Marked

by Jenny Martin

Bear falls into line right next to me. Side by side, we wait for Captain Nandan. Bear stares straight ahead, but I risk a glance.

  “Good morning, Phee,” he says, still avoiding my gaze.

  I nod. The rest of the morning he’s perfectly cordial, and there’s no trace of longing or anger or disappointment in him. As we work with Hank and Fahra, Bear even goes out of his way to help Miyu slip into her exo-suit. I watch the interaction like an outsider, too afraid to interrupt.

  “Just pop this lever,” he tells Miyu, punching the left collar plate of her exo, “and your shields lock into place.”

  Sure enough, a clear, retractable hood arcs over her head and slips into the gutter of her collar, and suddenly Miyu’s self-contained in her own atmosphere, behind the clear flex glass of her helmet and the dull, gunmetal skin of her suit. Lights dance on the visor as her screens read and assess us as friendlies. “Hey-o,” she says. Her voice comes out foggy, as if distilled in a jar. She touches the small weapons port on her forearm. “Is this loaded?”

  “No,” Bear says. “Stun guns are disengaged. This suit’s not yours anyway. It’s just for training. You’ll get weapons when you’ve learned to use them.”

  “Mine will have them,” she says, no question.

  I catch Bear’s sideways glance. Just a flash of pain—a one-second stumble in his gait, and then his gaze is calm. He’s taken his loss and quietly put it away. Unlike me, his eyes aren’t red-rimmed and he isn’t pale with grief.

  I straighten and take a deep breath. If he can endure this, so can I. I will make it as easy for him as I can. No more talks. No more bunking together. No more quiet exchanges. Civil and cordial and nothing else. Bear’s shown me the way it has to be.

  Miyu pops the helmet switch again, and her visor retracts with a hiss. Gingerly, her finger hovers over the opposite lever, the one on her exo’s right collar plate. “What about this one?” she asks.

  “Careful,” he answers. “That’s the quick-lock. Punch it, and every bit of your plating flies off. You’d be left standing around in nothing but liner.”

  She cringes, and I don’t blame her. The tight black liners we wear under the suits are like glorified underwear. If underwear were thermo-woven and nearly bulletproof.

  “There,” Bear coaches, pointing to a spot a few meters behind her. “Back up, then punch out.”

  “Punch out?” she says.

  He nods. “Hit the quick-lock.”

  She eases away from us, then manhandles the switch. There’s a loud magnetic click as her armor breaks loose from her suit. Clearly repelled by her liner, the plating hovers in the air, and the hang time’s unnerving. When Miyu takes a step forward, at last, the spell breaks. My jaw drops as the armor finally clanks to the ground.

  Miyu’s a little less impressed. “Isn’t that a critical design flaw?” she asks Bear. “A switch that leaves you vulnerable?”

  “Not necessarily.” He says. “Punch it again.”

  She does, and the exo resurrects itself. Bit by bit, the plating flies up and leaps into place over Miyu’s liner. Just as quickly as it came off, it all clicks back on. Again I gape, but Miyu still doesn’t look sold. I guess her standards for next-generation exos are higher than mine.

  “If I can punch myself out so easily, then so can my enemy.” Miyu asks, “Why would anyone use it?”

  Bear’s answer is less than patient. “You really want to wear an extra hundred pounds of armor bolted down on your back all the time? You’d prefer a solid exo that doesn’t come off so easily? You’d use the quick-lock if the suit malfunctioned, or the power cell was leaking or corrupted, or the plating jammed, or maybe you’d punch out after pulling a double shift, because you just want to get the damn thing off.”

  “Oh,” Miyu says. “Good point.”

  And after we spend the next six hours in an airless, simulated zero-g freighter hold . . . I can’t help but agree. We can’t punch out fast enough.

  Larken wakes up the day before we launch the rescue mission, thanks to a little stim therapy and a lot of anti-gel. The doctors insist he still needs rest, and I only get a few minutes to sit at his bedside in the infirmary. As I walk in, I see I’m not the only one vying for his attention. Larken’s propped up, talking into an oversized flex screen.

  He sees me, then quickly wraps up his conversation. He signs off and puts the screen down.

  I sink into the chair at his bedside. “How are you feeling?”

  He ignores my question. “I hear you’re leaving soon. The rescue mission.”

  I nod.

  “Is Hal going with you?” he asks.

  “I can’t convince him not to go.”

  “Good. I’m glad. You’ll need him. And when you’re both out there, trust no one—not completely, at least—but Bear and Miyu and Hank.”

  “And Captain Fahra,” I correct.

  Larken doesn’t quite frown, but he doesn’t answer either.

  I think of Fahra and the first moment I laid eyes on him in the wellspring abbey. If you’d asked me what I thought of him then, I’d have said he was a cutthroat for hire. But after everything that’s happened since Manjor, all the sap we’ve slogged through together? No, there’s no way he’d knife me in the back.

  “He saved your life, Larken. You still don’t trust him?”

  “I’m just saying . . . be careful. I’m not saying he’s a traitor, but don’t forget: His allegiance isn’t to you. It’s to his queen, who’s now aligned with Benroyal, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “She doesn’t have a choice. She’s just protecting Cash.”

  He cocks an eyebrow, and lets it go. “Fair enough. Just keep your eyes open, then. That’s all I’m asking.”

  Again I nod.

  “I wish you were going with us,” I say.

  “Why? You’ve already got the rebellion’s best on your mission team.”

  “Except for you, Commander.”

  “I’m no good to you out there,” he says. “You need me here.”

  I sigh, sitting back. “We need something, that’s for sure.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” he adds. “Vilette tells me cease-fire negotiations are already under way between Castra and Cyan. But I’ll speak to the council. I may be able to slow things down, at least.”

  “If that doesn’t work . . . if the Skal calls you back to Raupang, what will you do?”

  He squints, nursing the faintest smile. “I’ll try to convince them I need to stay . . . with a few ‘peace-keeping advisors,’ of course.”

  “Peace-keeping advisors?”

  “Absolutely. You know, it can take a lot of soldiers to tidy up this sort of thing. We’d be very busy, preparing not to engage in armed combat. But if the IP happened to show up again at the border . . .” The smile on his face turns into a full-on sap-eating grin. “Maybe we could figure something out.”

  “Thank you, Larken,” I say. “For not abandoning us.”

  “It’s me who should be thanking you. You saved my life, Phee.”

  A few seconds pass by, and I don’t know what to say. So I settle on the truth. “I’m just glad you’re okay. And I had help, you know. If it weren’t for the others, who pulled you out—”

  “I know. Hal told me.” He pauses. “He also told me you’re in therapy. That you’ve been working hard on Mary’s sim, showing up every night.”

  “The sim’s not that hard to deal with. It’s not really the sim at all. Doesn’t even raise my pulse anymore. It’s the talking part that’s hard.”

  “Talking with Hal?”

  I hesitate, and suddenly, I have to glance around—at the ceiling, at the floor, anywhere but at Larken—just to keep going. “Group counseling.”

  His raised eyebrows might as well be question marks, so I add, “Takes the edge off. I don’t have to run around so much now. Just a
s well; it’s not like I can hike up to the poppy fields anymore.”

  “So it helps.”

  I nod. I don’t tell him how much it hurts.

  “It helps,” I answer quietly.

  “I’m glad,” he says. “If it didn’t, I wouldn’t want you to go on the rescue mission. I wouldn’t think you were ready.”

  “I’d still feel better if you were going with us.”

  He sits up, until we’re eye to eye. “I know. But my place is here, on the line. As for you . . .”

  I try to lower my gaze, but he holds it. “You were meant to do this. To go and rescue that prince. So get out of here. I’ll stay and hold my ground. You go and hold yours.” Just when I think he’s getting too sentimental, he adds, “Like a flock of stinking barden, hold it well.”

  One smile, one scrap of laughter, and now it’s time to go.

  I hope it won’t be the last.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  WE LAND NOT FAR FROM RAUPANG. I’M TOLD IT’S A BEAUTIFUL city, the glittering, ice-kissed heart of Cyan, a citadel built of three-thousand-year-old stone and timber. But we see next to none of it. Our vac touches down in the lowlands, south of the Cyanese capital, which towers above the fjords. From a distance, looking up, all we see is a glimmer of polished gray—the very tip of the Skal.

  No. We won’t be visiting Larken’s snow-capped home during this trip. Instead, we’re prepping for launch, in the foothills far from Raupang’s gates. In a matter of hours, my team and I will buckle in, blast off, then drift toward a giant calibrated ring—a gateway through folded space. In an eye-blink, we’ll charge it, hurtling out of our galaxy and into Earth’s orbit. Then, millions of light-years from here, we’ll find a different kind of ring. A forgotten space station. The U.S.S. Sweetwater.

  For now I sit alone in the flight master’s office planted on one end of the yard. It’s cozy and spare, a glorified glassed-in box that trembles at every takeoff. Through the windows, I watch the many vacs in the yard, launching and landing in the shadow of the not-so-distant peaks. The Cyanese Mountains are cold and strange. But the ice and snow are beautiful enough. In a way, their endlessness speaks to me the way the Castran Desert does. One hand on the windowpane, and the chill bites my fingertips. The frost reminds me: I’m a long way from home.

  I shiver as the side door swings open. It’s Hal. Windblown, he walks in and it clangs shut again. I know why he’s here. We’re squeezing in one last session before the rescue mission.

  He sits down in the opposite chair. A heating vent grumbles between us.

  There’s no space to run a sim. Here, at the end of the road, there’s only room for quiet talk.

  Finally, Hal takes both my hands.

  Mine are trembling.

  “It’s going to be difficult up there, Phee,” Hal says at last. “You’re going to have a hard time.”

  My gaze drops, but it’s not a dodge. It’s a giant, gut-swooping nod.

  “And that’s all right. Whatever happens . . .” he adds. “It’s okay to bug out and lose it and be afraid. It’s okay to fall down.”

  “I . . .” I trail off, uncertain. But Hal jumps into the gap, squeezing hard. There is no more softness in him now, only unfailing strength.

  “Every time, all we have to do is get back up.”

  We launch.

  Hal gives me something to ease the trip, and mercifully, I doze off. Now there’s a split second of disorientation as I finally wake. I look up. Fahra’s still sitting across from me, and he’s saying something, but I can’t make it out. The sound is low and sluggish like syrup in my ears. And then my hair slithers by, and everything spins back into place.

  We’re in an unlicensed, obsolete orbital shuttle. I’m still buckled in, weightless under my seat restraint.

  We made it through the gateway.

  The last time I ripped through folded space like this, I was in one of Benroyal’s vacs, jaunting from Castra to Cyan-Bisera for my final race. That ship was state-of-the-art, with inertial dampers, gravity drivers, and a mass-condensing core. Then, I made the trip in air-conditioned luxury, and still threw up. So now? In this zero-g tin can?

  Even with Hal’s best meds, I don’t have a prayer.

  I look out the tiny side window. There is no sideways, or up or down; there is only spinning. Lots and lots of spinning. Ugh . . .

  “Take it,” Fahra says. “Take!” He thrusts something in my face. And just in time too. Before he can shout a third command, I latch on to the valved air-sickness bag.

  After . . . well, I’m sure we’re all thankful the bag’s opaque. I rock against my tethers, limp as a wrung-out rag. Fahra laughs.

  “You know what that is?” Fahra says to Hank, pointing at me. “Freshly squeezed gan-gan.”

  I think my face must turn a deeper shade of green, because Fahra quits grinning. He reaches under Hank’s seat. “You need another one?” he asks.

  Slowly, I shake my head. I try to answer, but burp instead. The belch clears my head, and the past twenty-four hours slam back into it. I see everything in rapid playback mode, and marvel: We’re finally here, in another galaxy. Here being something like eight hundred kilometers above my ancestors’ burned-out planet. I angle toward our window again, and there it is, slowly crawling below us, a sun-rimmed swirl of churning gray storms.

  Earth.

  I am mesmerized by the light, the way it hugs the surface of the planet, slicing through the surrounding darkness like an unstoppable glimmer. There’s no end to the shine, no matter how far the shadows reach.

  Hal passes me the necessities. A dose of motion anti-sickness meds, mouthwash, and a small bottle of water. Eager, I take them. By the time I look up again, there’s another patch of Earth meeting the dawn. The gray storms still swirl here and there, looming like threats, but there are pockets of dull blue and deep brown and even a bit of green scattered in the gloom.

  Up here, in orbit, the stars belong to IP ships and bloodthirsty smugglers. Below us, on Earth, I’m guessing it’s worse. There are two kinds of folk down there. First, the people who were left behind, after Castra was colonized. Second, all the criminals Castra’s dumped here over the years—the worst sorts, the ones they won’t even put to work in the sap mines. To these luckless herds belongs a half-shadowed planet. The burned-out, used-up world my father once called his home.

  I turn away from the window. We wait.

  Finally, Miyu touches my arm. “Almost there. Feeling better?”

  “I’m okay. How much longer?”

  “I see it,” Hank says, looking out. “Come look.”

  We all unbuckle, then float toward the glass. Weightless and jostling, we crowd around the tiny window. And sure enough, there it is. Our ride to the space station. A big black decommissioned IP vac, its bay doors yawning wider by the second. The crew manning it does business with Benroyal, but they aren’t soldiers. This outfit? Apparently, they were recommended to James by a friend of a friend of a nefarious friend. Because there are no legal ways to get out here.

  “Buckle in and gear up,” Hank says. “Docking in five.”

  He doesn’t need to repeat the warning. We know the score. That fast-looming freighter’s our ticket to Cash. Our last hope? A ship full of no-account, credit-stealing, vac-hijacking, black-marketeering, antiquities-hauling, independently contracted space pirates.

  We dock inside the pirate freighter.

  The first thing I notice is how awkward and off-balance I feel lumbering out of our vac. The moment we touch down and depressurize our doors, the free-floating sense of weightlessness . . . gone. Now I can’t quite adjust to the artificial gravity of this new ship. It’s as if I have lead in my bones, and more in my boots.

  Second, there’s no escaping the gray, grimy dim of the industrial space, or the low-grade static of wall-to-wall chatter. Inside the landing bay, the burly
freighter crew stare us down. A second later, they flash their weapons. I read the warning. Easy now. Don’t do anything stupid and we’ll all get along just fine.

  Cautiously, my eyes search the bay. But the smugglers don’t make a move. They just stare. Casually they grumble and snicker amongst themselves.

  I touch my right arm. I’m prepared to fire at will, ready to tap the trigger pad of my glove. My thumb hovers over it, just in case. I can stun the first sap-hole who makes the wrong move. One of the crew—a hulk of a man with silvered dreadlocks and matching whiskers—leans against a half-shadowed stack of crates, his arms folded. After sizing me up, he damn near laughs. When Fahra answers with a fast draw of his dagger, he whistles.

  At his signal, the rest of his mates back away. As they part, I see who’s standing behind them.

  One look and I gasp. I know those sly, deep-set eyes and that gold-toothed, sap-eating grin. I’ve faced down his ugly mug a thousand times in his own tin-roofed garage, and rust all if he hasn’t cussed me out half as much. Here comes bad luck and trouble.

  Benny Eno.

  Or Fat Benny, if you’re asking for him on the street. Toughest crew boss in Capitoline. The fierce hard-nosed crook who was inexplicably kind to me. The muscle-brained tough guy who gave me my first rig and backed me on the streets. At the sight of him, Bear’s eyes flare in anger, and I can’t even try to hide the mixed-up grimace on my face.

  “Got nothing to say to your old boss?” Benny huffs, his hands up and his shoulders bunched in mock surprise. He walks my way. Short, thundering steps, just like always.

  A jolt of nostalgia tempers the shock. “Benny,” I say, clumsy and a little breathless. “What are you . . .”

  Then it occurs to me. I’m standing here, looking at the man who sold me out. Who set me up to race the night Benroyal first had me arrested. And now he’s probably selling me out again. In my mind, I see it all slip away. Our plans. The rescue. Cash’s life. Selling us all out, right now. I should be bugging out. I should be wetting my exo.

  I should be landing a punch.