone from the screen, then gently take Col’s arm.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You said he was safe.” His voice breaks. “That the other cities wouldn’t let this happen, not at a school.”

  I want to argue that it doesn’t make sense. That no fourteen-year-old boy is such a threat to my father that he’d risk allying the whole world against him.

  But Teo Palafox is missing.

  “I was wrong,” I say.

  My father makes his own reality. Sometimes with nightmares.

  “Almost at the rendezvous point.”

  Zura’s voice startles me awake, and it takes a moment to remember where I am.

  Late-afternoon sunlight slants into the cramped hovercar. The air is scented with spagbol and self-brewing coffee. My shoulder aches where I’ve leaned against the straps of my seat.