Even though I can’t fully stomach working with Fractionists right now—albeit a different cell of the movement than the one that chose to vent the Aeschylus—I know this is what I signed up for. Lopez will report to Yasmin. I need her impressed. And maybe he can fill in the information I’m missing. “The Fractionist protestors were a distraction for a team of infiltrators trying to get at scientists in the research quarter.”
Lopez’s focus sharpens. “Scientists researching what, exactly?”
“The origins of the wasting fever.”
He grunts, pulling up a document and logging the information. As I walk him through the details of the deployment, the breach, and our trip to the Lancelot after, I keep trying to make it all fit together in a way that makes sense. Why was a small team of scientists the objective of a protest that drew hundreds? Why does the Fractionist movement have any interest in the fever trying to kill my brother? And why—God, why—would the Fractionists vent the ship?
When I finish telling Lopez every useful detail, he sits back, a frown deepening the lines on his face. “I don’t know what to make of it all,” he admits. “But that’s not my job. Now it’s time to figure out how you’re going to make your next report.”
“Can’t I just—”
“No, you can’t just come waltzing up here every time you have new intel. Today was an exception. A rare opportunity. During basic, you get one day a week without”—he sketches a loop in the air next to his temple—“that going on, and with time-sensitive information in the mix, we can’t wait around for the next time it’s convenient for you to disappear.”
“Then how—”
“You need a runner.” Lopez points to a screen showing an overhead view of Assembly, to the scrawny-looking humans darting back and forth across the deck. Pilots. Maintenance. Doctors. Dockworkers. To most of the ship, they’re as invisible as the mechanics of the craft and just as essential. I see what he’s saying—I need someone who can slip through the cracks, who can move inconspicuously where I can’t. “But since this is your runner, you need to find someone who’s already in your orbit. Someone who doesn’t have to go out of their way to interact with you.”
“And how do I find a Fractionist?”
Lopez shakes his head, laughing. “They’re all Fractionists, robot girl. They just don’t know it yet.”
I stop myself from squaring up again. I don’t need this kind of flippancy. “Everything about that is too convenient. How’d the Fractionists even recruit you anyway?”
Lopez’s gaze drops to the pictures taped around his monitors, and his chest swells around a heavy sigh. “Kiddo, I recruited myself. This room recruited me. You try being stuck in a box this big for twenty years and get back to me on how you decide to get your kicks. In a Fleet like this, everybody’s got something that’ll turn them away from the General Body’s shining beacon.”
I’m halfway to feeling sorry for him.
Then the arrogant smirk is back. “Don’t worry about finding a Fractionist—you pick your person, you send them my way, and I’ll take care of it. I may not be as pretty as the girls they put in the First District propaganda casts, but I’m very persuasive when I need to be.”
I suppress the urge to sniff, though my exo is simmering with ridicule. He’s got an awfully high opinion of himself if he thinks he can recruit anyone to the movement, especially at this fragile moment. But if that’s the way he wants to play it, I’ll play along.
An idea comes to me, and my exo lights up with glee. If Lopez is leaving the choice up to me, I’m choosing someone he’s going to hate.
* * *
—
For any Scela with downtime, Assembly is the place to be. As I approach the recreational side of the deck, I spot groups of senior Scela—distinguishable by their long, elegant hair, which seems to be a point of pride—lounging together. Some of them talk out loud, others seem to be absorbed in deep mental conversations, and I even spot what looks like a guerilla tattoo studio set up in the shadow of one of the smaller shuttles.
I move through them uncomfortably, the fuzz on my scalp prickling, trying to avoid their gazes. None of my squadmates seem to be on the deck. I don’t want to know what that means Wooj and Praava might be doing, and I’m glad Key and her silent judgment aren’t weighing on me.
A familiar voice carries over the chatter, its tones far too varying and intricate to be mistaken for Scela. I whirl around and spot Zaire the dockworker sitting cross-legged on a blanket with a knot of senior Scela surrounding him. “Folks, folks,” he says, raising his hands in the air as an uncanny smile spreads across his face. He looks like a cat backed into a corner by a pack of dogs, but there’s something about his posture that’s far too relaxed for that.
I take a few steps in his direction, trying not to look like I have an agenda.
“Let’s play a simpler game,” he drawls, holding up a ball bearing the size of his knuckle. “The cards are too fancy, you know. Let’s try this. I’m going to place this ball under a cup.” He reaches behind his back and produces three opaque drinking glasses, which he drops mouth-down on his blanket one by one. “You pick the cup with the ball in it, I pay you. You pick an empty cup, you fill it. Who’s in?”
Three of the Scela around him raise their hands simultaneously, clearly joined in an exosystem. “Forty-five units,” one of them says, and each of them pulls fifteen out of their pockets, dropping them in a neat pile on the blanket in front of the cups.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Zaire scolds as one of the Scela starts to flip her headpiece down. “This game is camera-shy.”
She retracts it, looking sour.
Zaire glances up and picks me out of the crowd. “Hey, newbie!” he calls. “Want a piece of the action?”
Something sharp twists in my gut at the thought of wasting money on a trivial betting game. I should have pushed Lopez harder about contacting Yasmin and Malikah—I still have no idea whether my salary has made it to the Reliant yet. And though some Scela seem to withdraw enough units to carry around and wager, pocket change has never been a part of my vocabulary.
Zaire skips right over my hesitation with a cheerful shrug. “Bystanders are welcome to watch, but no hints, got it? Same goes for all of you,” he says, waving his hands at the flock of Scela. He beckons the three players with a crook of his finger. “C’mon, you. Pop a squat.”
The three of them kneel in unison. I wonder how long they’ve been together as a unit—how long it must take to get that comfortable with other voices constantly threading through your thoughts.
“No last words, no regrets?” Zaire asks. Seeing none, he cracks a wide, human smile. “And here we…go.” With a flick of his thumb, he sends the ball bearing high in the air, then scoops up two of the cups, spinning them in his palms. When the bearing drops, he swoops one of them across its arc. The ball disappears into the cup, and Zaire’s hands disappear into a flurry of twists as he juggles the two cups between his hands.
I’ve already lost the ball, so I shift my attention to the three Scela staring intently at Zaire’s display. If I were them, I’d set one person on each cup to track whether the ball enters or exits it. My exo agrees, and I suspect it’s what they’re doing. Their focus is unblinking, and all of them lean forward slightly, as if a few inches of proximity will help them win the game.
I edge a little closer too. Not for sight, but for sound—I try to train my exo’s hearing processing on the clatter the little metal ball makes every time it hits the wall of a cup. But when Zaire slams the two cups down on his blanket and starts swirling the three of them back and forth, occasionally tilting them up to pass the ball between them, there are too many little noises to distinguish which one comes from the bearing.
Several of the Scela rock back on their heels, letting out groans. Zaire’s smile grows wider, and his hands start moving faster. He has no enhanced
muscles, nothing beyond what he was born with, but this guy is putting experienced Scela to shame.
Finally he decides he’s had enough of toying with them. His hands come to rest with a sudden snap, and all three cups fall still. I notice two of the players cocking their heads, straining to catch any last giveaway rattles, but the blanket he plays on deadens the sound in a way that explains why it’s there in the first place.
Zaire lifts his eyebrows at the Scela.
The three of them stay absolutely still. A huge mental volley must be going back and forth between them, because one keeps shaking his head vehemently. It takes them a full minute to reach a consensus, and finally they point at the rightmost cup.
Zaire tips it up, but we all already know from his smile. “Pleasure doing business,” he says.
“Cheeky little shit,” one of the players replies.
Zaire sweeps the pile of units up, flipping them in the air one at a time and letting them drop into the satchel at his hip. “Any other takers?” he asks, glancing around the crowd. When no one steps up, he shrugs. “Can’t blame you. Tomorrow, maybe.”
“Cards later?” one of the senior Scela asks.
“Gimme a minute.” As the crowd dissipates and Zaire flips the last of his units into his bag, I step up to the blanket. “Change your mind?” Zaire asks without looking up.
I ignore the inevitable pinch of my thoughts flicking to my empty pockets. Dropping to a crouch next to the blanket, I reach out and knock the middle cup over. Empty. I try the leftmost cup, and find nothing but air beneath it. I glance up at Zaire, who holds up his left hand. Caught in the web between his thumb and index finger is the ball bearing.
“You cheated.”
“I think you’ll agree that cheating against this crowd is a little justified,” Zaire says with a smirk. “Also, one of them definitely should have caught the moment I pulled the ball out.”
“Maybe they did notice, but they wanted to make you feel better.”
“And it worked,” he says, patting his bulging satchel.
“Is it good money, doing this?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Doesn’t hurt. But it’s mostly just how I get my kicks. When you spend all day hanging out with jacked-up cyborgs, it’s nice to feel like you have something going for you. Why, you looking to go into business?”
I let a smirk slip past my lips. “Of a sort. Do you know your way to the Master Control Room?”
The stunstick hums in my hand. If I think too hard about it, I start to pick apart the different resonances—flesh, bone, metal. Nerves vibrating against wires. All of it me.
But the point is to stop thinking. My exo flashes the pattern of moves I’m supposed to be working through, and I shift my stance into the start of the set, my focus homing in on the dummy in front of me. The exosystem lines up as my squadmates do the same, our bodies locking in sync.
Go, the impulse whispers down my spine.
I lunge forward, stunstick raised, flowing into the first strike—
And my fingers slip. The humming escapes my grip, the stunstick sailing out of my hand a fraction of a second before it lands on the dummy. FUCK, I blast through the system, landing hard on my knees.
I know it’s just a dummy I’m hitting. I know I’m doing no damage, hurting no one. The exo’s been reinforcing those facts over and over. But all I see is the Aeschylus. The somber face of Chancellor Vel, speaking in low tones on a Fleet-wide cast from her seat on the starship Pantheon as she offered her condolences for the tragedy. The massive hole blasted in the Aeschylus’s hide that they showed on every screen.
The people who fell by my hands.
They were going to die anyway, the exo insists, trying to be kind about it. You were sparing them from agony. And most of them were just Fractionists. No need to get worked up over their deaths.
It’s been three weeks since the Aeschylus disaster. We’re two days away from our final assessment. The marshal’s past two reports have inched us slowly leftward on the board, but it’s nowhere near enough to make the elite ranks I know I should be striving for. Everything rides on our last test. And not once today have I successfully completed a combat set without either dropping my stunstick or crushing it in my grip.
“You just kinda have to lean into the reality of it,” Praava observes from my right. She’s the only one who paused when I fucked up—Woojin and Aisha are still hacking through their sets. “It’s your human side that’s causing the problem. Leave it to your exo.”
Which is easy for her to say—Praava’s never had a problem with her exo. Since our return from the Lancelot, she’s gotten even better, constantly outstripping the rest of us in training. Her thoughts burn with purpose, almost as irritating as Aisha’s. If we make a good assignment, if we impress the General Body with our potential, she believes she might be able to secure her sister’s release from the prison ship.
To my left, Woojin lands blow after perfect blow on a dummy. His control over his body is beautifully fluid now, but it’s only because he’s not wearing his full rig. In the metal, he still struggles to keep up with the rest of us. He’s been improving steadily. But, as the marshal warns us after every single training session, we’re only as strong as our weakest link.
I can’t let that be me. I won’t let it be me.
“If it were as simple as leaving it in the exo’s hands, I would have the hang of this already,” I snarl. I kick against the mat, my enhanced musculature bouncing me three feet into the air. Aisha sends a burst of amusement into the exosystem when I land with my legs splayed.
I shove her back into her own head. She’s been acting weird lately, practicing cloaking herself to the point that sometimes it feels like she’s dropped out of the exosystem entirely. Which is a relief, honestly, but I can’t help but wonder why she needs to hide herself from us, especially when she used to batter us with every single worry in her head.
Whatever it is, it’s not affecting her performance. She’s doing better than me.
I stalk across the mats and scoop up my stunstick. Praava nudges a curl of encouragement at me, and I snap back at her.
She shrugs. Just trying to help.
I don’t need your help. I just need practice. I need to get my mind in order. I need to become the perfect tool the General Body designed me to be, and that starts with clearing my head. Forgetting what I did on the Aeschylus.
Forgetting that boy I saw on the Lancelot.
There has to be a rational explanation for how he got in my head. He must be an acquaintance from the Antilles who fell in with the Fractionists or stirred up some other sort of trouble—the kind that lands you on the Lancelot and not in an Endymion tank. I suppose he’s pretty enough to latch in my subconscious and end up in a dream or two.
Doesn’t really explain the consistency.
But maybe I’m just spooked from the theory I had about the Aeschylus vent. Maybe I’m jumping at shadows, finding little conspiracies everywhere to fill up the empty spaces inside me. I still can’t shake the thought that there might be more to the breach that damaged the Aeschylus, even though I know it’s ridiculous. The General Body’s kept us safe and kept us flying. We’ve lasted three hundred years on these ships, thanks to their leadership. Just because we came close to losing another ship to Fractionist terrorists—
Did we?
I hoist the stick over my head and bring it down on the dummy, trying to ignore the shudder that threatens to overtake my spine and cling to the glow of success. The exo nudges me into the rest of the practice set, and I keep my grip tight as I land a flurry of strikes. I can do this. I won’t be the weak link.
But then I remember the words Ratna whispered to Praava in the shuttle. I remember how true it felt to hear that the General Body can’t be trusted. Deep as my bones and the metal laid against them. All these holes inside me, all these uncertain
things, and then there’s this—and it’s completely irrational. There’s no foundation in my memories for that mistrust.
Just empty spaces where a foundation might have stood.
I will feel complete, the exo promises. I will feel whole again. If we come out of our final assessment on top. If I can get my mind together and be the best damn Scela I can be.
But now that I know how a bone-deep truth feels, I’m not so sure about the exo’s words.
And the second that thought settles is the second I slip again. Only this time I don’t let go of the stunstick. I don’t crush it either. I just follow through on my swing, strong and sure, clear past the dummy I was aiming to hit.
And straight into my other arm.
Oh, fuck me, four minds think in unison, right before the pain whites out the exosystem.
* * *
—
“You’re really quite lucky it isn’t worse,” Isaac says as he limps around the hospital bed.
I stare at the ceiling, not bothering to conceal my scowl. My useless left arm is stretched out, propped up on a series of supports. My exo enforces strict instructions to keep it deadened from the shoulder down. Isaac and his team of juniors have managed to restore the anatomy I bashed and electrocuted. A furious red burn sears across the skin of my forearm, making the metal and resealing underneath it stand out even more.
I almost wish I could feel it. The numbness is disconcerting, made worse by watching the doctors twist and pull at my body with massive clamps until the metal I bent was set straight. A handful of thin endoscopes did all the interior work, burrowing into the flesh of my arm to repair the artificial muscle, tendons, and nerves.
“We were able to make repairs with minimal invasion and no cutting you open,” Isaac continues. He tucks his datapad away and sets himself carefully on a stool, stretching out his braced leg. “You’ll be sore, of course, but you won’t miss your assessment.”
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